No news here

For the past several months I've been preaching to what must be called a faithful remnant at North Baptist Church in Port Chester, N.Y.


Just standing in that pulpit is an honor. The three Tiffany windows over my shoulder and other arrays of stained glass make it one of the most beautiful worship centers I've known, and the church's storied past also includes a pastor to whom I am now married, the Divine M, ten inches shorter but always over me in the Lord.


But the church has seen better years and most Sundays the congregation approaches the minimal requirement for Jesus' presence, two or three gathered faithfully. But I work as hard on the sermons as if I was preaching in Riverside Church, and although the congregation looks like a small prayer group, I preach from the elevated pulpit so we all feel like we're really in church.


Un-ordained and un-adorned as I am, I have never preached on Easter so I've been pouring through scriptures and commentaries all week. By Saturday morning, I was leafing through dusty volumes of The American Baptist magazine, where I used to publish editorial homilies. As any columnist knows, an approaching deadline may put the Muse to sleep. That must have happened in the spring of 1980, because I didn't write an Easter message that year. I drew a cartoon instead. (See http://www.cruz-jenks.com)


The cartoon is hastily drawn and shaded with press-on screens that had to be shaped by Exacto knives and pressed on to the paper. The drawing shows a TV news van pulling up to a tomb carved out of rocks in the middle of a barren desert. A reporter with a microphone emerges from the empty hole as a videographer waits tensely from his perch atop the van.


"Just an empty tomb," the reporter calls to the camera guy. "Signal the assignment desk. That news tip musta been a joke."


Ha, I must have thought at the time. Irony. Very funny. But for me, the agony and ecstasy of art was still to come.


About a month after the cartoon appeared, I was one of a thousand or more participants in Religion Communication Congress 1980, a once-a-decade event for religious communicators. That was the year the newly elected Pope John Paul II addressed the gathering by videotape, and Harvard theologian Harvey Cox was a keynoter.


I watched Harvey from a balcony at the rear of the auditorium. He was -- and is -- a major American Baptist celebrity and he was idolized by a Roman Catholic chaplain I had worked for in the Air Force. Chaplain Kucharski, one of the young liberals swept into the church by the fresh air of Vatican II, quoted Harvey Cox incessantly, especially paragraphs from Harvey's best-selling book, The Secular City. Years later when I joined the American Baptist staff I met Harvey and even edited some essays he wrote for The American Baptist magazine. I made plans to casually run into Kucharski one day so I could pinch my fingers together and tell him, "Yeah, me and Harvey are like this!" Sadly, the next time I heard about Kucharski, he had dropped out of the priesthood, gotten married, and died. But I never think of Harvey without thinking of Father Kuch.


As I was settling in the rafters of the auditorium on that warm spring day in 1980, I was astonished to hear Harvey say, "I saw a cartoon recently that summarizes the state of the church." I was stunned and then breathless as Harvey went on to describe my drawing and quote the caption as a smattering of applause broke out in the audience. Whoa, I thought. Is this my 15 minutes of fame?


I don't remember what Harvey said after that (although I think he ended his speech by quoting the cartoon again). After he finished I made my way through the crowd to shake his hand. He smiled toothily at me and I thanked him for the endorsement.


"What?" he said. He lowered his ear in a quizzical manner.


I realized instantly that he had no idea what I was talking about. He had forgotten where he had seen the cartoon or the magazine that printed it.


I thanked him again and stepped back so the rest of the admiring crowd could get to him. My fifteen minutes of fame expired in the footlights.


It was a harsher lesson then, when I was in my early 30s, than it would be now. Three decades later I've accumulated a sufficient number of humbling experiences to handle them with a modicum of aplomb. Perhaps the real message back then was that there's no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit.


But I'd like to think that the message of that cartoon still has meaning this Easter.


The fact that Jesus' tomb is empty is big news. But it no longer tops the news hour or appears on page one above the fold. Seasoned reporters don't get it. It's the most overlooked headline of our times.


Maybe that's the message I'll preach to the faithful remnant at North Baptist Church on Easter morning.

Hey Gov, Pass the Soap

It’s a five hour drive from Manhattan to Utica, and the Divine M and I made it just south of Albany before we needed to pull into the Thruway’s Malden service center. We were on our way to a scholarship awards ceremony for our daughter Victoria and were driving happily through late season snow squalls and driving rain.


The first order of business, of course, was a visit to the restrooms. Martha carried a flannel shirt and slacks so she could change into more comfortable driving attire, and I slipped unencumbered into the men’s room.

As every guy knows, public bathrooms are places for minding one’s own business and – except for unexpected developments known as the “Senator Larry Craig Exception” – what happens in men’s rooms stays in men’s rooms.

This time, however, two men entered just behind me and faced the wall on either side of me. Both wore well-cut gray suits. Both pulled their jackets slightly apart, and soon all three of us were gazing slightly upwards and heaving contented sighs.

As we completed our missions, each affixing his gaze on the tiles in front of us, we readjusted our clothing and moved toward the row of sinks. Out of the corner of my eye I realized that one of the men seemed familiar and I stole a glance at his face. It was the former governor of New York, David Paterson.

The other man may have been an aide or a security agent. The three of us washed diligently and shook the water from our hands. Two of us stood back so the ex-gov could have first dibs at the paper towels, and then we departed.

Outside the bathroom, I watched as other customers began to recognize Paterson, who was simultaneously smiling and nodding and quickening his pace to get out of the place. He stopped ever so briefly to shake hands with a puzzled child whose parents were pushing her toward him, and then he escaped through the open doors. As almost everyone knows, the former governor is legally blind, but that didn’t slow him down. In an instant he was gone.
    
It was several minutes before Martha emerged from the women’s room. As seasoned journalists, we try not to be impressed by celebrities, but this was one story on which I could not sit.

“You’ll never guess who was in there,” I said, gesturing to the men’s room. “Governor Paterson!”
    
“You’re kidding. Where is he?”
    
“He left,” I said.
    
“Did you get his picture?”
    
“Um. Nooo.”
    
“Why not?”
    
“It was the men’s room,” I said. “There are certain protocols to be observed in the men’s room.”
    
“You should have gotten a picture.”
    
We bought some food and carried it to a table. I grabbed my ‘Droid and tapped an update to my Facebook status:
    
“Ran into ex-Gov David Paterson in the men's room at the Malden service area on the Thruway,” I wrote. “Was he ever surprised to see me.”
    
Three hours later we pulled into a small motel in Utica and began to unwind for the day. I pulled out my phone to see if there were any messages. There on the small screen was evidence that meeting celebrities in bathrooms may be a universal and memorable experience. The first Facebook response was from a prominent American Baptist leader:
    
“Several years ago I was in the men's room at the train station in NYC.” He wrote. “Looking straight ahead, as we've been taught to do, doing my man thing, I heard two voices that sounded really familiar to me. I looked around. To my right was Jesse Jackson. To my left was Al Sharpton. I managed to resist the temptation to try to shake hands.”
    
I read the response to Martha, who said all the talk about Men’s Room Protocols made her think of the lyrics to “Lovely Ladies” in the musical Les Miserables. 

Old men, young men, take 'em as they come, 

Harbor rats and alley cats and every kind of         scum:

Poor men, rich men, leaders of the land,

See them with their trousers off they're never     quite as grand. 

All it takes is money in your hand!

She also recalled standing in a long line to the ladies’ room in a Broadway theater with an unexpectedly patient Liza Minelli. (“There is no parity in lines to Broadway bathrooms,” Martha added.)
    
My brother Jim added his experience to Facebook: “I once peed next to Ed Bradley at a Broadway show. He still talks about it.”
    
Amid several additional FB comments, my friend Martin Bailey observed, “Sounds like you’ve got the makings of a great book.”
    
Now there’s an idea. The proposition jogged my memory of an event years ago in New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington. The 1976 presidential campaign had begun, and the church hosted an ecumenical gathering called, “Religion and the Presidency.” All the major Democratic candidates attended except the ultimate winner, Jimmy Carter – but no one cared because it was early in the campaign and he was a long shot. The other candidates were more prominent and more likely: Sargent Shriver, Eugene McCarthy, Morris Udall, and Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp.

At one point during that hectic meeting I joined the testosteronal crowd that jammed into the bathroom with all these potential leaders of the free world. I stood unobtrusively next to Sargent Shriver, but the image that sticks with me is of the petite Shapp squeezed unwillingly between ex-basketball star Udall and the lanky McCarthy. There is no parity in men’s rooms either.
    
What’s the big deal about meeting famous people in toilets?

Jon Fox, a one-term Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, was delighted to discover that his House office had once been occupied by Congressman Richard M. Nixon. Fox routinely escorted his visitors to the bathroom so they could share an historic commode with a disgraced former president.

I had a similar experience at the original Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. had offices. During a World Council of Churches meeting in the church dining hall, I excused myself to use the bathroom. And as I stared into the scratched and stained urinal, a shiver came over me. Is this, I asked myself, the urinal – he – used? 
    
There’s no real secret to the feelings that come over us when we engage in a universal and necessary act with rich or prominently powerful people. In this over-mediated age where film and video and blue tooth elevate the merely famous to demigods, it’s reassuring to be reminded that it’s merely an illusion. All human beings are created in the image of God, but God did not create all of us as stars. On a high-res flat screen TV, your governor or president is elevated far above you. But standing next to the dude at a urinal, you remember that God made us all the same.
    
The late Bob Campbell, general secretary of American Baptist Churches in the seventies and eighties, used to tell a colorful bathroom story. I assume the story is apocryphal, but it makes the point.
    
According to Bob, several Orthodox clergy gathered in the Interchurch Center in New York for an ecumenical meeting. During a break all of the priests adjourned to the men’s room – including Iakovos, the archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.
    
“Your Eminence,” one of the young priests said, “How shall we conduct ourselves in such a place? Shall we line up according to ecclesial rank? Shall we address each other by our titles?”
    
Bob told the story dozens of times, and it may even have been true.
    
“Brothers, relax” Iakovos said. 
    
“In here we are all peers.”

Media Fast

The So We Might See Coalition, an interfaith media justice group coordinated by the United Church of Christ Office of Communication, Inc., is joining a national effort for this year’s Media Fast: Free Screen Week.

Initiated by the Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC), a national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups, parents, and individuals who care about their children, Free Screen Week is slated for April 18 – 24, 2011. This year it coincides with several of the holy observances of various faith communities.

 

The coalition is offering a series of on-line reflections from various faith perspectives, Christian Protestant and Catholic, Islamic, Jewish, among them.

 

My friend Andrea Cano, chair of OC, Inc., invited me to submit one of those 250-word reflections. My humble contribution follows:

He makes wars to cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
“Be still, and know that I am God.”
─ Psalm 46:9-10a (NRSV)

God, our heads spin with raucous music, news updates, tweets and TXTs, interspersed with noisy ads that – as Brother Thomas said – treat all products with reverence due to the sacraments. Save us, God. Soothe us with silence. Amen.

My formative years came at the end of the golden age of radio and at the cusp of the golden age of television. My blogs are filled with nostalgic reminiscences of radio dramas that evoked dazzling images in my brain far superior to anything 3D Blue Ray has yet achieved. And when I recall my childhood friends, I think first of Lucy and Desi and Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett.

I am not the only Boomer for whom media were as profoundly influential as our teachers. No two people had a greater impact on my life than John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and I remember them with affection, quote them to my children and choke-up on the anniversaries of their deaths. And yet I never met either man; their images and voices were merely flickers of light and sound on cathode ray tubes.

Media are pervasive. Just driving around, you can tell by the bowed heads, contorted hands and interrupted gait of passersby that they are TXTing. Others show by vague expressions that their brains are locked between the earphones of an MP3. None of this is inherently bad, except that it diverts you from the real human beings who you live and with whom you live. “A daydream,” Brother Thomas Merton said, “is an evasion,” and media create daydreams that don’t go away.

A week-long media fast can bring us closer to those we love. May God clear our heads of the daydreams and evasions that distract us.
---

Squeezing this important topic into 250 words was discipline enough; following through on the challenge will require even greater self-control.

Dream On, a nineties HBO series featured a neurotic New Yorker portrayed by Brian Benben whose childhood was spent watching fifties television programs in his New York apartment, and whose adulthood was spent flashing back to memories of TV past. When Benben’s Martin Tupper character faced stressful situations, scenes from black-and-white films noir or Leave it to Beaver flashed before his eyes. Dream On made the point that television has permeated our consciousness and blurs our reality.

My childhood differed from Martin Tupper’s only in venue: I watched television in a small town house with an expansive yard surrounded by cow pastures and forests. When George Reeves’ Superman was on, my brother Larry and I would tie towel capes around our necks and leap heroically off our bunk bed. When Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett was king of the wild frontier, we hunted b’ar in a small but dense forest at the top of the hill, sometimes dragging our father’s heavy crowbar along because we thought it looked like a flintlock. Unlike cloistered apartment dwellers in Manhattan, our TV-stimulated imagination had practical outlets, most of them healthy. (I do apologize to Larry for blinding him with cellophane-molded Clark Kent glasses and pushing him off the top bunk. What can I say? I thought we could fly.)

My last media fast was in 1964 when I was in basic training in Texas – an eight-week span that included the deposing of Khrushchev and the U.S. presidential campaign. After 18 years of getting my news from John Cameron Swayze and Douglas Edwards, it was strange to tune into the outside world entirely through the jaundiced eyes of drill sergeants. For weeks they convinced me that Barry Goldwater had the election in the bag. The experience was enough to persuade me that no one should be deprived of media, even if it was Fox News.

So – now that I’ve gone on record of supporting a media fast, how will I spend those seven desolate days in April. Is there really life without Facebook, House and Bones? Will I sublimate my inner rage without Criminal Minds? How will I know what’s going on in the world without Roger Ebert’s tweets? And what will the rest of the world do without my penetrating press notices and web updates I’m paid to write?

One of the purposes of the media fast is to set aside the distractions that place psychic walls between you and your loved ones. But I must admit that I am happiest at the end of the day when I lie in bed with my partner, humming along with Glee’s New Directions chorus, laughing at Homer and Bart or watching a favorite character actor on Law & Order SVU and wondering where we’d seen her before. It’s possible for media to bring folks closer together, though not always.

My spouse hates John Wayne, who I loved. And I hate HBO’s Big Love, which she adored.

As the seven-day media fast looms closer, I will try to follow the code of John Woolman, the 18th century Quaker mystic whose journal had an enormous impact on my college days. Woolman, a notary public, resolved he would do nothing that would hurt another person. He refused to notarize wills that passed on slaves as property. He convinced tavern owners to stop selling whiskey. He wouldn’t ride in stage coaches because the drivers abused the horses. And his daily garb, contrary to the image of a frontier Quaker, was made of white muslin rather than black wool because he feared the harsh dye blinded the slaves who made the clothing. He must have cast a memorable image in colonial America, ambling around New Jersey on a dusty ass, dressed in a permanently wrinkled yellowing and possibly redolent costume.

In our rather more complex society, a media fast – boycott would be another way to put it – may hurt as many people as it helps. It may create holy spaces for families to come closer together or it may create caves of resentment as children smolder over their parents’ decision that family time is more important than DeGrassi. And too often decisions about which media hurt and which media help are made for the wrong reasons – as when Republicans vote to remove funding for public broadcasting.

In the final analysis, perhaps a media fast doesn’t have to be absolute. Some Christian traditions (not mine) suspend Lenten fasts on Sundays to give the faithful the will to remain sacrificially strong all the way to Easter.

That could work for me. I don’t know yet how successful my own fast will be. But I can say this without equivocation: this April 18-24, I will righteously eschew O’Reilly, Beck and – no matter how much it hurts – Limbaugh. But after a draining week of media deprivation, I will sneak out to my car and turn on the radio and drink in the wisdom of America’s true pundits: Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers, on NPR’s Car Talk.

No one else need know. And what a glorious breakfast that will be.

Comment below: what will YOU give up?

Doris from Rego Park

She died in 2003, and unless you follow all-night sports radio in New York, you would not have  heard of her.


In fact, the woman satisfied all the criteria for perfect obscurity.


Into her fifties, she lived in Queens with her parents, elderly Jews who fled the Holocaust. She suffered from neurofibromatosis - Elephant Man's Disease - that required frequent operations to remove skin tumors from her face and body. She had lung cancer and a chronic cough. She had an autistic compulsion to memorize factoids and arrange small objects in straight lines. She never married, she never learned to drive, and she never worked beyond menial office jobs.


Her name was Doris Bauer. Under most circumstances, she was the kind of person who elicits pity - an emblem of lives that amount to little and never quite begin. She's the kind of person you think of when you're alone on dark, cold nights, appraising your accomplishments and wondering if they add up to anything. And in the loneliness of the hour you might be tempted to thank God that your life - at least - adds up to more than Doris Bauer's.


But in New York, Doris is remembered for more than that. She is fondly recalled by thousands of people who never met her but whose lives she touched.

This year, as spring training begins and a new baseball season looms, a mournful ballad is making its way to New York area radios and MP3 players, first on WFAN - a sports call-in station - and more recently on Jonathan Schwartz's weekend program of wonderfully eclectic music on National Public Radio's WNYC. Written and performed by Don Rosler, the song tells of the frequent late-night calls Doris made to WFAN, introducing herself as "Doris from Rego Park." Her voice on the radio became so familiar over the years that when she took the subway to Shea Stadium for Sunday games, people would recognize her by her irrepressible cough.


Listeners to WFAN quickly realized that Doris was also a loyal Mets fan and a superior tactician. In an always pleasant but sometimes struggling voice, Doris would suggest trades, line-ups and ways of motivating the team to play harder and smarter. Mets managers who tuned in to WFAN realized her advice was valuable, even when it came too late. She said trading Lenny Dykstra "was the second worst trade" the team ever made. She did not deny rumors that she had a crush on Dykstra, as well as on Ed Kranepool.

It's hard to imagine a more lonely medium than late night radio. 

"What is comes down to is aloneness," WNYC's Schwartz said in an email to the New York Times. It's the medium of choice by shift workers, insomniacs, nocturnal loners and those recently separated from someone they love. It's the medium that enables people who have no one to touch to imagine a connection with the voices of strangers. "The city at night," Schwartz writes. "Doris calls. You hear, you listen. It's snowing. Alone."


No one really knows if Doris was a lonely person herself. Her brother, Harold Bauer, told the New York Times that she was happiest when she set her alarm for 1 a.m. so she could call WFAN. She did that so often that regular listeners looked forward to her voice. Doris from Rego Park made a connection with untold hundreds - perhaps thousands - of people who came to depend on her insights, her auditory companionship and her unfailing politeness. She ended every call with thanks to the host and listeners "for your time and courtesy."


There may be hundreds of rabbis, priests, imams and ministers in New York who would have pitied Doris while thanking God that their own lives had a greater impact on people. Some of them might be right, but when Doris died in 2003, her brother said he inundated with sympathy cards.

Listeners of WFAN knew they had lost someone very important to them. Doris reached out to other lonely people on cold, dark nights, and together they found the spark that makes life important.


Doris of Rego Park

By Don Rosler


Doris from Rego Park,
Calls by day and calls by dark.
She just phoned in at 2:10 am
In NYC on FAN.

Doris talks about the Mets,
Who they shouldn’t have got,
Who they should get,
I’m not quite sure if she ever sleeps.
She seems to keep all her hours with me.

She has a chronic cough that makes it hard for her to talk
But that don’ t stop tonight’s discussion of offensive woes.
I think we have in common that our most constant companion is our radio’
I know I’m tuned every night when I hear
Doris from Rego Park
She mourns the lack of lead-off spark.
Through central park up to outer space
Floats her new proposal for a trade
I wonder if those far away and in the future will agree
The second worst trade ever, letting Dykstra go?
Are they under their own spell of great obsessions
they express on space age call in shows.

Well all I know is I stay up ‘til hear
Doris of  Rego Park,
Calls by day and calls by dark.
Each call concludes when she says thank you for your time and courtesy.
Now I wonder if she’ll drift off to sleep
With her radio on like me.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0Wc8AkpMrE

Sincerely, Your President

Several times a month I get a nice letter from Barack Obama.
Just today I received a nice emailed message thanking me for facilitating the reform of Wall Street.

When you and I set out on this journey three years ago, we knew that ours would be a lengthy struggle to build a new foundation for this country -- one that would require squaring off against the special interests who had spent decades stacking the deck in their favor (Barack wrote). Today, it is clear that you have shifted the odds.

I think it's so nice that a man as busy as the President takes time to keep me informed about what he's doing. And he's so considerate. Last Memorial Day he sent me a personal message thanking me for my military service.

It's nice being on the President's listserv, and it's always good to hear from him. But I've got to admit: when the President writes several times a month, it kind of takes the thrill out of the contact.

Back in the day (that would be, for me, when I was an older teen), receiving a personal message from the President was so unusual it could knock the wind out of you. (I was going to say except for the letters that begin, "Greetings," but actually, those, too.) I worry that the President may be dissipating his impact by writing everytime he's left alone with his keyboard.

Dear Phil, Michelle is on the road today and I'm thinking we should suck back a few brews and maybe maybe grab Rahm and take in an old John Wayne movie while we have a chance...

When John F. Kennedy was inaugurated in January 1961, when I was 15, I began a personal campaign of letters to try to get him to write me back.

While I was waiting for that historic response from the Oval Office, I wrote to other U.S. politicians -- anyone I could think of.

A surprising number of them (not necessarily JFK) wrote back. Their gracious written responses only encouraged me to write more letters. And more letters.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had more letters from past and future presidents, presidential candidates, governors and senators than my brothers has baseball cards. And my brothers had a lot of baseball cards.

Some of the letters I received were from impressive people -- Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover and Lyndon Johnson, among others. The letters were certainly novelties in the 1960s. Whether they have evolved into historical documents, I don't know.

I dug the letters and autographed pictures out of a box the other day and was shocked by how old they looked -- yellowed, wrinkled, faded and stained with cellophane tape. One thing was sure: if I left them in the box, they would eventually turn to dust. I resolved to scan them and transport them from historical papers into digital images. At least posterity -- meaning my daughters and son -- will have some record what they looked like.

I'll let them be the judge how important they are.
Butr important or not, they were all fun to receive. And each letter that appeared in the mailbox at the Morrisville Post Office infused ecstatic thrills into ordinary days.
Feel free to read them over my shoulder here.

And Barack -- keep those letters coming in. It's always good hearing from you.

But the thrill is waning.

Sinner Byrd

It used to kill me the way Robert C. Byrd's West Virginia Baptists used to address him.

"Sinner Byrd, won't you come in?"

"Sinner Byrd, are you goin' ta vote for this bill?"

"Sinner Byrd, did you bring your fiddle?"

It was the accent, of course, because nothing about Bob Byrd suggested a predilection to sinning. He was an upright man, a stalwart Baptist.

He was, in fact, an American Baptist, though when I interviewed him in 1975 I suspected he had no idea what kind of Baptist he was. He was a member of Crab Orchard Baptist Church in Crab Orchard, W.Va., and Bill Withers - his pastor in the 1970s - said the senator actually attended church on occasion. When he was in Washington, Byrd called home.

"Folks'd come to church Sunday morning and I'd hear them whisper to to each other, 'Bob called last night,'" Bill reported. "He was always checking on his friends - to see how one was coping with an illness, how another was dealing with an injury on the job."

That kind of caring may have been politically prudent for a senator, but it was also down home Baptist. (Down home, Byrd probably pronounced it, Babtist.)

In January 1975, Robert Byrd accepted an invitation to address the meeting of American Baptist laymen that summer in Atlantic City. As the recently appointed editor of The American Baptist Magazine (I was 29 that year), I called and asked Byrd for an interview. Someone in his office called back and said, "Y'all come."

I headed to Washington with a modest sense that I was about to brush shoulders with history. The nation's capital was undergoing major change: the Watergate scandal had ripped the nation apart, and the Washington subway system was being built. I thought the rubble in Washington streets was a wonderful metaphor, and in my youthful enthusiasm I overwrote my article, burying the lead beneath several paragraphs:

Post-Watergate Washington, like a war-torn capital, is in a period of reconstruction.

The first evidence of the rebuilding process is physical. The main streets of the city are torn up with the construction of a long-awaited subway system, and most of Washington's best known landmarks are undergoing a major facelifting for next year's bicentennial celebration. Even the rotunda of the Capitol, where the bodies of Presidents have lain in state, is obscured by latticed scaffolding, and the once awesome stillness of the dome is shaken by muffled jackhammers.

Two paragraphs later, I got to the point of the article: Robert Byrd. First elected to the Senate in 1958, Byrd had wrestled the job of Senate Majority Whip from Edward M. Kennedy (later his political ally) in 1971.

The offices of high-ranking Congressional leaders are cavernous, ornate, and hard to find, and I made several wrong turns on the way to the Majority Whip’s office. The office anteroom is (or was then) cluttered with long coffee tables and thickly padded arm chairs. I quickly calculated the square-footage of the room as exceeding that of my townhouse.

Byrd was at lunch when I arrived in the office and an aide directed me to one of the padded chairs. I settled in, studied my notes, and looked around, wondering whose historic posteriors had preceded mine to the chair. In my mind's eye I saw a ghostly LBJ sitting in the chair opposite me, leaning forward intently, his finger jabbing the air.


But my mind didn't wander long. Byrd walked in quietly, moving a little stiffly I thought, and extended his hand. His grasp was so light I wondered if his hand hurt and I hesitated to squeeze back. He nodded in a courtly manner and smiled.


"Bob Byrd," he said, barely audible.


"It's an honor to meet you, Senator," I said. He glanced at my empty chair and I took it as an offer to be seated.


I have no recollection what I asked him that day, although my article in the April 1975 issue of The American Baptist suggests the topics were predictable: Watergate, morality, faith, presidential ambition. Byrd's answers were obviously better than my questions. Those who have seen an aging Byrd lampooned on The Daily Show as a Foghorn P. Leghorn coot may be surprised at his carefully weighed comments, which I recall were delivered in slow, measured tones.

On Watergate: "We're not morally bankrupt as a nation because of Watergate. Watergate involved a very small handful of individuals, most of whom had never gone before the electorate."

On determining right from wrong in politics: "I would imagine it's pretty hard, always, to see a pitfall ahead. One just has to try to do what he thinks is right. If he has the right kind of upbringing and has lived in a home where the principles of honesty, patriotism and doing right have been taught, he will probably come out all right in the end." 

On being discouraged about a career: "I wouldn't advise young people to desist from pursuing any responsible endeavor just because a few people in that particular field make failures of themselves. I wouldn't discourage a young medical student from pursuing a career in medicine just because of a few quacks. I wouldn't discourage a young law student from pursuing a career in law just because of a few charlatans. And I wouldn't discourage a young minister from pursuing that high calling just because there have been some false men and women who have stood in the pulpit. We find these people in every walk of life who have failed and disappointed others and who have not kept the faith. It isn't just in politics where this has been found, it's only that it has been more recent and it has been more publicized." 

On Presidential Ambition: "Any man or woman in politics has the ambition to go as far as he or she can possibly go. I don't know how far I can go. I haven't reached the age or point in life where I feel that I've gone as far as I can. I don't know whether I shall go any farther or not, but I feel if the opportunity should come, I can do whatever duty is involved in that particular assignment. I believe that when one goes beyond the office of a United States Senator, one gets into an area that is much larger than one's own capabilities or personal planning. I have long held the view that somehow this is beyond the individual. Some, I suppose, feel that by accident they may go farther. Others may ascribe it to destiny or fate. But it seems to me there is some good reason to believe that one does not project oneself into the highest of offices purely on the basis of his own strengths. He has to have some strength and qualities and attributes. But I think what I'm saying is that one is not always the master of one's own fate."

Later that year, I sat in on Senator Byrd's address to the American Baptist Men luncheon in Atlantic City. The banquet room was packed. When he finished, men and women formed a line that extended out the room and down the hall, each hoping to have a word with the Senator and to ask him sign their programs. The line took over an hour to dissipate, in part because Byrd had a slight motor dysfunction in his right hand that caused him to make several labored circles with his pen before pressing the nib to paper. I stood behind him like an ex officio press aide, watching his many admirers reach out to him. (The photograph above is from that event; I'm the young chubby guy behind the Senator.) Byrd stood patiently, smiling and signing, and only when the last person had departed did he turn to me.


"Would you care for some coffee in the press room?" I asked.


"All right," he said quietly, and followed me out of the room. He was not particularly charismatic, and when we walked together up the hallway I don't believe anyone recognized him.


I wonder if most of the people who waited in line for his autograph were hedging a bet that Robert C. Byrd might one day take advantage of his strengths and qualities and attributes and become a president of the United States. What a souvenir his bold signature would be, then!

Of course it never happened. When Bob Byrd died early this week at the age of 92, he was regarded by some as a distantly comic figure in Washington, ranting on CSpan against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, weeping copiously when Ted Kennedy died, scolding the Senate for its lack of decorum and ignorance of its own history.


Even so, I thought Robert Byrd may even have transcended the nation's highest office. He was honest. He had integrity. He had faith. He was the longest serving senator in history. He cast thousands of votes that were, for the most part, an effort to advance peace, justice, morality, prosperity, domestic tranquility and common sense.


How many presidents can match that record?

Himan Brown and the Ultimate Media Experience

Elita called me recently to ask what I'd like for Father's Day. She had to ask because I don't golf or know how most shop tools work. But I didn't hesitate.

"I'd like to see a 3D movie," I said.

I have happy memories of the old anaglyph movies of yore, which required viewers to wear lenses tinted red for the left eye and cyan for the right to blend images on the screen to form a convincing three-dimensional illusion.

Who can forget such 3D classics as Bwana Devil in 1952, or It Came From Outer Space in 1953. My personal favorite was Creature from the Black Lagoon, the only 3D movie to spawn two sequels. Sadly, 3D production waned after 1954 when I was 8 so I didn't get to see many films.

Fortunately, the Morris Theater in Morrisville didn't get films for years after they were out of general distribution, so many of the 3D films arrived after 1954 when my mother deemed me old enough to see them. I assumed the steady rain of celluloid scratches on the old prints was part of the special effect.

But that was then. The phenomenon of 3D is different now, they say. Critics of Avatar who complained about the pedestrian plot and hackneyed message raved about the three-dimensional images on screen, some declaring that James Cameron went beyond virtual imagery to create a dizzying new world for the viewer. 

Avatar is still on my must-see list, but last week Victoria and family friend Robert Lowell allowed me to accompany them to a screening of Shrek: The Final Chapter. The movie is a top-drawer entertainment experience with animation and 3D effects that make you wonder if there is anything computers can't do. Wearing RealD glasses with thick black frames similar to the ones I wore in high school, I was fascinated by the detail in Shrek: the tiny fibers and stitches of clothing, billowing bouffants of hair, the convincing illusion of depth, all went far beyond my Mcluhanesque expectations for media absorption.

But was the 3D experience as fantastical and transforming as I had so long anticipated?

Oddly enough, not quite. I won't say I was disappointed by the experience, but Shrek left me with a nagging feeling, like a dim memory,  that there were more profound and more absorbing media experiences to be had.

Then last week, my memory was jogged in a sad way. The New York Times reported the death of Himan Brown, possibly the greatest creative spirit of the golden age of radio, at the age of 99.

Most people haven't heard of Hi Brown, and most of those who have are in their 60s and older. He was the creator of such radio dramas as "The Adventures of the Thin Man," "Dick Tracy,"  and "Inner Sanctum Mysteries" known for the sound of a creaking door that unsettled millions as they listened to the show in their dark living rooms. The reason the eerie sound was unsettling is that it was filtered through the ears and imaginations of a million brains that tapped the darkest recesses of individual souls to create images so personally horrifying that even Lon Chaney, Sr. couldn't duplicate them. When "Inner Sanctum" signed off with a sardonic male voice intoning, "Pleasant Dreams," thousands lay awake for most of the night.

Hi Brown believed that the human mind was the best medium for creating the images that move the soul. Radio, he said, would always be far more effective than cinema or television for putting complex, unfilmable, undrawable pictures -- beautiful, erotic, horrifying or devastating images -- into persons' heads. The brain is capable of creating images that surpass computer-created high density 3D on a screen.

"I am firmly convinced that nothing visual can touch audio," Himan Brown said when I interviewed him for American Baptist media in 1974. "I don't need 200 orchestra players doing the 'Ride of the Valkyries,' I don't need car chases, I don't need mayhem. All I need to do is creak the door open, and visually your head begins to go. The magic word is imagination."

Be that as it may, the golden age of radio drama faded with the advent of television in the 1950s, and no one who has viewed Avatar will see the sense of listening to a radio drama. And perhaps the human brain is losing the wiring necessary to appreciate audio tales. Child psychiatrists used to worry that color television with vividly formed and richly colored characters like Big Bird and Sponge Bob Square Pants may be robbing children of the facile imagination their grandparents used to be inspired or terrified as they read fairy tales or listened to radio drama.

Certainly the effects of radio drama on our minds cannot underestimated. Jack Benny, whose schtick was to pose as a tight-wad, had a bit on his radio program in which he would lead visitors to the money vault beneath his house, perhaps to get a quarter to pay the paper boy. Security measures along the way to the vault included a moat filled with splashing, growling, snapping alligators -- hilarious in the minds of imaginative radio listeners, but disappointingly lame when it was recreated on television.

Another popular television program that originated on the radio was Gunsmoke. On the radio, it didn't matter that Marshal Dillon was portrayed by short, morbidly obese William Conrad because the actor's rich baritone swelled listeners' ears and created the image of a tall, athletic lawman. On television, it took the six-and-a-half foot tall James Arness to complete the picture. And who can forget that the bookish, bow-tied Bud Collyer, host of television's To Tell the Truth, was completely convincing as the man of steel on radio.

Another convincing argument for the superiority of audio communication came from humorist Stan Freberg, who produced a brief demonstration to convince advertisers to spend money on the radio. Freberg demonstrated that the mind responds to radio more creatively than to the big screen:

Hi Brown continued to produce radio dramas into the nineties. From 1974 to 1982, he produced the nightly CBS Radio Mystery Theater, complete with the creaking door effect. Some time during that period, I had the privilege of doing a telephone interview with Mr. Brown to promote the program among listeners of Vita, the erstwhile American Baptist weekly radio program. We had a nice long chat, during which I became completely convinced that audio will always create more vivid images and profounder ideas in the brain than television or film -- or HD 3D.

I rarely missed an episode of CBS Radio Mystery Theater after that. And today I count my half-hour conversation with Hi Brown as one of the great human encounters of my life, up there with shaking hands with Jonas Salk at an American Baptist meeting or sitting in Joe DiMaggio's warmth when he left his seat at a gate at National Airport.

I must admit that most of my media experiences today consist of watching favorite programs on a high density flat screen in our bedroom, and I will always relish an opportunity to watch a 3D film on the big screen. I've been privileged, in media terms, to live a life that has spanned radio to 3D, 360-degree, computer generated virtual reality. And I love it.

But the next time I sit slightly slack-jawed in a movie theater, awed by the three-dimensional effects that are tickling my synapses, I'll think of Hi Brown. And I'll say to myself, what a great show. But if I was listening to this story on the radio, would it be even greater?