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June 2008
Fifteen minutes before polls close, I’m voter No. 27
As I pulled into Englewood Baptist Church’s parking lot Tuesday evening, I couldn’t believe the number of cars. All these folks had turned out to vote in the state labor commissioner runoff?
Well, no. Not exactly.
I quickly learned that the parking lot was full because it’s Vacation Bible School week at Englewood. Voting had been temporarily moved next door to Rocky Mount Fire Station No. 3.
There, the parking lot was … well, not so full.
I tried the knob on the front door, but it wouldn’t turn. I started to walk around to the back of the building when the front door opened.
“Are you here to vote?” a gentleman politely asked.
“I hope so,” I said. “The door was locked.”
He started to turn the knob to prove me wrong.
“No, it’s — oh,” he said.
No worries. I didn’t exactly have to jostle my way through the crowd.
It was 7:15 p.m. — 15 minutes before the polls were supposed to close. I was voter No. 27.
So as I sat down this morning and read Mike Hixenbaugh’s story about the cost of the runoff between John Brooks and Mary Fant Donnan, I at least could tell anyone in earshot, “Well, I did my part for that $75 ballot.”
That was the average cost of a vote in Nash County, considering the dismal 1 percent who turned out.
As I mentioned here Monday, there has to be a more efficient way of choosing a candidate when there’s no clear winner in a primary.
I still don’t know what that is. But one thing’s for sure under the present system — you can’t complain about the lines.
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Does Rocky Mount need a curfew?
I hate to start with a “Back when I was a kid …” story, but …
Back when I was a kid, we lived pretty comfortably with a curfew. When it got dark and Mom or Dad walked out on the porch and hollered for us … that was our curfew.
That may be oversimplified nostalgia, but it worked fine a generation ago. Not so much today.
A Rocky Mount High School basketball player was shot and injured a few weeks ago, riding around in a car after 11:30 on a Saturday night. He wasn’t seriously hurt, and 11:30 wasn’t that late for a Saturday night, even when I was a teenager. But it’s not the same world today.
I can’t remember anyone worrying about bullets flying into a car when I was in high school. I certainly don’t remember anyone my age being shot.
Some members of Rocky Mount City Council are kicking around the idea of a curfew, in hopes of keeping more kids at home and out of trouble late at night. No specifics have been mentioned, but a similar ordinance in Kinston requires anyone under the age of 18 to be home by 11 p.m. Allowances are made for 16- and 17-year-olds who work or who are involved in school activities that keep them out later.
I would have balked at that policy when I was that age, but it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea now. It won’t put an end to crime, of course, but it might keep kids off the street during some of the most dangerous hours of the night.
It’s a shame to say it’s an idea whose time has come, but that might be the case. Better to listen to the kids complain while they’re safely at home than read about them in the police report later.
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At 60 bucks a pop, we’d better vote!
Back from vacation just in time for Tuesday’s exciting runoff election! What journalist could stay away from a heart-pounding race of this magnitude? The thrills, the chills, the elevator rides …
Ok, the labor commissioner’s race deserves more respect than that. (You did know that’s the election I was talking about, right?) But it’s having a hard time finding anyone who cares.
Maybe it’s vacation time for everyone else, too. Or maybe voters are so tired of politics they’re ready to talk about the new Indiana Jones movie instead. But as Mike Hixenbaugh reported Monday, fewer than 40 people have cast ballots in early voting in the Twin Counties. Chances are pretty good you won’t face much of a line if you turn out to the polls Tuesday.
That’s a shame because the labor commissioner does carry a heavy load of responsibility in North Carolina. It’s an intriguing race, too - former commissioner John Brooks faces Mary Fant Donnon, who was director of policy research for former commissioner Harry Payne.
Donnon finished first in the May primary with 27.5 percent of the vote. Brooks had 24 percent of the vote.
Some folks have suggested other voting methods to avoid runoffs like this. The idea would be for voters to mark their ballots in order of candidate preference. Ballot counters would then tally up the “scores” to determine who the winning candidate is.
Opponents of that plan say it’s too confusing, and they have a point. Voters have a tough enough time figuring out their first choices in those little-publicized Council of State races. How the heck are we going to decide our third, fourth and fifth choices, too?
Still, Tuesday’s runoff is costing the state a chunk of change for a handful of voters to go to the polls. As Hixenbaugh reported, it’s costing more than $55,000 in the Twin Counties alone - about $60 per vote, if the turnout is 1 percent, as projected.
Is there a better way to hold elections? Tell us what you think. And if there isn’t a better way, then get out there and do your duty!
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When the news is so bad, it hurts
Here’s an editorial that will run in Tuesday’s edition of the Telegram:
There are times when news is so awful it’s impossible to make sense of it all.
Last week began with a jubilant Rocky Mount homecoming of National Guard troops from Iraq. By midweek, we found ourselves reeling in the wake of a nursing home shooting that left two people dead and one person wounded. By Friday we were all but numb trying to comprehend the cruelty of a case in which a 13-year-old boy was tied to a tree for “misbehaving.” He died Thursday afternoon.
The mind sinks asking just the simplest of questions. Why? How? What were they thinking? No easy answers arrive and probably never will. It’s so awful it hurts.
The Twin Counties community has worked together to overcome so much through the years. From hurricanes to floods to fostering better relations among ourselves to welcoming refugees from Katrina to lending a hand and support to causes as great as the Red Cross, United Way, Salvation Army and more.
We’ve seen this community at its best under the worst circumstances imaginable. Sadly, we’ve seen its worst in times of senseless tragedy.
We’re good people. We have differences of opinion, sure, but that’s only natural when two or more people have different ideas about what’s best for a community.
We’ll pull back together in the wake of this, and one of the big-hearted souls who makes Rocky Mount so caring will find a way to make yet another positive difference in this world.
You can’t imagine how much we look forward to reporting that kind of news again.
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A strange feeling in a familiar neighborhood
I live a couple of streets and at least as many galaxies from the home of Thomas Willis Smith. It felt more than a little strange to drive back through my neighborhood Wednesday night.
Smith shot and wounded his wife at their home Wednesday morning. Then he drove to Guardian Care on Winstead Avenue, where he shot and killed his mother. Then he turned the gun on himself. He died later that day at Pitt Memorial Hospital.
Whatever demons drove Smith to this tragic series of events aren’t readily apparent in Rocky Mount suburbia. Kids ride bikes around the cul-de-sacs where I live. Folks walk and wave and ask about my wife’s flower garden.
I’m probably not the only person in the neighborhood who has made a detour since Wednesday, just to roll by Smith’s house and wonder at the madness of it all. Not that there are any answers on the quiet street where he lived.
That’s a paradox, I guess, of pretty neighborhoods in the 21st century. People move in and out all the time. As friendly as everyone is, I know by name just a handful of folks who live on my street, and most of those friendships go back 10 years or more.
We lock ourselves in, watch a hundred channels of television, cruise the Internet and disengage with the world outside our doors in just about every way imaginable. When a tragedy as awful as Smith’s occurs, it’s reason for some of us to burrow that much further into our cocoons.
I can’t suggest that neighborhood block parties or other get-togethers would have made a bit of difference in the Smith case. For all I know, he might have been one of the friendliest guys around anyway.
But it’s strange now to walk through streets as familiar as mine and feel something as foreign and as unwanted as a guy who flips out and shoots two loved ones and then himself.
That just doesn’t feel like my neighborhood. At all.
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The things you see on the way home …
So I’m driving home from Nashville last night around 7:15 or so when the goofiest-looking dog I’ve ever seen gallops up to the edge of Sunset Avenue.
Gallops probably isn’t the right word, but this is one of those something-is-really-weird-here moments that the language doesn’t quite do justice.
Instead of running one foot in front of the other, the way dogs usually do, this one is throwing his front legs out together, then swinging his back legs out in front of him, then front legs, then back, etc.
He’s big and black and there’s something not quite right with his head. And about the time I’m starting to think, “Where the heck is that dog’s ears?” he swings his big bushy butt around, then gallops straight back into the trees where he came from.
So what, the dog doesn’t have a tail eith— “HOLY CRAP! I’S A FREAKIN’ BEAR!”
Hope you’ll pardon the french.
All of this is unfolding on Sunset Avenue between Nashville and Rocky Mount where the grading and clearing have begun for the new interchange with Interstate 95.
I mean, I’ve seen tortoises … snakes … a boatload of ’possum. I even made the acquaintance of a deer who bounded up on the driver’s side of my car two Novembers ago, smashed my windshield, shook himself off, then scampered away unhurt.
But BEAR?!
We’ve had bear reports before. About a year ago, the phone rang off the hook with stories about a bear near Englewood School. We hunted but couldn’t find it.
We had better luck about five years ago when a bear climbed a tree in Tarboro. We shot plenty of photos of that.
But in terms of personal encounters, I’ve never seen a bear anywhere but in zoos and television shows.
It’s not the kind of thing I expected to see last night on Sunset Avenue.
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Fly a flag for the Rocky Mount troops; the military police unit is headed home
Grab the kids, fly a flag and say a prayer. The 1132nd is headed home.
The military police company from Rocky Mount flew into Gulfport, Miss., Saturday and is scheduled to return to Rocky Mount between 4:30 and 5 p.m. Tuesday at Rocky Mount-Wilson Airport.
An official welcome home ceremony is scheduled for Wednesday in Rocky Mount. It will be held at 1 p.m. in Englewood Baptist Church on Winstead Avenue.
The military police unit of the National Guard shipped out of Rocky Mount about a year ago. The troops have spent the past nine months in Iraq and have seen things that no one should ever have to see - death, catastrophic injuries and more.
All the more reason to take a little time Tuesday to offer a prayer, a salute and thanks.
It would be wonderful to have a crowd of folks at the airport to welcome home the troops. Anyone who attended the city’s homecoming celebration for a quartermaster unit out of Nashville two years ago knows how moving the event can be.
At the very least, if your business has a sign outside that can be changed easily, why not offer some encouraging words to the 1132nd? And feel free to post your own wishes here, as well.
The 1132nd has faced tough going since its arrival in Iraq. Five soldiers lost their lives — Sgt. Thomas C. Ray II, 40, of Weaverville; Sgt. David B. Williams, 26, of Tarboro; Sgt. David S. Stelmat, 27, of LIttleton, N.H.; Staff Sgt. Emanuel Pickett, 34, of Wallace; and Sgt. Lance O. Eakes, 25, of Apex.
Other troops in the unit are fighting back from injuries sustained during their stay in South Baghdad.
A press release from the National Guard office in Raleigh soberly noted: “During the deployment, the 1132nd served with great distinction and suffered the heaviest casualties of any NC National Guard Company since World War II.”
Our troops are more than worth a salute from the rest of us.
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Smoke from a distant fire
About the time the Celtics were winding up the first game of the NBA Finals Thursday night (Celtics! Lakers! History!), the smell of something burning reached my den. The kids and I walked around looking at wires, afraid something had melted.
Then, we opened the front door and saw a haze over the street. It must be a house fire, I thought. We walked up and down, looking at the horizon for an orange glow, but we couldn’t seem to get any closer to the source.
Finally, I called 911 to tell an operator I thought there had to be a house fire nearby, even if I couldn’t find it. That’s when I learned that the smoke and smell of wildfires in Hyde County had drifted more than 100 miles - all the way to Rocky Mount.
In all the time I’ve lived here, I’ve never seen anything like it. As Telegram staff writer Mike Hixenbaugh notes today, the combination of smoke, and soot plus the oppressive heat we’re experiencing isn’t good for anyone.
Stay inside, folks. It’s not healthy out there.
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Reminder: Respect other posters
I’ve had to reject a few comments in recent days because they’ve been personal attacks at other posters on the blog.
Just a reminder of the ground rule I set at the beginning: Let’s have a good discussion, but be respectful of one another.
Thanks!
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It’s hot enough to fry a journalist
Telegram staff writer Eric Klamut and I walked outside at lunch a little while ago, and a story Klamut is working on hit us in the face.
Literally.
Man, it’s hot out there.
Klamut is putting together a heat report for Friday’s edition of the Telegram. He’s from Western Pennsylvania, where early June is a slightly different beast. His mom was scraping ice off her windshield just a few days ago.
But unlike, say, Arizona, ours is a muggy, oppressive, apocalyptic kind of heat. There’s nothing dry about it.
So we’ve got that going for us.
We tried frying an egg a couple of years ago on the sidewalk at our old offices on Tiffany Boulevard. The temperature that day topped 100 degrees, and a crowd of us went outside.
What you end up with when you try that is a really messy sidewalk. The surface temperature has to hit 158 degrees or more for pavement cuisine, according to Google.
Let’s hope we never get the chance to test that out.
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Barack Obama makes history
Here’s our editorial for Thursday’s edition of the Rocky Mount Telegram:
If in 2004 you had asked someone of the baby boom generation if he or she could imagine an African-American presidential nominee in their lifetime, most would have answered, “yes,” in the same way many of us believe we can end world hunger and find peace.
But even the most optimistic boomer probably would have stopped short of predicting that we’d see such a candidate in just four years. Let’s be realistic here, after all. And yet, America woke up Wednesday with Barack Obama all but certain to be the Democratic nominee in November.
Regardless of your party affiliation or even whether you preferred U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton over Obama, 2008 marks a watershed year in U.S. history. The candidacy of a man who happens to have black skin is no longer a dream. It’s here at last, barely two generations removed from Jim Crow segregation laws and despite the bitter prejudices that sadly linger to this day.
Obama may or may not become the next U.S. president. If he falls short, his supporters will no doubt be disappointed. But even if that’s the case, the United States will have crossed a threshold unimaginable for so long for so many Americans - until now.
As many others have said, one of the beautiful things about America is its ceaseless effort to reach the vision of what our country hopes mightily to become - a place where all men and women have equal opportunities to live, go to school, work and, yes, maybe even become president.
We’re not there yet. But we took a big step forward this week - one that was impossible for too many during much of this country’s history, but one that will be remembered forever by the history books of tomorrow.
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Gryphons win state championship!
I never played for a championship team. The closest I came was my senior year at High Point Central when I was starting center for a football team that finished 7-3 but didn’t make the playoffs.
We were 7-1 going into the last two games and needed at least a tie to make the post-season. Didn’t happen, and I’ll never forget the long bus ride home on that cold November night of my senior year.
That was more than 30 years ago, but memory holds onto things like that with amazing tenacity.
All the more reason to revel in the magic of this past Saturday, when Rocky Mount High School won the state 3-A baseball championship against East Rowan.
Never mind the toil and burdens of everyday life. Check out the faces of those joyous players celebrating in an infield pile-on. You can bet those kids won’t think about politics or war when they look back at 2008.
It’s something for those of us who are older and supposedly wiser to keep in mind.
Forgive me for blowing our horn for a moment, but the Sports section that ran in Sunday’s edition of the Telegram was one of the finest we’ve produced since I’ve been editor.
Sports Editor Ben Jones, Jessie Nunery, Matt LaWell and H. Williams Kellenberger brought to life a glorious finish to the Gryphons’ season. And Alan Campbell’s remarkable photographs preserved the moment for the ages. If you haven’t already, be sure and check out the photo gallery he shot during the championship run.
Congratulations to Gryphons coach Pat Smith, players Brian Goodwin, Chris Berry and all the rest. Your finish lifted the whole community. And the memories of this year will hold a place in your hearts and ours for a long time to come.
