Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

June 15, 2024

Hikers on Giant Mountain, one of the 46 Adirondack High Peaks, found themselves at eye-level with a rainbow. John Bulmer

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

We’ve been thinking about dads this week — some we’ve known, some we’ve observed, and some we’ve only heard about.

They come in all colors, shapes, sizes, and crazy get-ups. Some seem born to be dads. They help deliver their children in the hospital, cradle them in the nursery, read to them every night, and have as much spit-up on their Boston Red Sox T-shirts as any mom. Some come into their dad roles later. They coach and teach and cheer. They drive on field trips and buy ice cream for the team. They help with the math homework even when they don’t get it either.

Almost all dads embarrass their kids at some point. It’s an honorable dad tradition. They cheer too loudly, give unsolicited advice, brag to the teacher, principal and coach, and ask stupid questions of the friends. These are the dads who are really trying to connect, if a little awkwardly.

Some dads struggle with their own awful demons, and sometimes this keeps them from doing what they truly yearn to do: Love their children and be present for them. These dads don’t need to be judged. They just need a little help.

Some dads have to be both mom and dad. They deserve our admiration. Some dads aren’t even really dads; they are beloved surrogates.

Some dads know how to fish and hunt. They know the best places to take the kids on a hike. They can pitch a baseball or a tent. Others prefer museums, movies and board games. Some love computers. Some need naps. Some love to cook.

Some dads really come into their own when grandchildren arrive. Finally, they can be the dads they always hoped their younger selves could be.

All dads feel immense pride. And the good ones feel deeply the pain when their children suffer.

Almost all dads want to be better. And that’s the point. On this Father’s Day weekend, we honor all dads — the great ones, the good ones, the struggling ones, the getting-better ones, the present ones, the absent ones, the living and the dead, the cuddly and the strict, the supporters and the demanders, the teachers and the learners, the defenders and the critics, the encouragers and the discouragers, the proud and the even prouder.

We love you, dads.

A GOOD BET: It was no small or inexpensive feat for the New York Racing Association to move its operation from Belmont Park to Saratoga Springs, N.Y., to host the Belmont Stakes at historic Saratoga Race Course, but it paid off, both at the track and in the community. Chatter on social media and official accounts are giving the four-day racing festival rave reviews. The crowds were large and well-managed, racetrack people were friendly, and the atmosphere throughout the city was jovial, which is saying something when there were more than 50,000 in attendance at the track on Saturday alone. “Saratoga is such a cool place. It's a throwback,” said Jayson Werth, the former major leaguer who is an owner of the Belmont Stakes winner, Dornoch. “I'll go back to Saratoga as much as I possibly can just because of the experience and the connection to the track and to the people and the place.” NYRA and city officials now prepare for the 40-day Saratoga meet, which starts July 11, and includes the legendary Travers Stakes on August 24.

A CLASH AWAITS: Thursday, June 20, promises to be a historic day for the Adirondack Park Agency, which will consider the Lake George Park Commission’s insistence on using a chemical herbicide in Lake George despite adamant opposition from the people who will be most affected — lakeside property owners backed by the Lake George Association, the first lake conservation organization in the U.S. and one determined to fulfill its role as lake protector. If approved, this would be the first time a chemical is used in Lake George to kill weeds or anything else. The potential consequences are immense. “The resources we are pouring into our opposition would be much better spent on other things like research, monitoring and harvesting milfoil,” Peter Menzies, an LGA director, told Adirondack Explorer. “They are ignoring the will of the people.”

BONES AND SUCH: The Lake George, N.Y., area is rich in archeological finds. Just ask local landowners who might tell you they can’t turn over a shovel without finding a reminder of people long gone — a button, a bit of clay pipe, a jagged piece of knapped flint. Lake George was pivotal in epic 18^th-century battles between the British and the French for control of North America. Now, an official archaeological survey is under way in Lake George Battlefield Park, under the direction of Skidmore College Anthropology Department Chair Siobhan Hart, the first since 2016.

CLASSICAL NOTES: Vincent Caruso, one of the voices behind Sirius XM’s “Symphony Hall,” will give a studio talk at The Sembrich in Bolton Landing, N.Y., today at 2 p.m. The talk, titled “A Kitchen, A Radio, and a Kit,” will discuss Caruso’s journey through classical music and radio. He will be joined by Joel Brown and the Finger Lakes Guitar Quartet performing arrangements for classical guitar. Caruso has been a DJ for SiriusXM Satellite Radio’s Ch. 78-Symphony Hall, as well as the SiriusXM Pops and Classical Voices channels. Tickets are $38 and can be purchased online at www.TheSembrich.org or by phone at (518) 644-2431.

MYSTERY NO MORE: A corporate jet that vanished shortly after takeoff on a snowy night in Burlington, Vt., in 1971, appears to have been found beneath 200 feet of water near an island in Lake Champlain. The lake froze over four days after the crash, halting underwater search efforts at the time. More than a dozen search operations over the years came up empty until underwater searcher Garry Kozak and a team using a remotely operated vehicle last month found wreckage of a jet with the same custom paint scheme in the lake close to where the radio control tower had last tracked the plane before it disappeared, The Associated Press reported. The 10-seat plane was en route to Providence, R.I.

MALAWI MOURNS: Malawi’s vice president and nine others were killed when the small military plane they were traveling in crashed in poor weather in a mountainous region in the north of the country. Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera called Saulos Chilima “a good man, a devoted father and husband, a patriotic citizen who served his country with distinction and a formidable vice president.” Chilima served as vice president for nine years, in two administrations. Chilima is the second major world figure to die in an aviation crash in three weeks. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and that country’s foreign minister were killed in a helicopter crash in May.

RISE ABOVE: At a fundraiser last week, the leader of IPH, an Albany, N.Y.-based nonprofit that serves people experiencing homelessness, spoke of the temporary nature of being unhoused, despite the blow it serves to a person’s dignity and prospects. “It is not who you are,” Janine Robitaille said. “It does not need to define you.” In New Orleans, a young man whose circumstances might have overwhelmed his potential proved her point. Elijah Hogan’s mother died when he was 8. He and his siblings moved in with their grandmother, but when the house she rented was sold and she moved into senior housing, Elijah moved into a youth shelter. He might have dropped out of school. Instead, he studied harder, and with the help of a case manager and teachers who mentored him, he graduated at the top of his class. “Take pride in how far you have come,” he said during his valedictorian speech on May 24. “Have faith in how far you can go.”

It’s the time of year when people slip off their shoes and enjoy the refreshing waters of the Adirondacks. Nancie Battaglia

RULE NO. 1: SHOW UP: There’s all kinds of advice out there for new college graduates as they’re about to enter the full-time workforce. It’s harder to find advice for those who aren’t going to college or enlisting in military service, even though each state every year produces thousands of high school graduates who will go directly to full-time employment. Michael J. Hicks, a professor at Ball State who writes frequently about business and economic policy, steps into the void with some practical guidance and encouragement. Businesses don’t expect 18-year-olds to have all the skills they’ll need, he writes, but, “They expect someone who can show up on time, ready to work; sober, clean, wearing the proper clothes and eager. The fastest way to distinguish yourself is to respect the job and the workplace.” You also should prepare yourself to do grunt work, just like every junior associate of any workplace. “The junior member of the U.S. Supreme Court is the ‘note taker’ for deliberations,” he writes. “If you cannot perform your assigned tasks well, no one will give you better ones.”

FRANKLY RIDICULOUS: The world’s most famous glutton got bounced from the world’s most famous display of gluttony, the annual July 4th Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Competition on Coney Island, because, believe it or not, he signed an endorsement deal with a Nathan’s rival that makes vegetarian hot dogs. Joey Chestnut, who’s won the contest 16 times, including every year since 2016, as of now will not “compete” in this year’s contest, according to (go ahead and swallow your coffee so you don’t spit it all over your device) something called Major League Eating, which apparently is a thing that reporters are supposed to write about with a straight face. A spokesman for MLE said the organization was “devastated” to lose Chestnut, though evidently there’s a chance that things will turn around and we’ll again get to watch Chestnut inhale his food.

CRANKY NEIGHBOR: Americans, it seems, are a cantankerous bunch these days, enough so that our friendly neighbor to the north is taking seriously the prospect that a second Civil War could be on the horizon. For all the loose rhetoric that gets tossed about in the toxic haze of modern politics, it’s still astonishing to consider that sober minds of our closest ally are advising the Canadian government to prepare for the possibility of armed domestic conflict in the U.S. Given the breathtaking surge in road-rage shootings in the U.S. — up more than 400% from 2014 to 2023, according to a gun control advocacy group that analyzed data from across the nation — you can’t blame them.

A FRIEND INDEED: A whippet whose owner crashed his pickup into a remote, wooded ravine near the Oregon-Idaho border ran nearly four miles with glass in his snout to a campsite they had visited previously and where his owner was supposed to meet a friend, prompting a search that resulted in the rescue of the driver and three other dogs, two of which also were injured in the wreck.

DISCOVERING HISTORY: Three boys on a hike near their home in North Dakota found what turned out to be the fossil of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, a discovery that one paleontologist told the New York Post was, “even being conservative, one in a million.” The discovery was chronicled in “T. REX,” a documentary that will debut June 21 in museums and on Imax screens.

FADING LIGHT: The grandson of Jimmy Carter said the former president, entering his 16^th month of hospice care, is no longer awake every day, but is “experiencing the world as best he can as he continues through this process.” Jason Carter, the oldest of the Carters’ 22 grandchildren, told Southern Living about a recent visit in which he told his grandfather people were asking how he was doing. “He kind of smiled and he said, ‘I don’t know, myself.’ It was pretty sweet.”

A FINAL SALUTE: Robert “Al” Persichitti enlisted in the U.S. Navy In 1942 and took part in the invasions of Okinawa and Iwo Jima, where he watched the iconic flag-raising on Mount Suribachi. A resident of Fairport, N.Y., he frequented World War II remembrances in Washington and New Orleans, home of the National WWII Museum, and was on his way to participate in D-Day ceremonies in France when he fell ill in Germany, where he died at 102. “I’m really excited to be going,” he told a Rochester TV station just before the trip.

JERRY WEST was arguably the greatest combination of athlete and successful executive in the history of North American sports. An all-American for West Virginia, West combined with Oscar Robertson to lead the U.S. to the 1960 gold medal in men’s basketball, then went on to a sensational 14-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers, where he was a 12-time All-NBA selection and the only player ever to be named Finals MVP as part of a losing team. Literally an icon — his silhouette is the NBA logo — Mr. Clutch later helped build dynasties as an executive with the Lakers and the Golden State Warriors. West, Magic Johnson and Hakeem Olajuwon are the only players ever to win a Finals MVP, be named NCAA tournament Most Outstanding Player and earn an Olympic gold medal. He was 86.

HOWARD FINEMAN was 8 when, on election night in 1956, he converted the den of his family home into a makeshift newsroom where he “broadcast” the results to his parents and laid out piles of paper to look like the cards the networks fed into their rudimentary computers. At Colgate University, he was the editor-in-chief of The Colgate Maroon-News. After Columbia Journalism School, it was off to The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., where he covered politics and Klan rallies. In 1977, he made his way to Washington where, within three years, he was the deputy bureau chief at Newsweek, at the time one of the most widely read newsweeklies in America. Then, in a career that spanned some 40 years, it was off to the Huffington Post and MSNBC as an astute and valued political pundit. He died of pancreatic cancer at 75.

MORRIE MARKOFF was born in New York City on Jan. 11, 1914, one of four children of Max and Rose Markoff, Jewish immigrants from Russia. He lost one sibling to the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. Trained as a machinist, he moved to Los Angeles in the late 1930s and married Betty Goldmintz. They were married 81 years before her death in 2019, not long after her husband started a blog that led to the publication in 2017 of his memoir, “Keep Breathing: Recollections from a 103-year-old.” “I have had many close calls, escapes from death. Never did I ever expect to reach the age I am, and to still have my marbles,” he wrote in a 2021 blog post. “Just good luck. Some people have it, some don’t. Some believe our lives are preordained (meant to be). Perhaps. Who is to say.” Believed to have been the oldest man in the United States, he was 110.

“We are a community, and we’re supposed to love each other.”
— Brenda Anderson, a faith-based community activist and advocate in Flint, Mich., explaining her approach to service.

KINDNESS MATTERS: Wherever they go in life, it’s unlikely that the 180 members of the Apponequet (Mass.) Regional High School Class of 2024 will ever forget Mason Macuch. Not because he was their class president, but because he left personal, hand-written thank you notes under the chairs of every graduate, a task that took about 10 hours.

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Principal Author: Bill Callen.

Sincere thanks to our contributors: Ryan Moore, Leigh Hornbeck, Mark Behan, Troy Burns, John Brodt, Kristy Miller, Tara Hutchins, Claire P. Tuttle, Nancie Battaglia and John Bulmer.

FACING OUT is what we do. We help companies, organizations and individuals work effectively with their most important external audiences – their customers, their shareholders, their communities, the government and the news media.  www.behancommunications.com

Facing Out features news and other nuggets that caught our eye, and that we thought might be of value to you, our friends and business associates. Some items are good news about our clients and friends, others are stories that we hope will leave you a bit more informed or entertained than you were five minutes ago. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback. 

Let’s make it a conversation: mark.behan@behancom.com