The Week: What Caught Our Eye

April 29, 2023

Great Blue Herons, like this one on Lake Logan in Easton, N.Y., are usually present in New York year-round, but are more abundant during their breeding season from mid-April through the end of July, according to the New York Natural Heritage Program. Skip Dickstein

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

Well, that certainly was an interesting week in the U.S. mediaverse.

In about a 24-hour period, Fox News fired its highest-rated host, Tucker Carlson, evidently deciding that they could tolerate just about anything except mean text messages aimed at their own people; CNN dumped one of its longtime stars, Don Lemon, amid allegations of misogyny and general obnoxiousness; and NBC Universal fired its CEO, Jeff Shell, for sexual harassment. Is this anything more than coincidence, or indicative of heightened standards? As much as we may wish for the latter, we suspect it’s the former. The spate of firings overshadowed CNN’s announcement a few days earlier that newswoman Gayle King and former NBA superstar and current studio analyst Charles Barkley will collaborate on a weekly primetime news and culture program called “King Charles,” to debut this fall.

HONORING A PIONEER: Diane Struble was 25, a single mom of three girls, and a native of Scotia, N.Y., when she slipped into history and the waters of Lake George near Ticonderoga, N.Y., at 10:29 a.m. Friday, August 22, 1958. Thirty-five hours later, she emerged, cold and shaken, the first person to have swum the entire 41-mile length of the lake. Ten thousand people cheered her on, and the national and local media made her an instant celebrity. She appeared in her bathing suit on the “Today Show” and on “To Tell The Truth.” She received $2,500 for the feat from her sponsor, Schaefer Beer, and went on swim the width of Lake Champlain twice, around Manhattan Island and across Boston Harbor. Struble will be posthumously inducted into the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame in a ceremony next weekend. Struble and other Lake George swimmers will be honored by the Wiawaka Center for Women in Lake George during an annual weeklong event August 21-25.  

TOP PICK: Pundits debated which team made the best pick, but there was no doubt who was the winner of Day 1 of the NFL Draft on Thursday. Make-A-Wish Northeast New York wish kid Kyle Stickles of Ghent brought down the house in Kansas City and blew up Twitter with his hyper-energetic announcement of the New York Jets’ 15th pick in the draft, edge rusher Will McDonald IV of Iowa State. His enthusiasm, capped by a perfect J-E-T-S chant, drew online raves from fans, media and even NFL stars such as Patrick Mahomes.

KNIVES OUT: When things aren’t going well for the boss, and that boss happens to be the governor of a state, you can be fairly certain there’s a lot of sniping and second-guessing going on behind the scenes. If the acrimony gets bad enough, people hear about it, and sometimes rivalries and feuds spill into the public sphere. And then there’s Adam Sullivan. Despite living in Colorado, Sullivan, known to relatively few before this week, has long been New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s most trusted advisor, a status that is sure to be tested by a political takedown in The New York Times that was fueled by the frustrations of sidelined staff members who were granted anonymity to basically accuse him of being nasty, condescending and hard to get along with. The on-the-record comments weren’t any kinder. Liz Krueger, an influential Democratic state senator from Manhattan, told the Times, “I’ve never met him, I’ve just heard bad things about him — sorry.”

GREAT CAMP: The impossible-to-pronounce name, Chingachgook, came from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper’s Chingachgook was the classic noble savage said to have been modeled after a Mohican basket maker and hunter named Captain John. The Schenectady YMCA adopted the name for a summer camp at Pilot Knob on Lake George in 1913, and it’s been providing children with an unparalleled Lake George experience every summer since. Now one of the oldest camps in the country, Camp Chingachgook has been recognized by Newsweek magazine as one of the best.

ANSWERING THE CALL: The ranks of volunteer fire departments and emergency medical services squads are flagging. But there may be a resource hiding in plain sight. According to the U.S Fire Administration, only one in 10 volunteer firefighters nationwide is a woman. Dawn Bailey is one of four women volunteers with the Cold Spring Fire Co. in Putnam County, N.Y., and says her recruiting pitch to other women is direct: “You’re capable of more than you know. Don’t hold back or worry about what somebody else thinks. If you’re feeling it, go for it.”

With woodland strolls comes the potential for tick bites and the diseases they can transmit. New York State health officials are urging people to be vigilant, checking themselves every 15 minutes while hiking, gardening or engaging in other outdoor activities that could pick up ticks. Nancie Battaglia

CHANGING FORTUNES: Billions of dollars in government funding and incentives for renewable energy, battery storage, electric vehicle production and other initiatives meant to clean up the environment and stem climate change bring with them the promise of transformative change and growth in parts of the country unaccustomed to investments of the scale now being contemplated. “This is massive and unprecedented investment,” Philip Jordan, vice president at BW Research, which studies how policies impact the workforce and economy, told The Wall Street Journal. “It will reshape some local economies and it will revitalize and strengthen others.” Of course, finding locations for renewable energy projects isn’t the only challenge — so is getting them plugged into the electric grid.

GLOBAL IMPACT: Racing to address a worldwide shortage of the computer chips used in cars, cell phones, video games and countless other devices, GlobalFoundries of Malta in Saratoga County, N.Y., has purchased all of the unsold land in a local technical park – 800 acres – to build a proposed second chip manufacturing operation. More than 2,500 people already work at the $15-billion-plus complex that includes both manufacturing space and GlobalFoundries’ corporate headquarters.

DEDICATED TO AWARENESS: The news is dire about girls’ mental health. Research released in February by the CDC showed 57% of U.S. teen girls felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021 — double that of boys, and the highest level reported over the past decade. Hope Angioletti, a three-sport athlete and straight-A student at John Jay Senior High School in Hopewell Junction, N.Y., knows what it feels like to battle anxiety, and she’s not alone. Fortunately for Angioletti, her friends, coaches and community supported her. This year, the softball team at John Jay partnered with Morgan’s Message, a nonprofit organization that seeks to spread the word and spark conversations about mental illness, particularly among young athletes. This week, they dedicated a game to mental health awareness. “I think everyone faces some kind of challenge in life and, at some point, we all need help,” one of Angioletti’s teammates and close friends, Hannah Greer, told the Poughkeepsie Journal. “It’s important that people realize that everyone is dealing with something, and it’s OK. You’re loved and appreciated.”

SHAKESPEARE ORIGINAL: A rare first edition of Shakespeare’s First Folio, a near-complete collection of his plays that was published seven years after his death in 1616, is being offered for sale by a rare books dealer in London who also has second, third and fourth editions of the book, as well as a first edition on Shakespeare’s poems. He’s listing all five books for $10.5 million. The First Folio alone lists for $7.5 million. A Shakespeare scholar told NPR the First Folio is one of the most important books in the English language. Without it, she said, half of his plays would have been lost, including “Julius Caesar,” “The Tempest” and “Macbeth.” 

GRAVITY OF HIS PROPHECY: We can all agree that Isaac Newton was a pretty sharp cat. He wrote the rule book on gravity, built the first reflecting telescope and figured out the exact shape of Earth. But when the father of modern science wasn’t making pioneering discoveries in physics and mathematics, he spent a great deal of time studying the Bible and other religious and prophetic writings in an attempt to calculate when the world would end. In Newton’s estimation, that time is more or less right around the corner — in 2060, to be exact. Some think he may be right.  

DOOR CLOSED: New York City’s longest-serving doorman has greeted his last resident. Manny Teixeira, who worked the door at the Trafalgar House Condominiums on the Upper East Side of Manhattan since shortly after it opened in the early 1960s, retired this week. His final shift was Thursday. He said he plans to spend his newfound free time walking and trying not to automatically rise at 2:30 a.m.

HISTORIC DISCOVERY: Historians think a chunk of debris that washed up on Long Island after Tropical Storm Ian last fall may have come from the SS Savannah, which ran aground and broke apart in 1821, two years after becoming the first vessel to cross the Atlantic Ocean partly under steam power. “It was pretty thrilling to find it,” Betsy DeMaria, a museum technician at the National Park Service’s Fire Island National Seashore, told The Associated Press. “We definitely are going to have some subject matter experts take a look at it and help us get a better view of what we have here.” The Savannah was transporting cargo between its home base of Savannah, Ga., and New York when it ran aground off Fire Island.

THE PRICE OF POOR CELL SERVICE: Why is there not yet virtually universal cell phone coverage coast to coast? A 2021 report commissioned by the state recommended improvements to cellphone reliability to eliminate coverage gaps, with an estimated cost of $610 million. Lack of coverage has cost lives before, and it became an issue again recently when friends of a 20-year-old gunshot victim in rural Washington County drove around frantically searching for a signal to call 911. A spokeswoman for Gov. Kathy Hochul told the Albany Times Union the governor “is committed to strengthening broadband and cellular service across the state.”

LIVES

HARRY BELAFONTE was an entertainer and activist who was committed to the hard work it took to be successful in both arenas. He became the first solo performer with a million-selling album, “Calypso” in 1955, and was a star of stage and screen, winning a Tony Award in 1954 and, five years later, becoming the first Black actor to win an Emmy. A force in the arts, his greatest legacy will likely be his lifetime of activism, beginning with the Civil Rights movement and patterned after his hero Paul Robeson’s view that artists must act as “gatekeepers of truth.” At the peak of his singing career, he produced a benefit concert for the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., that helped make Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a national figure. In the 1980s, Belafonte initiated the all-star, million-selling “We Are the World” recording, the Grammy-winning charity song for famine relief in Africa. Tributes poured in after his death, at 96, of congestive heart failure.

ALTON MADDOX never backed down from the incendiary accusations and rhetoric he consistently employed as one of the lawyers representing Tawana Brawley, even after her accusations of rape and brutal treatment in 1987 at the hands of several white men, including police officers, proved to be false. Maddox, fellow lawyer C. Vernon Mason and the Rev. Al Sharpton, were relentless in their insults and allegations, with Maddox fond of calling white people “crackers” and labeling then-New York Gov. Mario Cuomo “the George Wallace of the ’90s.” Neither he nor Mason or Sharpton apologized, and when Maddox refused to respond to a misconduct allegation related to the Brawley case, appellate judges suspended his law license. He never regained it. He died at 77.

JERRY SPRINGER ushered in the era of no-holds-barred, freak show television, its popularity an early clue that American society was taking a turn for the crude and prurient. Fans of the “The Jerry Springer Show” tuned in each afternoon to watch bleep-filled arguments among degenerates, with the occasional melee to keep things spicy. At one point during its 27-year run, the show was outdrawing Oprah Winfrey. Springer, a former Cincinnati mayor and TV newsman, called the show “escapist entertainment.” Others would say degrading. He died at 79 after a brief illness.

CAROLYN BRYANT DONHAM was working in a grocery store in Money, Miss., when she accused a young Black boy of making improper advances — he apparently had whistled at her. She told her then-husband and his half-brother, who found 14-year-old Emmitt Till and lynched him, an act that galvanized a generation of Civil Rights activists. No one ever was punished in court for the crime. “It has comforted America to see this as merely a story of monsters, her among them,” said historian and author Timothy Tyson, who interviewed Donham in 2008. “What this narrative keeps us from seeing is the monstrous social order that cared nothing for the life of Emmett Till nor thousands more like him. Neither the federal government nor the government of Mississippi did anything to prevent or punish this murder. Condemning what Donham did is easier than confronting what America was — and is.” She died in hospice care at 88.

ALMOST FINAL WORDS

“It was definitely out of character for our faculty. That is not the typical response we see here.”
—    University at Albany Police Chief Paul Burlingame, after an adjunct sociology professor was arrested on charges of disrupting an anti-abortion event on campus. She allegedly unplugged an electronic display that the group leading the event was using to show what it said were the remains of aborted fetuses. The incident came two weeks after students at UAlbany shouted down a conservative speaker on campus.

THE SIGNOFF

MISSING TREASURE: A 2,000-year-old bust of a Roman military leader, believed to have been stolen from a storage place where it had been moved to protect it during World War II, is on its way back to Germany after an odyssey that included being purchased for $34.99 from a Goodwill store in Austin, Texas. It has spent the past year on display at a museum in San Antonio.

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Principal Author: Bill Callen. 

Sincere Thanks to Contributors: Ryan Moore, John Brodt, Lisa Fenwick, Leigh Hornbeck, Troy Burns, Tara Hutchins, Claire P. Tuttle, John Bulmer, Nancie Battaglia, Skip Dickstein and Mark McGuire.

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