newspapers Archives - Page 2 of 3

Me, mentioned in newspapers

three-car collision

Roger singing, Trinity AME Zion Church, age 6

After I did a meme that included the number of times I was on TV, I decided to look when I was mentioned in newspapers. I have this Newspapers.com account, which I initially got for genealogical research. So I get to research me.

I decided to limit the search to the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin from 1953 to 1976. There are some hits from other people named Roger Green. Searching the Albany papers will be much more difficult because there was a state legislator with my name who was often mentioned.

Sat, 17 Dec 1960 – City Protestant Churches to Hail Nativity. I would be singing Little Drummer Boy at Trinity AME Zion Church.
Sat, 16 Dec 1961 -Area Protestants to Celebrate Glorious Nativity. I would have a solo at Trinity AMEZ.
[I was still a boy soprano then.]

Sat, 7 Feb 1970 – City Schools will mark Negro week. A number of students, including my sister Leslie and me, would be reading the works of black poets at an assembly the following Friday at Binghamton Central High School.
Sat, 3 Apr 1970 – King Memorial in City Tomorrow. “Eulogy and benediction will be given by Roger Green.”
{I was moving away from the desire to become a pastor by then.]

Mon, 23 Feb 1970 – Green Family Life Harmonious. I wrote about this HERE.

14 Sep 1970 M-E Girl leads Albany panel. Governor’s Council on Children and Youth; I represented Binghamton Central HS. [The first time I ever flew in an airplane was a little thing with about a dozen seats, flying from Binghamton to Albany in a thunderstorm! The return flight was calmer.]

The accident

23 Jun 1972 – two identical posts titled Hospitals. “CHARLES JOSEPH, 37, of Endicott, and ROGER GREEN, 19, 29 Ackley Ave., Johnson City, fair condition, Ideal Hospital. Injuries not immediately available, after a three-car collision in Endicott.

“Endicott police said that Green was a passenger in a car driven by Joseph. The Joseph car was stopped in the westbound lane of North Street at McKinley Avenue when it was struck in the rear by a car driven by Dorothea…, 41, Endwell, they said.
The impact forced the Joseph car into a car driven by Robert Smith, 24, which was stopped in front of it.

“They said Joseph was taken to the hospital with head and neck injuries, Green was taken with shoulder and jaw injuries, and Smith, who was not admitted, was treated for a neck injury.”

[I hitchhiked to work. Charlie picked me up because he recognized me as my father’s son. In hospital for a day and a half, followed by six weeks of physical therapy.]

3 May 1975 ‘The Boys’ BHares Homosexuality. (Review of Boys in the Band at the Roberson Center.) “Bernard (Roger Green) is the black faggot of the play, the ‘African Queen’ as he’s referred to at one point, and later as the “queen of spades.” His role, too, jells only in the second act. It is minor, but as painful as the others.”

[After reading that, no wonder one of my grade school classmates thought I was gay before she was corrected by another one of my old friends.]

I might have missed some articles, but I didn’t want to look through over 20,000 records.

Off topic

My blog provider’s host machine went down on the afternoon of July 4. It took over 24 for them to restore data and web services. But MY site took another message from me and an additional four hours. The trick was that I was supposed to give a presentation ABOUT MY BLOG and its content about race on the morning of July 5, while my blog was still down. I muddled through. Thanks to my kind audience.

“As my provider noted, “We understand how important your online presence is to you, and we apologize that in this case, we weren’t able to meet the high standards for service you’ve come to expect from us… To help prevent this type of event from happening in the future, we will be doing a full internal investigation of this issue, working to thoroughly determine the root cause and the scope of its impact.

“Thank you for your patience, we greatly appreciate it!” I wasn’t all that patient, but what can you do? Watch three MCIU movies so I wouldn’t keep checking my site every 10 minutes.

June rambling #1: love and math

Nation Wishes It Could Just Once Be Reminded Of Preciousness Of Life Without Mass Shooting.

Get Visual: On passing.

Everything Doesn’t Happen For A Reason.

NY Gov. Cuomo signs “unconstitutional, McCarthyite” pro-Israel exec. order punishing BDS boycott movement.

Chuck Miller: The Blackbird: 2006-2016.

John Oliver: Debt Buyers.

Dan Rather on a free press.

Dear Journalists: For the Love of God, Please Stop Calling Your Writing “Content”.

A Progressive Agenda to Cut Poverty and Expand Opportunity.

Meditations of an Anxious Baker.

Christine Baxter: We Are Singing For Our Lives. The sights of her experience at the United Methodist General Conference.

Love and math.

New Yorker: Frog and Toad: an amphibious celebration of same-sex love. “Arnold Lobel… was born in 1933 and raised in Schenectady, New York.”

A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, a topic I wrote about here.

Arctic greening not a good thing; low-income assistance doesn’t make people lazy. And Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) is a schmuck.

Having It All Kinda Sucks. “Only women would sign up for this much crap.”

Jaquandor is dee-you-enn with the first draft of another book.

8 Important TV Shows That Were Lost Or Destroyed.

Bruce Dern, at 80, Reflects on His Career, Working With Clint Eastwood and Alfred Hitchcock.

Deconstructing Comics Podcast: #500 – Stephen Bissette: Comics, Movies, and Creator Credits.

Trouble with Comics #40: Party All the Time.

Bats In The Bedroom Can Spread Rabies Without An Obvious Bite, something I learned firsthand.

Your Ramadan beverage.

Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It’s Called, It’s Going Out of Style.

Now I Know: Watching What You Say and Decipher This and The Land Down Under in the Land Down Under and How to Take Turns, International Treaty Edition.

Peter Shaffer Dies at 90; Playwright Won Tonys for ‘Equus’ and ‘Amadeus’. Pronounced SHAFF-er. Amadeus: Peter Shaffer’s Enduring Portrait of Genius (and Mediocrity).

Gordie Howe, hockey legend, R.I.P. at 88. Howe played more than 1,700 games in the NHL and scored more than 800 goals. He was widely known as “Mr. Hockey.”

Irv Benson, R.I.P. at 102.

SamuraiFrog answered a bunch of questions from me, including about the Cincinnati Zoo.

Muhammad ALI

Pentagon learned from the epic mistake of making a martyr of the world’s most gifted and famous athlete.

Cassius Clay sings Stand By Me.

Remembering Cleveland’s Muhammad Ali Summit, 1967. Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Lew Alcindor and others.

World Heavyweight Champion of Peace, Justice and Humanity.

Ali Understood the Racist Roots of War and Militarism. And he called them out fearlessly.

The Political Poet.

How Muhammad Ali helped Tavis Smiley heal a father-son rift.

The champ on That’s Incredible.

Man and Superman.

Muhammad Ali’s other big fight.

The 1996 Olympics.

When Muhammad Ali fought at the Washington Avenue Armory.

‘Ali! Ali!’: The Greatest is laid to rest in his hometown.

Pieces by Dustbury and Ken Levine.

A bunch of articles from Slate, including Billy Crystal’s Homage at the Champ’s Memorial. Plus Billy Crystal’s Muhammad Ali tribute – 15 Rounds (1979).

Muhammad Ali documentary ‘When We Were Kings’ to screen at Madison Theatre in Albany 6/23.

MUSIC

Big Daddy’s new video is a mash-up of “New York, New York” with classic Doo-Wop styles of the 1950s…most notably “Blue Moon” by The Marcels.

Marcia Howard: A voice from the past brings the past to The Voice.

Carpool Karaoke with James Corden, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Audra McDonald, Jane Krakowski, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson.

Lin-Manuel Miranda Freestyles about RAMEN.

Classic guitar riffs.

Bobbie Gentry and other classic music photographs from the BBC archive.

Paul McCartney talks about the early days.

As Dustbury knows, this IS bad: Court Says Remastered Old Songs Get A Brand New Copyright.

Now I Know: Faking Fakin’ It.

You don’t sound black

It’s that mindset that gives political correctness a bad name.

The cartoonist Keith Knight, a/k/a Keef is “the creator of three popular comic strips: the Knight Life, (th)ink, and the K Chronicles.” I haven’t followed (th)ink, which is a one-panel editorial strip, but The Knight Life is syndicated in several daily newspapers, including the local Times Union; you can read it HERE.

Arguably his best strip is K Chronicles. Keef says: “K Chronicles is like an indie film and the Knight Life is like a (good) network sit-com. Read his September 2015 strip Not Black. (I’ll wait.) I so relate!

When I was first working in my current job, we provided library services not just for New York State, but all around the country. In those largely pre-Internet, and even pre-email days, I would talk with SBDC counselors on the telephone, taking their questions. Then we would go to the national conference to tout our services. Invariably, I’d see white people, shocked that I was black. And black people, PLEASED that I was black.

More than once, I’ve gotten into debates with people about whether I “sound” black. My argument: I’m black, this is what I sound like. Ipso facto, I sound black.

Oh, the picture above is from a 2009 K Chronicles that created a kerfuffle. Students at Slippery Rock University in western Pennsylvanian school were “outraged” that “the black cartoonist Keith Knight dared to draw a black guy in a noose.” The objection is “extraordinarily stupid… once you read the actual comic strip in question.”

It’s that mindset that gives political correctness – whatever that means – a bad name, especially at colleges. In fact, The Atlantic had a lengthy article in September 2015, The Coddling of the American Mind. “In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.” So the idea of lynching is so offensive that when Keef is making an anti-lynching point in the drawing, the greater truth is lost.

Ellmers v. Aiken

It’ll be interesting to see what type of representative NC-2 wants.

Earlier this month, reporter Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner wrote “an article about the GOP’s poor messaging on the ‘war on women’ narrative. I posted some comments from Rep. Renee Ellmers, R-N.C., who said GOP men need to bring their messages ‘down to a woman’s level.’

“Ellmers called me a ‘liberal woman reporter’ and said I had taken her quote ‘completely out of context.’

“Below are her full comments from the event…, along with the audio of her segment. I have bolded the comments I used in my original post.” Having looked at the link, I feel Ellmers was treated fairly.

This story is still interesting to me because:
1) it IS the GOP war on women, being propagated by a woman
2) it is a classic “blame the press” ploy, which might work on a few, but not to anyone who bothered to read the transcript

Let me express my inherent bias here: all things being equal – and all things are NEVER equal, I’d be inclined to support a female candidate over a male candidate. In this case, though, if I were able to vote in the Congressional race for North Carolina’s Second District, I would support the male candidate.

That guy, BTW, is Clay Aiken, best known to me as the second-place contestant on an early season of American Idol; we even own one of his albums. You may have also seen him – I did not – on Celebrity Apprentice, where, I am told, he presented himself well.

Aiken had an odd row to the Democratic nomination. He had a tough primary fight with his opponent, 71-year-old Keith Crisco, back in May. Aiken won by a small margin, but Crisco had not yet conceded the race when Crisco suffered injuries from a fall at his home and died. Crisco associates say that he was about to concede the race to Aiken the next day.

It’ll be interesting to see what type of representative NC-2 wants, a two-term woman who appears to be over her head in Congress, or an openly gay man with a bit of entertainment fame. Last time out Ellmers won with 56% of the vote. As noted, my rooting interests are with the singer.

Signed, Dear Abby

The name Abigail Van Buren came from a Biblical woman and a one-term President.

Even as a child in Binghamton, NY, I religiously read Ann Landers in the morning paper, the Sun-Bulletin, and Dear Abby in the Evening Press. When the papers merged, both columns appeared.

Someone of a younger vintage might not appreciate the impact of the social significance of these columns written for many years by twin sisters, born July 4, 1918. Ask Ann Landers was originally the pen name created by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Ruth Crowley in 1943, but it was taken over by Eppie Lederer in 1955, and used until her death in 2002 when the name was retired; it was Eppie with whom the pseudonym was most identified.

A few months after Eppie became Ann, Pauline Phillips started the similar Dear Abby; the name Abigail Van Buren came from a Biblical woman and a one-term President. The sisters feuded for years. Pauline’s daughter Jeanne Phillips, took over Dear Abby in 2002, officially, when Pauline’s Alzheimer’s became known, though, in fact, Jeanne’s participation went back to her time as a teenager.

I long preferred Ann to Abby. I thought she was more tolerant, especially after her 1975 announcement about the end of her 32-year marriage.

Yet it was Dear Abby, by the structural simplicity of the pen name, which was the better known of the two. “Dear Abby” generated many more references in popular culture, such as this piece by the Bitchy Waiter. My favorite is the song Dear Abby by John Prine [LISTEN].

Pauline Phillips, the original Dear Abby, died on January 16.
***
Conrad Bain died this week. I must note that I wasn’t a big fan of Diff’rent Strokes, which was about this rich white man, who had a young daughter, adopting two black kids. Arnold often said to his brother, “What’chu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” I think it was supposed to be funny.

I did watch and enjoy Bain on Maude as Dr. Arthur Harmon, her neighbor, and Republican foil to her liberal views.