Journalism can be gritty indeed

By Fred Lambert
flambert@valenciavoice.com

Patrick May has seen a lot. Before he became a staff writer for the San Jose Mercury News, in Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, he was a college drop-out train-hopping and hitchhiking. 

Drifting through Boston, Alaska and Oregon, and eventually all over the world, working odd jobs like guitar-playing and cab-driving, May would ultimately find himself covering gritty crime beats and international news.

“Basically I get paid to write, which I love,” May said.

It started when the Oakland native headed to Europe with $8000 of saved taxi fares from working in Seattle.

“The one thing I really wanted to do was see the world,” May said. “I didn’t want to go back to another university, but I wanted to have my university in my mind.”

After meeting an Iranian on the plane over and agreeing to help deliver a new car to Amsterdam, Holland, May commenced a seven-year cyclone of travelling through Europe, Turkey, Iran and North Africa. He eventually met an Australian journalist at a youth hostel in Greece.

“He was on assignment, and he was being paid to write and travel,” May said. “I always liked writing stuff – journals, letters back home – and I loved travel, so I asked, ‘How do I become a journalist?’”

Following the Aussie’s advice, May finished his “around-the-world” trip, returning to obtain a degree at San Francisco State University.

“By then I was 30, so it was harder to get a job – there was a lot of competition,” May recalled. “I applied to about 250 newspapers all over the United States. I got one response.”

This started May’s time as a police reporter in Jacksonville, Fla. His work at the Florida Times Union is something May describes as a “crazy adventure, covering plane crashes, homicides, and a lot of mayhem and death.”

Next was the Miami Herald, a 15 year job that had May covering stories like Hurricane Andrew, the Gulf War, and the “cocaine cowboy days” of violent Cuban immigrant crime.

May was hooked. He returned closer to home in San Jose, but is still plugged into major events and oddities throughout the American news scene.

Covering 9/11, he claimed that the smell of death hung in New York for weeks. While 9/11 was bad, his worst experience was reporting on famine-ravaged Kurds in Northern Iraq after the Gulf War.

“It was like a scene in a weird movie,” he recalled. “All these fathers were bringing their dead kids – who’d died the night before – to put them in this big grave. I was just surrounded by death, and I’d never been in a situation like that before.”

His favorite was a human interest story about a recently deceased hobo in Miami, which May spent five weeks putting together. “I pieced together his whole life, and the top editor read it and killed it. He said it glorified alcoholism.”

May also writes business news. He compares covering Apple to dealing with CIA secrecy. “They don’t tell you anything,” he said. “They are masters at manipulating the media and masters at getting people all hyped up for the next product launch.”

After covering crime and war and I-Phones, May is still in the business. Now he deals with a changing industry. “About ten years ago the newspaper industry started to really get into trouble and shrink,” he said, explaining how Craigslist’s free advertising killed the traditional classified ad revenue of local papers.

“We started having layoffs. We’re getting really lean; everybody’s working a lot harder.” he said. “You’re now expected to write at least a story a day, sometimes more, as opposed to the old days when you could spend a week working on one story. Those days are gone. Everything is going online.”

In any case, May’s portfolio will speak on its own – he’s never shrunk from the tough news. On seeing violence and death, he claims that there’s a sense of getting used to it.

“I know it sounds kind of macabre,” he said, “but those make the best stories.”

Mayor's Press Secretary Killed in Bar Shooting

Lambert
Dec. 1, 2011
Bar Shooting

By Fred Lambert
  Mayor Fred Wiley's press secretary was shot and killed outside of a bar in the Grungeville section of Centerville last night after a heated argument.
  Patrons of the Fandango Bar and Grill on Wilson Street claimed that two men got into a shoving match around 10:45 p.m. before the fight was forced outdoors. Gunshots were heard, and Peter Wickham, 35, was found collapsed with a projectile wound to the forehead. Police later deduced the bullet to be .38 caliber -- a widely used pistol round in personal defense. Wickham, who was clad in suit and tie when discovered, was dead on arrival after being rushed to St. Mary's Hospital.
  The fact that Wickham was Mayor Wiley's press secretary adds a unique angle to the incident, which occurred in a notoriously drug-laced bar. Homicide detectives speculate a drug-dealing angle to the scuffle, but patron information has remained inconclusive.
  "That's not surprising," said Lt Jane Ortlieb of the Centerville Police. "The Fandango is a known hangout for drug dealers and users, and people aren't likely to talk."

 

Former Marine Seeks Redemption in Jiu-Jitsu and the Legion

Gianni Tanza takes Jason "Mayhem" Miller's back during a sparing session at Easton Jiu-Jitsu in Denver. Miller ended up winning. (Photo provided by Gianni Tanza. Taken Feb. 2011)

By Fred Lambert

flambert@valenciavoice.com

Young Gianni Tanza wanted to be a master spy when he grew up. It was a standard pick for some kids, but his second choice – custodian -- was not.

In the end he became neither, but Tanza, 27, of Denver has yet to complete his story. The Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu blue belt and former Marine infantryman has lived in the Mile-High City since early 2007. He drifted there after the Marines, and has been schooling at multiple jiu-jitsu gyms since before the relocation.  He now intends to ship off to Europe and join the French Foreign Legion next year. But there was an inauspicious start to his dreams.

“I wanted to be the lowest thing you could be, growing up,” Tanza said. “I saw the school custodian when I was in fifth grade, and he was a gnarly, big-old fat dude. He only wore flannel shirts, and he was older. Other kids made fun of him, but I told them they were stupid. He looked like he’d had a hard life.”

Tanza was born in Coronado, Calif., but raised in the desert of the Antelope Valley, in Lancaster and Palmdale, northeast of Los Angeles.

“High school was kind of rough, because it was just a bad area,” he said. “I wasn’t very popular, so I just did sports and kept to myself.”

Tanza’s upbringing was barely lower-middle class; his mother was a nurse and his stepfather a prop-maker. He was on the swim-team and wrestled at Little Rock High School in Lancaster before joining the Marines in late 2002. After serving a somewhat uneventful tour in Iraq during the next summer, he was introduced to jiu-jitsu in 2004 while sparring with another Marine named Diego Quintana.

“Diego took about a year of jiu-jitsu. He also trained from the internet,” Tanza explained. “I came from wrestling in high-school, and I was kind of good at it. He would always beat me with submissions, and I would say, ‘That’s cheating,’ and he would say, ‘No, that’s jiu-jitsu.’”

Tanza finally gave in and started going to the gym more, adopting the style. He started training with other Marines in “sloppy, second-hand barracks jiu-jitsu.” After his enlistment, he upgraded to a school in Lancaster called Gracie Barra, headed by Kazeka Muniz.

Since then, Tanza has trained, grappled and taken seminars with multiple MMA greats like Dan Severn, Jason “Mayhem” Miller, Anthony Johnson, Shane Carwin, and Brendan Shaub. Most of these sessions occurred at Denver schools like Grappler’s Edge and Easton Jiu-Jitsu, but Tanza takes classes wherever he travels, including Elite MMA in Orlando, Fla. and at Tenth Planet Jiu-Jitsu in Hollywood, Calif.; the latter under the tutelage of rubber-guard inventor Eddie Bravo.

He claims some of his most monstrous sparing partners have been jiu-jitsu masters Braulio Estima and Rodolfo Viera. Submission expert Jeff Glover, Tanza said, was “impossible,” and he likens grappling with Shane Carwin to a match against the giant boulder from the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Tanza notes that his Marine Corps training prepared him for the pace of the warm-ups and “Round-Robin” sessions, where sparring partners cycle through each other in five to ten minute intervals, sometimes known as Randori.

“In the Marines you have to push yourself,” he said. “There are points where you say, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ You have to say, ‘Shut up. Of course you can do it, and you’ll pass out trying.’”

Tanza has been steadily training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for five-and-a-half years now, minus a few months of recovery time from injuries. He received his blue belt in 2009 from Amal Easton.

Easton Jiu-Jitsu instructor and black belt Jeff Suskin described Tanza as “relentless.”

“He is a sponge for new info and highly coachable,” Suskin said. “He’s tenacious to train with. Gianni doesn't give up, and has a kill or be killed attitude. But he’s always smiling afterward.”

When Tanza’s colleagues hear about his decision to join the Foreign Legion, the response is usually bewildered shock.

“I think he’s crazy as hell,” said Curtis Wallach, 28, of Denver. He befriended Tanza in 2007 when the former Marine first moved to Colorado.  Wallach, who has visited France, was skeptical of how welcoming the French would be toward an American alpha-male.

“They might like him more because he’s going to fight for them,” Wallach said. “But I can’t imagine the French accepting militant Americans with open arms.”

If asked why he’s chosen this path, Tanza’s response is calculated and revealing. He’s been out of the Marines since February 2006, and has regretted the departure ever since.

“I’m over civilian life,” Tanza said. “I got out of the Marine Corps on bad terms, because I smoked marijuana. I missed some serious combat deployments that my unit got to go on, and I lost some friends on those deployments. I think I have a lot of survivor’s guilt, and I’m kind of disappointed about not finishing my four years, or doing more. This is an opportunity to rectify myself."

Tanza’s goal is to serve his five years in the Legion, hopefully with the 2^nd Foreign Parachute Regiment; once out, he looks to earn his black belt and finish school – if he makes it through training and survives any forward deployments.

He currently has two-and-a-half years of college under his belt, and has been pursuing a degree in Modern Languages at the University of Colorado Denver -- something he financed on his own, lacking the VA benefits of an honorable discharge.

“I don’t think I’m really meant to live a normal life, anyway,” Tanza said. "I don’t even care what other people think at this point, because this is what I’m going to do.”

David McCullough Speaks at Rollins College

By Fred Lambert

flambert@valenciavoice.com

WINTER PARK, Fla. – Two buildings quickly filled up on the night of Nov. 4 at Rollins College, as  locals and students piled in to listen to Pulitzer Prize winning writer and historian David McCullough.

McCullough, author of books like Harry Truman and 1776, spoke in the Knowles Memorial Chapel, drawing the giant audience while discussing his feelings on the priceless value of education and how understanding history enriches it. 

His speech, titled “History and the Love of Learning,” brought out such high numbers on the Winter Park campus that the chapel filled up completely.  It was broadcast by video in the adjacent Bush Science Center for an equally packed room of spectators.  When both buildings hit full capacity the fire marshal had to turn extras away.

“We are producing Americans – citizens – who are, by and large, historically illiterate,” McCullough said during his speech. “This situation is not their faults. It’s our fault – all of us -- fathers, mothers, grandparents. We need to do more. We need to show our appreciation, gratitude, and respect for teachers. Teachers are the most important people in our society.” 

These comments brought resounding applause and were one of the main themes for the author’s monologue.  The speech served as a precursor for the signing of his latest book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. It explores a series of intellectual Americans who studied abroad in the City of Light, including Mark Twain, John Singer Sargent, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

McCullough correlates these brilliant minds and the idea that history doesn’t always have to be about politics and the military – sometimes its art, music, poetry, theatre, architecture and science, also. These were things that Americans braved terrible 19^th century voyages across the Atlantic Ocean to become enlightened in.

When compared to Europe, America was far behind, says McCullough, especially in schools of medicine, architecture and art. US citizens sought cultural delights and educations that were far more advanced and tempered by time than their own. “The old world for them became the new world,” he said, “and the greater journey, they realized – even after crossing the Atlantic – was one that they were supposed to have in the mind.”

When McCullough concluded, a line trailed out the chapel doors, composed of both students and elderly guests waiting for an opportunity to have their books signed.

“I loved it; I’m a teacher,” said Sara Robertson of Howard Middle School, sharing McCullough’s passion for educating children in history. “As a society, it’s so important that we engage our kids and talk to them about what’s real.”

Indeed, during the speech, McCullough expressed his disdain for the ignorance in modern times. “We have got to get over this obsession with television and sports, and start talking about other subjects – like the world we live in,” he said, inducing more roaring applause.

Former Valencia College professor Jennifer Berry clutched a signed copy of John Adams, and said she related to McCullough’s concepts about gaining an interest of history later in life. “I didn’t learn enough of it in school, and I developed a love of it in my 40s,” she said. Berry, who’d previously worked in Valencia’s nursing department, said she adored McCullough’s sense of humor and looked forward to reading all of his books.

McCullough capped his speech examining the talent and hard-working attributes of the Americans who studied in Paris. He said that some people were only truly happy when they were working hardest at something they loved. 

Touching on a final note, McCullough reminded the audience that to not teach children history is to cheat them of one of the great “joys of life.”

“Why should we spend our time just in the immediate present,” he asked, “when we can have it all?”

New Census Bureau Education Stats released

  The US Census bureau has released figures detailing high school and college completion rates, showing an almost doubled rate of salaries among college graduates over high school diploma holders. The report, named Educational Attainment in the United States: P20-153, displays a series of figures based on race, gender, and age, noting inequities in total earnings dependent on category.
  "Given the very large differences between younger and older age groups, the attainment level of the total population will continue to rise for some time," said Eric Newburger, co-author of the report, explaining how youthful, better educated groups will eventually replace older, less educated ones.
  While young adults aged 25-29 had a high school completion rate averaging 88 percent and a college degree earning rate of 28 percent, adults aged 25 and up trailed slightly behind, four percent less for high school diplomas and three percent less for bachelor degrees. This puts the edge in the younger crowd's figure, if only by a hair's-length.
  Aside from age, having a college diploma trumps the age-old standard of the high school diploma, at least money-wise. Those aged over 18 who possessed a high school diploma earned roughly $25,000 yearly, whereas college baccalaureate degree holders earned almost twice that at nearly $46,000 annually.
  Gender and race also played a role. Women earned degrees in both levels at around 30 percent over their male counterparts, while African-American graduation rates trailed roughly ten percent less than those attained by whites.
  Aside from age, gender and race, the study also revealed a slight inequity between rates of high school degree attainment dependent on geography. Mid-western groups held a minor lead over other regions, and southern groups lingered in last place.
  Below are a few of the specifics:
  
                                            High School degree              College Degree             
18 and over                             $24,572(avg. salary)          $45,687(avg. salary)

25 and over                              84%                                    25%

25-29                                        88%                                    28%

Whites                                      88%                                    28%

African Americans                   76%                                    15%

Midwest                                    87%

South                                        82%


"A degree will show my integrity," said Lawrence Laguna, 19, student at Valencia College in Orlando. "It'll show my ability to compete and strive and attain a career in my profession."
 

Simple Living Revival Requires a Long-Term Method

By Fred Lambert

            WINTER PARK, Fla. – What is happiness? What does simplicity have to do with it? These were questions that Dr. David Shi, author and former president of Furman University, attempted to grapple on Oct. 18 at Rollins College's Bush Science Center in Winter Park, in his speech titled The Great Recession and the Revival of Simplicity.

            Shi spoke in front of an attentive audience of students and local residents, opening with the concept of happiness in America, and the complications the nation faces in trying to reach it amid a culture of frivolous spending and a wounded economy.

            “Since the end of World War II, and especially during the last 20 years or so, Americans have increasingly equated the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of more money and more consumer goods,” Shi said, later noting that simplicity remains an enticing ideal, but it has been pushed to the periphery by “America's runaway consumer culture.”

            The other problem is debt. “All financial crises result from debt, in one form or another,” Shi said, explaining further how lenders had by 2007 been giving credit to unqualified people, enabling them to spend far beyond their income levels and allowing the rate of debt to outpace economic growth. “Borrowing has been the only way that many people think they can advance economically,” he said.

            Shi later roused abrupt laughter from the audience with the remark: “Until the 20^th century, indebtedness in the United States was widely viewed as a moral failure. Since then, it's become a patriotic virtue.”

            The solution? It's not simple, but in the same breath, Shi explains, simplicity is the answer –  slowing down and being satisfied with less. Shi also notes that living a simpler, cheaper lifestyle in America is a knee-jerk reaction to economic dips, and is usually temporary.

            “Americans have never embraced simplicity in large numbers for long periods,” he said, further explaining that when economic prosperity rebounds, so does the urge to frivolously spend once more.

            The real key, according to Shi, is to embrace simple living as a state of mind, rather than a disposable principle that will probably only be as prolonged as the recession. This involves long-term goal processing, and reconstitutes what Americans might consider happiness to be – traditional consumer materialism versus contention in what one already has, including things that transcend objects and wealth.

            “I was working 15 hours a day, but it sucked,” said UCF student Steven McConnen, 23, noting how increased income doesn't always equal more happiness. “It wasn't worth the trade-off of having more money.”

            Evan Schlarb, a 29-year-old Rollins student and the Production Designer for Rollins' Who's Who radio show on WPRK, said the topic of simplicity drew him to Shi's speech. “I thought he was outstanding and felt he had a very inspiring message and delivery as well,” Schlarb said, adding, “I know he said that there isn't necessarily a checklist -- it's more of a day-to-day decision making process in how you live your life -- but I would like to hear specific things I wouldn't necessarily think of, or ways I can reorganize my own personal life to simplify.”

            “There's no way to develop something that's going to fit everyone's circumstance,” Shi explained about the check-list concept amid roaming guests in a reception room after the speech. “I try to shift people away from picturing something physical, and instead think about a middle process whereby every day you're thinking very intentionally about, 'Who am I? Where am I headed? Why am I doing this?' In other words, most of us just get up in the morning and we just flow. We just drift. So, it's really a life of intentional simplicity, where you're calibrating your choices, your decisions, your priorities every day, rather than just occasionally.”