The Week: What Caught Our Eye

May 13, 2023

Gathering storm clouds create a stunning palette in the evening sky over Glens Falls, N.Y. Kurt Ruppel.

 Dear Colleagues and Friends:

On this Mother’s Day Weekend, please indulge us as we celebrate big news this week involving two moms who are dear to us.

On Tuesday, Katy Delgado Moore and her husband, Ryan Moore, our CEO, welcomed Maisie Delgado Moore, baby sister of Madison. We’re pleased to report that mom and baby are doing well, and we can’t wait to meet little Maisie.

The day before, in Western Maryland, Jean Callen-Brown, mother of the person writing this with profound relief, rang the bell signifying the successful completion of cancer treatment. Of course, anyone who knows her is not surprised; at 85, she stood on a step stool in the back of a pickup truck to pick four bushels of apples from the trees in her yard, and has declared that she, like her mother, will live to 100. Aim higher!

It is unlikely Katy Delgado and Jean Callen-Brown will ever meet, or that their life experiences could be more different, but they will forever share a bond — beloved mothers who this week reminded us how precious life is and filled us with joy beyond measure.

Happy Mother’s Day, indeed.

The world grew more beautiful at 9:05 p.m. Tuesday, May 9, 2023, when Maisie Delgado Moore made her debut. Jean Callen-Brown performing the act every cancer patient — and those who love them — looks forward to.

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ELEVATING YOGI: You can observe a lot by watching, Yogi Berra famously said, and when Lindsay Berra was watching the major league All-Star Game in 2015 with her famous grandfather, what she observed infuriated her. That night Major League Baseball honored the four players voted by fans as the greatest living legends — Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax and Johnny Bench. But not Yogi Berra. A few years later, documentary film producer Peter Sobiloff, a family friend who had just seen a documentary about Fred Rogers, wondered aloud why no one had produced a documentary on Berra. So he worked with the family to make "It Ain’t Over," which highlights the grace and kindness Berra extended to others in addition to recounting his brilliant baseball career.

SPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT: Tommy Kuhl is one of the top collegiate golfers in the country, and had just played the round of his life, shooting a course-record 62 in a U.S. Open qualifier. With one qualifying tournament still to play, he was on the verge of achieving every amateur’s dream, a spot in the Open alongside the game’s greatest players. But as he was walking off the course in the glow of his amazing round, a comment from a teammate made Kuhl realize he had broken a rule by repairing aeration marks on the putting greens. An innocent mistake that no one had flagged, but Kuhl knew; he had broken the rules of golf without penalizing himself, which means he had signed an incorrect scorecard, a disqualifying event. “I felt sick to my stomach,” he told a reporter. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I didn’t tell the rules official.” He was disqualified and will have to wait till next year to try again.

TIPPING POINT: By now, anyone who has used a credit card to buy food and drinks is accustomed to being asked how much they’d like to tip, typically in the range of 15% to 25%, with a customizable option. Those automated roadblocks are increasingly popping up for transactions involving zero interaction with another person, with some decrying the practice as tawdry emotional manipulation to extract extra money from the consumer. “They’re cutting labor costs by doing self-checkout,” said a college student interviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “So what’s the point of asking for a tip? And where is it going?” (Employers are legally obligated to give tips to workers). Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and an advocate for higher wages for restaurant workers said, “some employers are trying to use increasing tipping as a way to not have to pay people more.” 

INCOMING: A family in Hopewell, N.J., had an unexpected visitor this week — a “metallic object,” thought to be a meteorite billions of years old, crashed through the roof and ceiling and damaged the hardwood floor. The shocked homeowner, thinking someone thrown a rock, touched it and reported that it was warm. A local astronomer told a Philadelphia TV station that the meteorite had been “running around in space all that time and now it's come to Earth and fell in their laps. For it to actually strike a house, for people to be able to pick up, that's really unusual and has happened very few times in history.”

QUITE AN ENTRANCE: Back in the day, fancy rides to the prom were for the kids who could afford to rent a limo, or were lucky enough to have a relative with a cool car who was willing to part with it for the night. Of course, in those days, if you wanted someone to go with you, you just asked, preferably after your cotton-mouth cleared up. But then, there wasn’t social media to show off your elaborate “promposals,” or your entrance, which may explain why two students in Washington state dropped $1,000 to rent a World War II tank that was escorted by a flaming bagpipe played by a unicycle-riding Darth Vader. The sign one held to ask his date: “I’d be tankful to take you to prom.”

SURVIVAL KIT: A 48-year-old Australian woman who got stuck in the mud in a remote area survived five days on a few snacks and sweets and a bottle of wine before a rescue helicopter spotted her. The woman said she’s not a drinker, and had purchased the wine as a gift for her mother. “The first thing coming in my mind, I was thinking ‘water and a cigarette,’ ” she told 9News Australia. “Thank God the policewoman had a cigarette.”

RUN FOR THE LOVE OF IT: Kelly’s Angels, the charity NewsChannel 13’s Mark Mulholland founded to honor his late wife Kelly and help local kids, expects to welcome 1,000 runners and walkers Sunday for its 11th Mother-Lovin 5K Run/Walk in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Kelly’s Angels provides fun grants, angel hugs and scholarships to kids who have lost a parent or caregiver to cancer or whose families are facing health-related adversity. This year the all-volunteer charity began providing grants to children of families from the Ukraine who have relocated to the Capital Region.

SOUTHERN EXPOSURE: The northern lights — spectacular, colorful waves created by activity in the sun’s magnetic field — typically are visible only in the world’s northernmost places, but cyclical shifts in the sun’s magnetic field are making nature’s light show visible to people who ordinarily are too far south. In March, powerful geomagnetic storms helped to make them visible as far south in the United States as North Carolina. In April, they were spotted in Arizona and central California. The New York Times reports the phenomenon of greater southern visibility will peak in 2025.

THERE’S ALWAYS HOPSCOTCH: Thieves in the Peruvian city of Huancayo thought they hit a mini-jackpot when they broke into a shoe store and stole 200 trainers from various brands, with an estimated value of more than $13,000. One problem: They’re all for the right foot.

BETTING ON BELMONT: Belmont Park, the Long Island racetrack that hosts the last and longest of the three Triple Crown thoroughbred races, stands like a cavernous dinosaur, attendance sparse on most days, as is the case at most tracks in what observers agree is a struggling industry. On opening day this year, 2,120 fans showed up in a venue that holds 50 times that number. New York State is trying to give Belmont a leg up, allocating $455 million to renovate and modernize the facility. The hope is that an attractive venue will lure more fans — an industry-funded study suggests a spiffier Belmont could attract 350,000 additional fans per year, double the current attendance. A fan interviewed by New York Focus was skeptical. “Honestly, I really don’t know. There’s a huge stigma,” he said. “Almost everyone who doesn’t come out with me, they think that it’s old men who are drunks. They don’t want to be here.”

MINDING MENTAL HEALTH: The American Psychological Association has weighed in on the effects social media is having on American teenagers, this week issuing recommended guidelines for social media such as having parents monitor teens’ feeds and try to minimize or stop any dangerous content their child is exposed to. Some of the recommendations would require government action to implement, such as the creation of "reporting structures" to identify and remove or deprioritize social media content depicting “illegal or psychologically maladaptive behavior.”

VALUES AND MONEY: Middlebury College has removed the name of former Gov. John Mead from the prominent chapel on its campus because Mead, a physician, advocated for sterilization for “degenerates  and defectives” a century ago. Middlebury says Mead’s values are inconsistent with the college’s. Mead’s family wants the money back. 

HAPPY HOMECOMING: A Yorkshire terrier mix named Blossom Flower was returned to her family in Detroit six years after escaping their yard. A passerby spotted the dog, which appeared to be homeless because of the condition of her fur, and took her to a nearby animal shelter, which conducted a routine scan and discovered she had been microchipped, allowing for an unusual and joyful reunion. A deputy police chief described the emotional moment to The Oakland Press: “One of our patrol officers even got teary eyed. They were shocked and happy. The family had put up a memorial page reminding folks about the dog. They were keeping hope alive.”

A curious fawn comes in for a closeup at the Adirondack Animal Land in Gloversville, N.Y. John Bulmer

YOU DON’T SAY: Charlotte and Steve von Schiller are not what you picture when you think of sports franchise owners. She’s a school teacher, he’s an electrical engineer. They bought a 5% share in the Albany Empire, an arena football team, because they wanted to help the franchise become more prominent locally and connect with local schools. All was well, they say, until Antonio Brown came to town, bringing with him a whirlwind of headlines, most of them about how dysfunctional the organization has suddenly become. The von Schillers know all too well. “They’re very negative to us — they swear at us, call us names, all this through text,” Charlotte von Schiller told the Albany Times Union, showing the evidence. As for selling out and moving on, she said, “I can’t imagine anybody, in the middle of all this chaos, is going to want to buy our shares.”

TOO CLOSE TO HOME: Kouri Richins, a mother of three in Utah who wrote a children’s book to help her children cope with the March 2022 death of their father, was arrested this week and charged with his murder. An autopsy revealed he had five times the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system. Her arrest came two months after she was featured in a local television segment called “Good Things Utah,” in which she talked about her husband’s unexpected death and its impact on their three sons.

SAYING GOODBYE: Cazenovia College, a small, private liberal arts school in Central New York, is closing for good following today’s commencement ceremonies, joining a growing list of small colleges that have gone under because declining enrollment and other financial challenges. A group of alumni gathered on campus last week to reminisce and bid farewell to a college that opened 199 years ago. “We formed this bond of family that would never break, no matter,” alumnus Alan Graham told Syracuse.com. “Rip the buildings down, dig up the roots — Caz roots are in us.”

SHARK SEASON: The warming of ocean waters and lengthening of days is calling the great whites north. Great white sharks generally start their migration toward the waters of Cape Cod in the middle of May, in search of the abundant gray seals that populate the coastal waters. Great whites have been increasingly active around Cape Cod in recent years, with last year’s count of 133 individual sharks detected the highest number ever.

LIVES

DENNY CRUM built the University of Louisville men’s basketball program into a powerhouse in the 1980s, winning two national championships and six Final Fours in 30 seasons. A former assistant to legendary UCLA coach John Wooden, where Crum was on the staff for three national title winners, he became the second fastest coach to achieve 500 wins and led his team to 23 NCAA Tournament appearances in 30 seasons. Inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1994, he later was one of six coaches to be honored with a commemorative bench around a statue of Dr. James Naismith outside the Hall of Fame, a group the Hall of Fame said exemplified the values of Naismith: teamwork, determination, self-respect, leadership, initiative and perseverance. He was 86.

HEATHER BROOKE HAMILTON created a lucrative career no one had heard of. She was a mommy blogger. First she graduated from Brigham Young University in 1997, moved to LA and took a job in tech. She began writing about the absurdities of life in a crazy tech startup, which quickly got her fired. Then she invented the “mommy blog,” writing about her life as a wife and mother, about poop, plumbers, high-strung dogs, margaritas, and postpartum depression. In 2009, Ms. Armstrong appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and was attracting some 8.5 million readers a month, earning millions in advertising revenue. She was the lone blogger featured that year on the Forbes list of the most influential women in media. The news media christened her “the queen of the mommy bloggers.” She died of an apparent suicide at 47

ALMOST FINAL WORDS

“I loved my four years at Syracuse — it was my dream to play basketball at Syracuse for Coach (Jim) Boeheim. Not many people can say they fulfilled a dream. I’m thankful for the four years I had, it was a lot of fun.”
—    Joe Girard III, a native of Glens Falls, N.Y., and the state’s all-time high school basketball scoring leader, after announcing his decision to play his final collegiate season at Clemson.

THE SIGNOFF

In Japan, 37 people signed up for a course on relearning to smile after three years of covid-related mask wearing. Participants used hand mirrors to check their smiles. “Smiles are essential for maskless communication,” one of the participants said. “I want to apply what I learned today at volunteer activities and other gatherings.”

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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, and Kurt Ruppel.

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