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Polling methods affect how people answer

April 10, 2023 by Guy

Public opinion polls can be tricky. They can be inflammatory. They can be wrong.

They may even be right.

But more often than not, the surface results of a poll — particularly on questions other than a political up-or-down vote on candidates — do not reflect nuances in opinion or outside factors that can affect how people answer any particular polling question.

A recent poll by one of the nation’s most highly respected news organizations and one of the top polling groups illustrates the difficulty of taking a poll at face value. The results of the poll by the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago spread virally online in late March because they seemed to portray a seismic, downward shift in cultural values.

One of the most breathless, ominous, overwrought takes on the poll that I saw came from Mike Allen of the news site Axios, who wrote, “Rarely does one poll stare so deeply into the soul of a nation and tell its story.”

Let’s be clear: Polls do not stare anywhere, let alone into a nation’s soul.

A poll may be a snapshot (taken with a cloudy lens, held by someone whose hand-steadiness you may not be able to gauge), or a thermometer. But it has no eyes. It has no brain. It has no empathic ability to divine the feelings or intent of those who are surveyed.

This particular poll’s results that generated so much alarm were a cratering, compared to a poll done in 2019, of the public perception of the importance of patriotism, religion, having children and community involvement. (Allen compared the new poll to a Journal/NBC poll done in 1998.)

And indeed, if true, those trends would be alarming.

But are they true?

Not long after this poll went viral, I saw an analysis by Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster who co-founded the political research firm Eschelon Insights, that sought to lower the temperature of the discussion.

“These findings fit into a declinist narrative we are already predisposed to believe,” Ruffini wrote. But he cautioned, “If these numbers had been produced by my firm, I would immediately assume we had made a mistake and send them back to an analyst to double check.”

“The point here is not that the Wall Street Journal and NORC released bad data. The Journal is one of the more thoughtful media sponsors of polling and NORC is the premier survey data-collection organization in the country. Rather, the dramatically different results we see from 2019 and 2023 are because the data was collected differently,” he wrote.

The 2019 poll, like ones before it (including the 1998 poll cited by Allen), was done by telephone interviews with survey participants. The March 2023 survey was collected via NORC’s Amerispeak, which Ruffini called “an extremely high-quality online panel,” but that difference is the key.

“Surveying the exact same types of respondents online and over the phone will yield different results. And it matters most for exactly the kinds of values questions that the Journal asked in its survey,” he wrote.

“The basic idea is this: if I’m speaking to another human being over the phone, I am much more likely to answer in ways that make me look like an upstanding citizen, one who is patriotic and values community involvement. My answers to the same questions online will probably be more honest, since the format is impersonal and anonymous.”

Ruffini’s take is that the online survey results are probably a more accurate reflection of how people really feel. You might find THAT alarming.

But if he’s correct, it will take future online survey panels to show whether there is an actual trend in any direction.

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Day at school defies expectations

December 9, 2022 by Guy

School principals walk a lot.

That was the only thing I correctly expected before arriving at Fairview Elementary School to participate in Principal for a Day, an annual event organized by the Guilford Education Alliance. Volunteers are placed throughout Guilford County Schools to shadow principals for a couple of hours and get a closer look at our county’s public schools.

This year there also were a few people shadowing other school workers, including Matt Thiehl with a school bus driver at Andrews High School and Wayne Young with a custodian at Fairview.

I wore sneakers instead of my usual dress shoes for work because I expected to be on my feet most of the morning.

And indeed we were. Abe Hege, the principal of Fairway, walked me through Fairway’s long, long, long hallways (the school sure seems longer on the inside than it looks on the outside), stopping in many classrooms to observe the classes in session and explaining what the classes’ daily routines are. Hege said he spends a big chunk of every day going to different classrooms to observe.

One thing I did not expect was seeing student desks that double as dry-erase whiteboards. Fairview has replaced all of its wooden desks with these dry-erase desks, which have angled edges so students can be arranged close together in small groups.

I also did not expect the prevalence of digital tablets. It’s one thing to read in the news about schools widely adapting the use of tablets, but it’s another to go into a classroom and see every student wearing headphones and quietly studying exercises on their own screen that they complete at their own pace.

Which brings up another thing I did not expect: almost uniform good behavior. Shortly before I left, one student loudly protesting his innocence was brought to the school’s main office, but throughout the rest of my time in the school I didn’t see so much as one student talking out of turn — or fidgeting. Even the kindergartners who reveled in throwing up their hands and yelling answers in unison seemed to sit still while awaiting the teacher’s prompt for them to yell.

To some extent the good behavior might be attributable to the morning hour — everyone was well rested.

But Hege said one of the things he didn’t know when he first became a principal in 2018 was that the job would involve managing adults — parents as well as staff — much more than managing children.

Hege is proud of the culture he has helped build at Fairview and of the progress the school has made. Student discipline cases have plummeted, and academically the school’s student body has exceeded its growth goals every year since Hege arrived. The key has been building relationships with and among both the staff and the students, he said.

“I want a third-grader to feel this is their school as much as it is mine,” he said.

It’s certain that his office belongs to the students as much as to him. It’s right next door to a kindergarten classroom. When they collectively scream their answers for their teacher, it’s like the wall is made of balsa wood rather than cinder block.

Hege smiled and said, “It lasts all day.”

Probably another reason he walks the halls so much.

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Degrees of separation from fame or infamy

June 3, 2022 by Guy

My high school’s most famous graduate is either an actress featured in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” or a homicidal maniac.

I thought for sure it was the maniac, until I Googled the person I thought was going to be the runner-up, which led me to my high school’s Wikipedia page, which under the heading “Notable alumni” listed two: the person I Googled and the actress.

All of this was prompted by one of those questions that pop up on social media (which you should never answer, by the way, because it’s all just data mining, not harmless fun): Are you your high school’s most famous graduate?

Almost no one would be able to answer yes to that. But it made me think about what the answer for my high school might be.

I went to a small, Catholic high school in Phoenix, Arizona (I’m not Catholic, but the school was practically around the corner from my house, so I chose to go there). One of the school’s graduates who achieved a sort of fame actually came from my circle of friends and my graduating class, Robert Walesa, but he was more notorious than famous. A few years ago, after being stopped for drunken driving and sent home in a cab (not hauled to jail), he got mad, grabbed a rifle, drove his other car to a spot near the DWI checkpoint, shot a sheriff’s deputy from a distance and drove away. Eventually, they figured out who did it and came to his house. He met them at his front door and fatally shot himself on the spot.

He made national news, but it was of a routine sort of shocking news nowadays. I doubt many people remember him.

Better known, I hope, was Jeff Feagles, who graduated a year behind me. He was a football player and made it to the NFL, where he played 22 years as a punter and twice was named to the Pro Bowl.

It was while Googling Feagles that I learned that an actress named Catherine Hicks graduated from my high school in the late 1960s. Among other things, she is known for playing Dr. Gillian Taylor, the whale biologist in “Star Trek IV.” That’s certainly the role I recognize her from, but she had many more, including Marilyn Monroe in the 1980 TV movie “Marilyn: The Untold Story,” for which she received an Emmy Award nomination.

I think Hicks gets the edge over Feagles.

But I think the best-known person who graduated from my high school, disturbingly, might be another infamous member of my own graduating class, though thankfully not from my circle of friends. He did not seem to any of us like a homicidal maniac, but a little more than 16 years after graduation, Armand Chavez made national news and lingered in the headlines much longer than my former friend.

You might recognize him better by the alter ego he adopted after being expelled from medical school, Diazien Hossencofft. He claimed to be a thoracic surgeon and geneticist, and he sold bogus cancer treatments and anti-aging injections for thousands of dollars. And he probably would have gotten away with all of that for a long time had he not also convinced a girlfriend to murder his wife.

The murder story has been the subject of TV episodes of “Crime Stories,” “Court TV,” “American Justice,” “The Investigators,” “Snapped,” “Monstresses,” “Sins and Secrets,” “I’d Kill For You” and “Charmed to Death,” according to Wikipedia.

There is unlikely to be any other graduate more famous or infamous. The school closed in 1989 because of declining enrollment, so even the youngest graduates already are in their 50s. If any of us are going to make it big, we are running out of time.

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Everyone likes Mom better than me

February 4, 2022 by Guy

My mother has long been far more popular on the internet than I am despite her being dead.

I got used to that eventually, but now she’s also getting better junk mail, and that stings.

My mother had a massive heart attack in late 2008 that pushed her from a mild, early dementia that no one who knew her recognized to clearly obvious dementia. I had to place her in assisted living, and I had all of her mail redirected to my house. Naturally, that included junk mail.

She died in May 2012. (Just two days before the big corporate business transaction that I predicted, correctly, would eventually cost me my job – but that’s a story for another day.)

After she died, I started sorting through a box of her things that I had put aside. She had been a newspaper features writer in her youth before I came along, and again from middle age to her retirement, and some of the writing she was most proud of was in the box.

I wrote about a few of the things she wrote and posted them on my personal blog. That’s when her internet following began.

One post reproduced a column she wrote about making Buckeye Balls, a type of peanut butter candy that is popular with fans of the Ohio State Buckeyes because the candy ends up looking like an Ohio buckeye nut. That post has been, by far, the most popular post on my blog, seen by thousands of people. A week does not go by without it getting multiple views. Around the time of the Ohio State-Michigan game and the Christmas holidays, it can get dozens of views per day.

I’ve had people (yes, plural) who were writing books about candy contact me about that post.

Like my mother’s internet traffic, her junk mail also has persisted. Each of the two times I have moved since she died, the junk mail followed, even the ones misaddressed to a man named “Lucas Tabor” (a transposition of her married last name and her maiden name).

I know for a fact that my mother has not donated to the ASPCA since at least 2008, but the group still spends postage to solicit money from her.

The mail has become a testament to how much paper our society wastes.

Since moving to High Point, I have gotten a few pieces of mail addressed to either Mom or Mr. Tabor inviting her/him to come see a local retirement home, and one of those came just this past week, but it stood out in one critical detail:

It offered wine and Girl Scout cookies to those who would visit.

My first reaction was that my mother would have been sorely tempted to make that visit.

My second reaction was to wonder why no one ever offers me wine and cookies.

I’m nowhere near needing to find a retirement home, but why isn’t anyone else making that pairing to lure foot traffic? Or if anyone else is, why am I not in the demographic to get that offer?

If my mother is going to get all the internet readers, the least I deserve is some free Thin Mints and cabernet.

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Admire the commitment to the bit

December 17, 2021 by Guy

In comedy, there’s often a “straight man” – one person who is sane and sober and “normal” while someone else is delivering the jokes or being a clown.

The straight man makes the scene funnier, but if the straight man is the only person on-screen, nothing’s funny.

Which is why I once risked my own digestive safety and well-being for the sake of a short food video.

It was more than a dozen years ago, but the friend I made it with recently dusted off the video in a new post on Facebook.

Two important things about this friend, whose name is Lee:

1. Ordinarily, anyone who is with Lee is the straight man, the Abbott to his Costello, the Ice Cube to his Kevin Hart. Life is a rich tapestry of humor to him, and he is constantly cracking jokes. Visiting a friend’s ailing mother in the hospital, he tells her, “You have more tubes coming out of you than a radiator.” Someone on Facebook posts something like, “Name something you can say both at a birthday party and during sex,” and he answers, “Howdy howdy howdy, I’m a cowboy.”

2. His mouth is made of asbestos. Hot peppers mean nothing to him. He will eat anything and like it. Do not challenge him to a pepper-eating contest. At best, it will end in an agonizing draw.

This is where the video comes in.

More than 12 years ago, Lee and I both were living in Richmond, Virginia, where he was the features editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. One day in a staff meeting, he told everyone that a chicken wing restaurant in Richmond had what he considered to be the hottest wings in the world. They were named Suicide Wings.

The paper’s executive editor decided that if the wings were really that hot, it might be funny if the paper shot a video of Lee and someone else eating the wings.

Lee told me he had put out the word to the entire newsroom that he needed someone to go with him. I had an instant clairvoyant vision: No one would volunteer.

This would be a huge problem. A video of Lee eating the hottest wings on the planet, without the contrast of someone else also eating them, would look like a man eating a plate of plain fried chicken.

I told Lee that if no one else volunteered, I would go.

My vision came true. No one volunteered. I had to go.

Understand, I like spicy food, even to the point that my eyes water and I turn red (redder than usual, that is). But I’m no “Man vs. Food” fanatic about it. If you label the food anything like “Suicide Wings” or “Stupid Wings” or something with the word “death” in it, or you require me to sign a release of liability, you can generally count me out.

But there I was with Lee and a videographer, walking into Planet Wings one sunny day, resigned, head up, trying to sound cheerful about my impending gastric doom.

It went pretty much the way I envisioned. From the first bite, I was in agony. Maybe they were the hottest wings in the world, maybe they weren’t. But they were the hottest I had ever had.

Next to me, Lee chomped quietly away on his wings.

I gasped, exhaled sharply, turned red, then purple, and Lee looked over at me, then back at the camera and rolled his eyes. 

For perhaps the first time in his life, Lee was the straight man.

I called it quits after just three wings. Lee ate all of his wings plus one of mine and took the rest of mine home in a box.

The video is pure gold. I may never take part in a greater comedy bit in my life.

The editing was a bit misleading. I did not get up in the middle of eating and get a large soda refill. That came after. Also, the videographer put text on the screen at the end saying I ate only two wings. But both of those edits make the video funnier, so … whatever.

Years later, after we both had moved on to other cities and other jobs, Lee dared me to show the video to my new employees. Too late, I told him – I had already showed it to them because it was too hilarious not to share.

I don’t mind being laughed at – at least not in that context. All I want is acknowledgement of my commitment to the bit. I sacrificed the lining of my mouth and throat, and the entire contents of my tear ducts, for the sake of making people laugh.

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Shatner oldly goes, but is he first?

October 15, 2021 by Guy

Depending on your definition, William Shatner almost certainly is not the oldest person ever to go into space.

As an aside, count me among those people who wish that billionaires could find something more constructive to do with fortunes so vast they literally could not spend all of their money if they tried. In the early 20th century, our nation’s superrich men competed to see who could erect the tallest phallic object in New York City as untold millions around the world starved and died of disease, and today they launch phallic objects into space amid a global pandemic.

However, like millions of other lifelong “Star Trek” fans, I got a small kick from the sight of Shatner in his Blue Origins jacket – which had stitched on his right chest “W. SHATNER” and under it “AKA CAPT. JAMES T. KIRK” – gazing about the space capsule in open-eyed wonder and, back on Earth, gushing emotionally about the experience.

And at 90 years old, Shatner certainly is older than any astronaut, cosmonaut or wealthy space tourist Earth’s various government space agencies or billionaires have sent into space.

It’s just a little arrogant to assume no older person, anywhere, ever went into space.

My quibble here is with the definition of “person.”

Many who remember “Star Trek” probably also remember astronomer and exobiologist Carl Sagan on his show “Cosmos” discussing the odds of life developing elsewhere in the universe, particularly intelligent life reaching a technologically advanced stage. (If you don’t remember or never saw it, you can find it online at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x271be)

To summarize, even at the time that was recorded in 1980, astronomers estimated there could be 400 billion stars just in the Milky Way, and Sagan conservatively estimated that perhaps one-quarter had planets, most of those having more than one planet. If conditions for life are rare or the odds of intelligent life are low, there could be just a handful of civilizations in the entire galaxy, or even none other than ours – but if the chances are better, there could be thousands or millions.

And there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe.

If we met intelligent extraterrestrials, and instead of trying to kill us they treated us as peers, would we not begin to refer to them as a people? Or any one of them a person?

And what if some of them have longer life spans than we do?

It’s conceivable that there are or have been dozens of planets where intelligent life developed and advanced technologically to the point of at least limited space exploration, and that at least one of them sent someone into space who has lived longer than Shatner.

So all we can accurately say is that Shatner is the oldest human to travel into space – that we know of.

After all, there’s also the whole topic of humans secretly abducted by aliens …

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Life lessons line up supporting speaker

October 8, 2021 by Guy

One of the most difficult kinds of stories to do for the newspaper is one about someone who has died, involving interviews to go beyond the person’s achievements and gain a sense of who the person was.

It’s difficult because most people in their grief retreat to superlatives, describing a person’s qualities in the abstract. “She was just the best, a great leader.” “He always gave of himself, he always stepped up.”

What makes for a strong story are anecdotes – descriptions of scenes, conversations and events that illustrate concretely the person’s qualities and personality.

When you are able to elicit a few of those, the fabric of a personality always seems to come together. The stories line up, consistently adding detail to a portrait.

As I interviewed several people on Wednesday who knew Paul Broyhill, who led Broyhill Furniture Industries when it rose to its greatest prominence and prosperity in the 1970s, the stories also lined up in another way: They illustrated philosophies I had heard described the previous night in the first episode of High Point University President Nido Qubein’s new half-hour UNC-TV show, “Side by Side.” Qubein interviewed John Maxwell, a renowned author and lecturer on leadership.

Maxwell said that leadership is influence, which he defined as making those around you better.

“If you really want to be a great leader, just start by specifically and intentionally adding value to people on a daily basis,” he said.

One of the things Broyhill was best known for was his company’s executive training, which included teaching the value of relationships and how to build them.

Maxwell said that one of the key elements of being a good leader is humility. In part, that means being willing to learn.

Broyhill demonstrated this quality by surrounding himself with talented people, training them and asking their opinions and advice. He also frequently traveled to meet with the retailers selling his company’s products and seeking their opinions and new product ideas.

Maxwell said that humility also is “the ability to care for people, who they are, what they do.”

Jeff Cook said he saw this after being named president of Broyhill Furniture in 2007 and meeting Paul Broyhill. By that point, Broyhill had been out of the business for over 20 years, but the human connections he had built at the company were still clearly evident.

“Everyone he hired, he knew their names, he knew their families,” Cook said.

One of Broyhill’s qualities everyone mentions was his vision, his ability to recognize where the industry should go in the future. Cook described a conversation with Broyhill about the industry’s offshoring of jobs to Asia that showed he retained this ability long into retirement.

“He hated that Broyhill (Furniture) had closed all its case goods plants and sold all the equipment to the Chinese,” Cook said. “He said that sooner or later they’re going to get you.”

Broyhill felt that if work had to be sent overseas, the company should have mothballed its factories in North Carolina and retained the equipment, holding everything in reserve in case conditions later warranted bringing the work back to the U.S. – which we have seen being played out. Some jobs have been brought back, and we also have seen how the unforeseen conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic have put the furniture industry at the mercy of long delays in its far-flung global supply chains.

Vision is not an element of leadership that can be learned, it is simply a gift. You have it or you don’t.

But Maxwell talked about that too.

“Understand that you have a gift, and it was God-given, … but remember it was a gift,” he said. “You didn’t earn it, you’re not amazing yourself.”

And that’s another reason to surround yourself with talented people and help them to become better and achieve more. Whatever your gift may be, it might not be the one that’s needed at a particular moment.

So you may ask what conclusion I have drawn from this experience of watching a TV interview and seeing its lessons echoed back at me a day later.

I haven’t decided, except that if Qubein interviews an exorcist, I’m not leaving the house the next day.

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Experiences shape our interpretations

September 26, 2021 by Guy

Fifteen years ago, actor and director Clint Eastwood made two films about the World War II battle for the Pacific island of Iwo Jima — one told from the perspective of American soldiers, one from the perspective of Japanese soldiers.

The juxtaposition illustrates what is meant by the phrase “context is everything” — as well as a number of other brief sayings we frequently use but rarely analyze.

For instance, “Don’t judge another man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.”

The broad truth behind that saying is that any individual’s lived experience is the context that shapes his or her life and how that person perceives the world and reacts to it.

Dr. Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at the University of London, says your brain makes sense of the information it is presented based on you have experienced before.

“The functional structure of your brain is literally a representation of your history. We only ever see what was useful to see in the past,” he said.

Two people with different experiences can watch the same event and interpret it differently because their experiences create their assumptions about how the world works and how others behave.

This is why it is useful, regardless of your own background and experiences, to listen to and read about the experiences of people who are different than you. You don’t know their stories.

All this was brought to mind last week by the last sentence of the letter that the local NAACP sent out reacting to how the City Council responded to its call for a commission to study the issue of reparations: “Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.”

The website Afriprov.org, which explores African proverbs, says there are a number of variations in the wording of this proverb, but all deal with context and the parts of a story that are left out in the retelling.

“When a hunter brings home a lion … it may very well be due to the hunter’s skills, but it may as well be due to pure luck. The lion might have been sleeping or injured. No matter in what circumstances the lion is killed, a hunter will always tell a story that makes the hunter shine. Is the hunter telling the true story or just bragging? No one will ever know,” the website says.

“This Ewe-mina proverb refers to this unknown part of the struggle between the lion and the hunter because … a story is never complete until one hears from both sides.”

The key word is “hearing,” which means not just hearing the words but understanding, before concluding what the speaker really means, the experiences that shaped the perceptions of the person who is speaking and what those perceptions are.

When another person has a radically different interpretation of an event than you do, trying to make sense of the difference can be difficult, as Lotto explains.

“We hate to have our assumptions questioned because it creates uncertainty, which leads to stress. Your brain hates uncertainty,” Lotto says. “Yet the best questions are the ones that create the most uncertainty; the questions that challenge what I assume to be true already.”

The U.S. State Department has a website offering new diplomats a primer in understanding cultural differences and communication styles called “So You’re an American? A guide to answering difficult questions abroad.”

Its lessons could be broadly applied at home as well. Misunderstanding doesn’t begin at the water’s edge.

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The Thinker

August 3, 2021 by Guy

I have a contemplative chipmunk.

Or rather, living near my house there is either a chipmunk or a family of them prone to striking a contemplative pose and holding it for an inordinate amount of time.

When my wife and I first moved to High Point, in the backyard we found a pretty chunk of gray-and-white-striped granite roughly the size of a human head. My wife moved it to a corner of the back deck. The next morning, she looked out to find a chipmunk perched on top of the rock simply staring out at the yard.

Every morning, the chipmunk returned. And each time, it remained on that perch, not moving, for a long while.

When the weather turned cold, it disappeared, but in the spring it came back — or it and others came back. Sometimes the chipmunk on the rock looks a little smaller than usual. Maybe there is a young chipmunk mimicking a parent’s perching.

Whether there is one or there are more, whether it’s learned or just in the nature of chipmunks, the behavior is the same.

The critter gets up on the rock and just looks across the yard — not unlike the way I sometimes sit in a chair on the deck and look out across the yard, silently staring as my mind wanders. Sometimes I think about yard projects I want to get to, some short-term, some for next summer, or the next. Sometimes I simply wonder at nature, looking up into the trees, the setting sun still lighting the highest leaves stirring in the breeze as the darkness starts to deepen down below. Sometimes I worry about money or work or myriad choices I’ll never be able to undo even if I discovered during my rumination an alternative I would have preferred. Sometimes I just stew.

Sometimes I look at that rock and wonder what the chipmunk thinks as it looks across the yard.

Is it planning lunch?

Thinking about digging a new extension for its burrow?

Wondering whether Mrs. Chipmunk will be feeling frisky later?

Worrying about the neighbor’s cat?

Maybe it’s just absorbing a moment’s peace.

Or perhaps it is just trying to figure out what the big, white-headed beast keeps staring at across the yard, and why it won’t just stay inside its brick cave and leave the deck to its rightful owner.

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Life of promise cut short

May 28, 2021 by Guy

Everything most important in Robert Booth’s life seemed to coalesce Friday evening as friends and family gathered for his pastoral installation ceremony and he surprised his girlfriend by asking her to marry him. She said yes.

Bishop Kerry Thomas, who hosted the event at God’s United House of Grace and Mercy on Leonard Avenue, said that afterward as they changed into their regular clothes, the 25-year-old Booth wrapped his arms around him in a bear hug.

“He embraced me so tightly, I can’t even relate to you — you know the passion you can feel in a hug?” Thomas said. “He whispered to me that that night … was the first time he’d ever felt at home.”

Barely four days later Booth, father of a 2-year-old boy, was gunned down outside his south High Point apartment.

The High Point Police Department released few details except that it happened shortly before 8:30 p.m. Tuesday in the parking lot at 304 Ardale Drive, near Interstate 85 Business east of S. Main Street, and that no one else was shot.

Police did not release his name Wednesday, but friends identified him to The Enterprise as Robert A. Booth Sr.

Police said Wednesday they were seeking a maroon-colored SUV, possibly a Nissan Rogue.

Brandon Smith, a longtime friend, said everyone who knew Booth is in a whirlwind.

“We’re just devastated. We went from planning a wedding to planning a funeral,” he said.

Smith had just been riding with Booth on Sunday, listening to gospel music from an album Booth was about to release.

Music and the church bound together many elements of Booth’s life. He was raised in a religious family, played music for his church and later felt called into ministry, following in his father’s footsteps, Smith said.

Smith met Booth over 10 years ago at God’s United House of Grace and Mercy, where Booth was the organist.

A generous man with a gregarious nature, Booth met people easily and quickly made people feel at home. In addition to being a musician, he had started doing some stand-up comedy a couple of years ago, Smith said.

“He loved making people laugh,” he said.

Booth’s humor and generous nature fed into the ministerial outreach work he did, Thomas said.

“Robert went after people other people were afraid to go after, such as gang-bangers and people on drugs, people who didn’t look like us or smell like us,” Thomas said. Despite wading in where others dared not, “I believe he was a man that had no enemies.”

Before the pandemic, Booth began building his own congregation, Hood Holiness Church. His pastoral installation ceremony on Friday essentially formalized his role as a pastor and recognized the work he already had been doing in his church, Thomas said.

Leading up to the ceremony, Booth also began telling those closest to him about plans to propose to his girlfriend, Star Lane, Smith said. He asked her parents for permission, and he told Thomas of his plan to pop the question during the ceremony.

“He said, ‘Bishop, is it OK if I propose to my girlfriend at my installation?’ ” Thomas said. “He was worried it would detract from the ceremony, but I thought it would add to it.”

Booth later posted a short video to Facebook showing the moment. As he recited a passage from Genesis about marriage — “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife” — he knelt before Lane, who bent over as though losing her breath as the church erupted in cheers.

Thomas said Booth’s father, Rodney, drove more than five hours from his home in Georgia to be at the ceremony. In a photo Booth also posted to Facebook, Rodney Booth absolutely beams with happiness alongside Robert and Robert’s son, R.J.

Robert Booth’s energy and happiness overflowed as well, Thomas said.

“I don’t know if he even slept that day,” he said.

Everything seemed to be coming together at once for Booth, Smith said.

“Robert had really gotten on a straight path to know what he wanted to do with his life,” he said.

It is unclear exactly what happened Tuesday evening, Thomas said. Everyone is shattered, and he has heard differing versions.

Smith said he was told that Booth saw a vehicle outside his home and someone sitting inside, and he did what his instincts always drove him to: He went to talk.

“Robert — he was just doing what he normally does,” Smith said. “He went out to see if they needed help.”

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