The Southerner Journal

MONTICELLO, Ark. — I recently attended the Associated Collegiate Press/College Media Advisers annual conference in Kansas City, Mo. Students seemed worried that the media as we know it will not be there once they get out of school.

Who’s to blame them considering the continual death tolls:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/business/media/29carr.html

Considering we’ve just gone from three national daily newspapers to two, who’s to provide the news if the profits from the print product disappear? Who’s to say the Christian Science Monitor won’t figure it out?

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1029/p25s01-usgn.html

But just when everyone says newspapers are dying, along comes a historical event and EVERYBODY wants a paper:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/06/obama.newspapers.ap/index.html

Personally I believe newspapers will stay around as long as smaller communities exist, and as long as people need something to read while taking public transportation, going to the bathroom or sitting under a tree. Truly, time will tell.

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — ‘Tis the season of ghosts, werewolves, witches and zombies. Halloween waits at week’s end.

My wife carved the pumpkin at left, took its picture and sent it to me over the cell phone. She claims Halloween as her favorite holiday.

“There’s much less pressure than the other ones,” Tanya says. “It’s pure fun. And I like the origination of the holiday as an opportunity to commune with ones who are gone.”

Unfortunately, some people never know if their loved one is truly gone. They just disappear. From the other side, the system occasionally finds victims of crimes without knowing who the victim was.

For your Halloween treat, examine what happens to the unidentified dead in 21st century Arkansas through an article I wrote earlier this year.

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Tell Me, Who are You?
Tracking the Unidentified Dead
By Ronald Sitton

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Nobody knows the last thought that went through her head, but Little Rock homicide Detective John “J.C.” White knows the last thing was a bullet.

Have You Seen Me? — Little Rock Police still want to know who this woman was. If you have any information, contact Det. John “J.C.” White in homicide at 501-371-4660 or jwhite@littlerock.org.

She wore Arizona-brand carpenter jeans with a black leather belt and a large brown T-shirt. Over this, an extra-extra large dark blue windbreaker and jumpsuit pants while white-and-blue Reeboks clad her feet. A gold-and-silver link bracelet hung from her wrist. Standing between 5’3” and 5’7” with black hair and a nose broken earlier in life, the black woman could have been anywhere between 18 and 40.

On a walk with its owner in August 2002, a dog uncovered her tennis shoes and bones face-down under a pile of pink insulation behind an abandoned-looking house at 2772 Reservoir Road. The first responding officer would have started the investigation by preserving the scene, especially any physical evidence that would lead to identification of the victim or a suspect.

Dr. Cheryl May, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Criminal Justice Institute, estimated the victim’s body had been there for several months. Inventory of her various clothes would later help with educated guesses of her overall size.  Pictures of the scene show an apparently abandoned house, but crime scene investigators found nothing of evidentiary value like a bullet casing or murder weapon – though they did find more of her teeth.

“Once you’ve exhausted everything on the scene, hopefully by then you’ve got her identified. And we just haven’t even gotten to the point of getting her identified yet,” White says. “We don’t know where to start. We got initial phone calls about what could have happened, this, that and the other, but in following up on that information, we always found out that the person who we thought that might’ve been killed was actually alive. Therefore that lead has been exhausted, so we move on to the next. At this point we just don’t have anything, we don’t have anything whatsoever. It’s frustrating, very frustrating.”

Occasionally White works suicides, accidental deaths and deaths of homeless victims that result in an unidentified body prior to an examination by the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory. But the black female from six years ago represents the only unidentified homicide victim in White’s current caseload.

A walk through claustrophobic hallways occasionally turns passer-bys sideways within the four-story concrete and steel Pulaski County Administration Building. Garland Camper starts his third month on the third floor as full-time Pulaski County Coroner since assuming the post May 9 after nearly 14 years as chief deputy coroner. A grandson of a cemetery caretaker, Camper serves as the state’s only appointed coroner in 75 counties.

Family pictures dot the wall and various other nooks around his office; his Dell computer sits next to a window while current case files cover his desk. He also keeps a framed photo of the 2005 Asian tsunami’s carnage hanging on the wall. The surreal sight shows bodies littering a beach like match boxes emptied in waves over a floor. Read the rest of this entry »

We do not cover a lot of celebrity, tabloid-style news on this Web Press, but it’s different if we know someone who pops up in the news, especially when that someone dies tragically and unexpectedly.

Brad Renfro, the young actor from Knoxville, Tennessee who broke into the movies from a DARE theater program for troubled kids in the 1990s with a major role in “The Client,” based on John Grisham’s novel, was found dead Tuesday morning in Los Angeles. He was 25.

The cause of death was not immediately determined, according to sources, but an autopsy was planned. Renfro had reportedly been partying with friends the night before, which is not surprising, since that’s how he spent a lot of his time based on my experience knowing him in Knoxville from 1996-2000.

He was a nice, soft spoken and even shy young man. As well as showing some talent as an actor, he was a decent guitar player who showed up for the Wednesday night weekly blues jam at Sassy Ann’s on a regular basis. I played the drums several times in the same ad hoc combination, and partied with him a number of times, but never really got close to him. He came from a relatively poor and troubled home and could be quite distant when asked questions about himself and his family.

I tried several times to do a formal interview with him but he always declined.

Renfro’s lawyer, Richard Kaplan, told the Associated Press he was on the road to recovery from addiction.

“He was working hard on his sobriety,” Kaplan said. “He was doing well. He was a nice person.”

Renfro recently completed a role in “The Informers,” a film adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel that stars Winona Ryder, Brandon Routh and Billy Bob Thornton, according to the AP.

“Brad was an exceptionally talented young actor and our time spent with him was thoroughly enjoyable,” Marco Weber, president of the film’s production house, Senator Entertainment, said in a statement.

Renfro had his share of run-ins with the law over the years. He served 10 days in jail in May 2006 after pleading no contest to driving while intoxicated and guilty to attempted possession of heroin after being arrested on Skid Row while attempting to buy heroin from an undercover agent in 2005. He was placed on probation in January 2001 and ordered to pay $4,000 for repairs to a 45-foot yacht he and a friend tried to steal in Florida in August 2000, the month I left Knoxville for New Orleans.

I was told a wave of crack addictions hit Knoxville about that time and destroyed the lives of a number of talented musicians from East Tennessee.

He was arrested again in May 2001 and charged with underage drinking, violating the terms of his probation, and was ordered into alcohol rehabilitation the following March.

In 1998, Renfro was charged with possession of cocaine and marijuana. He avoided jail time in that case due to a plea deal, aided in part by his sponsors in the DARE program and in Hollywood.

His other movie credits included “Sleepers” and “Deuces Wild,” as well as “Apt Pupil” and “The Jacket.”

AP: Troubled Actor Brad Renfro Dies at 25

AP

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer shown at a lecture entitled ‘The 20th Century on Trial’ at the New York Public Library on June 27, 2007.

by Glynn Wilson

It is hard to believe Norman Mailer is dead.

I just met him in September on a subway ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and I had planned on writing him a long letter after studying the Harper’s magazine article that became the Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction novel The Armies of the Night.

The article, The Steps of the Pentagon, and the book, deals with a protest march on the Pentagon in Washington Mailer was sent to cover as a journalist for Harper’s, edited at that time by Willie Morris of Mississippi, the youngest editor in the storied magazine’s history.

While other practitioners of “New Journalism” such as George Plimpton, Truman Capote (an Alabama native), Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese (who attended the University of Alabama) were pioneering the non-fiction novel, also referred to as “creative non-fiction” or “literary journalism,” Mailer uses the occasion of the protest march and his arrest and night spent in jail to do his own version of self-portrait, taking off on the Vietnam War. But since Morris had his doubts about the use of first person in the magazine, Mailer wrote the piece in the third person, referring to himself as the protagonist.

Now anyone who has ever worked for a newspaper or a magazine knows that there are few editors who will allow a writer to use first person to place himself in the story, since that flies in the face of the economic definition of objectivity used by American news organizations. But using the third person is even more rare, although Mailer, being the combative, controversial and outspoken character that he was, not only got away with it. He won a Pulitzer Prize as a result and has been praised for it by the likes of the New York Times, which says in the lead to his feature obituary today that Mailer “loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation.”

NYT: Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84

The Associated Press is also leading it’s AP A wire this morning with Mailer’s obit.

AP: Norman Mailer Dead at Age 84

And you can learn more from this free online encyclopedia entry on Mailer.

Wikipedia: Norman Mailer

Here’s my story on meeting him, which I never ran before now because I was not positively sure it was him. Now that I see the AP photo of him from earlier this year, however, there’s no doubt it was him.

On A Personal Encounter With Norman Mailer

After following Jill Simpson to Washington, D.C. to be there for her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in the political prosecution of Don Siegelman, I decided to make the four hour trek to New York and spend a few days there on my extended fall trip this year.

(You can read more about that trip from the September archives.)

The plan was to run into a former protégé of mine from my time in the master’s program at the University of Alabama in the mid-1990s who lives in Brooklyn. And the plan was to meet in person with Scott Horton of Harper’s magazine blog fame and Joe Conason at The Nation Institute to further cement my relationship with them on covering big stories out of the American South.

I crossed into Manhattan after sundown on Monday, Sept. 17, and got into Brooklyn in time for some food, beer (and a special Coney Island refreshment) before crashing for the night in a basement apartment in an old Jewish neighborhood not far from where Mailer was born and raised.

The next day, I called up Scott Horton and arranged to meet him at the Union Station Oyster Bar for an appetizer and a few glasses of wine. We talked about the Siegelman case, Jill Simpson and the funny state of Alabama, and then I got back on the subway for the 30 to 40 minute ride back to Brooklyn.

As I sat in the back of a subway car and looked out the window over the East River at the Statue of Liberty off in the distance, I noticed four old men just a few seats in front of me laughing and talking and having a good time. One of them looked exactly like the photograph on this page, and I began to study his face. Could it really be Norman Mailer?

I had started up a conversation with an attractive, exotic young woman and hated to interrupt it, but I just had to know for sure if I was riding the subway with Norman Mailer. So I asked her: “Do you think that could possibly be him?”

She had no idea who I was talking about, so I got out of my seat, approached the man, and asked: “Are you Norman Mailer?”

I immediately felt a little guilty, since I hate it when I see and hear stories about tourists approaching famous people and bugging them in public. He did not answer right away, but smiled and looked at his compatriots. I looked at them too and mouthed the words: “Is this him?” The one who made the most eye contact with me glanced at Mailer to make sure he was not looking and gave me a little wink and a nod in the affirmative.

I tried to get a conversation started by telling them that I was a visiting writer from Alabama who was a big fan of Mailer and Willie Morris, thinking that might get him to open up and talk to me.

In fact, I mentioned that I had recently taken a trip to Oxford, Mississippi where David Rae Morris had a show in a gallery there with many pictures of his dad Willie Morris.

(You can read my column on that trip here: Escaping Shadows: The South as a Backdrop for Art).

Instead of engaging me, Mailer started speaking Yiddish and making a joke with his buddies, probably about my Southern accent and knowing I would not be able to understand a word they were saying. I was still not 100 percent sure it was him, sitting there holding a walking cane and a folding chair.

I just stood there holding onto the silver pole in the subway car listening to them cut up, but when their jibberish slowed down and then took a long pause, I asked the man I thought was Mailer what he did.

“What do I do?” he said with a New York accent, looking right at my face good for the first time, almost angrily.

Then, looking down at the chair he was clutching in his old, wrinkled hands, then back up at me with a smile and a remarkable twinkle in his old blue eyes, he said, “Mostly I sit.”

“Sit?” I asked, joining in the fun. “Where do you like to sit? And what do you do while you are sitting?”

“I sit down on Broadway and watch the girls walk by,” he said, cracking up his friends.

It had been a beautiful fall day for sitting outside and watching people, so it made perfect sense.

The men kept on speaking in Yiddish and joking around and I figured I had interrupted their fun enough, so I said good night and went back to my seat in the back of the car by the exotic young woman.

When I got back to Alabama, I looked up Mailer in Wikipedia and in the Harper’s magazine archives and read “The Steps of the Pentagon.” It was then that I realized what Mailer had accomplished writing about himself in the third person.

Like Truman Capote or Hunter S. Thompson, I am more comfortable writing in first person, but the style of journalism is often the same. A writer who places himself in the action of the story goes beyond mere objective journalism and is able to construct a more readable and complete narrative coverage of events. And that is what this Web site is often dedicated to doing.

Le׳hitra׳ot, Norman Mailer. You were a great American character. You will be missed.

NORTH LITTLE ROCK (June 20) - Today is the longest day of the year. So I started it right.

I met the owner of the liquor store at 9:15 a.m. and bought a keg and the makings for Opie’s Punch. At 10:23, I tapped the keg of Fat Tire and proceeded to get a beer bath (it’s been awhile since I did this for a living). I’m marinated shish-k-bobs for later today.

It’s been 10 years since my last Solstice party, and I’m starting to remember why. First: Solstice tends to happen mid-week, and most people work during the week. Second: Last time I had a Solstice party, the undercover police showed up. Now, I knew them, but my guests didn’t feel they could relax if the po-po sat nearby.

But I digress. I know Lil’ Chuck’s coming to play and Alice and Mars plan to initiate an art installation. Maybe the promise of chess, dominoes and canasta wasn’t enough for some. Hmmmmmm…

I thought about canceling the party after last week when I had to put Kilroy down.

Cat Myths

Moon Goddess Diana created a smaller version of the lion, the cat. A cat lies at the feet of the Roman goddess Libertas. According to Russian folklore, a black cat put in a baby’s cradle will ward off evil. Henry VII claimed a mischievious cat trapped him into marriage. The French once considered the cat as a symbol of freedom. Mohammed preached with a cat cradled in his arms. Burman priests worship golden-eyed  Sinh.

I never really considered myself a cat person (I didn’t steal that line from Willie Morris, though I realize he said something similar about Spit McGee). Although my baby blanket featured kittens, I never owned a cat as a child. Dogs, lots of dogs, but no felines. The only memory of cats I have from childhood is reading about the Egyptians idolizing them.

I didn’t live with a cat until the early 1990s, when Tracy Hayes gave me a kitten named Merkedes. Coincidentally, that was around the time Tanya and I dated. Anyway, Merkedes went crazy after I moved out of a trailer and into a farm house in Scott, Ark., that sat on 130 acres. I was the only human he’d approach after we moved. He died with a poisoned rat in his mouth. He’d been around for about a year.

I didn’t plan to get another cat, but graduate school and a bad break-up changed things. I’d moved into an efficiency apartment on the third floor of Knoxville’s Riverhouse on West Hill. The whole room was about as big as my living room now.

Glen Harris talked me into taking home a kitten from the offspring of Boomer, a Tennessee alley cat, and Jezebel, a Himalayan. I once saw Boomer spring from a prone position on the sidewalk, four feet into the air to take down a low-flying bird.

Kilroy plays cat’n'mouse.

I picked out the runt of the litter and named him Kilroy, after the nickname given to a cousin who died in a motorcycle accident when I was a kid. Kilroy and I went back to the Riverhouse and bonded. Well, kind of.

The Riverhouse sits next to the Tennessee River and across the hilltop from Neyland Stadium at the University of Tennessee. I never believed my family when they talked about walking uphill both ways to school until I attended UT. I still think they were full of it, but I’ve got proof. Anyway, I’d walk to school or occasionally ride my bike. Every afternoon when I’d come home, I could see Kilroy in the window waiting for me. By the time I crossed the street to my block, I could hear him whining, which wouldn’t stop until I’d climbed to the third floor to unlock the door.

After a while, the whining got to me and I decided Kilroy needed a playmate. So I went back to Glen and Christine’s and picked up his brother, Pep. I often refer to them as “The Boyz.” I even started writing about them.

That’s my boyz — the predators.

Kilroy (bottom) slashes out while Pep stares in the efficiency apartment at The Riverhouse.

Oh sure, they’ll fool you into thinking they’re laid back — sprawled on their backs in the noonday sun on my waterbed like puddles, expecting me to pet them or something. They refuse to even let the bed waves disturb them. Instead, they’ll act like they were born to sail.

But wait for a bug to fly in the window … you’d think Armageddon’s begun. Off the bed lightning quick. Little black hairs flying into the air and onto my computer screen.

Kilroy goes left; Pep goes right. They strategically surround the enemy, even allowing it to think there’s a possible escape. Yeh, right.

The Game Begins.

At first, it’s just a swipe of the paw, enough to stagger but not kill. If the enemy has wings, now’s the time to fly. If not, grim reality sets in.

Sometimes the game lasts a minute … sometimes 15. Depends on how much fun the Boyz want to have. But it always ends the same.

Another dead bug. Another happy cat. Another day.

The first group photo of me and the boyz.

The Riverhouse sat across the street from Lord Lindsey’s Mansion, a fancy old columned house where people would dance Saturday nights and schools would hold Prom. One day, I noticed a wedding across the street.

The apartment was hot, so I opened the windows. The Boyz had been cramped up so they sauntered in and out of the french windows, much to the distaste of one middle-aged man sitting across the street on the veranda of the mansion. I probably wouldn’t have noticed him at all. Had his wife not stared with dropped jaw into my window. Had the wedding photographer not gazed to where I stood as well. Had the man not shown me a disdainful look as I sauntered past the window. Weddings being the superstitious affair they are, well, you see the dilemma. But I wasn’t going to bring my black cats back in the room just to please a superstitious lady who gawked and her husband with his menacing scowl.

Kilroy at Laurel apartment

I moved to Laurel Avenue and had perhaps the only showdown over the cats I ever encountered. I was dating a Croatian who told me it was either her or the Boyz. I told her she could go; she came back later.

Kilroy and Pep kept me sane during that time of graduate school. I couldn’t take myself seriously when a cat would walk across the keyboard as I worked. I went on a trip to the Dakotas with Anne Cunningham and left Christina Haines to watch the boyz. I called back to check on them and Stina tells me Kilroy’s been gone for two days. I told her if he didn’t come back in the next day or so, I didn’t expect him to return. I called back the next day and he’d stopped by for dinner.

Ron and the Boyz outside the Laurel apartment

I returned to the Laurel house after an extended hiatus at the Haines property on 44 acres on the side of a mountain in Clinton, Tenn. I stepped out on the porch one morning to find a man holding his doberman at the length of its leash. I looked over the railing to see Kilroy with three legs down and one up, swinging side-to-side, ready to give the doberman the what-for. The man looked at me and said, “He’s not afraid of much, is he.” I replied, “He lived with a Rottweiler for awhile.” The man and dog moved on.

I moved to Ohio to teach at Muskingum College and The Boyz rode in the window of the U-Haul or slept in my lap, too haughty to stay in any damn car carrier. It’s easy to claim they should be in the carrier, but you try dealing with screaming cats on a 425-mile trip.

The Boyz didn’t deal too well with the raccoons who kept eating their food off the front porch of my cabin. Nor did they deal too well with the screeching as I learned to play harmonicas. But they never left for good. We all returned to Clinton to the Haines property, a.k.a. House of Misfit Toys. We seemed to fit in and I put the finishing touches on the dissertation.

Kilroy at home on Broken Arrow

When I returned to North Little Rock, I didn’t know what the Boyz would think about it. They’d never been west of the Mississippi River. But once again, they adjusted. We moved into Hickory Hill Condominiums, which featured floor level windows that pop open. I rigged mine so the Boyz could go in and out no matter what time of year.

My brother, David, would check on the Boyz whenever I’d go out of town. One day he walked in and didn’t see them, but went out to the porch to fix their food. As he came back inside, Kilroy and Pep were flying into the room hot on the trail of a rat. David said he jumped on the couch and had to walk across furniture to get out the door.

On another occasion, David and I were watching television as Kilroy sauntered in with a bird in his mouth. Once he set it down, the bird tried flying. Dave and I both jumped out of our seats, but Kilroy quickly put the bird out of it’s misery.

When Tanya and I started dating again, Kilroy was the first to seek her out for pats. Since we’ve been married, I can only think of one disagreement between the two. Before we found out he’d been shot on Friday, April 13, the doctor thought Kilroy had arthritis. We had to pop pills into his mouth, which caused him to foam at the mouth for hours. It got so bad that he’d have ropes of saliva coming out of his mouth when Tanya walked into the room. They’ve since made peace.

br>The last month has been hard watching him and wondering if he’d get better. For awhile he seemed fine, as he walked up and down the stairs and seemed to get his equilibrium back. I even took him to the vet last Friday to get his annual shots. But he took a turn for the worse last weekend.

Last photo of Ron and The Boyz, Kilroy on right

We were in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge on the Excursion from Hell. We’d finally started heading west when Kelli called to tell me Kilroy couldn’t move and ask if she should take him to the emergency clinic. I told her to wait until we got in before taking him. We got there around midnight and drove directly there, where they ran blood tests and x-rays. The doctor said his drop from 13 lbs to 9 lbs primarily came from atrophy of the muscle in his hind quarters. We took him home and tried to decide what to do. I tried to help him to the litter box Monday night, but when I returned, he’d fallen in it. He didn’t seem to care, though, as we cleaned him up. You know a cat is sick when it doesn’t pitch a bitch about getting wet.

Tanya fed Kilroy buffalo meatballs in beef gravy Monday night, and lump crab meat twice Tuesday (both meals accompanied by diluted milk). He sat in my lap nearly all day both days and we gave him a lot of love. But he wasn’t getting any better.

We took him to the regular vet Tuesday afternoon. It was rough. They gave him a sedative shot that made him jump, but it was supposed to calm him. Then the doctor gave Kilroy the “death shot,” but the first one didn’t kill him; so they gave him another. I just sat there holding him, watching with tears rolling down my face. What was I to do? It sucked. I had Kilroy with me almost 10 years.

Afterwards, we took Kilroy home. The dogs came up to sniff as we walked through the door, but Pep, Kilroy’s brother, just wanted some wet food. I took Kilroy’s remains to the hillside sliding down to the bottom of our back yard. I started digging with a mattock and shovel, but around 2 feet down, I hit bedrock. I went ahead and buried him there. Tanya built up an additional two feet by placing a catnip plant on top of him surrounded by cedar mulch; I hope we can keep the dogs away.

Final resting spot for Kilroy my boy

I thought about getting really drunk, but I didn’t even feel like doing that. I woke up looking around for Kilroy before rememberin’ he’s not here. This last week, I’ve thought I’ve heard him in the hall or in the garage. Some of you may think I’m crazy for spending so much space writing about a cat, but to me, Kilroy was my bud. I miss him.

That’s enough of rememberin’; I’m ready to forget. Wish you were here, but have a wonderful solstice and know you’re in my thoughts. To prove it, here’s the recipe for Opie’s Punch:

1 jigger Southern Comfort
1/2 jigger Amaretto
Pineapple, Cranberry and Orange Juices

Warning: Drink slowly or you may find yourself on the floor! That being said, it’s starting out to be a slow party. Not that I mind. I realize some people love to make late appearances. Still, there’s a keg to finish and Lil’ Chuck just showed, so it’s time to unload the band equipment. Hope you have a GREAT solstice.