A masterpiece of deceit

Posted on October 21, 2024 by admin

BY LUKE WARM

PROFESSOR OF MENDACITY

UNIVERSITY OF MUNCHAUSEN

Students — I apologize for interrupting the flow of my lecture series on “Merging the Big Lie with the Little Truth.” But just today I was shown a masterpiece of underhanded deceit masquerading as righteous indignation so courageously, diabolically misleading that I feel compelled to doff my hat to the geniuses at the University of Michigan who invented this marvel of treachery aimed at discrediting a legitimate work of journalism.

I am very tempted to include this case study in my forthcoming textbook, Dissembling in the Academy: Handbook for Skullduggery and Backstabbing at the Modern University.

The case I’m about to describe involved a difficult situation for the institution in question. The facts at first blush seem to be against them. A reporter showed up on campus and requested an interview about a subject that was highly sensitive.

We should keep in mind that ALL subjects in the academy are highly sensitive. That is Rule Numero Uno.

Next, any press report that goes to print outside the academic institution’s control is, ipso facto, to be judged “highly critical,” “completely negative,” and “irresponsible.”  Other adjectives may be applied where necessary. I repeat, any story that cannot be and has not been censored by the university is by its very nature biased, jaundiced, preternaturally hyperbolic, and contemptible.

That is Rule Numero Uno.

Did I say that already? Every rule I cite is Numero Uno!

In this case, the University of Michigan was dealt a bad hand. They were faced with a reporter who gave them ample time to grant interviews and guide his reporting. They had a clear opportunity to steer their story in a desired direction. Instead, however, they chose the path of stonewalling.

Rule Numero Uno: When public officials make bad decisions, mendacity consultants make big bucks!

For the public official, there are two co-equal evils. One is sitting for a media interview. The other is not sitting for an interview. Not taking the interview is always advisable. Unfortunately, it is a stance that cedes moral authority to the journalist. Certainly, the official who dodges a reporter can offer the excuse of “tied up in a meeting.” Such ploys have a shelf life. Meetings seldom last a full day, let alone a week. Thus, when a reporter approaches his quarry several days ahead of his deadline, the target will need a more persuasive pretext. But in the U of M case, while the reporter spent several days trying for an interview, no excuse was given. Credibility is supremely important, especially where an institution is sowing mendacity left and right. Some semblance of an excuse for why officials were not forthcoming is necessary, but in the U of M case it was not supplied. Not good for the institution, but fertile ground for the professor of mendacity.

While this university was digging a hole for itself in the public relations sense, one good can come out of the stonewall: a refusal to provide information does not foreclose officials from loudly criticizing defects in the published report.

Would that be two-faced? Mendacity, thy middle name is Hypocrisy!

In the present case, sad to say, the officials elected to play dead for six days. This was an ambitious tactic, because it is impossible to justify repetitive reticence. But I will say this — it takes outrageous nerve to pull off a six-day stone face.

Speaking of chutzpah, one of the UM officials actually was seen by the reporter in her office sitting at her desk accomplishing no work other than telling her secretary that she didn’t want to talk to the reporter, no reason given.

Special skills of misdirection are needed to put a shine on such egregious misbehavior by an official on the public payroll.

Some may be moved to criticize the officials for their noncompliant approach to media relations. However, it should be recognized that officials have advantages that few are willing to admit. In the United States, many people are taken in by the myth of a free, independent press beholden to no interest and devoted to upholding the rights of the downtrodden and poor. This delusion works to the advantage of the public official whose purpose is to suppress knowledge and truth. While there will be the occasional aggressive, troublesome reporter, editors typically are cowards. They will predictably cave when pushed. So the stonewall can be successful if the news hierarchy follows its well-worn highway of talking big and buckling under the lightest resistance from an intended target. See my textbook, Art of the Bluster (Phineas T Books, Wartbegone, Michigan, 2018).

In the Michigan case, the reporter was not calling in response to a university press release.  That is a sign of trouble. The press release will emphasize certain facts the institution wants known while ignoring facts injurious to the institution’s reputation. Press releases can control the reporter’s mental discourse. In this case, the reporter was calling out of the blue. No university official wanted the Detroit Free Press to run an article about the environment for black students at the University of Michigan. Even a positive article could be negative if it spurred rivals to produce copycat articles that sought to distinguish their reporting by finding something unpleasant from the institutional point of view. Thus, the officials were correct in principle in hoping to derail the reporter.

Officials may also have counted on journalists to hold or even kill the reporter’s story if official comment was lacking. News media put great stock in appearing “balanced.” But it is a mistake for officials to bank on the balance credo as a self-imposed restraint by journalists on their own work. Unfortunately, it is possible to achieve balance outside control of the target institution. Indeed, the U of M burned itself by publishing in-house reports on racist behavior on campus. A journalist may utilize such self-inflicted damage in place of official comment, which happened in this case.

Nonetheless, a news outlet that runs a piece that lacks official comment runs the risk of being called “unbalanced.” That outcome occurred in the case of “Being Black at UM,’ published by the Detroit Free Press on March 31, 1985. The article was immediately excoriated by regents and top administrators at the university in phone calls to Free Press editors. The article appeared on a Sunday. On that day, a regent called a high-level editor to complain that the university was blindsided. There was “no warning” that a story was coming, the official told the editor.

On Monday, a Free Press editor accused the reporter of failing to request an interview. Unfortunately for the administrators, one of their secretaries had coached the reporter in composing a list of questions that revealed the outline in detail of his planned article. The administrators had copies of the reporter’s questions on Wednesday, the day when one of them was seen and heard by the reporter to refuse an interview. I will not pull my punches. This was a very bad situation for the university and for the officials. The reporter had documentary proof that he had not committed a sneak attack, and his proof made liars of the university officials.

The April 8, 1985 Frye rebuts ‘biased’ Free Press article complete 4-8-1985 2-20-2019 quoted Provost B.E. Frye indirectly stating that “the article appeared with no warning to U-M officials of its highly critical nature, Frye said, nor time for them to comment.” Here would have been a good place for Provost Frye to stop commenting, although in this short statement he already has committed a contradiction that will be difficult for a mendacity specialist to explain away. But he unfortunately continued to comment, apparently, unable to prevent himself from spewing facts that further undermined his veracity.

In plain English, once he started lying, he couldn’t stop.

Here is a paragraph from the University Record quoting Provost Frye on his failure to speak to the reporter:

Frye said he also had strong objections to the article’s implication that he and (Vice President Nyara) Sudarkasa had refused to talk to the Free Press reporter or to provide him with minority enrollment financial data. “This simply is not true,” he declared. “This man, after being told no time was available on one day, gave up on an interview, left written questions, and then went ahead with the article before the reply could be mailed back to him. There was no input from us.”

No professional manager of mendacity could have devised a more exquisite set of interrelated prevarications. The University Record proposes that:

— 1. “The article appeared with no warning” and adds that the reporter allowed “no time for them to comment.” How could officials comment if they didn’t know about the story? How could officials comment if they didn’t know about the story? How could they comment if they had “no warning”? When two ends of a statement clobber each other in this manner, a lie is revealed.

— 2. The reporter gave up trying to get an interview. Again, Frye acknowledges contacts with the reporter belying the claim of “no warning.” The lie is repeated.

— 3. The reporter wrote his story without waiting for the officials to mail their responses to his written questions. For the third time, Frye acknowledges that he was warned after claiming “no warning.” The lie layers upon itself.

Here is a real challenge for the practitioner of mendacity. Of all untruths, the self-defeating, or self-contradicting lie is the hardest to erase. Which end of the whopper does one tackle? If left alone, “no warning” would be defensible. But requests for interviews and written questions? The most dimwitted of observers will notice the recurrent admission of warnings given but denied by officials.

And yet! And yet, what a compact little network of opposable lies!

What artistry!

Let us for a moment relax and savor deceit woven at the high level one would expect of such an august university as Michigan. Not only has the university portrayed itself as the victim of a sneak attack, but it has pictured the reporter as an impatient fellow who gave up when told officials would not speak to him and then submitted written questions but “went ahead with the article before the reply could be mailed back to him.” One wonders what barn he grew up in!

Really, we must enjoy the beauty of what I term a “verity reversal.” Conversion of a reporter into a villain. There are reasonable people who might judge that the reporter traveled to Ann Arbor from Detroit and expended several days of his time trying to interview the officials. A reasonable person might wonder why officials refused to speak to a reporter, especially after they received a list of questions that outlined the main points of his story. Why, a reasonable man or woman might wonder, did the officials not at least offer the reporter a credible reason why they refused to meet with him? Would they not want to influence his reporting? Why, a reasonable person might inquire, would an educated man, a university provost, think it expedient to mail his answers to a reporter’s questions when the provost knew there was urgency in the matter — a so-called deadline — that would dictate using the telephone rather than the postal service or perhaps even having a face-to-face conversation with the reporter who was available and actually present in his office several times over several days?

The challenge for the professor of mendacity is to persuade the reasonable person that the reporter was somehow at fault, possibly for being born in the first place.

The University of Michigan went to print without responding to any of those hypothetical questions, and yet, the institution prevailed. After publishing one “highly critical” article that officials found offensive, the newspaper groveled back to Ann Arbor and produced a follow-up article that reflected only their views. Rumors of mistreatment of the secretary who dared to help the reporter remain rumors following a Free Press editor’s judgement that she “wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole!” and an executive editor’s declaration that he didn’t want to “be treated like a nigger,” possibly referring to his abuse by higher-ups in both the newspaper and university bureaucracies. Final insult to journalistic integrity: the newspaper’s refusal to acknowledge a commendation from the Michigan NAACP for the article’s candor in discussing racial issues.

Kudos to the University of Michigan! What might have been a productive public discussion of racial conditions on its Ann Arbor campus received the best journalistic award of all — the Order of the Big Spike.

A toast to the Victors Valiant:

Champions of the West,

Mendacity at its best!

If you wish to contact me, I may be reached via my agent at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

 

Posted in Adventures in history, Bad government, censorship, Joel's J School, LUKE WARM | Leave a comment

Memory hole and rattlesnakes

Posted on October 21, 2024 by admin

A memory hole is any mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a website or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened. The concept was first popularized by George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eight-Four, where the Party’s Ministry of Truth systematically re-created all potential historical documents, in effect, re-writing all of history to match the often-changing state propaganda. These changes were complete and undetectable.

–Wikipedia

By Joel Thurtell

“Complete and undetectable.”
That is probably what Detroit Free Press scribes thought they had accomplished when they changed the paper’s website to more accurately distort the facts contained in their October 1, 2015 article about massasauga rattlesnakes.
On October 2, 2015, I emailed a proposed letter that I hoped the Free Press would publish to correct important mistakes published in their article. I never heard from anyone at the Free Press.
But today, November 13, 2015, I called up the problem article and discovered that without notice, it had been corrected. Sort of.
The statement by a naturalist who claimed that no human had died of a massasauga bite in the last century has been scrubbed from the post. The article now reports that a child was injured by a massasauga bite in 2013. There is still no mention of deaths, although my letter informed the paper of four deaths due to massasauga bite since the 1930s. Furthermore, I showed the Free Press letters editors a letter published by the Free Press in 1989 reporting the death of a girl from massasauga bite. The letter, from a Grosse Pointe Woods woman, was sent to the Free Press in response to an article researched and written by me and published in the Detroit Free Press magazine on July 29, 1989.
Had the present-day Free Press reporter done a little research in his own newspaper archive, he would have discovered my article. He might also have seen a September 5 2013 USA Today article, originated at the Free Press, reporting the serious injury of a child bitten by a massasauga rattlesnake and now alluded to in the “corrected” website version of the Free Press October 1, 2015 article.
I don’t understand why a newspaper feels it has to act as a flak for a snake. Why not tell people that massasauga venom  is second only to the Mojave rattler in toxicity? Why not admit that drop for drop, massasauga venom is more toxic that that of the Western Diamondback?
I’m talking public safety and public health.
The Free Press is doing spin control for a rattlesnake.
Here is the letter I emailed to the Free Press on October 2:

An October 1 Free Press article on eastern massasauga rattlesnakes gives the erroneous impression that a bite by one of these reptiles poses minimal risk to humans. A naturalist quoted in the article claims incorrectly that no human has died of a massasauga bite in the last 100 years.

On July 29, 1989, the Detroit Free Press Magazine published a cover story, “Snakebit!,” written by me. I reported that a retired professor of microbiology and immunology at the Indiana University Medical School in Indianapolis and an authority on snake venom, Sherman Minton, had compiled a list of four human deaths attributed to massasauga bites in the mid-twentieth century.

Massasauga venom is the second most toxic of 21 rattlesnake species. Massasauga venom is more potent than that of the Western Diamondback rattlesnake. That more people have not died or been seriously injured by massasaugas can be attributed to their reclusive personalities and the fact that these small snakes don’t pack as much venom as larger rattlers.

A Grosse Pointe Woods woman responded to my article, reporting that her cousin died of massasauga bites in Georgian Bay on July 17, 1962. “For years,” she wrote,”park rangers have given the snake great PR without mentioning that a bite can be lethal to humans.”

My article described how physicians’ ignorance about massasaugas nearly caused the death of a man who was bitten accidentally. Another man thought a rattler was harmless, picked it up and was bitten. He was hospitalized with a serious injury.

Naturalists and the media need to recognize that the bite of a massasauga rattlesnake can lead to serious illness and even death.

Joel Thurtell

The writer is a retired Detroit Free Press reporter

Posted in BAD JOURNALISM, Wildlife | Leave a comment

Henry Ford and the Germans

Posted on October 21, 2024 by admin

BY JOEL THURTELL

I was seventeen years old when I delivered the Youth Sunday February 10, 1963 sermon on intolerance at the First Congregational Church in my hometown, Lowell, Michigan.

My theme was the evil of racial prejudice, especially racism directed by whites against blacks.

But I also was concerned about Christian prejudice against Jews, Muslims, and other religions.

I was surprised to read my notes for that sermon and see that I was aware of Henry Ford’s newspaper attacks on Jews.

“It is not generally known,” I said, “that one of the pillars of American industry was an anti-Semite. Henry Ford, who introduced mass production, the reasonably priced automobile and the $5 day also financed an anti-Jewish newspaper called the Dearborn Independent. This paper continuously attacked what it called ‘the international Jewish conspiracy.’ The Jewish Anti-Defamation League won a public apology from Ford, but only after great harm had been done.”

How at seventeen, in 1963, did I know about Henry Ford’s scurrilous attacks on Jews?

Certainly not from my US history textbook.

My teacher was the father of the family who were my hosts the summer of 1962 when I was an exchange student living on a dairy and hog farm in northern Germany. My German father thought Henry Ford’s bigotry was something an American like me should be proud of. I was given this lesson one evening as the family and several neighbors sat around the  living room with bottles of wine and beer emptying into glasses. Gemütlichkeit was flowing all over. Urged on by his pals, the father took a 78-rpm record from a drawer and placed it on a phonograph turntable. Not music, but a voice, high-pitched, came through the loudspeaker. I didn’t understand the German, but I knew I was listening to Hitler.

After a few minutes, the father switched off the record player. Attention now focused on me. A neighbor man lectured me:

“America has a Jewish problem. Just like Germany had. Germany had a solution, thanks to Adolf Hitler. Hitler was a good man with wonderful ideas about bettering mankind. One of the most important goals was the eradication of inferior races. The worst of these people are the Jews. They are subhumans who managed to get control of all walks of life. In the United States, you have Jews running your industries, your banks, even your newspapers. America made a big mistake by coming into the war on Britain’s side. With the help of America, Germany could have finished the work of exterminating the Jews.”

Not all of this garbage came from Hitler. They told me that a fellow American, Henry Ford, knew about the Jews and supported Hitler, a great admirer of Henry Ford. There was no internet back then, but these farmers knew about Ford and his newspaper and his arguments about the international influence of Jews.

They taught me that second to Hitler, Henry Ford was the most influential anti-Semite.

They forgot about Martin Luther.

Stay tuned for more thoughts on Nazis, great American fascists, and the great leader of the Protestant Reformation.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

 

 

 

Posted in Adventures in history, Henry Ford, Nazis | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Diggs Standard for Supremes

Posted on May 1, 2023 by admin

By Joel Thurtell
Staff Writer

A former congressman named Charles Diggs spent seven months in prison in 1978 for what reportedly is routine behavior by three justices on the U. S. Supreme Court.

According to the April 30, 2023 New York Times, Supreme Court justices
Neil M. Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Brett M. Kavanaugh “regularly used employees in their chambers to coordinate their outside academic duties despite a judicial advisory opinion — which the justices say they voluntarily follow — that staff members should not help ‘in performing activities for which extra compensation is to be received.’ ”

Is the U.S. Justice Department concerned that federal employees are being paid to do private work for the justices? This is the same Department of Justice that in 1978 cracked down on civil rights activist then Detroit’s congressman.

Diggs was convicted of assigning congressional aides to work in his family’s funeral parlor and then submitting false federal pay claims for them.

“Despite the prohibition against enlisting court staff members to help with paid outside work,” the Times reported, “records show that much of the labor of keeping up with the justices’ teaching and other activities at Scalia Law fell to the chambers’ administrative staff — organizing class materials and student papers, managing student visits and coordinating guest lectures.”

“Justice Gorsuch’s staff used the justice’s login to create an online “forum/discussion” space for students and post readings, and submitted his grades to the school,” according to the Times. “The staff of Justice Thomas requested his class roster and collected his syllabus, helping tack down missing reading materials. Justice Kavanaugh’s chambers inquired about when he would get his paychecks, and whether he would get a raise.”

How is working in a private funeral parlor different in principle from Supreme Court employees acting as support staff for the justices’ outside jobs?

Federal prosecutors called Diggs’ offense fraud. And so it was — forcing federal employees to work for his personal business and submitting pay claims asserting they were doing congressional work pretty well defines fraud.

Will Attorney General Merrick Garland assign a special counsel to investigate payroll fraud at the Supreme Court?

Equal treatment before the law. Call it the Diggs Standard: what applies to a black civil rights activist also applies to Supreme Court justices.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

Posted in Bad government, JC & Me, Joel's J School | Leave a comment

A Jewish airman in a Nazi POW Camp

Posted on March 6, 2023 by admin

BY JOEL THURTELL

The Detroit Free Press scrapped this story when I wrote it 21 years ago.

What do you think? Would you have published this story?

First, some background: He was retired in 2002, but Detroit TV weather caster Sonny Eliot’s folksy, chatty act left fond memories among many Detroit area people. I was then a Free Press reporter. I heard that the Holocaust Memorial Center in West Bloomfield planned to interview Eliot for an oral history project. Sonny Eliot was a US Army Air Forces airman shot down over Germany in World War II. He was a Jew. It seemed important for the Holocaust museum to record his story. I wanted to write a story pegged to the center’s interview. Sonny Eliot agreed to let me interview him. I wrote a story. It was not published.

Here is the story that didn’t make the Free Press:

gfbyBy JOEL THURTELLFREE PRESS STAFF WRITER    Before he was a wisecracking Detroit radio and TV weatherman, Sonny Eliot was a B-24 pilot who was shot down and imprisoned by the Germans in World War II.

Eliot, the son of immigrant Jews, well knew that he could be killed if the Nazis found out his religion. So he covered up his Judaism. Because of that subterfuge, Eliot says, he learned something very disturbing about his fellow American prisoners.

By 1944, it was well known that Hitler’s people were killing millions of Jews, yet Eliot discovered that like the Germans, many of his imprisoned countrymen were prejudiced against Jews and were not upset when American Jewish fliers were rounded up, apparently to be killed.

In front of a video camera Sunday at the Holocaust Memorial Center, Eliot, 78, recounted his experiences in the nearly 15 months he spent in Stalag Luft I, the German prisoner-of-war camp where he was placed after his B-24 bomber was shot down over central Germany by German fighters on Feb. 24, 1944.

The taping session was part of an oral history project which records the experiences of people who were victims of German persecution. To date, the library has 275 Holocaust-related videotapes.

In an interview with the Free Press a few days before the videotaping, Eliot was asked what it was like to be a Jew in a German prison camp.

“Not much of a story,” said Eliot. “The only time this came up was after D-Day. They rounded up all the Jewish flyers in the camp. There must have been two, maybe 300.”

The Germans placed the Jews in a separate barracks, Eliot said, and “the rumor just ripped through the entire camp that these people would all be put on a train and taken to some place like Auschwitz.”

Eliot was not among them. The Germans believed – or at least Eliot thought they believed – his lie that the downed pilot known as Marvin Eliot Schlossberg was a Christian.

That fiction was possible because when Eliot bailed out of his burning Liberator, the sudden opening of his parachute popped his shoes off his feet and blew off his dog tags, the metal cards giving his identity, including religion.

“Even if I’d had them, I think I would have thrown the dog tags away,” Eliot said.

“I landed right in the town where we had bombed,” Eliot said. “They thanked me in their own way – they kicked my ass.”

When a German officer demanded to know his religion, Eliot answered, “Martin Luther.”

He was moved to a prison camp for aviators at Barth, a small town on the Baltic Sea. The Germans signed him in as a Protestant.

But when the Jews were moved to a separate barracks, Eliot said, “I felt, my God, my people – I’m a part of them. I’ll be brave, I’ll go, and so I talked to a Father Carlton, who was a Catholic priest captured at Dunkirk.”

“I didn’t know what to do,” Eliot said. “Should I go tell them they forgot me? Hey, I’m with those guys?”

Original text: “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘get the fuck back in the barracks and shut up. I said ‘okay,’ and that’s exactly what I did.” End original.

Re-written text per editor: The priest told Eliot to go back to his barracks and say nothing.

    “That’s exactly what I did.” End re-written text.

Now all the Jews were gone but Eliot, and except for a few Americans in his room who knew the truth, he was seen as a Christian by his fellow prisoners.

With their Jewish compatriots gone, the Americans’ behavior loosened up.

“The anti-semitism which is so strange to me began to surface in small little ways, not very important, but I was aware of them in that you would hear jokes like, `They’ve got three balls up there – they’re turning the barracks into the pawn shop place.’ ”

“Not a great deal of sympathy for putting all the Jews into one barracks,” Eliot said.

There was no resistance to removal of the Jewish flyers, no expression of repugnance. “It was like a gentleman’s agreement,” said Eliot.

Meanwhile, thinking there were no Jews to hear them, Americans made caustic remarks about the Jews. “They called them `little flicks.’ ”

“Blacks are the same way. They would hear it, too. It’s not as hidden with blacks because they are immediately identified.”

“I don’t think they did it out of meanness. It’s that way still today, everywhere.”

Before the Germans could move the Jewish airmen out, Russian soldiers liberated Stalag Luft I.

Eliot went to the office and found his file.

On it, a German official had scrawled, “Jew.”

So the Germans knew.

“Somebody had turned me in.”

 

Here is a trail of internal newspaper staff messages about my story, starting with my photo assignment. David Crumm was the Free Press religion writer. Dennis Niemiec was a Free Press reporter. Lisa Manns was my assigning editor. Leesa Bainbridge was editor of the Free Press Oakland County newsroom and boss over both me and Lisa Manns.

At the Free Press, reporters did not make photo assignments without getting their assigning editor’s okay first to write the story. The existence of a photo request means that my story idea was approved by Lisa Manns. She placed the story on the budget, or schedule, and gave it a file name, known as a “slug”: 1SONNY19. The “1” before “SONNY” means the story was scheduled to start in the first, or state, edition, and “19” means it was to run March 19, 2002.

Messages appear most recent first, meaning that replies precede questions. We are reading backward through time and will finally arrive at the story text. Unlike other stories I’ve presented, this one has no indication of publication date, edition, or key words, all of which would mean it had made the paper.
, which this story did not.
 

<UB>FREE PRESS PHOTO REQUEST<RO>

<BO>Day/Date: <RO>2-9-01

<BO>Time: <RO>9:30 a.m.

<BO>Flexible? <RO>little

<BO>Will reporter be there? <RO>yes

<BO>Discussed w/ which photo editor? <RO>

<BO>Subject/phone: <RO>Sonny Elliott, (w) 248-455-7200; (h) 248-661-0046

<BO>Contact (if not subject): <RO>

<BO>Location: <RO>37412 Halstead

<BO>Directions: <RO>Lodge to Northwestern to 14 Mile to Halstead; South on Halstead; The Legends condos are on west side of Halstead, second driveway on west side 100 yards south of 14 Mile.

<BO>What is story about? <RO>Sonny Elliott, the perennial Detroit weathercaster, was an airman in World War II. Shot down over Europe, he was captured by the Germans and held as a prisoner of war. What was it like to be a Jew in a Nazi POW camp? Elliott’s story is to be videotaped Feb. 18 for the Holocaust Memorial Center’s oral history program. We are trying for an advance interview with Elliott.

<BO>Reporter/phone: <RO>Thurtell, 248-586-2609

<BO>Story editor/phone: <RO> Bainbridge, 248-586-2615

<BO>Slug: <RO> 1SONNYXX

<BO>Day/time needed: <RO>Next week

<BO>Run date: <RO>

<BO>Section/position: <RO>

 

Joel:

 

Very sorry to see such a lack of vision and understanding of these issues.

 

We’re talking: brain dead on this score.

 

— David

 

CRUMM  19-MAR-01,11:56

 

incredible!!!! I think you need to ask if you can freelance it for some other publication.

 

NIEMIE 19-MAR-01,11:47

 

The word at this point is the same — we don’t plan to run it. I take the

 

fall for this one. I thought he was part of a national holocaust museum

 

exhibit. Just telling his story that is years old doesn’t seem much of a

 

story or timely.

 

BAINBR 19-MAR-01,10:56

 

Leesa – Any word on my Sonny Eliot story? There are possible hooks: for

 

instance, I understand the Legislature may set a Holocaust Remembrance Week

 

to start April 19.

 

Joel

THURTE 19-MAR-01,10:27

 

Joel,

 

I’ll run your suggestion by Jim Finkelstein. But I don’t expect he’ll get back to us before Monday.

 

Leesa

 

<BO>BAINBR<RO> 23-FEB-01,15:04 <FO>

 

 

Joel:

 

They’re idiots!

 

If I were editing, I might suggest a couple of small tinkers with the

 

story. For instance, given how little of most stories we actually get “out

 

front” these days before a jump, I might have moved up the ‘graf in which

 

you picture Sonny sitting in front of the microphone — the “news peg” as

 

it were.

 

But that’s very very minor stuff.

 

It’s a great little story — and definitely should have been promoted

 

and run.

 

Dolts!

 

David

 

CRUMM  16-MAR-01,17:18

 

My note on 2-19-1:

 

Photo shot 1SONNY19, but per Lisa Manns, “Leesa read it and we aren’t going to run it. She’s going to talk to you about it.”

 

On Feb. 19, the day it was to have run, I made this note: Per Leesa Bainbridge, it’s a one source story and we normally don’t do one-source stories. She misunderstood when I pitched it and thought it was part of some national thing. It’s just this one guy’s memories, not that important, not that many people would be interested in Sonny Eliot’s experiences in World War II, even though he is famous. Doesn’t work as a news story. She will pitch it to entertainment. But I need to remove “fuck.”

 

<RO>

 

Leesa _ I can just never say die. Here goes on the Sonny Eliot story:

 

There is a hook for it on April 20. That is Yom HaShoah, an international day for remembering the Holocaust.

 

I could talk to Holocaust Center people in West Bloomfield and Washington to get more background about what happened to the Jewish prisoners; get some reaction about the experience Eliot had with Americans’ expressions of anti-Semitism and lack of sympathy for the Jews. And maybe interview Eliot again to probe more for his feelings about what happened.

 

What do you think? Is it a dead horse, or can I revive it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joel <BO>THURTE<RO> 23-FEB-01,14:51 <FO>

 

 

 

Posted in Adventures in history, Nazis, People | Leave a comment

FDA approval of Alzheimer’s ‘cure’ a huge gift to drug maker

Posted on June 8, 2021 by admin

BY JOEL THURTELL

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single disease that afflicts a vast portion of the world’s population must be in want of a cure.

According to the FDA, that single disease is Alzheimer’s, and the cure is a new drug called aducanabab, trade-named “Aduhelm” by its manufacturer.

It is equally axiomatic that the first drug manufacturer to market an FDA-approved cure for Alzheimer’s disease will be the winner of profits beyond imagining. The FDA has approved other drugs such as Arisept, Namenda and Exelon that treat symptoms of Alzheimer’s, but do not stop the disease. No drug has been approved that actually stops the disease.

Aduhelm’s manufacturer, Biogen, has set a stunning cost of $56,000 a year per patient.

Biogen’s FDA coup will be a huge moneymaker both for the company and for other profit-oriented parts of the medical establishment.

There are two hitches. Normally, the FDA demands that a new drug be proven safe and effective. The rationale for creating a Pure Food and Drugs Act in the early twentieth century was that the government needed to protect the public from mendacious claims of miracle-working, money-grasping drug makers. But Biogen has not proven Aduhelm to be  safe or effective for treatment of Alzheimer’s. Moreover, clinical trials have shown that any minimal gains from the drug have been nullified by evidence of “swelling or bleeding in the brain the drug caused in the trials,” according to The New York Times.

The FDA’s own advisory committee along with Alzheimer’s experts warned the agency that Aduhelm is not effective.

Apparently, the FDA anticipated blowback. It required Biogen to complete an additional clinical trial of Aduhelm’s effectiveness, and declared it might withdraw its approval. However, there is no requirement that the FDA reverse its decision, according to the Times.

It is not clear from the Times article why the FDA approved this non-cure. The newspaper reported that “patient advocacy groups lobbied vigorously for approval because there are so few treatments available for the debilitating condition.” Several drugs that show more promise than Aduhelm are years from approval, according to the Times.

I suspect many readers, like me, are puzzled about why the FDA selected one manufacturer as the beneficiary of an approval that will give Biogen a huge lead in marketing a product it can claim “cures” Alzheimer’s. It seems like a throwback to the 1800’s, when drug makers were free to make the most audacious and fallacious claims about products without oversight from a government empowered to force testing of the drugs’ contents, safety, and effectiveness.

It may seem too soon to express suspicion about the FDA approval process. The federal government could not be anything other than fair and decent in its oversight of the clinical trials of a drug with such obvious consequences both for patients suffering with Alzheimer’s.

Right?

Do we know of any past FDA history where the agency was less than honest in its dealings with rival manufacturers and the public?

As a matter of fact, yes.

In my next column, I will discuss my own and other reported findings in a 1980’s case involving improper relations between a drug manufacturer and the FDA. In subsequent columns, I will discuss additional FDA scandals and outline procedures I think reporters should follow as they — hopefully — investigate FDA’s odd approval of a drug that doesn’t get its job done.

Stay tuned.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted in Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's and dementia, Bad government, Karen Fonde | Leave a comment

Times n-word hypocrisy

Posted on May 9, 2021 by admin

I sent the following letter to letters@nytimes on May 2, 2021. So far, it has not appeared in The Times.

To the Editor:

Regarding The Times’ May 2 op-ed, “How the N-Word Became Unsayable,” by John McWhorter: Times editors thought it was okay for the newspaper to print “nigger” in a newspaper essay about the word’s implications. But it definitely was not okay for former Times reporter Donald McNeil to utter the same word over dinner in a discussion of the word’s implications. You gave Mr. McWhorter prime space in the “Sunday Review.” You fired Mr. McNeil. How do you reconcile your contradictory behaviors?

Yours truly,

Joel Thurtell

Posted in Joel's J School, Times letters | Leave a comment

SPIKING THE SUPER BOWL POOL

Posted on February 1, 2021 by admin

First posted on February 5, 2012 JT

Revised version posted February 1, 2021 

By Joel Thurtell

I’m no sports writer, so it was neat to think my byline would appear over a Super Bowl story.

What a drag that my first-ever Super Bowl piece failed to meet the exacting publication standards of the Detroit Free Press.

Yes, my Super Bowl story was spiked.

It was a story that might have given readers a chance to ask what is and what is not tolerable behavior by a law enforcement official.

Is it okay for a prosecutor, say, to break the law if he does it at home, with his pals?

I was working on the Ed McNamara story late in 2002, right after the FBI — with lots of media fanfare — raided his government offices. McNamara was Wayne County executive. Now he is the late Ed McNamara.

Any story about Mac was also a story about his right-hand man, the onetime deputy Wayne County executive, Mike Duggan.

Today (2021), Mike Duggan is Mayor of Detroit. Back in 2002, Mike Duggan was Wayne County prosecutor. Duggan was thoroughly entwined in the McNamara Band’s political ops, so if the feds’ spotlight was on Mac, it was also on Mike Duggan.

Remember that FBI probe? Didn’t think so. They prosecuted a couple of lackeys, but never got close to Mac or Mike.

Never fear. I was on the case.

For a couple years, I was the Detroit Free Press reporter assigned to cover Wayne County government. By the time of the FBI raid, I’d been off that job for, well, about eight years. Why tap me for the McNamara story?

Well, they needed SOMEBODY to do it. The Detroit News had two reporters kicking the Free Press’ butt left and right. One reporter focused on county government, while the other mined the federal court. They coordinated their reporting on the FBI’s investigation of the county. They were embarrassing the Free Press, one reporter covered a slew of out-county towns and schools along with Wayne County government. He was thirty miles from the Detroit action, working in a strip mall office in Livonia.

An editor thought of me. I had covered Wayne County eight years before. Presumably, I could do it again from a desk in Oakland County. A third reporter was assigned to our little team. She backed out. Nobody wanted the job. The lone reporter on this godforsaken beat was Dennis Niemiec, and one look at this tired and frustrated man was warning enough. My assignment was to help Dennis turn this thing around.

Dennis offered solace. He told me his “pizza” theory. He said editors aren’t looking for real substance in stories. What they want is a talker, a story they can hype to fellow editors in the various meetings that consume much of their working days. A story they can chuckle about, joke about, make other editors envious about. A story, in short, that was like a pizza. Full of short-term flavor, high on fat, tasty, but not necessarily of lasting value except maybe to the waistline.

By the time Super Bowl 2003 rolled around, I was delivering pizzas, or trying to, by myself. The day after New Year’s, I was roaming around the bowels of the City-County Building in Detroit looking for some records having to do with county officials’ conflict of interest disclosures. I emerged from the darkness of Wayne County government into a cold, blustery morning and saw Bob Ficano, the newly-elected Wayne County executive, giving his maiden speech on the steps of the old county courthouse. Standing in the crowd taking notes was a Free Press reporter none too happy about being there. “Where’s Niemiec? He’s supposed to be covering this.”

Niemiec, it turned out, at that very moment was retiring from the pizza delivery business. He quit. Now I was delivering my pizza on my own. I thought I had a juicy one. I’d gotten a tip that Wayne County Prosecuting Attorney Mike Duggan had a little pizza party of his own on Super Bowl Sunday. Well, I don’t know if he served pizza. Duggan and his assistant prosecutors , I was told, had wagered on the outcome of the game. You know, a Super Bowl pool. They’re pretty common. But they are illegal. So says the Michigan Penal Code.

Mike didn’t deny holding the pool. He told me, “I’m learning that I can’t relax and make a mistake for a single minute when you’re the prosecutor. But I’ve learned. I sent a twenty dollar check over to Focus Hope as a donation to charity and I’ve learned a lesson from it.”

I wrote my Super Bowl story. I quoted Mike Duggan admitting he had the pool. I quoted a University of Michigan law prof that pools are illegal. I quoted the Michigan Penal Code. My story said that a prosecutor who puts other people in jail for breaking the law himself broke the law by sponsoring an illegal gambling activity. My story might go down in history as “pool-gate” or “Bowlgate”! Colleagues were reading my story in the computer. People were stopping by my desk for a laugh. Great story, Joel!

But there was a problem. It’s called the double-standard. Hypocrisy. You know, people who live in glass houses and all that.

A managing editor broke the news: “Joel, if we print your story, the Free Press will never be able to hold another Super Bowl pool.”

There would be no “Pool-gate.” No “Bowlgate.”

The only pool for my story was the toilet.

Journalists wring their hands about the dismal Future of Newspapers.

At the Free Press, the only concern was The Future of the Super Bowl Pool.

Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

 

 

Posted in Bad government, future of newspapers | Leave a comment

SPIKING THE SUPER BOWL PIZZA

Posted on January 21, 2021 by admin

Spiking the Super Bowl Pizza 

Breaking news January 20, 2021 – In a parting shot at anyone who believes in rule of law, the now former President, Donald Trump, commuted the prison sentence of disgraced Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Current Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan thinks it’s great. But hey, since when did Duggan, a former Wayne County prosecutor, think that obedience to the law applied to him or members of his privileged political class? Here for the sake of irony is the story I wrote before Kwame Kilpatrick’s conviction. I posted it on my joelontheroad blog to celebrate the 2012 Super Bowl: 

By Joel Thurtell

I’m no sports writer, so it was neat to think my byline would appear over a Super Bowl story.

What a drag that my first-ever Super Bowl piece failed to meet the exacting publication standards of the Detroit Free Press.

Yes, my Super Bowl story was spiked.

Personally, I thought it was a pretty good little tale. Nothing like the Free Press scoop on current felon and former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

But still, had it been printed, it might have given readers a chance to ask what is and what is not tolerable behavior by a law enforcement official.

Is it okay for a prosecutor, say, to break the law if he does it at home, with his pals?

I was working on the Ed McNamara story, late in 2002, right after the FBI — with lots of media fanfare — raided the offices of the then Wayne County executive and now the late Ed McNamara.

Any story about Mac was perforce a story about his right-hand man, the onetime deputy Wayne County executive, Mike Duggan.

By this time, Duggan was Wayne County prosecutor. But Duggan was thoroughly entwined in the McNamara Band’s political ops, so if the feds’ spotlight was on Mac, it was also on Mike Duggan.

Hey, anybody heard about that FBI probe lately? They prosecuted a couple of people, I seem to recall, but they never charged anyone close to Mac or Mike.

But never fear, for I was investigating, too.

What, you might ask, was the current editor, reporter, staff writer, photographer, chief layout person, chief of the copy desk and all around mayordomo of joelontheroad.com doing on the McNamara story?

For a couple years pre-newspaper strike, meaning from about May of 1993 till July 13, 1995, I was the Detroit Free Press reporter whose job it was to cover Wayne County doings. By the time of the FBI raid, I’d been off that job for, well, about eight years, either striking, running my used radio business, writing a novel and then back at the paper I was writing about Oakland County lakes. Why tap me for the McNamara story?

Well, they needed SOMEBODY to do it. The Detroit News was kicking the Free Press’ butt left and right with a reporter duo well-connected both to county and federal sources. That one-two punch was burying the Free Press, where one reporter, actually, one super-reporter, Dennis Niemiec, was covering … Oh, let’s see, what did Dennis cover? Why, he covered Livonia, he covered Plymouth and Canton and Northville and anything else western Waynish. He covered the Wayne County Detroit Metropolitan Airport (a full-time job by itself) and let’s see, oh by the way, he covered Wayne County. All from an office in a strip-mall at Six Mile and Newburgh in Livonia.

Somebody figured out Dennis needed help. Somebody thought of me. A guy who covered Wayne County eight years ago could do it again. Besides, nobody else wanted the job. One look at Dennis — tired, frustrated and beaten up — was warning enough.

So The News was eating our lunch every day and I was supposed to help Dennis turn this thing around. Dennis offered solace. He told me his “pizza” theory. Editors, he said, aren’t looking for real substance in stories. What they want is a talker, a story they can hype in the various meetings that consume much of their working days. A story they can chuckle about, joke about, make other editors envious about. A story, in short, that was like a pizza. Full of short-term flavor, high on fat, tasty, but not necessarily of lasting value except maybe to the waistline.

By the time Super Bowl 2003 rolled around, I was delivering pizzas, or trying to, by myself. The day after New Years, I was roaming around the bowels of the City-County Building in Detroit looking for some records having to do with county officials’ conflict of interest disclosures. I’d found them where county officials had squirreled them away in some file cabinets in the back of the county’s cavernous print shop. I emerged into a cold, blustery morning to see Bob Ficano, newly-elected Wayne County exec, giving his maiden speech on the steps of the county executive building. Standing in the crowd taking notes was Mike Elrick, a Free Press reporter none too happy about being there. “Where the fuck is Niemiec? He’s supposed to be covering this,” Elrick said.

At that very moment, Dennis was in the offices of Free Press bosses tendering his resignation. He’d no longer be delivering pizzas. Or rather, the was going to deliver them as a public relations guy for the very county executive whose speech was thundering via the PA speakers up Lafayette Boulevard.

Boy, did I think I had a pizza, though. I’d heard from sources both inside and around the prosecutor’s office that Mike Duggan had a little pizza party of his own on Super Bowl Sunday. Well, I don’t know if he served pizza, but the main thing is that he and his assistant prosecutors had a pool. They bet on the outcome of the game.

You know, a Super Bowl pool. They’re everywhere. Why, they had them in the newsroom, in the sports department. Pools were and I’m sure still are a big deal at the Free Press and probably at most other papers.

But they are illegal. So says the Michigan Penal Code. Mike didn’t deny holding the pool. He told me, “I’m learning that I can’t relax and make a mistake for a single minute when you’re the prosecutor. But I’ve learned. I sent a twenty dollar check over to Focus Hope as a donation to charity and I’ve learned a lesson from it.”

Just because he said he did it and just because the Penal Code says it’s illegal doesn’t mean Mike broke the law. See, we have this thing called the “presumption of innocence.” For the pool to have been truly illegal, there would have to have been an investigation. Then, a prosecutor somewhere (obviously not in Wayne County) would have to have authorized a warrant charging Mike with the crime. But even then, it wouldn’t have been a crime. No, it wouldn’t have been a crime until a judge or jury had found him guilty of violating the anti-pool law.

Until then, any story I wrote would lean heavily on words such as “alleged” and “apparent.”

How can I explain this in a more timely way? Well, let’s think about the mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick. The media have been tooting the perjury horn since Mike Elrick and Jim Schaefer broke the most recent Kwame-gate story. And quite a story it is. But we can’t say Kwame actually committed perjury until a judge or jury convicts him of that crime. [Note to readers: I wrote this essay before Kwame was charged.]

Presumption of innocence.

Okay, so I was armed with all my “apparents” and “allegeds” and I wrote a story that might have gone down in history as “poolgate” or “Bowlgate.”

But the only bowl my story found was in the toilet.

I quoted Mike, I quoted a UM law prof, I quoted the Penal Code. I had a neat story about a prosecutor sworn to uphold the law sponsoring a gambling activity that admittedly was low stakes but that allegedly, maybe, violated the criminal code. No charges, no trial, no conviction. Standard journalism: I quoted people including Mike who said the pool took place.

Kind of like I imagine happened with the Kwame Kilpatrick text message story. Nobody’s denying the text messages, right? Into the paper it goes.

Not so fast. My story was written. It was in the computer. People were stopping by my desk to share a laugh. Great story.

The editors found the story highly amusing. A great read. But there was a problem. It’s called the double-standard, aka hypocrisy. People who live in glass houses and all that.

An editor broke the news: “If we print your story, we’ll never be able to hold another Super Bowl pool at the Free Press.”

So, thanks to Free Press editors, Mike Duggan dodged a bullet.

The news story was less important than keeping up the tradition of Free Press football pools.

Kwame Kilpatrick was not so lucky.

Consider this: Kwame being investigated was the first step toward determining whether he had violated any laws. Why was there an investigation? Thanks to Free Press reports.

Outside the newspaper industry, many people are legitimately worried about The Future of Newspapers.

At the Free Press, the big concern was The Future of their Super Bowl Pool.

Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

 

 

Posted in Bad government, Kwamegate | Leave a comment

I BEAT OHIO STATE!

Posted on December 10, 2020 by admin

The last game of the University of Michigan football season is normally played against perennial rival Ohio State University. Due to the pandemic, the Michigan-Ohio State game scheduled for Saturday, December 12, 2020, was cancelled. All the more reason to commemorate the non-event with a new version of my essay celebrating the Michigan-Ohio State game that was played 75 years ago. 

 “I BEAT OHIO STATE!” 

By Joel Thurtell

HANK FONDE

HANK FONDE

The 80-year-old guy with the shock of white hair wore a fading maize and blue University of Michigan t-shirt. But this old man was not just any Michigan fan. Nor was it just any UM t-shirt. The woman, maybe in her fifties, quite evidently from Ohio, didn’t know either of these things. And neither I nor my two sons who were listening knew the story behind a clue this old man was about to reveal to us. I would not piece the story together for several years, even though I’d known this onetime Michigan football player and coach for more than three decades and was married to his oldest daughter for forty years.

The conversation — if you can call it that — took place in summer 2003 near the dock at J & G Marina on McGregor Bay in Ontario, a few miles by water from an island where this old man and his family had a summer cottage bought in the mid-1960s, when he was a UM football coach, second-in-command under another well-known Michigan player and coach, Bump Elliott.

The Ohio woman spotted the yellow and blue t-shirt with the UM logo and some script she didn’t understand. The shirt was a gift from UM to Hank and those 1948 team-mates still living at the time Michigan won the Rose Bowl game on January 1, 1998. The shirt commemorated two Rose Bowl victories and two National championships 50 years apart. Hank was a member of that New Year’s Day 1948 UM team that blew the University of Southern California away. The score was Michigan 49, USC 0.

The program for the October 4, 1947 Michigan-Stanford game described “diminutive ‘Hank,’ stout-hearted little speedster from Knoxville, Tenn., weighed about 150 pounds when he flung his compact frame against Army’s giants in 1945 at Yankee Stadium. Army players dubbed him ‘hardest to stop.’ He weighs about ten pounds more now and still is hard to stop. He scored thrice in 1945, averaging 4.1 yards per game, and last year he scored two touchdowns and averaged 3.23. He’s 23 and five-eight.” Michigan coach Bennie Osterbaan said Hank was “the best back, pound for pound, I’ve ever had.”

HANK FONDE makes touchdown in Northwestern game

HANK FONDE makes touchdown in Northwestern game

The Ohio woman didn’t know this. When her eyes detected blue, her brain saw red. All she knew was that this old man was wearing a t-shirt belonging to the enemy, the hated University of Michigan. She was an Ohio State fan. An easily perturbed Ohio State fan (aren’t they all?). Had she stopped to learn who this old man was, she might have heard an interesting story. But the ending of that story would have perturbed her even more.

My sons and I watched the Ohio woman, unforgettable because she came on so angry, so full of bile, so hostile to an old man who had said nothing to offend her. Hank could not respond round for round to this woman’s incessant, nasty volleys. Hank had Alzheimer’s Disease. His memory had long been gone for the people, places, things and events that once were dear to him.

But I knew who Hank was and I could have told her some phenomenal things about him. Most of it has nothing to do with football. Why, it was Hank who took me fishing in McGregor Bay and put us over the best bass and pike grounds. It was Hank who coached me to filet a bass or pike. It was Hank who helped me with the summer-long project of replacing the porch roof on our first house in Plymouth. I can hear him still: “Measure twice, cut once,” or he would declare, “level and half a bubble over!”

Hank loved language. His father, who played football for the University of Tennessee, was a poet. Hank did not write poetry, but he had a way of using language that is unforgettable. When he shook your hand, he would say, “Put ‘er there for ninety days!” If you dropped something or made a loud noise, Hank would shout, “Shoot him in the pants! The coat and vest belong to me!” If you were a tall person, he’d tell you, “It’s a long drink of water.” If you cut a fart, he’d say, “Who fired that shot?”

“Some low-down, dirty, good-for-nothin’, thievin’, cussin’, cattle-rustlin’ dirty dawwwg…put GLUE ON MY SADDLE!”

Edith, his wife, asked him, “Henry, does this dress make me look fat?” *

Hank replied, “No,…It’s the fat that makes you look fat.”

He had special nicknames for his kids. Karen was “tin can cottontail the cottontail that willy wag.”

Mark was “Marcus Aurelius Vestpocket Pucius.”

Looking forward to some event, Hank would say, “the good lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.”

Hank was proud to hail “from the hills of East Tennessee, home of Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Cordell Hull, Jellybean Birchfield and other great American statesmen.”

(I’ve posted a collection of Hank’s sayings on my blog, joelontheroad.com.)

Football was an undying love — even with Alzheimer’s he could correctly call a play. Hank was a high school star in his hometown of Knoxville, where his team once stood four other teams in succession, playing fresh teams a quarter apiece. Hank played something called “scatback,” and helped Knoxville knock off all four teams.

“Seven Touchdowns in January” is a movie of that January 1, 1948 Rose Bowl game. On the screen you can see a small but agile halfback — Hank — scooting around Southern Cal players and lofting the football to a Michigan player for one of those seven touchdowns.

This cartoon probably ran in 1947 and mentions the notable University of Michigan players, including HANK FONDE.

This cartoon probably ran in 1947 and mentions the notable University of Michigan players, including HANK FONDE.

For 10 years in the 1950s, Hank was head football coach at Ann Arbor High School, from 1949-58. In his first eight years, his team lost one game. They won two state championships. His overall record was 69 wins, six losses and four ties. Four of the losses occurred his last year, when he and his players knew he was leaving to coach at UM. From 1959-68, Hank coached at UM under Bump Elliott.  With Hank coaching defense and backs, Michigan won the Jan. 1, 1965 Rose Bowl game against Oregon State, 34-7. The two Michigan coaches in 1965 – Bump Elliott and Hank Fonde – were players on a victorious Rose Bowl team and later coached a team that won the Rose Bowl.

Back to that dockside rant in Canada. Here was this Ohio woman coming on with her nasty, Michigan-bashing comments, taunting an old man who would get lost in the middle of his sentences as he strove to find a word that eluded him.

Yet the Ohio woman wore on, making her crude remarks, getting no response from the old man in the maize and blue t-shirt.

Despite the Alzheimer’s, somehow Hank understood the gist of what the Ohio woman was saying.

As she paused for breath, Hank at last found words.

Amazingly, he put together a sentence rooted in a core memory, a recollection that even the brutal Alzheimer’s could not erase.

“I BEAT OHIO STATE!”

It was amazing to hear him utter a complete sentence, and to do it with such sternness, such authority.

The Ohio woman looked at Hank as if she finally understood that this old man was demented.

I have to admit, his comment puzzled me.

The Ohio woman went silent.

I thought about it:  “I BEAT OHIO STATE!”

What could Hank have meant?

The Ohio woman drifted away, maybe looking for her next victim, one with a green Michigan State shirt.

Several years later, I was visiting Hank’s son, my brother-in-law, Mark Fonde. Mark had one of the footballs Hank was given after games when he made crucial plays. The football is faded, worn and deflated. Hand-painted on one side, it says, “Michigan 7, Ohio 3.”

I asked Mark, “What does it mean?”

Mark said it was 1945, the last game of the season, and Michigan was, as usual, facing arch-rival Ohio State. World War II had only recently come to an end. This was a wartime team. Thirteen players, including Hank, were Navy trainees. Four were Marines. Four were discharged veterans. Michigan’s coach was the legendary Fritz Crisler, and the teams were called the “mad magicians” because it often was hard to tell exactly what they were doing when they drove for touchdowns.

HERO----Hank Fonde, 165-pound substitute right halfback, was the man of the hour yesterday as he scored Michigan's only touchdown against Ohio State...The Michigan Daily, November 25, 1945

HERO—-Hank Fonde, 165-pound substitute right halfback, was the man of the hour yesterday as he scored Michigan’s only touchdown against Ohio State…The Michigan Daily, November 25, 1945

In his book The Big One about the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry, Bill Chromartie wrote that Ohio scored a field goal for 3 points in the third quarter. The score stayed 0-3 until the last quarter. With eleven minutes remaining, Pete Elliott (Bump’s brother) threw a 25-yard pass to Hank at Ohio’s 19-yard-line. In two plays, Elliott brought the ball to the 10. Elliott was stopped on the next play. Fourth down, one yard for first down. The 85,132 fans in Michigan Stadium were on their feet. Hank crashed the Ohio line and took the ball five yards for the first down. Ohio was off sides on the next play. Penalty. The ball was on the one-yard line. Hank crashed into the end zone. The extra point was good. Final score: Michigan 7, Ohio 3.

The next day’s Michigan Daily headlined

Wolverines Beat Buckeyes, 7-3, in Finale

Fonde’s Fourth Quarter Score Decides Contest

According to Mark, Hank was knocked out during that play. He came to in the locker room, and someone handed him the ball.

Years later, I mentioned the Ohio State story to my older son, Adam. He reminded me of what granddad said to the Ohio woman.

Thanks to the Ohio woman, I understand what Hank meant when he told us, “I BEAT OHIO STATE!”

 

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

 

*Edith Fonde died in 2007; Hank Fonde died in 2009; Mark Fonde died February 28, 2015, one week before his older sister and my wife, Karen Fonde, died on March 1, 2015.

 

 

Posted in Hank Fonde, MEMOIR | Leave a comment