Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

August 24, 2024

Here comes the sun, shimmering across the surface of Lake George in Bolton Landing, N.Y., soon to smother the fog on the mountains.

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

A determined and accomplished woman was in the spotlight this week, filling arenas, riding a wave of support and reminding people just how bright her future could be.

We’re talking, of course, about basketball sensation Caitlin Clark.

After some early struggles as she adapted to the pro game and having been off the stage for a couple weeks during the Olympics and as the NFL preseason got going, Clark is blossoming into the star everyone expected after her stellar collegiate career at Iowa, while continuing to draw capacity crowds wherever she and the Indiana Fever take the court. Her team has recovered from a 1-8 start and is firmly in contention for the WNBA playoffs.

“Here’s the reality,” Jason Gay writes in The Wall Street Journal. “Clark isn’t a struggling professional anymore. Currently 1st in the league in assists and 12th in scoring, she’s tearing up the WNBA, very clearly one of the planet’s best players. It’s been fun to watch — the Iowa vibes are back.”

THE SPA’S BIG DAY: Saratoga Springs, N.Y., welcomes the oldest and one of the most prestigious thoroughbred horse races in the United States this weekend — The Travers. Forerunner of all of the Triple Crown races, the Travers has drawn many of the best three-year-olds in racing to the storied dirt off Union Avenue since 1864. In today’s Midsummer Derby, Belmont Stakes champion Dornoch is the favorite at 5-2, edging out Fierceness and Thorpedo Anna (both 3-1) in the morning line. Unmatched Wisdom, trained by Mechanicville, N.Y., native Chad Brown and undefeated across five starts, is 8-1. 

FAIR FARE: The New York State Fair was America’s first, a celebration of the agricultural output and industry of, largely, the state’s western counties. The first fair, in Rochester on September 29 and 30, 1841, was an immediate success with 10,000 to 15,000 visitors, a clear demonstration of the importance of farming in a state of big cities. The New York Archives in the Summer issue of its magazine celebrates the founding of the New York State Fair (happening through September 2 in Syracuse), covering the topic, and the people and context behind it, in its usual rich depth. It’s just a taste of the coverage found in each quarterly issue of the magazine, which is in the midst of a subscription drive for both the magazine and the new Jr! publication, aimed at introducing young readers to New York State history.

ADIRONDACKS CHALLENGE: The economy of the Adirondacks has long depended on the stability of local and state government jobs — including those in the state prisons that dot the region. The state needed prisons as a result of the harsh penalties triggered particularly by Rockefeller-era drug laws, and upstate communities were willing to accommodate the newly incarcerated and the jobs prisons created. But as prison populations dwindle, so does the need for penitentiaries and the jobs they provide, leaving accommodations of another kind — tourism — to pick up an even heavier economic load. The risk, of course, is that Mother Nature can be fickle and create havoc at any moment that can take months to recover from, as tourism-dependent communities in a depressed area of northern Vermont are learning.

FAST COMPANY: Melique Garcia coaches the indoor and outdoor track teams at his high school alma mater in Watervliet, N.Y. In the fall, he coaches the junior varsity football team, all while working as an IT analyst. And preparing to sprint in the Olympics. At 32, Garcia represented Honduras, his father’s home country, in the 2024 Games in Paris, finishing fifth in his qualifying heat in the 100-meter dash in a time of 10.76 seconds. The mayor and city council recently declared “Melique Garcia Day” and presented Garcia with a proclamation. He told the Albany Times Union he hopes to try again when the Olympics are in Los Angeles in 2028.

DISCOVERING HISTORY: Secrets long buried were unearthed in recent days with a pair of discoveries in the United States. In Mississippi, an amateur fossil hunter wading through a creek found what turned out to be a fully intact, 7-foot-long tusk of a Columbian mammoth protruding from the bank. The animals weighed 10 tons and lived during the Ice Age. The discovery is a first-of-its-kind for the region. In Iowa, researchers also working in a creek said they excavated the state’s first well-preserved mastodon, a roughly 13,600-year-old specimen that was found in the southern part of the state.

Theodore Roosevelt was depicted more than 100 years ago riding a moose through the Adirondacks, an image that required careful cutting and pasting. Today, it’s much simpler to generate such an image — just ask AI. AI photo: Midjourney; original photo, public domain.

TEDDY RUSE-EVELT: On September 14, 1901, then-Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks, having just returned from a hike to the summit of Mount Marcy, when he received a message that President William McKinley, who had been shot two weeks earlier and was expected to recover, had taken a turn for the worse. He famously descended the mountain and took a midnight stage coach 40 miles to a train station, where he learned McKinley had died. That’s all true, as far as we know. The image of Roosevelt riding a moose? A fake, and one of the first mass-produced manipulated images. Despite being a fabrication, the image has become an enduring piece of American folklore.

HEARTFELT PLEA: Brian Moffett was, in the words of his son, “a man of boundless energy and relentless goodwill … larger than life, a true character, and the only person I’ve ever known who always knew what to do in any situation.” And when he was diagnosed with ALS, Brian Moffett knew what he wanted to do with his situation — die on his terms. He feared what he knew was coming and wanted to avoid it, his son writes in the Staten Island Advance. That’s why he advocated for the state Legislature to pass, on its ninth try, the Medical Aid in Dying Act. For the ninth time, it failed. “Sadly, Dad died in pain, struggling to take his last breath. His death finally ended his fear,” Jake Moffett writes. “It’s too late for Dad, but it’s not too late for the New Yorkers who have yet to be handed a terminal illness prognosis of six months or less to live.”

TRAGEDY AT SEA: Divers recovered five bodies from a superyacht that capsized off Sicily as investigators try to piece together what caused the 184-foot vessel to sink almost immediately during a violent rainstorm in the middle of the night. The dead included British tech mogul Mike Lynch, who was celebrating with family and friends after his acquittal on fraud charges in a U.S. courtroom, and his 18-year-old daughter; a senior Morgan Stanley executive; and a high-profile New York defense lawyer. Fifteen passengers and crew survived. The superyacht is on the seabed beneath 164 feet of water.

WASTE NOT: One of the simplest ways to elicit fiery comments from a local elected official is to tell him or her a shipment of waste is coming to their community from another state — even when a facility with the numerous permits required to accept such waste is located within that community. It happened last year in Michigan, when officials reacted with breathless alarm to news that waste from an Ohio train derailment was coming in, and it happened again this week with news that nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project was destined for the same landfill. Politics is politics, but what do they think is going into those landfills every single day, and are they turning away the tax revenue those facilities generate?

CHANGES AT MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week reported a big decline in the percentage of Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander students in its incoming freshman class, the first since the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action, The New York Times reports. About 16 percent of students in the Class of 2028 fit that description, about 9 percent below recent baselines. The percentage of Asian American students jumped to 47 percent from 40 percent. The share of white students remained about the same. MIT is the first major university to announce the racial and ethnic composition of its incoming class.

ESCAPING THE TOXICITY: The leadership of two towns in the Capital Region of New York was in turmoil this week following mass resignations of Town Board members in one and the planned departure of the supervisor in the other, months after her reelection. Berne, a town in the highlands of rural Albany County, saw three of its five Town Board members quit, citing the “toxic work environment” under Supervisor Dennis Palow, the Albany Times Union reported. One of the departing board members told the Times Union the town was more than $500,000 in debt, and called on the state Comptroller’s Office, which found several deficiencies in a 2021 audit of the town’s books, to “come in and do a forensic audit.” In Niskayuna, an upscale suburb of Schenectady where constituents are still fuming over an increase in water and sewer bills, Town Supervisor Jaime Puccioni announced she was stepping down to return to teaching fulltime as an associate professor. Two days later, a former Niskayuna resident was charged with a second-degree felony count of aggravated harassment as a hate crime after he allegedly left a racist voicemail for the supervisor, a woman of color.

PRIDE IN THE SKY: Two new versions of Marine One and Marine Two, the helicopters that transport the president and vice president, respectively, were among 23 helicopters delivered to the Marines Corps this week from a Sikorsky plant in Owego, N.Y., Sikorsky’s parent company, Lockheed Martin, announced.

CHEAP LABOR: A farm that rescues goats and an upstate New York utility company are joining forces to keep vegetation, and costs, down. The goats are being used to limit weeds and clear vegetation in remote areas that are difficult for crews to reach.

SEEDS FOR ALL: An organic seed company in upstate New York announced that it no longer would sell its seeds, instead giving them away because, in the owners’ words, “Seeds are gifts. Gifts are shared,” The Associated Press reports.

LEAP YEARS: A study of molecular aging published in a scientific journal found that humans do not age in a gradual, linear way, but rather show accelerated, non-linear changes at around the ages of 44 and 60.

SEPARATE WAYS: Jennifer Lopez this week filed for divorce from Ben Affleck, two years after they were married and 20 years after their first engagement ended. It’s the second marriage for Affleck, the fourth for Lopez.

ALICE PADEN GREEN and her siblings grew up in the Champlain Valley of the Adirondacks, having escaped Jim Crow laws and segregation of the Deep South in 1948 so her dad could work at Republic Steel’s iron ore mines in Witherbee. In a town where she and her siblings were one of only two Black families, she found lifelong friends, fields to pick blackberries, and the discrimination she would fight for the rest of her life. She earned three master’s degrees and a doctorate, worked as a social worker, taught at the university level, became legislative director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and served as Gov. Mario Cuomo’s deputy commissioner of the state Division of Probation and Correctional Alternatives. In 1985, she founded Albany’s Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit civil rights organization where she served as executive director for almost four decades. She was 84.

JOHN HENDRICKSON was class president at West High School in Anchorage, Alaska, editor of the school paper, a state tennis champ, prom king and commencement speaker. He became a special assistant to Gov. Walter Hickel of Alaska at just 26. But that’s all before the Iditarod race in Alaska where he met the love of his life, Marylou Whitney, the first lady of Saratoga’s horse racing and social scene, four decades his senior. They were married in 1997 and together they embarked joyfully on a life of charitable works, with particular concern for the backstretch workers at Saratoga Race Course and the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. He served as chairman of the museum since 2017 and oversaw its recent renovation, which included an unprecedented multimedia experience honoring inductees to the Hall of Fame. He died after a brief illness at 59.

PHIL DONAHUE blazed a daytime television trail that started in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967. He signaled immediately that he would use his talk show to discuss important and controversial topics by featuring famed atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair as his first guest. The Phil Donahue Show was syndicated in 1970 and remained on national television for 26 years, during which Donahue earned 20 Emmy Awards and a Peabody. He typically featured one guest with plenty of audience interaction, and his success opened opportunities for the many stars who followed. “If there had been no Phil Donahue show, there would be no Oprah Winfrey Show,” Winfrey wrote in the September 2002 issue of O, the Oprah Magazine. He was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in May by President Biden. He died at 88 after a long illness.

“I am a very nice lady. I am not mean and do not have anger management problems. I am just so frustrated with this. … I guess I have to stop the poop-slinging.”
—  Denise Hardy, a Michigan resident who was caught on video throwing animal feces across a street and into her neighbor’s yard, actions she blames on the neighbor feeding neighborhood strays.

CUTTING FLIGHTS: A pair of scissors misplaced in a departure waiting area caused authorities at one of Japan’s busiest airports to ground all flights until they were located, resulting in 36 flights being canceled and 201 delayed.

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PRINCIPAL AUTHOR: Bill Callen.

CONTRIBUTORS: Bill Callen, Leigh Hornbeck, Mark Behan, Ryan Moore, Troy Burns, John Brodt, Kristy Miller, Claire P. Tuttle 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