Really Brownwood, What did you expect from a "Drive By" Columnist ?
Thursday June 1, 2006
Op Ed: Columnists Brownwood Bulletin
This crazy world has apparently caught up with our part of it — Steve Nash
I like to go online fairly early most mornings to check out the news far and near, and find out what’s happened overnight.
Usually, it’s the usual from what I’ve heard referred to as the “drive-by media” — the U.S. military is bad; America is bad; illegal immigration is good; the latest health/social environmental crisis is either global warming (caused by Bush); obesity, coffee, SUVs, cat jugglers, obese cat jugglers, cat jugglers with ADHD, obese cats with ADHD (or all of the above); the price of crude oil is expected to hit $1 million a barrel by tomorrow or Monday at the latest; blah blah blah, yada yada yada.
And Bubba Dokes got kicked off American Idol.
Holy smokes! Now we’re really in trouble ...
Let me back up to the crude oil item, which of course is tied to the price of gasoline, which of course is too high, which of course has Americans exercised. Unless you’re one of those evil rich people who have benefitted from those evil tax cuts propagated by the evil Bush, you’re probably feeling it — the so-called “pain at the pump,” as the media likes to call it. This cat juggler certainly is.
But wait, let me back up some more. I don’t need a screaming, leering link on my home computer’s home page to tell me what I already know — gas prices are too high. I’m not an energy analyst (nor do I play one on TV) so I’ll let someone else argue about why this is happening. But I can see the honkin’ prices when I look out the window.
My reaction to the drive-by media: Shut up!
I’m not saying don’t report on topics that have Americans steamed and talking it up — and that includes local residents who gather at their favorite French restaurants here in Brown County. Those topics obviously include gas prices, the recent property appraisals and illegal immigration (unlike the media, Vicente Fox and some American politicians, not all Americans are for it).
Mais oui! Enough is enough. I don’t need to see TV news reporters every day who seem almost gleeful at the gas prices and assure us that, hoo boy, you think it’s bad now, just wait till tomorrow! Oh, woe is us. People can’t drive their SUVs any more, they tell us. No more making that extra trip to the store because they forgot milk. No more vacations. People are having to decide between gas and food.
I’m not trying to trivialize this issue, and when Wife tells me it cost $60 to fill our 23-gallon Ford Freestar, that’s a big deal. When we drive to north Texas for the weekend and see that gas is 10 or 15 cents lower than it is here, that’s irritating — not that it’s lower there, but that it’s higher here.
And I’m not an oil industry analyst (nor do I play one on TV), so I’ll let others argue over why these things are so.
My point is, I don’t think the daily overdose of doom-and-gloom reporting on this and other issues is helpful.
“It’s like they’re trying to incite a riot,” said a friend who didn’t say I could use her name so I won’t. “We’re not mad enough to suit them.
“It’s like, if there’s not enough news, let’s stir it up. If you don’t care about it, we’re going to beat you over the head until you do.”
Now, you might be thinking, man alive, cat juggler, if that’s not the kettle calling the pot black, I don’t know what is! As a crime and courts reporter, I bring my share of negative news to the table.
A few weeks ago, me and some non-news media folks were waxing philosophical about our jobs, and to illustrate a point (although I’m not sure what the point was) I said, “It’s like ‘There’s a pervert down at the courthouse. I gotta get down there!’ ”———
Had another recent conversation with someone who had some interesting insights. Now, I could tell you his name but then he would have to kill me, so I won’t.
Like the cat juggler, he has come to Brown County within the past few years. We waxed philosophical about some of the bizarre events that have been in the news in Brown County lately.
“I think what’s happened is, the world has come to Brownwood, and all these things that were sacred for so long — we’re going to have to get with the rest of the world.
“I love a small town but you cannot live in a vacuum. The whole mindset of the community — ‘Well, this is Brownwood. We do things different here.’
“I don’t know how many times I’ve been told — and you’ve been told — ‘You’re not from here. You don’t understand how things work.’ You see more people coming here that are used to more accountability, I guess, and they expect more — they expect more from everybody.
“They expect more from law enforcement. They expect more from elected officials. And that’s not a bad thing.”
BTW (I’m learning chatspeak), I don’t think he intended to disparage the “whole mindset of the community.” This is a pro-Brown County person, as is your cat juggler. I’ll take the liberty of speaking for him and saying he was referring to the quirky events and attitudes propagated by a minority of residents.
Steve Nash writes his column for the Brownwood Bulletin on Thursdays. He may be reached by e-mail at steve.nash@brownwoodbulletin.com.
source: http://www.brownwoodbulletin.com/articles/2006/06/01/op_ed/columnists/opinion05.txt
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Links, Links, and More links !
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How Republican Walter Jones (of "Freedom Fries" Fame) grew a conscience
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Brownwood Restaurants ( I would wager that all of these folks are "Pro Brown County" Too ! Even the Steve Nash defined "French" ones !)
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Note from Steve Harris,
I wonder if "Drive By" Reporter/Columnist, Steve Nash (and his anonymous friends), would consider Avi Adelman "quirky" ? Maybe Nash and his anonymous cohorts will define " the quirky events and attitudes propagated by a minority of residents " for the readers of the area ! Is their use of the word "quirky" really just double speak for their thought of "queer" ?
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Would Brown County's Ellis Johnson and Steve Nash consider
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Note from Steve Harris, We'd welcome " Marviiiiin Ziiiiiiiiiindler, Eyewiiiitness Newwwws " to Brownwood Texas with
open arms. Let's make that call !
June 2, 2006, 3:32PM
TV's white knight
At 84, Marvin Zindler is still fighting for the little guy
By ERIC HARRISON
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
Marvin Zindler is shouting again.
"What else is new?" you say.
You don't understand: Off the air, The Loudest Man On Television can be surprisingly soft-spoken. Gracious, even. A Southern gentleman. Except when he's piqued.
"You ask why they're marching?" he bellows at the dinner table, pushing aside a steak he's barely touched. "I'll tell you why they're marching."
He's wearing work clothes: powder-blue suit pants, a blue monogrammed shirt, white suspenders and a specially made, extra-wide necktie, impaled by a diamond-encrusted tiepin. The clothes are appropriate, because Zindler can't get work off his mind tonight. Days have gone by since he commented on the air about immigration reform, and he's still worked up about it.
Immigrants are marching, he shouts, because the same people who long ago wouldn't let Mexicans eat in downtown restaurants and who fought desegregation "now want to throw them in JAIL for being here illegally. They want to make it a FELONY."
Niki, Zindler's wife, doesn't feel as passionate about immigration as he does. Or, at least, she expresses it differently. She asks questions, mostly, but she asks in a way that suggests she's already formed an opinion, one that differs from Zindler's. He grows more frustrated by the second.
"Don't yell at me, Marvin," she finally says, with force.
"I'M NOT YELLING," he yells. "I'm just trying to make you see my point."
Zindler has been yelling to make a point for 33 years. At least, that's how long he's been a Channel 13 consumer investigator, the station's first. If he weren't also the first local consumer reporter in the nation (as has been reported), he quickly became the best known. Only a few months into the job, he did a series of reports that led to the closing of a certain La Grange business establishment called the Chicken Ranch — "the best little whorehouse in Texas."
He hardly considers that his most important story. ("I didn't care that they had a whorehouse," he rumbles. "We had plenty here in Houston.") But after a long-running Broadway musical and a movie (Dom DeLuise played the Zindler character), the Chicken Ranch story still is the one for which he's best known.
Arguably Houston's most famous resident, Zindler attracts attention wherever he goes.
"Hey, look! It's Marvin Zindler."
He smiles and says hello to everyone. He doesn't wait to be recognized.
"Hiya, Marvin."
Handshakes.
"Marvin! Howya doin' today?"
At 84, he still walks with a bounce. It's a cocky little stride, which is what you would expect from a man who looks the way Zindler does. Not that many men do. With his jutting (man-made) jaw, dark glasses, platinum hairpieces and dandified suits (adorned, always, with a color-coordinated sprouting kerchief), Zindler — who admits to having had 15 cosmetic procedures — is as singular a figure as Houston has produced in our time.
As he makes his rounds through the city — his city — chances are the people who rubberneck to catch a glimpse have on their minds neither the Chicken Ranch nor the story Zindler considers his most important — his 1985 reports on financial mismanagement by the Hermann Hospital board of trustees. And it's a sure bet they aren't thinking about the Agris-Zindler Children's Foundation, which has helped children all over the world.
No, they're thinking of his weekly reports on restaurant health inspections, with their frequent finding of "SLIIIIME in the ice machine." He shouts it like a battle cry. Or they're thinking of his latest piece — he's done thousands — about ordinary people who got a bum deal.
Five days a week, at 6 p.m. and sometimes at 10, Zindler — impeccably dressed in suits that often are louder than his bray — plays the starring role in 90-second morality plays in which working-class people face forces against which they are no match. Almost always, the "little guy" wins.
After a visit from Zindler, the formerly recalcitrant company executive issues a refund, a city bureaucrat cuts red tape, or a local doctor — one of "Marvin's Angels" — performs gratis surgery that dramatically improves the life of a child.
Those pieces — "helping kids who never would've gotten help otherwise" — are the stories of which Lori Reingold, Zindler's producer for the last 23 years, says she's most proud. Zindler concurs. Last February, he was tooling through southwest Houston in his black Chrysler 300C on his way to an assignment when he turned to a passenger and said those stories are the reason he keeps coming to work. He sounded sincere.
He wasn't feeling well that day. He'd gotten a pacemaker a few weeks previously, and it needed regulating. He'd started out feeling OK. With his friend and plastic surgeon Dr. Joseph Agris, Zindler had begun the day with a mission to help another child. Later, he granted a newspaper interview over lunch (chicken and dumplings at the State Grill). Then he rushed to a Bellaire elementary school to tape a segment.
That was when it got to him. The walk from the parking lot to the school building tired him out. He had to take nitroglycerin and sit for a while.
As always, people were excited to see him. "You're so cute!" one teacher gushed, swatting at his shoulder, almost levitating with glee. "So dapper!"
For the first time all day, Zindler seemed indifferent.
He'd confided over lunch that he felt dizzy on the air the previous day and flubbed a couple of lines. He usually laughs at his mistakes, but this seemed to weigh on him.
"The problem with growing old in television," said the vainest man in America, "is that people watch you grow old."
But that was weeks ago. Tonight, as Niki gets Key lime pie from the kitchen and Zindler cuts his steak into tiny pieces for the dog, he is in good spirits. He got word from his doctor today that it's OK to golf again.
Golf is Zindler's favorite pastime. Before the pacemaker, weakness had forced him to cut back, but he still managed to get in three days a week on the course. He can hardly wait to get back out. In fact, he jokingly tells a dinner guest, Niki's love of the game was what drew him to her when they met.
Zindler's first wife, Gertrude, died in 1997 after 56 years of marriage. He said he'd never marry again, and he meant it. Then he met Niki at a bat mitzvah.
He shrugs and smiles.
"The first thing I asked her was, 'Do you like to golf?' "
Married three years ago, they live in Meyerland, in the modest house Zindler bought with Gertrude 48 years ago. It's full of memories and also nearly a half-century of accumulated belongings. That's what bothers Niki the most — the clutter, the furniture crowding every room, the knickknacks covering every surface, the boxes of old clippings and books squirreled away in cabinets and closets. She'd clear it all away if she could, not that there's any chance Zindler would let that happen.
"He's very strong-willed," she says when he leaves the room. "There's no doubt about that. But he has his soft side, too."
Then, remembering how agitated he got over the immigration issue, she adds what anyone who has watched him for long already knows: "And he really cares about people who are underprivileged."
KTRK until recently was Houston's highest-rated news station. (KHOU won the May, February and last November's sweeps.)
Zindler signed a lifetime contract in 1988 and reportedly earns a million dollars a year — one of his rewards for helping keep Eyewitness News at or near the top in the ratings all those years.
Another reward is the suite Zindler, Reingold and Bob Dows, cameraman for 25 years, share at KTRK headquarters. It has a glass wall and a sliding door that opens onto a tiny private patio. From his cluttered desk, Zindler faces a mural he commissioned for an outside wall. It evokes two things dear to him — Sugar, a white cat he owned for 15 years until it died earlier this year, and the antebellum South (not for nothing does he wear those white Col. Sanders-style suits so often).
KTRK is the station that time forgot. In an industry that celebrates youth, it embraces familiarity and stability. Television covets viewers in the 18-49 age group, and Zindler insists the station does well with them. It's unlikely many of those viewers remember a time when Dave Ward wasn't reading the news. He's been a Channel 13 anchor since 1967. Ed Brandon has done the weather for almost as long — 34 years. Doug Brown, Brandon's fellow weathercaster, has been with the station 31 years. And reporter Elma Barrera also joined the station in the 1970s.
Zindler came to Channel 13 in 1973 after spending 10 years with the Harris County's Sheriff's Department. He was famous for his clothes, for getting on television and for such idiosyncrasies as carrying mink-lined handcuffs for female prisoners.
Zindler had risen to the rank of sergeant and worked in several divisions before, working with the district attorney's office, he established the department's consumer fraud division. By all accounts, he was good enough at his job — and good enough at drawing media attention to his successes — that business owners he caught in unscrupulous practices wanted him gone.
"He stepped on some pretty large toes," Ward says of Zindler. "Marvin loves to step on toes — the bigger the better."
When Jack Heard was elected sheriff in 1972, one of the first things he did was fire Zindler. The consumer advocate blames his firing on agitation from politically influential car dealers he caught rolling back speedometers. Whatever the cause, Ward recommended to then-assistant news director Gene Burke that the station hire him.
"I accept the credit . . . or the blame," intones the man who has to keep a straight face during Zindler's nightly braying.
Zindler often says he doesn't consider himself a journalist, but he could claim credit for helping to pioneer broadcast journalism in Houston. In the 1940s, while working days in his father's clothing store, he toiled at night as a DJ and spot news reporter for KATL, a now-defunct radio station. In the 1950s, while working as a volunteer policeman, he also worked for the Houston Press, a long-gone daily newspaper, as a photographer and reporter. He also did spot news reports for KPRC television's fledging news operation until an executive fired him, he says, for being "too ugly."
That's what led to Zindler's first plastic surgery. He's been tinkering ever since. Even after all these years, Ward sounds amazed when he speaks of his colleague.
"He can grow hair," Ward says, his eyes widening. "He's not bald. He just doesn't like his hair."
A Houstonian returning to town after a 30-or-so-year absence would be forgiven if he didn't recognize the man shouting "MAAARVIN ZINDLER" on television. More than Zindler's face has changed. Where today he comes across as cuddly in a curmudgeonly sort of way, in the early years he seemed stern, unrelentingly intense. Zindler attributes it to nervousness.
"I was new," he says as he finishes his pie at the dinner table. "I wasn't a TV reporter. I was scared that I might make a mistake."
He acknowledges, though, that he's mellowed. He loved a good fight in those days; he delighted in bushwhacking scoundrels, catching them unawares.
"They'd tell me 'go to hell,' " he says of his early efforts to hold businesses accountable. "They wouldn't talk to me. Regardless of whether they talked to me or not, I'd tell the story of the other side.
"They say there are two sides to every story, but there are no two sides to a story when you buy a washer and dryer and it goes out in 30 days and you have a warranty and they refuse to take care of it," he says. "There's no two sides to that story."
Today, the man who got not only national notoriety but a public thrashing and two fractured ribs for closing the La Grange brothel says he cares more about outcomes than confrontation and theatrics.
A liberal Republican who decries economic inequities and speaks often of his support for national health insurance ("If you're poor, you die," he says of health care in America), Zindler uses his stories to help people, but he doesn't attempt to encourage systemic or societal change. He's a miniaturist.
The station says Zindler gets 100,000 requests for help a year. Neediness is one factor he uses in deciding which stories to pursue. He also considers his chance of success.
"I will not do a story unless it has a happy ending," he says. Which means that if, after a visit from Zindler, the store still refuses to honor the warranty on that washer and dryer, chances are the story won't make the air.
Spend a day with Zindler and you see people of all ages and walks of life respond as if they're in the presence of the president. At the State Grill, where Zindler is a regular, an apparently new young hostess bows slightly and says she's "honored" to meet him. An elderly man sitting in a hallway at a Medical Center office building shakes Zindler's hand and asks about his health as if they were old friends. The most excited reactions seem to come from African-Americans.
In Zindler's early years on the air, white men at his country club used to chide him for airing so many stories about black people. He estimates that 80 percent of his stories were about African-Americans.
Eventually, Zindler says, his friends realized that what happens to black people also happens to Hispanics and whites.
It was Zindler's father who instilled in him a sense of fairness and concern for the less fortunate. Abe Zindler, who owned a successful Houston clothing store and served four terms as mayor of Bellaire, was a liberal who opposed the Ku Klux Klan and advertised his store in black-owned newspapers at a time when other businesses wouldn't.
Another large influence was Zindler's African-American nanny, Eva Mae Banks. They were very close. She was almost a surrogate parent. Because his father wouldn't allow him to have a car, Banks even drove young Marvin on dates.
"She was with me until I was 18 years old," Zindler recalls. "When I proposed to my first wife, Gertrude, before I could marry her Eva had to OK it."
Through his relationship with her, Zindler — though white and born to wealth — experienced racial discrimination firsthand. When they went to the movies, they had to sit in the balcony. There was an ice cream parlor between the Lowes and Metropolitan theaters downtown, Zindler recalls. They couldn't eat there because Banks wasn't allowed inside.
When Zindler went with Banks to her Catholic church, he says they had to sit on the back pew.
"The young people today can't understand what it was like for black people when I was growing up," he says. "There's no way you can understand it. You have to be there to understand it."
Zindler considered running for Congress in the 1970s. Local Republican leaders who apparently weren't aware of his liberal social views recruited him. Zindler says they commissioned a survey that said he could win, but Gertrude didn't want to live in Washington.
If he'd entered politics, he would've been following in his father's footsteps.
Abe Zindler died in 1963 deeply disappointed in Marvin. He wanted his five sons to follow him into the retail clothing business, but Marvin hated working for his father, a man known for his angry tirades.
But Abe Zindler and Marvin were at odds long before conflict over the store surfaced. According to White Knight in Blue Shades, the authorized Zindler biography that Agris wrote, Abe Zindler considered his middle son frivolous and irresponsible. When he died, Abe placed Marvin's inheritance in a trust for Marvin's children (he has five), and he left behind a harsh letter.
"I hope that it is not too late for you to learn how to work . . . ," Abe Zindler wrote. "I hope that you will make good and surprise everybody who thinks of you as a silly playboy with no sense in your head."
By any measure, Zindler has made good.
eric.harrison@chron.com
source: http://chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/features/3923211.html
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This just in: Poll of Voters: Bush Worst President Since World War II
By E&P Staff
Published: June 01, 2006 10:30 AM ET
NEW YORK A new Quinnipiac Poll finds American voters selecting George W. Bush as easily the worst American president in the past 61 years, with fellow Republican Ronald Reagan picked as the best.
Bush was named by 34% of voters, followed by Richard Nixon at 17% and Bill Clinton at 16%, according to the Quinnipiac University national poll of over 1,500 voters released today. Leading the list for best President since 1945 is Ronald Reagan with 28%, and Clinton with 25%.
While Democrats and Republicans split widely on the "worst" choice, 35% independent voters picked Bush.
Among young voters, 42% listed Bush as worst, while Clinton "won" for worst among white Protestants.
The main reason cited by voters who disapprove of Bush is the war in Iraq -- listed by 43%. By 56% to 39% they say that that going to war in Iraq was the wrong thing to do. Nearly 6 in 10 want withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
From May 23 - 30, Quinnipiac University surveyed 1,534 registered voters nationwide. The survey has a margin of error of +/- 2.5 percentage points.
source: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002611668
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