Dan Rather

     “I was tagged as too intense to be an anchor man, too bull-headed.” Dan Rather

Born in Texas in December of 1931, the son of a ditch digger, Dan Rather grew up in Houston, did play-by play for the city’s minor league baseball team, the Buffs, and established a national reputation as a television reporter with his coverage of Hurricane Carla in 1961, when 350,000 Texas residents had to be evacuated.  At one point Rather offered to chain himself to a tree to demonstrate nature’s powerful clout.  He covered the assassination of JFK in 1963, was a foreign correspondent in Vietnam in 1966, and served as White House correspondent during the Richard M. Nixon administration (see below), frequently annoying the President with persistent questions about the Watergate scandal. For an unprecedented 24 years beginning in 1981, Rather anchored the CBS Evening News but was terminated after airing a segment on “60 Minutes” based on questionable documents claiming that President George W. Bush’s service with the Air National Guard was virtually nonexistent. In his ninetieth year, Rather still has not retired and retains an edginess that came to be his trademark.

Rather’s 1994 book “The Camera Never Blinks Twice” discusses his harrowing on-the-ground adventures and coverage of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s and such breaking stories as Chinese student protest in Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf War, the Branch Davidian conflagration in Waco, Texas, starvation in Somalia, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and the 1993 Mississippi River flood. That year, he returned to Vietnam, where he still had reoccurring nightmares from seeing a soldier’s legs blown off by a land mine and visiting a room full of amputees on a hospital ship.  At a Da Nang hotel lighters taken off dead G.I.s were for sale.  He interviewed General Norman Schwarzkopf on the roof of the former American embassy, where cameras had captured helicopters rescuing Americans 18 years before.  Schwarzkopf told Rather he’d been stationed in Alaska at the time and after observing the humiliating end to America’s longest war (at the time) went out and got drunk.

Rather’s two journalistic role models were Edward R. Murrow and Eric Severeid, whom he described as “a man’s man when that was still something you said.”  Though he began with a self-deprecating anecdote about a fan informing him the his fly was unzipped, Rather was very much a macho Texan who admired personal bravery and for a time signed off the air with the single word “courage.”  In “The Camera Never Blinks Twice” he lets us know his fondness for Red Man chewing tobacco, that he hunted quail with Severeid, fly-fishes for trout, and likes to be where the action is. As he wrote, “The best stories do not make office calls.” He has survived being, as Walter Cronkite once said, “waist deep in water moccasins,” been “maced, mugged, and arrested,” and had his sleep in an Afghanistan barn interrupted by scorpions. Rather carried with him a Cuban cigar given him by Fidel Castro.  He bragged about drinking in Dubrovnik till dawn and missing the press plane as well as his “undiminished” respect for Marshall Josip Broz Tito, who well into his 80s spent days in Dubrovnik’s ancient mud baths with his mistress.

Like all great reporters Dan Rather had an eye for the human dimension of cataclysmic events. In Sarajevo in August 1993, where I had visited a decade before, prior to the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, Rather met 9-year-old Malik, a victim of an artillery shell that had landed in his home while he was eating breakfast during a siege that killed 9,000 civilians and maimed countless others. Rushed to a hospital that had been struck 14 times and lacked water or electricity, doctors operated on him by candlelight. Writing that because Malik and his parents were of the “wrong” race and religion, he was a paraplegic, Rather concluded: “Malik was excited to have visitors from America, and he mustered a weak smile in the sunlight of midmorning. It was a welcome I won’t forget.”

    “That’s all folks,” epitaph on tombstone of Mel Blanc, voice of Porky Pig and other Disney animated characters

Filmmaker Chris Robinson chose “Looted” as a fitting epitaph for his documentary of Gary, his hometown.  While the word is commonly associated with lawlessness that takes place in the aftermath of protest, it can also refer to illicit gains by public officials or private companies.  In “Looted” former mayor Dozier T. Allen points the finger at big business, while Karen Freeman-Wilson mentions the steel mills, which profited from being in Gary but did not repay the city commensurately.   Robinson told the Gary Crusader, prior to a screening of “Looted” at the ArtHouse:

    I love my city!  It’s a place that raised me, and I felt compelled to do the research and tell this story.  Once my generation learn the true history of Gary, we will be armed with knowledge and hopefully motivated to do our part to effect change. 

A recent NWI Times obit for Andrea “Conchita” Olivares, who died at age 90 and once co-owned and operated Sam and Conchita’s Bakery in East Chicago, ran photos of her both as a younger and elderly woman.  That makes ma lot of sense. Obits for Jean De Young and Sandra Schaefer included the fact that Jean was a gifted oil and china painter, while Sandra “will always be re-membered for her luck playing the slot machines on the casino boat.”

At Charlie and Naomi’s for four-couple bridge, Chuck Tomes mentioned hearing from a Gary Emerson grad that during Ted Karras’ pro football career, linemen were so poorly paid that he started teaching at a Gary school in the off season and was assigned a notoriously tough class.  On the first day, when a kid acted up, Karras picked up both him and the desk he was sitting in and tossed him out the door, along with the desk.  Nobody gave him trouble after that.  I told of interviewing Ted Karras at his home in Miller and being told by his wife that we needed to be done by 11 because that was when reruns of the sitcom Webster, starring brother Alex, came on.