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Polling methods affect how people answer

Posted in In the news, tagged , , , , on April 10, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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

Posted in In the news, Personal, Print media, Uncategorized, tagged on December 9, 2022| Leave a Comment »

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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Shatner oldly goes, but is he first?

Posted in In the news, tagged , , on October 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »

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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When virus is out of sight, it’s out of mind

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , , on December 4, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Seeing is believing, but if believing required seeing we would have no churches.

When you buy a car, you don’t require that the dealer take the car apart and demonstrate how each element of it functions before you believe it will drive.

Do you understand how your flat-screen TV works?

Your cellphone?

A colleague recently wrote about losing a relative to COVID-19. The relative had a terminal form of cancer, but COVID-19 quickly took away however many months she would have had left. My colleague wrote of her frustration about people refusing to wear masks, which studies conducted during the months of the pandemic have proven can sharply limit the spread of the virus.

But one line she wrote about why people find it difficult to stick with the strict precautions that public health officials call for caught me short: “I know it’s hard. The last eight months have felt like a dystopian hellscape, our sense of reality warped by a disaster in slow motion.”

I told her I thought the reason it has been difficult is exactly the opposite – the world does not appear to be a hellscape or a disaster. If we went outside and brimstone were falling from the sky, we’d go back in to get our asbestos umbrella – “The scientists say we’ll catch fire if we don’t keep an asbestos umbrella with us at all times!”

The reason it’s hard to get people to change their behavior from what they were doing every day until this past spring is that everything looks exactly the same as it did a year ago. Unless you personally have known people who suffered extreme complications from COVID-19, the danger of the disease can seem remote. It’s hard to keep up your guard day after day when nothing happens to you.

A recent letter sent to The High Point Enterprise questioning whether the pandemic continues to rage through society said, “Doesn’t the definition of ‘pandemic’ include ‘excessive deaths’? I’ve yet to see bodies stacked on the roadsides.”

It is statistically evident that the United States is seeing “excess deaths” (that’s the term to Google). The number of deaths from all causes each year normally falls into a certain limited range, but a research letter published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in October reported that from March 1 to Aug. 1 the number of deaths in the U.S. was 20% higher than that normal range – that’s more than 225,000, of which only 150,000 officially had been attributed to COVID-19.

And you don’t have to look far to find recent news stories documenting the toll that the current surge in virus-related hospitalizations is taking on health care workers across the country – but unless those workers are part of your immediate family, you do have to choose to look.

Among the statistics that the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services publishes on its website, and updates every day, is the number of state residents hospitalized for COVID-19. Many county health departments, including Guilford’s, do the same. On Friday, 166 Guilford residents were hospitalized.

But the bodies are not stacked by the roadside.

Perhaps if this pandemic were like the 1918 Spanish flu, and one of the groups hardest hit was young children, there wouldn’t be so many skeptics. The emotional wounds would be more open and raw and distributed across the population.

No one would demand to see children’s bodies stacked like cordwood before believing there was a problem.

No one would think of suggesting that the deaths of a few hundred-thousand children was acceptable, as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested in the spring about the deaths of seniors from COVID-19: “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’”

But, at least so far as we know in the less than one year scientists have had to study the disease, COVID-19 does not have serious effects on most children.

In fact, most adults who are infected feel no effects or have mild symptoms, and even most infected seniors recover.

The issue, though, has never been that you personally were likely to die if you caught this disease. If that were the only risk, you would be well within your rights to not wear a mask and even to offer to deep-kiss any willing stranger.

But with this highly infectious disease, when you are infected you may not know it, so if you take minimal or no precautions, you easily infect other people. They then infect other people, and so on, and so on, and eventually the virus reaches someone whose health is fragile, but you will never see it. All you see is that the number of deaths went up yesterday, and you don’t believe you could have had anything to do with that.

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No, the government didn’t admit aliens are here

Posted in In the news, Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , on August 7, 2020| Leave a Comment »


A reader called me this past week and asked in an exasperated tone why the newspaper hadn’t run a story about a statement the Pentagon issued to the New York Times for a story that ran July 31 essentially confirming that at least some identified flying objects are alien crafts from another world.

“Why isn’t everyone talking about this?” he said.

He had learned about the Times story from a friend.

A quick Google search indeed turned up stories reacting to the Times report and indicating that the Pentagon task force investigating UFOs would be publicly releasing information that might confirm the existence of aliens.

This is how a story from the Fox TV Digital Team put it:

“Now, the New York Times is reporting that the secretive task force is expected to release new and alarming findings that may involve vehicles made of materials not of this planet.”

The Independent in England said this:

“A Pentagon UFO unit will make some investigations public as ex-advisors suggest that ‘vehicles not made on this earth’ were placed in U.S. government storage.”

The problem with those stories is that what they say isn’t what the New York Times story said. Rather, they read between the lines and juice the elements of the story most likely to catch people’s attention – a common flaw of our internet age. They strongly suggest facts that are not in evidence.

There is a term for that: clickbait. They just want as many people as possible to click on a headline and share it.

The Times story by reporters Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, which was posted online July 23 (not the 31st), actually said that the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force is focused on “discovering whether another nation, especially any potential adversary, is using breakout aviation technology that could threaten the United States,” and the story contained a suggestion that the unidentified aircraft might be highly advanced drones.

That would make sense because the limits on aircraft maneuverability in many cases are human limits. The human body can’t cope with the extremes of acceleration and high-speed changes in direction that aviation technology is capable of.

And there was no Pentagon statement confirming anything. Notably, the second sentence of the story began, “Pentagon officials will not discuss the program.”

However, the Times story does include a few people who openly say they think at least some UFOs may be of alien origin.

The Pentagon program’s previous director, Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who resigned in October 2017, “is among a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances who, without presenting physical proof, say they are convinced that objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study,” it said.

And Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who the story said worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the UFO program since 2007, is quoted as saying that in some cases examination of recovered crash materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.”

But the story also includes a couple of reminders that just because right at a certain moment you can’t tell how something could have been made doesn’t mean that nowhere in the world could there be anyone who has figured it out:

“In some cases, earthly explanations have been found for previously unexplained incidents. Even lacking a plausible terrestrial explanation does not make an extraterrestrial one the most likely, astrophysicists say. …

“No crash artifacts have been publicly produced for independent verification. Some retrieved objects, such as unusual metallic fragments, were later identified from laboratory studies as man-made.”

A correction attached to the story and dated July 24 shows that the original version of the story more strongly stoked speculation about aliens:

“An earlier version of this article inaccurately rendered remarks attributed to Harry Reid, the retired Senate majority leader from Nevada. Mr. Reid said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied; he did not say that crashes had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades. “

Whatever the truth is, there will be additional stories to come, prompted by public releases from the Pentagon’s task force. Again, from the Times: A Senate committee report in June outlining spending on the nation’s intelligence agencies for the coming year “said the program … was to report at least some of its findings to the public within 180 days after passage of the intelligence authorization act.”

In short, the reason no one reported the government’s confirmation that aliens exist is because the government didn’t do that.

Maybe in the coming months or years it will. But it hasn’t yet.

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The looming question: What now?

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , , , on May 8, 2020| 3 Comments »

With Gov. Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order at least somewhat eased as of Friday evening, I know what many of you in North Carolina, and those in other states similarly starting to “reopen,” are thinking: What are we supposed to do now?

The answer can be found within one of the lines of criticism directed at Cooper by his opponent in this fall’s election, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. After Cooper announced the limited loosening of restrictions on businesses, Forest issued a statement that said in part, “He does not believe that North Carolinians have enough self-control, restraint, or common sense to act responsibly in a world with COVID-19.”

No matter how you plan to vote this fall, if you want to know what you should do now with the limited freedom of movement that fits under Cooper’s Phase One guidelines, look to Forest’s statement: Show self-control, exercise restraint, display common sense, and act responsibly.

Upon reading that, those of you who interact with the general public regularly probably feel a sense of impending doom.

A different quote applies here. In the 1997 movie “Men In Black,” about the secret government agency that deals with extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, actor Will Smith’s character asks why officials don’t trust the public with the truth because “people are smart.”

Tommy Lee Jones’ character replies, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.”

That may be too cynical and overly broad, but if there were not a nugget of truth to it then no one would ever be crushed under a stampede of Walmart shoppers on Black Friday, political advertising would contain no falsehoods, and scammers would have to apply for welfare.

Ever since the stay-at-home order and social-distancing guidelines first were issued, there have been complaints about some businesses and people who were not complying. And they are correct, it’s not hard to find people ignoring all social distancing guidelines.

The number of positive tests for coronavirus continues to rise in part because some people do not take the threat or precautions seriously. Even if the governor had left his orders unchanged, those people’s behavior would not be affected — just the way that anti-littering laws don’t stop some people from throwing their McDonald’s wrappers and leftover fries out the window in front of you on the highway.

The best thing you can always do is be the best kind of person you know how to be, the kind of person your parents would be proud to see on television.

That doesn’t mean you have to wear a hazmat suit to the gas station.

It means having the sense to know that just because you feel fine doesn’t mean you haven’t been infected, so if you’re going someplace where you’ll probably be pretty close to people it would be a good idea to wear a mask of some kind to help reduce the risk to other people as well as their risk to you.

It means having the sense of history to realize that the last pandemic this extensive, the Spanish flu, lasted two years, not two months, so we will have to adapt our behavior for the long term, not revert to our old habits and go “back to normal.”

There’s another quote that applies. In “The Andy Griffith Show,” Sheriff Taylor scolds someone who is not displaying common sense, “Act like you got some smart.”

Show self-control, exercise restraint, display common sense, and act responsibly.

Or you can boil that down to something even simpler and easier to remember, something that I tell myself all the time — but don’t often enough heed — especially when it comes to interactions with other people:

Don’t be stupid.

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Coronavirus restores youthful perspective on time

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , on April 24, 2020| 11 Comments »

At long last, I found how to make time slow down.

But like the dog that finally caught the car it was chasing, I don’t know what to do with myself. Who needs all this slow-moving time? Take it back. You can have it.

Now I’m ready for time to speed back up again.

We all notice by our mid-30s that as we get older time accelerates. Each year goes by more quickly than the last.

By the time I turned 50, it seemed I barely was able to grow sick of mowing the lawn in the summer heat before frost hit, the leaves turned and I had to wear heavy coats again. Winters once seemed like a long, tedious parade of putting on and taking off heavy coats, but in recent years even the coldest weather has become almost tolerably brief because spring arrives so quickly. Almost. But spring departs barely after arriving, like a coworker who hates to be left out of a party but doesn’t like socializing.

Facebook serves up “memories” that feel recent but were posted a dozen years ago by a version of me that had mostly brown hair, which makes me think about how close I am to retirement age. Can the next dozen or so years really go even more quickly than the past dozen? It seems like a long way off, but back when I was 42, 54 seemed a long way off.

I thought it would go on like that endlessly, each year adding acceleration on top of the previous year’s speed like an ion engine building momentum in space until eventually I would whoosh effortlessly into the void, barely noticing as death arrives and passes quickly behind me.

But then came the coronavirus, and instead of speeding into a void it feels more like I have careened into a giant, moist sponge cake with thick, creamy icing. I’m embedded in it and can’t extract myself.

Last weekend on the radio a news reporter said it was the beginning of the third weekend since Gov. Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order took effect.

“What?!” I said. “That can’t be right.”

Two weeks? We had been cooped up mostly at home and locked out of many of our favorite businesses for a lot longer than that … hadn’t we? I checked the calendar.

Nope.

This is now the fourth weekend, not even 28 days yet.

But it feels like the fourth month.

Time has slowed to a crawl. My sense of the passage of time is now more like it was when I was 6. Inside my head, I’m whining, “But I haven’t been able to go out just to have a beer in FOREVEEEEEEERRRRRRR.”

I’ve seen memes on social media saying every day is like the movie “Groundhog Day.” We wake up and everything is the same, no matter what we do, because our options are now so limited.

I understand the frustrations of those protesting the stay-at-home restrictions.

But I also understand the limitations of the health care system to deal with a sudden influx of severely ill patients. There simply isn’t much room. Ask around. Fewer people than would fit in your living room would be a major crisis.

So when my inner 6-year-old whimpers, “How much longer is this going to taaaaaaaaaake?” my inner adult answers, “It takes how long it takes, now behave or I’ll pull this car over and GIVE you something to cry about!”

I’ll just have to take a beer out of the refrigerator, go sit in a corner upstairs, sulk and stare out the window, thinking about all the things I can’t do.

It feels like I’m grounded. We’re all grounded. It feels like it will never end.

My inner adult eyes the sulking 6-year-old in the rear view mirror.

“I know it feels like a long time,” the adult says. “I promise you we’ll go out when it’s over. Whatever you want.”

The 6-year-old rolls his eyes and half-heartedly answers, “Oh, OK.”

But to him the road ahead looks like a Kansas highway. It stretches on and on toward a distant vanishing point on the horizon.

My inner adult knows we are in a slow-motion race on that road. The prize is a healthy community, and it doesn’t go to the ones who get to the end first but to the ones who get the farthest without running anyone off the road. It’s harder than it sounds.

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What evil lurks in the hearts of peanuts?

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , , , on January 24, 2020| Leave a Comment »

They say only the good die young.

I wonder, then, what sordid deeds Mr. Peanut must have committed in the nearly 104 years before his recent death.

Yes, if you haven’t seen the TV commercial, Mr. Peanut is dead.

He and two men were riding in the peanut-shaped Nutmobile – the Planters answer to Oscar Meyer’s wienermobile, I suppose – when it headed for a cliff. They jumped out just as it went over the edge, and they found themselves hanging like Wile E. Coyote from a branch over a deep canyon. As the branch began to break from their weight, Mr. Peanut let go, sacrificing himself and plunging to the canyon floor, where the wrecked Nutmobile lay.

Looking down, one of the two men said, “Maybe he’ll be all right.”

And then, just to eliminate all doubt, the Nutmobile exploded.

That commercial is a teaser for another commercial that is scheduled to run during the third quarter of the Super Bowl.

Officials at both Planters and VaynerMedia, which created the commercial, swear that the character is dead, so presumably Mr. Peanut will not emerge from the flaming wreckage as an intact but roasted peanut. The Super Bowl commercial reportedly will show his funeral.

Maybe viewers will be introduced to Mr. Peanut’s progeny at his funeral, or much of his extended family, and one or more of them will take up his mantle.

Actually that’s probably exactly what will happen. There is no chance in the world that Planters is going to just give up using such a well recognized symbol.

Perhaps VaynerMedia hopes to do with Mr. Peanut’s family something similar to what KFC has done with Colonel Sanders since that character was rebooted in 2015. Now there is not just one Colonel, not just one image based on a real, historical person, there is a different Colonel played by an entirely different actor for every product or deal KFC offers. There’s even a female Colonel (at least just the one so far), played by country singer Reba McEntire when promoting the introduction of “Smokey Mountain BBQ” chicken. (My favorite is the Extra Crispy Colonel, played by deeply tanned actor George Hamilton.) It’s endlessly adaptable.

So maybe now, instead of the one Mr. Peanut with his unchanging monocle and top hat, there will be a whole family of Peanut characters, each with his or her own appearance and personality suited to the various Planters products. And whenever Planters introduces a new one, they’ll just roll out a new member of the family.

I just hope that the depiction of the funeral includes some dark character in attendance who will tell us Mr. Peanut’s naughty secrets, maybe a “second” family from a tryst with Miss Cashew, petty thievery, major stock holdings in Nutella and JIF, or forbidden passions, such as a late-night habit of snacking on peanuts – cannibalism! What would be the worst Mr. Peanut could have done in 104 years?

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Man with big bus slept here

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , , , on October 26, 2019| Leave a Comment »


A man who called the News-Topic on Friday didn’t dilly dally.

“You ought to send a reporter over,” he said without any preamble. “Ricky Skaggs stayed at the Comfort Inn last night and he’s still there. I just saw him.” Then he hung up.

Skaggs, the famous country and bluegrass musician, performed Thursday night at the J.E. Broyhill Civic Center, and after the show his tour bus headed up the highway to the hotel. Clearly, he preferred to spend the night in a stationary bed rather than on a bus.

No reporters were available, so I grabbed a camera and headed to the hotel. I thought I might get a photo of Skaggs and his band boarding their bus to leave.

When I got there, the bus was parked at one edge of the parking lot, clearly still in “night” mode – the bus’s sleeper compartment was still extended, and a roll-down shade covered all the windows at the front of the bus. There was no activity. It seemed unlikely anyone would be leaving soon. The deadline for checkout at the hotel was still two hours away.

I briefly contemplated hanging around to wait. It would be a nice shot to have.

But the more I thought about it, the more the idea made me feel like Mayor Pike on “The Andy Griffith Show,” who would lose his mind and all sense of proportion at the mere suggestion of a celebrity showing up in Mayberry.

Did I really want to stake out the Comfort Inn? After all, he probably would be dressed like anyone else in that situation: in casual, comfortable clothes, all set to spend the coming day on a bus.

And that’s what it comes down to. Skaggs is a famous person, but in all the ways that matter he’s a person like anyone else. Yes, it’s notable that he was staying here, and people would like to know – and now you do – but lurking outside hotels is what paparazzi do. Does anyone want a stranger shooting their photo first thing in the morning?

And I had another consideration. There’s a saying in football and other sports that is intended to discourage excessive celebrations over small accomplishments: Act like you’ve been there before. There must be a corollary for situations like this.

If there’s a celebrity in our midst, maybe we should act like we’ve seen a celebrity before. “Oh, hi, Ricky. How’d you sleep? How about some coffee?”

After all, why shouldn’t Ricky Skaggs stay the night in Lenoir after a concert? What’s the alternative? The hotels here are no different than their counterparts in the same chains in Hickory, and after a long, tiring performance would anyone really want to drive an extra 20 to 30 minutes when there’s a perfectly good hotel just 4 miles up the road?

And I’d rather that a famous person decided to stay here rather than felt an urgent desire to get as far away from Lenoir as possible just as soon as he could.

I can think of several reasons a person not only wouldn’t want to avoid Lenoir but might prefer staying the night here. For one, people here are friendlier than they are even just one county over. That’s been my experience, and I’ve heard it from many others. Also, nights here almost always are truly quiet. If what you want is sleep, you are better off trying it in a small town. Maybe one reason he stayed is we don’t have paparazzi here.

I had mostly made up my mind during my one drive around the parking lot. Driving back out onto Blowing Rock Boulevard, I only became more sure.

By the time I got back to my office, I had an answer ready if anyone else called about Ricky Skaggs staying the night.

Well of course he spent the night in Lenoir. Why wouldn’t he?

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I didn’t print the legend

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , , , on July 16, 2019| 1 Comment »

The little town of Rhodhiss lost the businesses and industry that gave the town its name (from cotton mill owners John Rhodes and George Hiss). But it still has a legend that came out of them, the fate of some unusual fabric spun in a now-closed mill.

Four years ago, in July 2015, one of my reporters was doing a more or less routine story related to the legend, and I Googled part of her story and found something that indicated the legend was wrong. I had her look into it.

What she wound up writing made her feel bad because it made the News-Topic a villain in that town, but it didn’t put much of a dent in the legend, which the town is celebrating on this 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

One of the famous movie lines related to journalism, from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” is “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” It’s a good line, but it’s not journalism. I don’t know whether many journalists would do what the newspaper editor in the movie did, reject running the real story told by U.S. Sen. Ransom Stoddard, and I don’t think it makes sense to ignore the facts that fly against Rhodhiss’ legend, as satisfying as the legend may feel.


And as the main source in the story said, this doesn’t mean there is nothing at all to the legend, only that some research is needed to find out exactly what was done with that fabric. Maybe, for instance, the bag under the lunar lander …

 

 

 

 

 

Read the story and decide yourself.

Rhodhiss’ point of pride called into question

By Lex Menz

RHODHISS – As you drive into Rhodhiss, the road signs show an astronaut in a space suit over the words “U.S. Moon Flags Woven Here.”

An astronaut also appears on the town seal.

It’s common knowledge throughout town that fabric used to make at least the first flag to go to the moon, if not more, came from Burlington Industrial Fabrics, which once had two factories in town but left in 1983.

A scrap of material sits folded up in a drawer at Town Hall that came, it is said, from the same batch as the moon flag material.

Town Manager Art Delaney never even considered that the story could be wrong until he recently called the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources in Raleigh about getting a historical marker for the town about the flag fabric having been made in Rhodhiss. The person he spoke to said that according to information on the Internet, his story was incorrect.

“She said they were pulled off a shelf at a post exchange in Washington, D.C., and just handed off,” Delaney said. “I nearly fell off my chair.”

Delaney wouldn’t be the only one falling off of a chair. Many people around town have personal stories about their connection to the flag fabric.

Carl Compton, who lives on the Caldwell County side of Rhodhiss, worked at Burlington Industrial Fabrics as a weaver right out of high school in 1961 and eventually was promoted to loom fixer. The company made special materials, including material for the Goodyear blimp and fabrics for NASA. Among the fabric made on the 64-inch looms was one that Compton said was extremely heat-resistant and involved Kevlar, a fabric best known for its use in bulletproof vests.

Shortly after the flag was unfurled on the moon in July 1969 by Apollo 11, the mission carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, Compton said, Burlington Industrial’s employees were informed of their accomplishment.

“We didn’t know what we had done,” he said. “It really surprised us.”

Compton said the company’s announcement was a proud moment.

“We were just working. That was our job. We weren’t trying to crow about it. But, if I had known, I would have gotten some pictures,” Compton said.

But Rhodhiss’ flag story doesn’t fly, according to Anne Platoff, who wrote a research paper in the early 1990s, when she worked at the Johnson Space Center, about all six of the flags that were taken to the moon.

“It’s an interesting story, but it’s unverified,” Platoff said of Rhodhiss’ story.

Her research paper, “Where No Flag has Gone Before: Political and Technical Aspects of Placing a Flag on the Moon,” details considerations that went into the flags and flag poles and where they came from, and no part of that story includes Rhodhiss. Her sources included a press release from NASA in July 1969 stating that the flags were ordinary nylon flags ordered from a catalog.

“I went through the evidence there was at NASA, and the only documentation I found at NASA was that it was purchased from a government stock catalog,” Platoff said. “As a historian, I will only go with what facts I have. I have found absolutely no evidence that points to who made the flag on the moon. I found no indication that it was a specifically made flag.”

However, she said Rhodhiss may have been involved in the Apollo 11 mission, just not in the way residents think. Possibly the material woven there was used for the flag patches on the spacesuits or some part of the ship. But that would take some research to find out.

“Maybe this is one of those cross stories with some truth,” Platoff said.

Delaney said the state will send him an application for a historical marker, which requires a packet of information to back the town’s claim.

“We’re going to send it back and see if we could get something,” Delaney said.

Ansley Wegner, a research historian and the administrator of the Department of Cultural Responses’ historical marker program, said the decisions on applications for historical markers are made by a committee of 10 history professors. Stipulations include that the information supporting the marker request must have a secondary source, such as a historical non-fiction book.

“It’s hard to say what the committee is going to approve,” Wegner said. “It’s up to them to decide whether it’s state historical importance and not local historical importance.”

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