Consult Mallowe

When a young businessman, Jerry Wolman, bought the Philadelphia Eagles in 1963, professional football was in approximately the same shape as tough-man boxing was a few years ago. That is to say: it had an impressive cult following; major advertisers and TV networks were still exceedingly nervous about it; celebrities wouldn’t even think about bothering to show up at the big games, and the really entrenched sports, like baseball, horse racing, big-time college football and heavyweight boxing were still supremely arrogant and condescending – as they whistled all the way past the graveyards of American leisure-time dollars.

But Jerry Wolman read the rune stones early; dreamed the vision and was one of a handful of people who were centrally responsible for putting Philadelphia on the marketing map for big league sports. Just in case you think Wolman’s big picture was limited to the Eagles, ponder this: without Wolman there would have been no sports complex in South Philadelphia, no Spectrum, no NHL hockey team, and no sense that the city could be something much more than the bad old days of the Phillies at their worst.

Now, almost 50 years later, let’s list the ways that pro football has evolved:

• The worst teams in the league are billion-dollar assets and their value keeps increasing.
• Network TV would have almost no chance of creating enough profitable content to keep operating without the annual boost from pro football.
• The NFL saved Fox-TV from oblivion.
• Competing leagues keep coming and going and failing, and the NFL just keeps rolling along.
• Horse racing is a memory; heavyweight boxing has sold what was left of its besmirched soul to Europe and Russia, college football is still struggling to get it right with the dysfunctional BCS bowl set-up, and baseball, for all its innate greatness, is holding its collective breath that the next national scandal won’t be its last.
• The NFL has muscled its way in as one of the iconic foundations of American pop culture and entertainment marketing around the globe.
• Pro football – in all of its diverse manifestations and profit streams – is bigger than General Motors was at the height of that corporation’s power and glory. And no franchise is more deeply entrenched in its demographic target zone than the Philadelphia Eagles.

When did this seminal transformation begin? Right around the time that sharp young entrepreneurs like Jerry Wolman decided to make their move into pro football.

Wolman, a native of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, worked his way out of coal country and into big business as an investor and real estate developer.

It would be hard to dream up a Hollywood script with any more twists, turns, and cliff-hangers than the Jerry Wolman story. He was a guy whose heart was bigger and deeper than the anthracite deposits that reach all the way to the center of the earth. It still is.

Think of it this way: Imagine Eagle Vince Papale as a brash young businessman, instead of a player – Wolman — intent on breaking into the old boy’s network of sports owners. It’s a little bit of Rocky, a dash of Wall Street and enough of the Blind Side to keep you rooting for the kid from Shenandoah.

I spoke with Wolman quite a few times over the winter and almost connected with him at Tommy Brookshier’s funeral. He’ll be in Philadelphia soon to re-introduce the public to his riveting story and to announce the publication of his book, Jerry Wolman: The World’s Richest Man.

Just in case you aren’t a sports fan and find yourself turning midnight green with envy every time you think about how much the NFL takes in each season – not to mention the networks and the makers of games like Madden, 2010 – Wolman’s record as a selfless philanthropist and friend of the under-dog could probably bring tears to Donald Trump’s eyes.

Try to see Wolman when he’s in town, think back fondly to the time when the Eagles played at Franklin Field, and make sure you check out his book (it will be available through Amazon, independent booksellers and at Wolman’s website, JerryWolman.com.

Canadian journalist and author, Craig Silverman (editor of Regrettheerror.com), has been one of the strongest proponents in holding the media accountable for its many mistakes.

In this excerpt from an interview, he explains his position:

“There has been a lot of scholarly research aimed at discovering the level of error in U.S. newspapers. It began in 1936 and has continued since then, with people like Scott Maier and Philip Meyer doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Overall, the research suggests that between 40 and 60 percent of newspaper news stories have some type of error, be it factual or something of a more subjective nature. So that’s the frequency. But here’s the other part of the equation: Research from Maier published this year found that only 2 percent of factual errors were corrected. So we have a relatively high error rate, and that is compounded by an anemic correction rate. Errors are not being prevented, and they are not being corrected.

“In a media environment where stories are often published in a paper, placed online and then loaded into various databases, the issue of uncorrected errors becomes even more urgent. The errors of today become the errors of tomorrow when they are accessed online or from a database at a later date. As much as we are creating the historical record, we’re also polluting it with errors. Errors can then be blogged, cited in research, used in press releases … they go farther, faster than ever before. In many cases, they exist forever. So we have a responsibility to do everything we can to prevent and correct them. It’s part of our job as journalists. Stories don’t end once they’re published; we are responsible for correcting and updating them.

“The other piece, of course, is the effect that errors have on the public’s perception of the press. Put simply, errors erode credibility.”

Craig Silverman
Regret the Error.com

And for more information about mistakes made in the media, be sure to visit Found Innocent

Mission

Unlike public schools, private schools do not have to exist, with the exception of a handful of faith-based institutions where families, churches and religious orders long ago made mutual commitments to regard education as a vital part of their overall mission. There are many examples of these schools, from several denominations, in the Philadelphia area, including Roman Catholic, Jewish, Quaker, Episcopal, Evangelical and Muslim.

To survive – to pay the bills — the private schools need to keep their waiting lists reasonably long and their collective mystique glowing.

Private schools, even if money is not a factor, are not for every family.

What to Expect

As a private school parent you will be much more involved than in most public schools. You will also be nickel-and-dimed to distraction. Parents are expected to jump in as volunteers and find-raisers for every single thing that a private school does, from class trips to pizza lunches to Christmas gifts for the teachers.

There will usually be a small board of trustees, but the main thing they occupied with is raising money. Private schools are amazingly expensive to operate.  Standing on the sideline, minding your own business at a JV field hockey game, for example, can automatically become a big, social deal. If you find that sort of thing annoying, then take a good long look at your neighborhood public school.

Any school, in any system, and in any location can be an excellent school, provided there is a successful, nurtured college prep program and a decent variety of AP (advanced placement) courses available for students to qualify for and choose from.

Really question the private schools that push Honors courses over AP courses. Honors courses can tend to be rewards for very experienced, favored teachers who only wish they were teaching in small college settings. Honors courses are prestigious, clearly, but can also be academically irrelevant and too much work for too little reward from many students’ points of view. AP courses, in contrast, can earn students actual college credits, while still in high school.

Try not to let your school play the “National Merit Scholar” game. Having a bunch of National Merit Scholars in your school is certainly a nice thing, but it could be an accident of location, too, or of too much emphasis on over-preparation for specific tests.

The more affluent the community, the more National Merit scholars there tends to be. Critics of standardized testing have been pointing out for years. Nothing takes the place of a student who consistently gets good marks in his or her regular courses.

Extra-Curriculars

If you or your child is looking for memorable extra-curricular programs, in music, for example, don’t over-look the public schools.

Schools in many public districts do have money for extra-curricular activities and are a mandate to spend it. That is sometimes not the case in private schools, where the specific activity might depend too much on the contributions of parents. There are exceptions.

Students who receive multiple college acceptances are certainly to be congratulated; it sounds really impressive at graduation. But, just keep one thing in mind: whether they attend private or public schools, they probably benefited from those rare school counselors who were on the ball and who got their high school transcripts in on time.

The last time, I was preparing for my second full hip replacement.

When I say “we” I mean Baby Boomers, of course, but the club for joint replacements is anything but exclusive.

Since it is, or soon will be, the most frequently performed operation in America. When you think about how few of us do any stretching (me included) it is hardly surprising.

We carry all that weight, never stretch and expect our joints to last forever.

Believe everything they tell you about getting on some kind of an exercise program – it is the difference-maker. I am living proof of all the bad stuff that can happen when you don’t.

This time it was the left side; I was not handling the thought of it very well. Every day as the operation date approached was agony – physically and mentally.

Finally, the moment arrived — a cold, somber morning in December.

Surgery went well. The blood pressure was high, but the anesthesiologist was confident he could get it down – three different ones came in to see me.

The anesthesiologist with the Slavic accent thought the epidural was a good option, so did my surgeon, but  after an hour putting long needles into my back and it still not taking, general amnesia was the only option.

Now I know. Later, the surgeon said it should have worked, but I had “a hard back.”

I was just as glad because I didn’t want to be awake during any part of the surgery. Just being wheeled into that cold metal room was enough.

The surgeon saw my wife in the “green room” later, to let her know all went well, it took long because of the anesthesia and some big, ugly bone spurs that had developed on my hip.

I think they were causing most of the pain. I had two large bone spurs that needed to be ground down in order to put in the new ball and socket.

No blood transfusion was needed, for which I was especially grateful because I was unable to donate my own blood beforehand because of my blood pressure had been too high.

With me, it’s always a toss-up – which is more of a concern to the doctors, the surgery, or whatever I am having, or the blood pressure.

I take medication for it, and once the main moments of stress are past, it does come right down. In the meantime, though, it never fails to prompt meetings of doctors, consultations, and some stern lectures to me.

Recovery in the hospital took three days; I actually was standing the first night. Kicking you out after such a short time seems inhuman, but on this point, both the bean-counters who work for the insurance companies and the physical therapists agree.

Staying even one moment too long in a hospital is the best possible way to contract a very bad infection – the reason why most surgeries fail.

They most annoying aspect was the oxygen, since you need to breathe deep through your nose, or you set of an alarm, which happened all night. Don’t even think about falling asleep.

Day two and they get me up in chair and walking in the hallway, I actually felt ok with it. That’s how quickly the original hip pain vanishes with a great surgeon. Afterwards, you should feel supremely happy that you did it.

Day three was physical therapy in the morning, and moving to the Rehab center right after lunch. It takes forever for the paper work to be signed, but finally at 2:30pm I am ready to move.

I get wheeled to the entrance, where my wife is waiting to bring me to the rehab center. The toughest part is getting in the car, and not moving your hip.

Big cars or small trucks do make the whole process a lot easier, but then what do you do about those big outside steps and the little skinny running boards.

Detroit is not in the business of making life any easier for joint replacement patients.

My legs and feet are still swollen from the surgery, so movement is slow and difficult. Yet, the only sure way to get rid of all that swelling is to move around as much as possible.

The day we made the transfer from hospital to rehab center was clear and warm for a mid-December day in Philadelphia; it would be the last one.

The polar cold that we have right now soon replaces it. I question my wife, is this necessary to go to rehab? I was ready to go home, but to rehab I went.

After a 20 minute drive, I pull up to the entrance. My wife gets out and looks for assistance. A few minutes later, a young girl is pushing a wheelchair toward the car. I manage to get out of the car, and in the chair, the young girl is pushing me to my new room.

She is not real good at navigating the entrance and hallway, but I finally arrive at room 35. The nurse is there to inspect my incision, take my blood pressure and temperature.

“It sent the wrong message. We were trying to say something differently, but nevertheless, it conveyed a different message.” – George W. Bush during his last press conference as president

To paraphrase: the nation’s problems had nothing to do with George W. Bush’s decisions, and little to do with his contempt for the U.S. Constitution and the traditional separation of powers.

The problem was the “message.”

It was his final press conference in the White House, or anywhere, and he was going to have it his way.

“The message we sent people was that we hated everybody.”

That was a reference to the GOP’s attempts to exploit the immigration issue for a John McCain victory.

Similarly, Mr. Bush saw his own downfall as a result of the banner on board a U.S. Navy ship that read, “Mission Accomplished,” during the very first victorious days of the war in Iraq.

The death and dying had barely even begun then, but the banner still screamed out that he was a winner.

“[That] was a big mistake,” he admitted in the press conference’s only real moment of candor.
“It sent the wrong message.”

When it came to Hurricane Katrina, he was in the same message mode. “I thought long and hard about having Air Force One land in New Orleans or Baton Rouge,” he said, “But I decided against it because it would have tied up too many police officers.”

That pesky message, again. Here’s a man who saw the entire last eight years of national calamity and shame, not to mention the loss of life in 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Katrina, as nothing more than a public relations glitch.

That’s scary, but it is instructive.

As Mr. Bush and his failed messages drift back into Texas and history, his successor is about to mount the national stage.

Barack Obama wants to be perceived as a man of action who will fix the nation’s economy. He is clearly channeling role models like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As my friend Rae Zigerman used to say, “He should be so lucky.”

What we are getting up to this point is Barack Obama as another “man of message.”

Just listen as he addressed the nation last week in a radio speech, following his tense call to action (message) from George Mason University, when he discussed the frightening reality of an economy that still appeared to be in free-fall:

“These numbers are a stark reminder that we simply cannot continue on our current path. If nothing is done, economists from across the spectrum tell us that this recession could linger for years and the unemployment rate could reach double digits — and they warn that our nation could lose the competitive edge that has served as a foundation for our strength and standing in the world.”

Barack Obama and the Democrats won with their messages and the Republicans lost with theirs.

Every war begins with a message. Every victory is rooted in the right message reaching the right audience, in the right way, at the right time.

It all begins with a good message that is communicated well.

That applies to the leader of the free world, just as it applies to your business.

That’s why I’m here – to develop the messages and implement the best strategy for communicating them.

Don’t look back in anger, lamenting the message that was never sent, as was the case with Katrina, or the message that was mis-communicated like the rueful, “Mission Accomplished.”

I create the message and design the best way of sending it. This year, this time, you have a mission to accomplish. Let’s work together to make sure it happens.

Let’s hope Barack Obama had a great time in Hawaii, mourning the passing of his grandmother and enjoying some dad-and-husband time on the beach on the rich side of the big island.

The rest of us are enduring one of the coldest, most dangerous winters of the new century, waiting anxiously for him to save us.

The much gloried New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt really didn’t work in economic terms. It was just too little, too late.

It offered a nice emotional and psychological lift for a badly demoralized America, but the prolonged neglect perpetrated by Herbert Hoover and the congressional Republicans in the face of the growing Great Depression had simply done way too much damage.

This should sound extremely familiar. Wasn’t that George W. Bush, the lamest of ducks, telling an interviewer that he had not yet made up his mind about saving the American auto industry last week?

What’s he waiting for? Another Muslim country to invade; or the sight of Rome/Washington burning as in the time of Nero? No wonder most Republicans pretend he doesn’t even exist.

President-elect Obama’s massive public works project, as announced, is certainly a nice, much-needed idea, but its immediate prospects for success seem just this side of laughable.

Too many suddenly jobless Americans who are in the process of losing their houses just can’t wait for some nebulous public works project to turn things around.

Franklin Roosevelt found this out to his regret, brilliant and innovative as his plans were. Thus far, Barack Obama has shown us neither brilliant nor innovative.

Roosevelt needed the event of World War II breaking out to create our national myth of full employment. Obama won’t get that.

Either we will continue to fight small colonial wars (call them “Crusades”) against Muslim fanatics (aka “terrorists”), or the whole world will become consumed in some kind of unimaginable Armageddon. I vote for the new Crusades.

Either way, Barack Obama needs considerably more than road and bridge building to save his fellow Americans.

The enduring lessons of George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry are as relevant today as they were back in 1876.

Let’s hope that General David Petraeus, the newly-installed head of America’s Central Command, is as aware of them, as he is the political realities of Washington and Baghdad.

George Custer was a pretty good politician, too, but that didn’t stop him from leading his troops to slaughter.

The 7th Calvary was created in the restive days following the Civil War to bring some sense of military order and safety to the vast reaches of the American West and upper Midwest.

Two similar regiments, both primarily composed of Buffalo soldiers, or freed black veterans, were drummed up for service in the even more dangerous Southwest, where Mexico and the Apache were constant antagonists.

But the 7th was the true glory brigade: Custer was the Army’s top war-fighter, if not strategist; the 7th depended heavily on professional soldiers from European countries, many of them Civil War vets, like Custer, and the outfit’s main mission was defense of the enormous open Canadian border, as well as subjugation of the Plains Indians.

The 7th was seen as an elite unit, a kind of American version of the British Light Brigade. Its duty was clear – fight America’s growing colonial war against the Indians and against any form of European interference that might come spilling south from the frozen, unguarded border with Canada.

It was imperialism, or in the young America’s case, Manifest Destiny, on the cheap. One regiment, with no back-up. It was kind of like the original Dick Cheney/Don Rumsfeld vision for the Middle East. Subdue the terrorists of 1876 (the Plains Indians) with one elite expeditionary force and not too big of a budget.

The strategy was exhibit number one in how not to fight and win a war. But, it must have seemed awfully cost-effective and macho to the neo-cons of 1876.

When the 7th was suddenly and shockingly wiped out by the largest gathering of Plains Indian warriors in the history of North America, it hit the newly united America like a forerunner of 9/11. There was disbelief and dread. And a thirst for vengeance. Just like Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the end, a combination of infrastructure (the railroads and steamboats) and sheer military might (the military expeditions that followed Custer) finally opened the West and subdued the Indians.

David Petraeus has studied all this at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. Determining exactly what he learned from it; however, is still an open question. Especially in Afghanistan where both the British and the Russians lost about 20,000 each before finally withdrawing. Now, the USA is next in line.

The final outcome was never in doubt, but the fate of the 7th became the stuff of myth and legend mainly because America initially asked the regiment to do the impossible.

The parallels with what we are expecting of our military in Iraq and Afghanistan are chilling and steeped in lessons still unlearned.

Every new American generation needs its own re-interpretations of this essential western hero and of the meaning of the country’s last pitched – and utterly disastrous – battle against the largest army of Native American warriors ever assembled.

The Little Bighorn – its causes, its lessons, its consequences, and its enduring memory grip on our national memory is nothing less than the American equivalent of England’s Charge of the Light Brigade. Neither battle seemed urgent or necessary at the time; both bore the stains of poor planning, horrid generalship and a disgracefully lurid waste of fine soldiers.

Yet, in the long view of history, both the Little Bighorn and the Light Brigade now seem pre-ordained by the inevitable forces that shaped the ages in which they took place. The Battle of the Little Bighorn had to happen.

The Light Brigade was a bloody precursor to the even more enormous carnage of the First World War. It underscored the hypocrisy of the British class system and the awful shortcomings of the English military and ruling establishments.

In our case, Little Bighorn was nothing less than the very real martyrdom of soldiers and Sioux, alike, and all in the name of “manifest destiny”, our national policy of imperialism, from sea to shining sea.

It represented equal parts of self-righteousness and self-interest. It would become the wellspring of America’s eventual emergence as the world’s preeminent super-power. But even super-powers have to begin somewhere and in the case of this country, the Battle of the Little Bighorn is as good a place as any to start.

Who could even imagine the United States today without the driving force of that self same manifest destiny? It would take us to Cuba, the Philippines, Europe, Asia, and Afghanistan and Iraqi. In the context of its 19th century era the policy of Manifest Destiny seemed as sensible and necessary as the Cold War or the current War on Terror.

Survival seemed to be at stake, not simply successful expansion. We were trying to win a country back then and an embedded culture of hard-fighting indigenous peoples were stopping us from doing it.

The notion of “genocide” seemed as fanciful and out-of-place as a trip to the moon. No one guessed that it would be the science fiction writers, alone, who could correctly foresee our national future.

The Little Bighorn had to happen precisely as it did, with the ensuing loss of life, for America to grow into the place that it is today. That might not be politically correct, but it does happen to be history. Think of it this way: for Americans in 1876, the massacre at the Little Bighorn was the very visceral twin of the attack on 9/11.

That’s why one reviewer of Donovan’s book termed the decade-long Custer expedition into the West and the Black Hills of the Dakotas as “the American Odyssey.” Custer and his men were not just following orders from Washington, but the dictates of Fate, itself.

But, it would be understandable if this book discouraged others from tackling the same territory. Donovan’s astute and craftily composed history of George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn is really that good. To call it merely definitive hardly does the book justice. It belongs on the shelf with the best of American narrative histories.

General Custer was a colorful, controversial and physically brave Civil War veteran who took command (at least in the field) of the United States Army’s Seventh Cavalry. That unit was to be the best of the best among the country’s thin blue wall of frontier troops. It was never truly designed to be a war-fighting regiment, like those massive, unwieldy units that won the Civil War for the North.

Rather, it was conceived of as a fast-moving, elite light cavalry, fully capable of keeping the peace, protecting America’s western borders, and, above all, maintaining a fragile peace with the best fighting force on the continent, the collected tribes of the Plains Indians. And, George Custer did seem like the ideal man for the job.

Isn’t that the way things always seem to go in war time, however? It all looks great on paper and in the planning sessions, but as soon as the boots of the troopers start to get dirty, those grand schemes have an irresistible way of unraveling.

It happened in Korea, it happened in Vietnam, in Granada, and in monumental terms in Iraqi – just to name a handful of this great nation’s accumulating roster of post-colonial wars. To think that Custer and his fellow soldiers-of-fortune could not make it work in the genteel climate of the late Victorian Age is to finally admit that war might never be the answer. Custer was fully committed to the American Dream and he never hesitated to risk – and finally give – his life in that cause.

And, still, he failed. It may well be that destiny intended him to fail. The taming of the West badly needed some catalyst to give it momentum. The engine for that drive became George Armstrong Custer and his squandered troopers.

Back East, America was already beginning to seethe and bridle at the stresses and instability associated with unplanned urban growth. Immigration was seen as a bigger problem then than now.

Racism had yet to be seriously addressed. Were it not for the renewed focus that the massacre of Custer and his men put on the West and on larger issues of peaceful settlement there, the authentic taming of the West could have taken another costly half-century. The deaths of Custer and his men raised the stakes at precisely the right time.

To attempt to list the merits of this powerful volume is not the stuff of book reviews, but more properly the content of a college course. Any professor of 19th century American history who misses the opportunity to make A Terrible Glory required reading should have his tenure seriously reconsidered.

The best decision that James Donovan made was to avoid the temptation to focus solely on the battle at the expense of the ten year saga that built up to it. In this type of reconsideration, Custer, long-ridiculed as a buffoon among professional military men, begins to look more and more competent with every one of Donovan’s passing pages. He was a fine soldier and leader, given the limitations of what those words meant in the world of 1876.

The complexity of the personalities and the circumstances that created the event of the Little Bighorn represents a multi-layered milieu in which each stratum has to be examined on its own merits. Custer made bad decisions, no doubt. Yet, they were almost always exactly the kind of brass, risky, aggressive decisions that had served him so well during the glory days of the Civil War.

Custer was not acting in a vacuum, either. He was accompanied by an intriguing collection of experienced, well-regarded professional officers. Several had served with great distinction throughout Europe, often in the service of the British Empire. At least half of his men were equally seasoned professional mercenaries from those world-wide campaigns. The other half were very young, somewhat naive American recruits who presumed themselves to be in rather elite company.

At the Little Bighorn a veteran army was massacred by Indian warriors who were well-lead and armed with better weapons than the Americans. The myth of blood-thirsty scalp-hunting troopers set on murdering helpless women and children is just not bore out by the facts.

At one point in our shared history, Custer was seen as a genuine American hero of the first order – a fearless force for the civilizing instincts of an enlightened, 19th century Christian society willing to sacrifice itself for the good of the emerging nation.

Revisionism eventually transformed that view into a depiction of Custer as a clumsy, cartoon-like self-mockery who played at being a general and who represented all that was evil in early American expansionism.

Both views were extreme, but, to a certain extent, each would have found a home in Custer. The triumph of this book is that it never veers away from the complex, compelling reality of the man who died with his command.

In less than three days I will lose my status as a person and once again become a patient.

Becoming a patient ages you faster than Father Time. I will become instantly dependent on people I do not even know to eat, sleep, get well, recover, and turn over in a hard, rubber-covered bed.

I will need all the help I can get begging for pain-killers, sipping on ice, peeing, fighting the nightmares and learning how to move and sit and walk all over again.

I am having my left hip replaced. This is a gruesome operation. I will need blood, oxygen and the super-human skill of a surgeon. I have a lot more faith in the surgeon than I do in my courage and recovery abilities.

The last time, about three years ago, I was in the hospital for the right hip. That hip took a long time to fall apart. It took years and many career moves and four children and one marriage and more deaths of loved ones than I can think about.

I did not know what was going to happen. It was scary, but the fear was buffered by the unknown. Not this time.

This time, I know what to expect. People tell me that should make it better. It doesn’t. It makes it worse because I am such a coward, especially about physical pain. I am not much better dealing with emotional pain, either.

But the thought of how much pain and suffering I will be experiencing, even in brief doses, cripples me inside and outside. I can’t pretend to put up a good, brave front. There is nothing even remotely brave in my entire being.

This hip has only taken three years to fall apart. The pieces of me are breaking off like bark from a very old, very bent tree.

As one of the first of the Baby Boomers, I have already lost the battle with time and age and deterioration. Now I am facing what a general might call an “orderly” withdrawal.

In my heart of hearts I know that it will be a head-long retreat, a crazy, screaming rout. A disaster. I know it is coming, but I can’t help it.

The only appreciation I have developed is a new and uncanny understanding of how important the hip is to a human being. Tell the truth: who has ever even thought about their hips unless you are facing the imminent removal of yours?

Yet, you can do almost nothing that does not involve the moving of your hips. You can’t sit,  walk, run, climb steps, drive a car, stand in place, sweep the front yard, feel comfortable in a chair, get up from the table, move around in bed, hug your wife or child, lift a light bag, or even sit properly on a toilet without using your hips in multiple ways.

That’s why it hurts so much when you need a new hip.
I know. I need one.
I will check back every day if I can to, to let you know what’s happening with the hip and the surgery.

I am doing this to help me keep from going crazy with the fear and anticipation and dread. I am also doing it to share these moments and this experience with my fellow Baby Boomers. All of our clocks are ticking.

H-O-R-S-E, it tells us in the basketball manuals, is a shooting game. You take a shot. If you make it, your opponent must make the exact same shot that you did. H.O.R.S.E. is the best and oldest game in the playgrounds of basketball anywhere the game is played. H.O.R.S.E. is a contest of skill, creativity and daring. So is being the President of the United States.

In H.O.R.S.E. if your opponent misses making the shot that matches yours, he or she now has H. The goal is to force your opponent to spell H-O-R-S-E before you do.

We all know by now that Barack Obama loves basketball – loves playing it, watching it, talking about it, loves the superstition and the ritual of the game. He played his mandatory basketball game the morning of the election. For him, that’s customary. Voting and basketball. Maybe H.O.R.S.E., or a pick-up game with several other players.

President Elect Obama has never lost an election. The basketball superstition is alive and well and working. This will quickly become the national chic now, just like Obama sneaking the occasional cigarette, or Mrs. Obama putting the media in its place, or his little girls becoming the “it” children. That’s how these things work. Ambitious people who can barely throw a ball will now pretend to be part of the universal basketball culture of the urban streets. Count on it. Ranches in Texas are officially so five minutes ago.

This is something we will all have to get used to. Obama is a basketball guy, not a runner like George Bush, or a golfer like Bush’s father, or a half-hearted jogger like the pre-weight loss Bill Clinton. Obama loves the city game – basketball.

There’s something else we will also have to get used to. Obama comes from the toxic waste of big city ward political machines. There aren’t many of them left – Philadelphia, Boston, Providence, Baltimore a little bit, Trenton, Newark, parts of New York, and of course, Chicago. Stealing from the public in grand and outrageous ways is an art form in those cities. Just check into the corruption trial of State Senator Vince Fumo in Philadelphia, now playing in federal court. It makes the governor of Illinois and the rest of the political thieves in Chicagoland look like petty crooks.

It isn’t even Christmas and already Barack Obama has had an H. hung on him by the fraud who sits in the governor’s mansion in Chicago. This is big time H.O.R.S.E. on a national scale. To the people who make and break politicians out there in Chicago and New York and Philadelphia, everything, even Washington, D.C., is just another neighborhood playground – and someone is always looking to start up a game.

There’s even talk now that Governor Blago’s piggish conduct was so irritating and potentially disastrous that Obama’s closest aides tipped the FBI and told them feed on the governor. The governor’s opinion of the incoming President clearly and profanely reflected Obama’s refusal to play quid pro quo. Still, the foul smell lingers in the air like a hot, humid day in the Chicago stock yards.

The new President walked in, eyes wide open, knowing all about the economy disintegrating and two pointless wars going very, very badly. That established the ground rules in this, his biggest game of H.O.R.S.E., ever. But now, he has to reach out and do something positive, something unmistable to match the H that Blago-the-foul mouthed-greedy pig has already hung on him as a badge of dishonor by Chicago association.

If Barack Obama somehow manages to win this initial game of big city neighborhood H.O.R.S.E. it will tell us all we need to know about his future prospects. And our own.

I

picked what might have been the quietest day of the year – the Wednesday after the Great Election of 2008 – to dip back into my life-long, semi-permanent romance with comic books.

I am not a big fan of super hero movies, my tastes, pedestrian as they are, run a lot closer to the CSI television franchises. But, I can’t recall too many times when I ever passed up a chance to read a good comic book, or drool over someone’s lovingly assembled collection. I do suffer from a complete inability to walk past a comic book store and not go in.

Why has this romance become semi-permanent? Inflation — plain and simple. In the glory days of comic books, (Golden Age, Silver Age, and so forth) from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s, you could buy thick, gorgeously drawn and colored first editions, from Superman to Archie, for as little as .10 or .15, or less.

Today, you would have to literally “invest” in those same comic books as collectibles, at an auction. Comic books as art, as “assets”, have more than come into their own.

Here’s a revealing case-in-point: Nicholas Cage, the actor, recently wanted to enter into a movie-with-tie-ins project with his son.  They started shopping it and the bankers began asking all the usual hard questions. Impatient and frustrated, Cage decided to circumvent the bean-counters and finance the project himself. How did he raise the money? He sold part of his comic book collection, reputed to be one of the finest in the country.

You might have to stretch your mind a little here, but beginning in the 1990s, everything from hedge funds to Penn’s Wharton School to  very serious art galleries finally began to pay comic books the long-overdue respect and homage that they had earned as the progressive, ultra-creative, mold-breaking leading edge of the graphic arts industry. Think of it this way, without comic books, there would be no glossy national magazines, very little Internet art, no USA Today, no over-the-top Madison Avenue advertising, a much tamer version of MTV, a limp brand of cable television, and the kind of creative and financial Great Depression in Hollywood that no one even wants to think about.

Comic books re-invented themselves throughout the 1980s and 1990s, moving, simultaneously, on to the Internet and out of the school yard. In part, this has to be due to the reluctance of Baby Boomers like me who grew up on Batman and the Justice League of America, refusing to abandon a cherished childhood delight just because we became adults.

Rather than just giving up on comics, as the generation before us did, we adapted the then crude wonders of story-boarding and computer-assisted animation to bring comic books right along with us. You can look at that one of two ways: lavish self-indulgence or the ingenious triumph of pop culture over the perceived limitations of the old comic book form. I say “perceived”, because those limitations never did exist.

Either way, the new world of comic books thrived. It was a natural progression for Boomer comic book readers to branch off and eventually become Boomer movie producers, who longed to see those timeless comic book heroes up there on the really big screen.

Comicon

What is the single most important gathering that takes place in the entertainment business each year – the event that is a must attend, if you have any hope of selling your movie, television show, high concept deal or next international superstar? It’s the Comicon convention that takes place annually in the blazing summer breezes in San Diego.

Comicon is the global gathering place that serves as the headquarters for the world’s comic book universe. Entertainment Weekly devoted as much coverage and analysis to Comicon this year as it did to the roll-out of the fall television season. Without the comic book-centered buzz that was generated at Comicon, there would have been no Dark Knight in 2008, no Iron Man, no Hell Boy II – pretty much no profits for anybody in Hollywood.

Haunting the Yard Sales

The last comic book I bought was at the end of the summer. I was making my way through one of those huge flea markets that spill over into the parking lot of the closest, nearby supermarket, moving methodically from car trunk to car trunk, from blanket to blanket, stopping the longest anywhere I could glimpse old toys, old jewelry or trading cards. If there are any comic books to be had, that’s where you are likely to find them.

That’s when I saw a deal I couldn’t pass up. Keep in mind, that the price of comics has all but driven me underground as a consumer. I just can’t afford to open my wallet anymore for first run Marvel or DC comics, with as few as 16 pages, lots of nice pictures, decent storylines, but not much that’s really captivating for $4.00 a pop.

A woman who was mostly selling junk books had a 1956 Special Issue of a Classics Illustrated for sale, The Ten Commandments. This line dominated the high end of the hobby from about 1941 to 1962 when the company went under. I have a nice little collection of Classics Illustrated, but nothing approaching the 169 original titles.

It was carefully sealed in plastic, in what looked like very good to excellent condition; 96 perfect pages, including every magnificent scene ever written in the Good Book, depicting Moses and the Pharaoh and the ten heaven-sent plagues.  She was asking $8.00 for it. We settled on $5.00, with a hard-cover promo book from the original Ben Hur movie thrown in. At some point I plan to offer The Ten Commandments on E-Bay. I will be asking a lot more than $8.00, just in case anyone wants to start the bidding right now.

As urban legends go, you will not find anything in North America even approaching the enduring terror of the “Jersey Devil” – the supposedly demonic 13th child of the evil Mrs. Leeds, the former Deborah Smith, who, the story goes, placed a curse on her own offspring the moment he was born, offering the child to Satan, in exchange for escaping the responsibility of raising yet another baby.

The variations of this tale are myriad. But, certain historical clues (it’s questionable whether they rise to the level of fact) have been passed down with an eerie accuracy, from generation to generation: the date of the child’s birth was 1735; the place is an ancient ruins not far from the South Jersey shore called the “Shroud House” (and, yes, I have been there more than once), and the setting was the night of a howling, October Nor’easter during Halloween Week, not unlike the one recently experienced by all the drenched people who attended the Phillies World Series game last Monday night.

The Jersey Devil is an evil presence, of some kind, that has been variously described as a feral son of Satan, complete with wings, horns and the fearsome face of “the beast.”

Other generations have identified it as a “bipedal flying creature with hooves” and a decidedly malicious intent. Dragons; huge, ill-tempered Sandhill Cranes; an unidentified wetlands creature overlooked by evolution, but flourishing in the misty Pine Barrens; and even supposedly extinct pterodactyls have all been linked with the Jersey Devil.

The Leeds Curse

From there, it becomes murky. The curse may have been the work of a wandering gypsy to whom the beautiful, but the mean-spirited, Deborah Leeds denied food and shelter in the storm. The child’s father was definitely not Mr. Leeds, but very possibly a frightened young British soldier, barely older than Mrs. Leeds’s own eldest children, who had deserted into the wilds of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, only to be hidden and then seduced by Deborah Leeds, the woman who had become a surrogate mother to him. From there, the variations become even creepier.

The exact nature of the legendary temptress, Mother Leeds, is also hard to fix. That she was an early and provocative version of what we like to call a hyper-sexed “cougar” is beyond dispute. However, the extent of Mrs. Leeds’ indoctrination into the “craft”, or the black arts of witchcraft, is open to conjecture.

The inhabitants of the Jersey Pine Barrens have always been thought of as an odd and menacing mix of pirates, pioneer survivalists, deserters from both sides during the Revolutionary War, ex-patriots from Imperial Russia to Napoleonic France, and simple, nature-worshipping plain folks who preferred the isolation of the bogs, and tar pits and grist mills to the relative sophistication of places like Philadelphia.

We have the great explorer Henry Hudson to thank for the initial discovery of this vast, forest-covered sweep of woodlands and open space. He sailed in from Raritan and Delaware Bays in the year 1609.

Large encampments of Leni Lenape Indian tribes greeted Captain Hudson initially. By the colonial era, the Pine Barrens were busy and semi-industrial, thanks to lumber, farming and iron smelting. The pig iron ore found in the Pine Barrens soon became a rich and coveted source of raw materials for many implements of war, including cannonballs and grape-shot.

That era ended during the 19th century largely through the introduction of short-haul rail lines, linking places like Philadelphia to the rapidly emerging of shore resorts, from Atlantic City to Cape May. At that point, the mysterious, hostile Pine Barrens – and the ubiquitous Jersey Devil, in all of its manifestations – were best avoided, if possible.

The span between Halloween and late January every year is the Jersey Devil’s traditional time to shine. In fact, no less an authority than this newspaper’s forebearer, The Evening Bulletin, even published a picture of the alleged creature back in 1909. It was during the week of January 16 to the 23 that year that the Jersey Devil made his most audacious and destructive forays into the Greater Philadelphia area, devouring livestock, setting fires (more on that later), destroying property of all kinds and threatening humans, from downtown Philadelphia to the Jersey shore towns.

Jersey Devil Lore

As part of the native mythology of the South Jersey and Philadelphia region, the Jersey Devil has withstood the test of time, skepticism and post-modern disbelief. He is intricately intermingled within the larger fabric of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. This huge expanse of land (well over 1.1 million square acres) encompasses 22 percent of New Jersey, including seven counties and 56 small cities and towns. The Pine Barrens represent the largest preserve of protected open space on the Middle Atlantic coast, from Boston to Richmond.

Today, the mystical creature has spawned not only thousands of carefully recorded sightings, included those made by police, firefighters and park rangers, but an impressive body of literature, many movies and television shows (including Episode #5 of the X-Files), dozens of clubs and state-sponsored “hunts”, a cottage industry of tourist items, from T-Shirts to videos, one National Hockey League team, the New Jersey Devils, too many web sites and blogs to list, and a small, but steady stream of scholarly articles and graduate school theses.

Among the most recent sightings of the creature are several by firefighters engaged in battling the massive forest fires that regularly lay waste the vast acreage of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. These descriptions report a striking similarity: an enormous demonic face, complete with horns, blazing eyes and a shrieking voice, with the creature appearing to rise out of the flames and feed on them.

Now, before you begin attributing these reports to the same kind of people who believe whole-heartedly in UFO abductions, here’s a 1993 account from an on-duty Park Ranger in the Wharton State Forest who was patrolling the Mullica River area: “It was approximately six feet tall, with horns on its head and matted black fur.”

History as Witness

Over time, Jersey Devil sightings have been reported by many credible witnesses and prominent figures.

Commodore Stephen Decatur, the naval hero of the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 was stationed in the Pine Barrens shortly after hostilities with England ended. The Hanover Iron Works, in the Pineys, was a major center for manufacturing cannonballs and other ammunition during much of the 19th century. In fact, today, the Pine Barrens are sill home to several, classified military buildings and ranges, beginning with the Lakehurst Naval Air Station.

Commodore Decatur’s Jersey Devil experience involved the testing of cannonballs and shot that was enroute to the war against the Barbary Pirates. While on the firing range, Decatur and is party reported being attacked by a creature fitting the description of the Jersey Devil. In that instance, the creature was driven off by cannon fire, but not at all injured.

Folklorists also point to Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Emperor Napoleon and the former King of Spain, who had been offered safe haven by the United States. He lived in Bordentown, New Jersey, for 15 years. During a hunting expedition into the Pine Barrens, Bonaparte’s people were also attacked and held at bay by a creature matching Decatur’s description and all the other early sightings of the Jersey Devil.

Additional witnesses abound, from Captain Kidd, the pirate, to a team working for the Federal Writers’ Project in New Jersey, during the Depression.

John McPhee’s Pine Barrens

New Yorker writer, John McPhee, was also fascinated by the Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil. His 1967 bestseller, The Pine Barrens gloried in the ecological uniqueness of these dense forests of oak, pine, cedar and bog berries. He fought to preserve this invaluable open space and the 17 trillions of gallons of pure water under them in the East Coast’s largest untouched aquifer.

In part through his efforts, the Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil were both included in the creation of the Pinelands National Reserve, in 1978. This act has safeguarded the pygmy forests of the Pineys, its 700,000 residents and the misty, mysterious wetlands where the Jersey Devil is still said to roam the unspoiled land. Major development is prohibited, although builders and municipalities still manage to gouge out Piney land on the fringes, here and here.

As John McPhee explained, the one thing still standing in their way is the myth and lore of the Jersey Devil, the unearthly protector of the Pine Barrens.

Blessed Be the child of Mother Leeds.

In one important way, I am a lot like John McCain. When it comes to money and finance, I know what I don’t know. Case in point: I am not allowed to touch the checkbook in our house, under any circumstances. I am not exactly certain what drawer the checkbooks are kept in. Trust me, it’s better that way.

I pretty much get an allowance, including a role of quarters for parking meters, and I always overspend on that. My wife, bless her, anticipates this. As I said, I recognize my shortcomings.

Up until about a month ago, the Republican Presidential candidate never had a problem admitting this, either. I’m not all that well-versed on the economy, Senator McCain told us, paraphrasing. That’s why I look for good people to help me there – including Warren Buffett, who’s voting, he claims, for Barack Obama. And, presumably, Mrs. McCain, a beer-distributor zillionaire, who can handle my money for me, any time she wants. Like her husband, I can spot talent, too.

All that changed, of course, when Wall Street suddenly fell down and couldn’t get up. Then came news of the government-backed bailout, and then came Senator McCain’s October surprise – he was taking time off from the Presidential race to figure out what was happening in Washington and in Congress and on Wall Street. And he invited his adversary to join him. This was about three days before one of their nationally-televised debates.

It was at that precise moment, I believe, that the majority of the American people, stopped whatever it was that they were doing, gulped, and decided to take one more long, hard look at both of these candidates. That was also when McCain’s numbers started to go down and have never stopped. The minute the American people wise up and start counting the change in their pockets, you can pretty much depend on them to snap out it and do the right thing.

Barack Obama probably just rolled his eyes when he heard that, pretty much the way he must have rolled his eyes when he saw Sarah Palin being introduced as McCain’s running mate for the very first time. I have this secret vision of Michelle Obama reaching over to her husband that night, maybe they were watching television in the living room of a hotel suite after putting the kids in bed for the night, sipping drinks and trying to get enough rest to get ready for the next day. His tie was off and she had her shoeless feet propped up on the living room table in the suite, resting them on a pillow. They both looked and felt exhausted.

Obama took another drink – a big one – and his wife muttered something to him about, “that pig in lipstick.”

At least that’s the way I want to believe it happened, because that’s how it would have happened between me and my wife, if one of us were running for President.

Money will ultimately decide this election – not leadership, or patriotism or the war on terror. And, there is nothing wrong with that. People have been voting with their wallets for generations.

This time, in terms of money – our money – there have been so many hands in the cookie jars of corporate America that if you started arresting people for grand theft, you would run out of federal prison cells so quickly that you would have to start using tents, instead.

That’s the current moral outlook of the men and women (but mostly men) who run corporate America. That is, never steal anything small. Never leave any money on the table. Never give the investors an even break, not if you can chisel them, instead.

This isn’t business strategy. This isn’t anything-goes-hardball on Wall Street. This is stealing. This is jamming your pockets with cash and getting the hell out of town. This is the kind of stealing that, if you do it in the Third World, and you get caught, they make you stick out your right hand and then they cut it off.

No one is calling for that to start happening here, in America, but no one is talking against it, either. That’s how bad things have gotten, money-wise, and that’s why this will be a money election.

Every once in a while I do some work for the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. I take the brilliant research that’s done by their faculty members and I write stories about it for their online publication – Knowledge@Wharton.

Last month, one of their top professors, Peter Cappelli , a management expert, among other things, was the focus of a very insightful article (not one of mine, unfortunately.)

AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac needed government bailouts or takeovers to survive. Lehman Brothers is in bankruptcy. Merrill Lynch has been sold. The shocking succession of corporate meltdowns signals a massive leadership failure across the financial services landscape, according to Wharton faculty. Executives at these troubled firms may have ignored or failed to see the level of risk their companies were taking on in a crusade to enhance results and their own compensation. When markets turned against them, their firms — big as they were — crumbled.

Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli says this type of lapse in leadership dates to the 1980s when companies began to focus on aligning executive incentives with shareholder interests. He believes an excessive focus on individual financial goals, at the expense of managing in the best interests of the company overall, is at the root of the leadership debacle that has rocked the financial services sector.

“We ought to start thinking about whether this idea is really working,” says Cappelli. “It seems to work for the people in charge, but is it really working for the company? It’s certainly not working in the broader society. The shareholders and the executives who have shares in the company are in trouble, but this is spilling over into the economy in a way that I haven’t seen before.

Cappelli says too many managers simply choose not to lead. He says managers believe that if they hire smart people and provide huge financial incentives for individual results, management of the firm will take care of itself.

“If they hire smart people . . . management of the firm will take care of itself.” Unless I am mistaken, this is the economic plan that John McCain originally proposed. It is also the plan that George W. Bush endorsed and it is unmistakably the greed-is-good philosophy that Ronald Reagan created back in the anything-goes 1980’s.

There’s one big problem here: it doesn’t work, it has brought us to our knees, financially-speaking, and it gives the CEOs and bosses at the top a license to steal.

The way it works right now is that if you are the big, big boss, your salary is tied-in directly to how much money the stock-holders are making to be making, on paper. No limits. Feel like making $200 million a year? That’s cool; just keep churning the shares of your company in the stock market to manipulate the numbers, inflate them and keep them artificially high. If that means making bad loans and taking too many huge risks, so be it. Churn and churn and churn. You always pay yourself, first. The first place we saw this was in the old business. Now, it is everywhere.

This is stealing. This is wrong. There are no other words. You are getting paid, not for what you do, or know, but for the phony paper profits you can generate in Wall Street’s thin atmosphere.

Before the 1980s and the Reagan greed revolution, this was not the case.

There was a limit to how much you could make and there was also an expectation that you had to be good at something – sales, marketing, management, invention, whatever – in order to get the top job, in order to get any job.

The “trickle down” philosophy of greed – the one that George Bush, the father, ridiculed as “voodoo economics”, when Ronald Reagan first proposed it, has brought us to the catastrophe we now face.

I have a piece of advice for the people in the government who are now writing the checks for the Great Corporate Bailout.

Stop tying-in executive compensation to artificial stock market profits. That’s killing the economy.

Start paying CEOs and big bosses a salary, just like everybody else, a salary that a board of directors has the guts to set and stick to. And, if the CEOs and the bosses at the top don’t like that – let them go out and look for another job, just like everybody else.

Where is Sarah Palin? Has Waldo seen her? Are they both at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands looking for Jimmy Hoffa?

Don’t we have the Election of the 21st Century closing in fast? Shouldn’t she be busy? Where is the Governor of Alaska? Is she about to drop another hockey puck at a Philadelphia Flyers game?

America needs answers.

On a magnificent autumn day in Pennsylvania and the Middle Atlantic States, Senators John McCain and Barrack Obama, early risers, both, are slugging it out in Virginia, where the leaves haven’t yet hit their colorful fall peak this October, but where 13 electoral votes are still there for the taking.

Obama is on his way to a rally in Saint Louis, Missouri, where he will draw 100,000 people to see him in the largest city in a state with 11 electoral votes.

Senator Joe Biden is sounding more and more like his edgy, in-your-face self out in a place called Lancaster, Ohio, carrying the flag for the Democrats, screaming himself hoarse and saying anything he can think of to keep our focus squarely on this battle-ground state’s fiercely contested 20 electoral votes.

This is big time politics. This is playing for all the marbles.
But, where is Sarah Palin and what is she doing?

McCain, Obama and Biden are important people, doing important things, with hard-hitting campaign promises in states that will decide the Presidential election.
So, where the heck is America’s new “it” mom, Governor Sarah Palin?

Less than three weeks before the election, this seems like a fair question. After all, isn’t this the woman who saved John McCain’s bacon during the dullest Republican National Convention in history? Was that two months ago, or two years ago?

Remember Maine

Well, I can tell you how Governor Palin was dressed today – another one of her trademark, red, waist-hugging jackets. The up-swept bun was in place and the mom-glasses were perched at exactly the right spot on her un-photo-retouched nose (How rude of you, Newsweek).

Governor Palin was standing at a microphone talking about a civic activist group called ACORN and their hyper-aggressive voter registration efforts. She makes it sound like Josef Stalin and Ho Chi Minh are leading an ACORN conspiracy to benefit Senator Obama. And here, the only thing we knew about ACORN was that it used to try to stop mortgage red-lining in the poorest neighborhoods in Philadelphia.
Here’s an even better question – Why is Sarah Palin in the wilderness of Maine, in the middle of October, where there are more trees and moose than people, and all of a piddling four – count them, one, two, three, four – electoral votes?

We could be making a big mistake here, but the Palin-McCain ticket is beginning to omit the sickly-sweet scent of a campaign that is already starting to ask itself — What do we do when it’s over? Where do we go next?

Well, we know what Sarah Palin is up to next; she’s making an appearance on Saturday Night Live, right there, in person, in the flesh, with the incomparable Tina Fey. And the election clock keeps ticking.

It is beginning to unravel now, and that is never a pretty thing to see.

Senator McCain is still clinging to a nobody named Joe-the-Plumber, even though Joe has been famously discredited as not being a plumber, at all, and some distinctly unheroic stuff about his background is coming out, little-by-little.

Joe-the-P is a nobody who walked up to Barack Obama on the campaign trail and announced that he had nearly $300,000 in loose change burning a hole in his pocket and he was thinking of investing in a plumbing business. What could Obama do for him?

Yes, that’s pretty creepy, in my opinion. I don’t have $300,000 in loose change. When I think about investing, I usually think about investing in a $4.50 cheesesteak for lunch, or a ten-pack of Septa bus tokens. Sorry, Joe-the-P, but you are way out of my league, I identify with you like I identify with Warren Buffet – but Buffet has good manners.

Earth-to-McCain-and-Palin: The “little” people out there, the ones sweating their bills and utility company shut-off notices, don’t have almost $300,000 to invest in a small business. Nobody cares about Joe-the-Plumber. You two are the only ones laughing.

Dropping the Puck

We are seeing the beginning of the end now. It all came undone about a week ago. That’s when Sarah Plain was making one of her frequent trips to Philadelphia – she was here so much that for a while there you almost thought she might have been establishing a temporary residency long enough to enter a new beauty pageant.

In reality, of course, she was just raising money and lying low, hiding from the national press. She hosted an event during one of those hush-hush pre-Biden debate weekend visits.

The enormously rich man who owns the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, Ed Snyder, who could also own all the politicians he wants, stopped by her invitation-only party and had a drink. He also wrote a check. He does that sort of thing like the rest of us paste on a stamp and mail a letter. No hidden agenda there.

A couple weeks later, the Flyers were getting set to open their National Hockey League season. A local radio station had already run a contest to select the real Hockey Mom of the Year. She seemed like a lovely, deserving woman.

That’s when some marketing genius decided to horn in on the real hockey mom’s night by running Sarah Palin out there on the ice and stealing the real mom’s thunder.

It is never a smart idea to big-time people like that in the city of Philadelphia. You also don’t want to screw around with their sports teams.

Let’s put it this way – it was not a good night for the clueless Governor of Alaska.
The booing started hours before when she was checking into a hotel on Broad Street.

Guys were running the street, lighting flairs, holding up some pretty bad signs and yelling like they do at Flyers games. Philadelphia Police had a busy night out there, too. Philadelphia’s Democrat registration edge is about 8-to-1.

Once they arrived in the arena at the foot of Broad Street, it didn’t get any better. The Flyers were playing the New York Rangers and they have guy who was born in Anchorage, Alaska. Governor Palin kept getting her picture taken with him. Wisely, she did not stay for the whole game.

Governor Palin left Philadelphia early during that trip. But, according to broadcast reports, she kept the hockey puck she dropped as a souvenir.

Last season, the Philadelphia Flyers made one of those rare last-to-first turnarounds.

Ever since their night of Sarah Palin as a phony Philadelphia Hockey Mom, the Flyers have barely even scored and seem to be intent on making it a first-to-last season.

Hockey fans are not happy. All of them keep complaining about Sarah Palin showing up to shove politics down their hockey-loving throats.

When it is less than three weeks before the Presidential election and everybody else is out doing important things in important places and you are running for Vice President, but they still have you hidden up in Maine, with its four electoral votes – well, things like that don’t happen by accident. Sarah Palin dropped the puck.

Paul Vallas, thin, balding, nearly gaunt, was standing at a big podium on a dark little stage, in the lower level of St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. The hospital is located at Front Street and Erie Avenue, in North Philadelphia, in the neighborhood they call the Badlands. That’s a long way from any place you’d like to see your own kids grow up.

Everyone was there for the graduation ceremony of an extraordinary, high achievement program called Health Tech. But the only thing they wanted to talk about today, celebrate, really, was Kal Rudman and all the kids he has saved – not merely helped, but saved. Once again, in a setting that would never make the headlines, Kal Rudman was more than living up to his nickname as the Guardian Angel.

“To me,” Vallas said, “Kal is like a force of nature. It’s fitting this is my last public event in Philadelphia because one of the first people I talked to when I came here five years ago was Kal Rudman. All he wanted to know was how could he help. Well, he helped plenty.”

Seated in the front row, next to his wife, Lucille, Rudman, who is more than familiar with the spotlight and the microphones after 40 years in the music business, with stops at the Today show, 20/20, Time, The New Yorker, Forbes, and about 50 television variety shows that he produced himself, looked just a little uncomfortable. But that’s Kal Rudman; he would much rather be doing something, even in his mid-70s, than listening to someone talk about things he has already accomplished.

Vallas called Health Tech, a mentoring and scholarship program aimed at economically disadvantaged and at-risk high school students from North Philadelphia, “the most successful program of its kind that I have ever been involved with, I cite it as the national role model all the time.”

Picking up on a statement that an administrator from St. Chris’s had made earlier, Vallas continued, “It is true that these programs come and go. It isn’t easy to sustain them. Sometimes the school district’s support fizzles out and sometimes the corporate sponsor fizzles out. What makes Health Tech different, what has seen this one survive three CEOs, is the fact that Kal Rudman has dispensed a considerable portion of his own wealth to fund the scholarships, to offer his wisdom and to be there every single time that the students needed him.”

Kal Rudman has, in fact, heard things like this before. How much has he given away to scholarship programs, to assorted police and fire departments, to houses of worship of every imaginable creed, to schools and shelters and more hopeless cases than even Saint Jude knew about? “Millions,” says a close friend of the Rudmans, “many, many millions. As fast as it came in he gave it away. He still is. Their foundation has practically no overhead. Kal wouldn’t put up with that. Every penny goes to worthy causes. Kal writes the checks himself.”

Often, those checks are big checks, really big ones, about three feet by four feet. The sense of theatre in that touches something deep inside the man. As Rudman likes to say, “Everybody has two businesses – the business they’re in and show business.”

Kal Rudman would know.

A generation or so ago, Kal Rudman was Simon Cowell, as in American Idol – with a few significant differences. First of all, when it comes to the business end of the music trade, and to picking out and promoting future stars, Rudman knew – and still knows – precisely what he’s talking about. He calls it “understanding both the demographics and the psycho-graphics of the audience.”

His flagship trade publication, among six, is Friday Morning Quarterback, still flourishing as a bible of the music industry. Forbes called Rudman one of the major influences in the leisure and entertainment industry in the United States. Time and The New Yorker pretty much agreed in thoughtful profiles. While the Simon Cowells are pretty much road-show attractions, Kal Rudman and his generation created pop music.

Unlike Cowell, who never finished high school and doesn’t talk about it, Rudman graduated with the highest honors from Central High School and the University of Pennsylvania, the classic Philly education, and went on to graduate school, in Special Education, at Temple University. Originally, he planned to be a doctor, but Rudman’s expanding life and profession got in the way.

He spent the beginning of his career as a science and special ed teacher who moonlighted as a music guy, landing his first show biz break-through as the Rhythm & Blues expert for the trades, and then branching out from there: Top 40 Disk jockey, music magazine publisher, long-time Today show and NBC music correspondent, television producer (in partnership with TV entrepreneur and star-maker Merv Griffin), 20/20 talking head for any entertainment stories that came along, live show impresario — it is a long and impressive list for a guy who still lives and works where he grew up.

If Rudman predicted that a song, a singer, a group, or a trend (he called the emergence of heavy metal and rap long before the mainstream, for example) would be big, the smart people simply asked, “How big?” Rudman was uncanny that way. He respected the artist and the process, regardless of the genre. In music, Rudman’s stamp of approval not only translated into bookings and dollars, his certification was viewed as credibility itself. Rudman’s reputation grew to be the-showman-with-the-intellect. Over 40 years later, he’s still riding that horse.

To appreciate the philanthropic motivation of Kal Rudman, it’s not a bad idea to ask some very simple questions: Who pays for the free fire detectors the Fire Department installs for the poor and the elderly? Where does much of the money come from to post the rewards offered for tips by the Crime Commission of Philadelphia? When the city’s police dogs were getting sick because they needed better facilities for their care, who paid for it? Many times, if a house of worship, or a school – any faith, any local district – is vandalized or destroyed, who writes the check that gets the place over the hump and gets the fix-up started? If cops or firemen want to go to college to finish a degree, or earn one, in important majors like criminal justice or fire science, and there’s no money to pay for it, who comes up with scholarships? When police bullet-proof vests, or motorcycles, or anything else they need wears out, where do the new ones come from? Ten years ago when the School District of Philadelphia and St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children needed an angel to help underwrite Health Tech, one of the great success stories in public education, anywhere in the country, who did the district turn to?

These aren’t trick questions, but they all do have the same answer: Kal Rudman. He moves in basic, meat-and-potatoes, unheralded ways to make good things happen and bad stuff go away, at least for a little while. It is the innate signature of a profoundly humble man.  “ ‘Why do I do it?’” he responds to a question, “all those thing needed to be done. The work is never finished. All I do is connect the dots.”

All that Rudman has ever asked in return is that the beneficiaries of his extraordinary generosity work with him and care as much as he does. You might be surprised how often that doesn’t happen. But Rudman is a world-wise man. “In show business,” he says, “everybody wants the same thing – F&F, fame and fortune. That’s my business, too. The question is: How much do you want it?

“It’s a pleasure to respond to people who want to work with you; people who aren’t afraid to connect with you. I pay attention to everything. In the end, money, including my money, is always portable, it can move around.”

The fact that his money has not moved around on the Health Tech program that he has been supporting for ten years — approaching about half a million dollars by the time the current class will be ready to graduate – is a tribute to the program and to Rudman. He knows the students and their families by name. They’re comfortable talking with him, hugging him, trying to tell him what it means to them.

Paul Vallas explained what Health Tech has done for North Philadelphia’s children, “Across this city we lose kids because of academic problems, but we also lose them because of their own low expectations. Kal Rudman and Lucille Rudman never allowed that to happen. They lift children up.”

Health Tech began, fitfully and with a lot of fingers crossed, back in 1994. The plan was inspired by Louis Lessick, a teacher at Olney High School. He wanted to give kids, especially at-risk kids, a reason to keep trying, a direction, and an exposure to a profession they could pursue all the way through school.  But nobody would fund it.

“Ever since Kal came onboard we’ve stayed in business and expanded,” Lessick adds. “He changed everything. And he isn’t just the guy with the check. These kids can call him anytime. He’ll talk to them like his own children. He’s there when they need him.” Today, Health Tech involves freshmen through seniors and is also supported by United Way, Communities in Schools of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Youth Network, among others. Rudman has focused it as the educational prototype.

“I fully intend to prove that it’s exportable,” Vallas says of Health Tech, “because I want to try to start something similar in New Orleans – except we won’t have a Kal Rudman behind us, stepping in to change lives.”

Luckily for Philadelphia, the Guardian Angel has his hands full here.

First things first: What, exactly, are the life sciences?

They’re all the “good stuff”, explains Donna Gentile O’Donnell, Ph.D., and by that she means the hard sciences, the micro technology, the miracle medicines, the diagnostic tools, the environmental breakthroughs, the data retrieval, and the food, nutrition and patient care research that can prolong both the length and the quality of human life. In other words, for most of us, the life sciences are the applied brainstorms that make life so much more worth loving.

The other good news is that for the last 40 years or so, greater Philadelphia has been as strategically positioned for life sciences advances as any region in the country. There are approximately 700 schools, companies, labs, high tech research facilities, and other organizations dedicated to the life sciences in this area – many of them are among Philadelphia’s employment leaders.

While it may be accurate to say that the manufacturing base has declined and decayed in Southeastern Pennsylvania, it is equally correct to say that the research and development sector has never been better.

In this rarefied world of high risk/high reward research and investment, the rock stars are the struggling entrepreneurs, fueled by equal parts of inspiration and stubbornness. They have accumulated their knowledge, peered through their microscopes, earned their multiple degrees, and glimpsed their visions. They are convinced they can change the world – or, at least some significant part of it – and because so many of them prove right about that the smart money hates to bet against them.

The next time a headline-making advancement in bio-science or medicine is announced by one of these lab-rat entrepreneurs, there’s a very good chance that Donna Gentile O’Donnell’s delicate fingerprints will be all over it, thanks, in part, to her pursuit of that smart money.

In a career that has ranged from medicine, to Philadelphia Department of Health administration, to public policy advocacy, to campaigning for elective office (City Council at-large), to running a major non-profit, she’s now in the business of bio-medical miracle-making – she goes out and finds the money that makes the breakthroughs feasible.

Connecting Technology With People’s Lives

And, this is where Donna Gentile O’Donnell comes in, literally. At this precise moment, she has hurriedly swept into her office, just off the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, behind the Four Seasons. The chic location works well for her. It underscores her status as the reigning muse (think Dr. Cuddy on House, but even hotter) of these budding geniuses of the life sciences.

She wastes little time in demonstrating her grasp of the mating of the visionary with the practical. A big, shiny, chrome-platted jukebox dominates her outer office. It works, too, and in no time at all, she and her guests are gently moving to the Happy Days black vinyl records that the machine lifts and deposits on the turn-table, song after song. It’s almost like watching a demonstration of Robbie-the-Robot from an old sci-fi movie.

“I needed some kind of an object, some icon, that would symbolize in a very visual way the connection between technology and the way we live,” she explained. As the last song ends, she dances her way into an office that everywhere recalls her own background in politics and policy.

Her husband is attorney Bob O’Donnell, the former speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and one of the most honest and qualified candidates to ever run for Governor of the Commonwealth. Both of them worked hard and smart on that Democratic primary campaign, but Bob O’Donnell ran into the Bob Casey (the father) meat-grinder of the western Pennsylvania county machine that hates all things Philadelphian and the obstinacy of single-issue voters (abortion).

After that experience Bob O’Donnell left politics and his wife re-launched a career in public policy that had begun during the first Ed Rendell mayoral term when she served as the city’s Health Commissioner for policy and planning. Those were dark days; indeed, with the city’s health policies pretty much in the pre-computer era. Mrs. O’Donnell’s history with the morass of Philadelphia’s healthcare dates back to the decline and fall of the old Philadelphia General Hospital.

The politics of the collapse surrounding that institution formed the basis of her Ph.D. dissertation. Later, she turned that painstaking research and keen assessment into the best book ever written on a city-run county hospital, Provider of Last Resort.

Chasing the Money

Most of the time, the main thing standing in the way of getting the bio-medical wonders out of the laboratory and into the clinical treatment of patients is money. And, not just any money, either. This is investment money, risk money, dream-making money, push-the-pot-to-the-middle-of-the-table money — venture capital to be spent on unproven technology or medicine.

As she explains it, there has never really been a “good” time to go out in search of that kind of financing. Bankers have an instinctive aversion to start-up companies; grant money is supposed to be about research, not some visionary’s projected profits, and most of the individuals wealthy enough to underwrite a new venture of any kind, expect ownership in return. The slope is indeed slippery.

The country’s current, prevailing conditions of massive government spending on war, a recession that sinks deeper every day, and much of the profit sector of the American economy in free-fall, have all combined to make this pursuit of venture capital for entrepreneurial purposes more difficult right now than it has been at any time in history – and that includes The Great Depression, when desperation aided the cause of inventiveness.

Yet, this is where Donna Gentile O’Donnell, petite, passionate and darkly alluring spends her days. She may have one of the most challenging jobs in the world.

“I connect the dots,” she says modestly. “That’s a simplification, but, really, my role is to show people how to get from where they are to where they need to be. And, of course, I try to help them along the way because so many of the things they’re working on have the potential to save, or change for the better, so many lives, in very dramatic ways.”

Mrs. O’Donnell would know all about that. Back at the beginning, her beginning, she was a critical care nurse. That’s still the way she sees her place in the universe. The people who come to her for help are very much like her patients from her nursing days. And it’s her mission to make them better.

The Life Sciences Portfolio

These days Mrs. O’Donnell works for the Eastern Technology Council as the managing director of that organization’s life sciences portfolio. She also holds hands, inspires confidence, calms nerves, urges people not to give up and, naturally, chases money in that capacity. Former Governor Tom Ridge probably deserves the most credit for having the foresight to urge business leaders and financiers to create the ETC.

“The Council exists,” Mrs. O’Donnell explains, “mainly because of the infrastructure that are here in terms of bio-medical research and development, grouped around colleges and universities and our teaching and research hospitals.” You could also throw in the huge market share that many of the pharmaceutical companies located in and around Philadelphia enjoy, although that particular picture is always changing, thanks to mergers and acquisitions.

California had its Silicon Valley and Massachusetts had been working diligently to develop the high tech identity of the Boston to Cambridge corridor. But Pennsylvania was, as usual, dangerously behind the times.

“Tom Ridge understood some fundamental truths,” she goes on. “The future would be in global market places. Venture capital mattered. Finding money short-term to bridge funding gaps was essential. The growth of healthcare and the research supporting that business was the best thing this part of the state had going for it in terms of employment.”

Governor Ridge’s terms in office, before being pulled away to launch the department of Homeland Security, in Washington, happened to coincide with the settlement of the federal government’s lawsuits against the big tobacco companies. Pennsylvania’s share amounted to approximately $11 billion.

“Governor Ridge,” she says, picking up the story, “convinced the state legislature to invest about 98 percent of the settlement money in healthcare projects and growth.”

That’s high praise coming from a Democrat activist like Donna Gentile O’Donnell. On a day-to-day basis, under the leadership of people like Donna Gentile O’Donnell and Eastern Tech Council boss, Rob McCord, the ETC tries to provide contacts, leads on sources of financing, market information and education seminars for its 600 members. On average, the Council stages some kind of event every five days.

As Donna Gentile O’Donnell pursues her vocation of finding and mentoring the next Dr. Jonas Salk, she sounds more convinced than ever that public policy decisions, especially in the healthcare arena, can have a determining effect not only on how people live – but also on whether or not they will live.

“The life sciences are the new frontier,” she says, echoing another bright young leader from a distant time. “The challenge is to properly manage it and move it forward. I’ve spent most of my life trying to do things I had no business doing,” she adds. “And, I have no intention of stopping now.”

Just as you would expect of an industry insider and emerging Hollywood mogul, Juliet Goodfriend has just gotten back from the Toronto Film Festival. Not that she is at all comfortable with descriptions like that.

“My eyes need a rest from watching so many movies in so few days,” she says. “I saw 30 movies, or enough pieces of them, that I was just able to finish up 28 reviews.”

Yes, 30 films is a lot of movies to watch; what she leaves unsaid is the fact that it’s also a great many really bad movies, too. But, that’s what film festivals are all about – pretension, self-indulgence and, just maybe, if you are lucky enough to be in the building when it happens, when proverbial lightening does strike, cinematically speaking, festivals are also about the creation of soaring, inspiring, enduring art, thanks to some of the most unlikely geniuses on the planet.

Yet, self-effacing Juliet Goodfriend is exactly the kind of opinion-setter and tastemaker in the world of films that events like the Toronto, or Venice, or Cannes Festivals are aiming for. These glamorous gatherings have little to do with making sales or hitting budgets, and everything to do with creating buzz, pre-selling reputations and lining up votes for the Oscars and other similar awards.

If their movie is big enough and glitzy enough, and offers enough brand-name stars, the producers and exhibitors at the festivals will eventually pull in all the candy-eating-teens-at-the-suburban-multiplex that they can handle. There might not be too many Dark Knights among them, but Hollywood will make its money, just the same. That’s all but guaranteed.

However, Juliet Goodfriend and her followers are something entirely different. They represent the critical mass of word-of-mouth spokespersons, review and blog writers, and uber-discriminating movie-buffs with money, friends in high places and enough free time to really work the upward trajectory of an art house or independent release. They are among the most prominent of the grown-ups who can certify a film as a genuine find and a director as a person worth watching. That’s power. And, you can’t buy it, not even in Hollywood, because these kinds of film institute third-party endorsements are seldom for sale.

Ms. Goodfriend is the president and founder of the Bryn Mawr Film Institute (BMFI); and she is a refreshingly old school boss, with a cubicle of an office and a busy desk – she does the writing and the typing herself, goes and pulls out the documents she needs, and worries through the details like everyone else on the small staff.

Ms. Goodfriend and the approximately 10,000 people (including an astonishing 80 percent retention rate) who have become members or patrons of the Bryn Mawr Film Institute since its opening just a few years ago represent the best of all possible worlds for the ego-driven players in Hollywood.

“Our audience (approximately 130,000 a year) is primarily educated adults who are either flourishing in mid-career, or are enjoying busy, active retirements,” explains Andrew J. Douglas, Ph.D., director of education at Bryn Mawr. “Through our classes, we reach these people, plus students of film, ranging from third grade through graduate school.

“Our role is to help them make sense of what they see. They already love film; they are serious students of the art form. We’re giving them the opportunity to see some very personal works, signature pictures that can invest a director or screenwriter a reputation for quality and well-crafted storytelling.”

The Reasons Behind the BMFI

“I’ve always believed that movies are the American art form,” Juliet Goodfriend explains.
“Great stories are what propel social opinion and social action. They emerge from great visuals and great narrative. Making movies is more collaborative and involving than any other art form. But so is watching a great film; that’s also a collaborative undertaking. There’s nothing like watching it with an audience. That’s the way the best writers and directors want to watch it.”

What Juliet Goodfriend is worrying about right now is both the quality and the quantity of those film festival movies. “I think we’ll be all right,” she says, sounding just a little wary. “There were some very good films this year, not as many as last year, but we’ll be fine, I think.”

The Bryn Mawr Film Institute specializes in independent, documentary, art house and classic films – as well as new first-time screenings by local filmmakers.
“We’re not the most ‘mainstream,’” adds Andrew Douglas.

But the BMFI and its theater also screens a surprising number of first-run Hollywood biggies. For example, the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, is on the screen at Bryn Mawr right now. That’s no accident because the very idiosyncratic Coen brothers are festival and film institute favorites.

Last week, on the occasion of the BMFI’s biggest fundraiser of the year, the Institute celebrated the career of Steve Sabol and NFL Films, with the presentation of its Silver Screen Inspiration Award. That’s a fine choice of a local filmmaker to honor, but, more importantly, it also demonstrates the BMFI’s willingness to break away from the art house mold to better reflect the interests of its very wide audience.

Long before her foray into the movies, Juliet Goodfriend spent about 30 years growing a very successful business in the cut-throat field of pharmaceutical marketing research (Strategic Marketing Corp, Bala, London, Beijing) and serving a very broad community, including Bryn Mawr College, as an active and astute member of over a dozen non-profit boards.

In fact, it was that intense board experience that prompted her into taking action in 2000 to save the old Bryn Mawr Theater, on Lancaster Pike in Bryn Mawr. As it turned out, she discovered that the only way she could save the building (now on the National Register of Historic Places) was by founding the Bryn Mawr Film Institute and thereby taking on Hollywood, not to mention several real estate investors who were salivating over the space that the BMFI and theater now occupies.

“They wanted to gut the theater, which had really fallen on hard times by then,” she says, “and use it to house the Philadelphia Sports Club, which is now in Ardmore. I thought we couldn’t allow that to happen.”

The best part of the story is that she did not allow that to happen. The hard part of the story is that for this to come to pass, she had to become the Bryn Mawr Film Institute.

The Glory of the Seville

The Seville Theater opened in 1927. It was one of six local movie houses constructed along the Main Line in that optimistic era. Four of them are still standing and still operating, some a little fitfully, as neighborhood theaters.

William Harold Lee, master of the non-downtown movie palace, was the architect. It’s an easy argument to make that he probably peaked when he created the Seville.

It sits as the most imposing building on that part of Lancaster Pike, dominating the Main Street, USA, feeling of commercial Bryn Mawr. The theater has been described as “exotic escapism, high art and imagination.”

The Seville opened as a destination in itself. The style is Mediterranean and roaring 1920s revivalism. The movie part of the Seville is set back from the street, behind a once-magnificent plaster and paint arcade and atrium that includes a high, arching skylight that seems to go on forever.

Back in the 1970s when I first discovered the place, as the Bryn Mawr Theater, this enticing interior had a strange, cruise-ship feeling to it. Once inside, you almost dreaded knowing that eventually you had to emerge back on bust Lancaster Pike.

The arcade is two-tiered, with boutique-style stores lining the walkway from street to turn-styles. In the 1970s one of the shops was an art gallery, another briefly sold rare sets of toy soldiers to a steady stream of collectors who came from near and far to spend too much money on the brightly painted little marching armies.

Ornate banisters offer still more depth and definition to the upstairs. The ruling architectural detail is tile, from walls to floor to storefronts. There’s plentiful light and glass. The effect is one of totally enveloping visitors as they amble through the arcade on their way to the magnificence of the old theater.

By the time the investors were ready to turn the Seville/Bryn Mawr into a big private gym, the entire edifice had an abandoned, Third World look to it. A Dollar Store would have been an improvement. Considering the fact that the surrounding neighborhood of Bryn Mawr is home to hundreds of million-dollar houses and condos, this was not only unforgivable, but also pretty hard to figure.

“I blame it on absent landlords,” Ms. Goodfriend says. “You can’t get them to appreciate what’s happening here if they’ve never even been in the state.”

She created a non-profit band of civic leaders to rescue the old Bryn Mawr. “It would have been such a tragedy to lose this,” she says. “Just from the aspect of maintaining some kind of an open community building on Lancaster, this was really important. As it is now this is the only public cultural building on the en tire length of Lancaster Pike.”
That’s a disgrace, too, considering the income levels, the education backgrounds and the upper class demographics of most of the people who live in those Main Line towns, by she has the good grace not to mention it.

They ended purchasing the Seville/Bryn Mawr for $2 million and then putting over $ 4 million-and-counting into the renovations. The negotiations weren’t easy of quick. But Ms. Goodfriend had no intention of losing.

Since then, the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts has come up with some grant or matching funds money to kick in to the enormous task of trying to restore the property to its former glory.

The mission of the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, with its snug offices and single large classroom in the warm warren of the arcade, is to “exhibit and educate.”

“The state has designated us as a cultural anchor for the area,” Juliet Goodfriend says proudly. “I think that’s a very good definition of just what this building is and what the Bryn Mawr Film Institute is all about.”

Learn More at http://www.brynmawrfilm.org

By now, most of our children are safely back to their usual school-time routines. They have their books, crayons, pencil sharpeners, glue sticks and all the necessary (and hyper expensive) trapper keepers.

But where do they put all of their supplies? They have to get to their homework, schoolbooks, lunch and assorted other treasures somehow.

Look around and you’ll see the answer at every bus stop. Today, for most kids, the backpack has replaced the traditional schoolbag. But with all of those assorted supplies in the bag, it puts a strain on a child’s back.

Here are some tips on how you and your child can prevent back strain.

The first feature to look for in a back pack is a waist strap. When this strap is used, it puts less strain on the lower back and evens out the weight so all the back and shoulder muscles can be used. L.L. Bean, for example, makes strong and durable bags that come standard with waist straps.

Next, only buy a bag with plenty of padding on both the shoulder straps. This distributes the weight evenly across the back and shoulders to lighten the load even further.

Make sure to ask your child if he or she is experiencing any pain in their back, shoulders or stomach. Yes, even the stomach can be injured from improper backpacking. If your prince or princess has a tendency to carry their back on one shoulder, make them stop this unhealthy practice. Putting all of that weight on one side can practically crush the ribs and contribute to everything from poor posture to much more serious back problems.

It’s never a bad idea to try a hiking pack, as long as it isn’t bigger than your child. The recommended mass should not exceed 10 to 15 percent of your son’s or daughter’s weight. For instance, if a 45-pound child is packing up, make sure the bag is no more than seven pounds.

Many back packs are flashy and just a little too trendy for their own good. There are good ones out there, you just have to find them.

*Statistics provided by Einstein Hospital, Philadelphia

The rooms are all exactly the same, but hauntingly different. It’s the cold look of generic apprehension. You walk in, select a seat as strategically as possible, one with a vantage point that allows you to see in as many directions as possible, and begin the ritual of waiting. You wait for information, for other family members, for medical professionals and surgeons to perform their saving craft and finally, you wait for the reassuring pronouncement from a doctor still dressed in sweat-soaked scrubs that everything went fine. You force yourself to believe that news will come. You try to numb yourself against any possibility that the doctor’s words will in any way fall short of “fine.”

Every time a person enters or leaves the hospital waiting room, or even passes near it, you become instantly alert. What’s happening now? Why are they coming and going? Does this movement have something to do with the person you’re there for?

When will this agony be over?

The atmosphere in a hospital waiting room is always static and unnatural. The smell is mildly antiseptic. The time is indeterminate, regardless of the ticking clock on the wall. For you and the people with you, it is forever the present and you are trapped in it.

Old magazines, televisions tuned to only one channel, artificial ferns, long rows of stiff seats, mounted wall plaques thanking some generous hospital benefactor, industrial-strength grey carpeting, harsh bright lights, a receptionist trained to deflect all questions — and that oversize, ticking clock on the wall – these are the never-changing artifacts of the hospital waiting room. And then, there is you, of course, one of the waiting ones.

As you work your way through a year’s worth of year-old Times or Newsweeks or Peoples, only half-concentrating on the printed words and the fading pictures, your mind wanders to frightening scenarios of worst-possible-outcomes. There is no good reason to do this, except for those demons of doubt that play havoc with your imagination.

Hospital waiting rooms are icons of angst where these universal experiences are shared by little groups of worried, weary people, sitting silently and staring, or chatting awkwardly, mouthing inanities and expressions of phony confidence. Everyone is trying to make the person next to them feel better, less fearful, confident in the necessity of what’s happening. But, it does no good.

Medicine in its contemporary form saves far more patients than ever before, but its faceless corporate appearance still takes a high toll on the despairing families and friends praying in any way they can that they will not have to hear the worst. Before an operation of any sort, patients and their loved ones are always thoroughly briefed about what will happen and why. Normally, a percentage of success or failure will be assigned to each and every procedure, as in “90 percent of the time, this operation is successful.” The last thing you want to do is reduce the person you’re there for to some abstract statistic, but that’s the shorthand of the healing arts.

Except in the most extreme cases, this is no mere throw of the dice. Medicine is more than a match for many diseases. But, that factor of uncertainty persists. There is no escaping those imagined terrors of what might happen.

The hospital waiting room, regardless of its particular title, from “family area” to “green room” to “lobby”, is a limbo of fear, dread, hope and resignation. Hardly anyone gets to go through a lifetime escaping the experience. At least the patients are anesthetized, but the people waiting to hear about them face the perpetual awakeness induced by worry.

The room’s stark appearance belies earnest efforts to superimpose an ersatz calm in the face of urgency and panic that can, in certain cases, be a matter of life and death slowly as the surgeon rises to his calling.

For a parent, it is always worse when a child is involved. Children and hospitals have no good thing in common, no child belongs in one and no hospital truly knows how to comfort a sick child.

The instinct to protect and fear for one’s child is natural; the sense of desperate helplessness that takes over when you can’t even see your child is the torture of sitting and waiting.

When cancer is involved in any form, the stakes become much higher, much faster. Cancer remains the plague of the world in which we live. Cancer’s reign as an unquestioned death sentence is past, but its power remains formidable. To mention “cancer” and “child” in the same sentence under any circumstances is an abomination – but one that too many people still have to endure. These are the moments that bring a family together in ways never to be forgotten, but never easy to express.

Finally, after the hours have passed, when the weary-looking surgeon finally arrives, delivering the news with his confident sense of work well done, that first sweet moment of relief will stay with you forever.

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“I think we’re getting beyond the point,” says U.S. Army Captain Laura Peters, “when people used to think that all we did in civil affairs was hand out soccer balls to little kids and attend meetings.”

If anybody should have a good grasp of the challenging, front-line services that Army civil affairs units perform, it has to be this 31-year-old native of Northeast Philadelphia and graduate of the red, black and gold of Archbishop Ryan High School, on Academy Road.

“I like to tell people that we specialize in fixing things,” she says, “and that can mean anything from putting a local hospital back in business, to restoring lines of communication that have been broken. You find out pretty fast that the people you deal with need one-on-one contact. They need to trust you before they’ll do anything. And trust is something you have to earn. So, there was a lot of sitting down with local leaders and drinking thick, sweet tea.”

Captain Peters returned from Iraq a few months ago and is currently stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. “But I have some of my soldiers in Fort Dix,” she adds, “and I try to get back to Philadelphia as often as I can. My parents are there and so is the rest of my family.”

Her base of operations was the Tikrit area, in northern Iraq, in Samara, birthplace of the Saddam Hussein clan and one of the last, bitter strongholds in Iraq to cooperate with the national government and with American forces. She spent much of her time traveling from town to town and from problem to problem in what she describes as an “up-armored humvee, with a machine-gunner on the top; they have to be brave and really vigilant because whatever happens, they get it first; they’re actually sitting outside the vehicle.”

She spent a good deal of her time in Baghdad, too. “In the Green Zone,” she explained. And what was that like? “They don’t like us to give out too many details,” she says, “for security purposes, but take my word for it, it has to be one of the toughest places on earth to get into and out of. I usually flew in on a Blackhawk helicopter; you can’t imagine what you have to go through just to drive in.”

Most civil affairs units come from the U.S. Army and of that group about 96% are composed of Army Reserve personnel. That’s how Captain Peters began her military career, too, as an Army ROTC (Reserved Officer Training Corps) cadet while she was a student at Florida Institute of Technology, near Melbourne.

“To me, civil affairs is the best job in the Army,” she says, although she said her living conditions could be “crack house austere.”

“You are working on peacetime ops and wartime ops and trying to stabilize and rebuild an economy and a government.”

In the normal course of things, civil affairs units will move into a country, or field of operations, shortly after the combat stops. The units can be composed of a wide array of specialists and professions, from economists and government administrators, to lawyers, bankers, computers programmers, police and firefighters, to farmers and agronomists. “It all depends on what’s needed,” Captain Peters explains.

According to the U. S. Army, “Civil Affairs units help military commanders by working with civil authorities and civilian populations in the commander’s area of operations to lessen the impact of military operations on them during peace, contingency operations and declared war.

“CA units act as a liaison between the civilian inhabitants of a war zone or disaster area and the military, both informing the local commander of the status of the civilian population, as well as effecting assistance to locals by either coordinating military operations with non-government organizations, (NGOs), or by directly distributing aid and supplies.”

Captain Peters divided her time between the operations of the still-emerging provincial government and the needs of the Army combat teams in the area. “That means I was the liaison,” she says, “and their provincial governments are roughly equivalent to our state governments; so I was dealing most of the time with our commanders and their governor’s office. One of our biggest challenges was getting the local Iraqi government to spend the money they had on rebuilding and humanitarian projects. We wanted to see the markets re-open and the kids start playing in the street again.”

It’s hard to overestimate the complexity of her task. Besides balancing the needs of the Army and the population, she was also working concurrently with the U.S. State Department, who were there to evaluate the potential political impact of every mission – as well as assigning Captain Peters to pressing State Department priorities.

Regardless of the country, the only thing that counts is performance. “It goes back to the old line about ‘winning their hearts and minds’, but that’s really what it is. The Iraqi people are constantly judging their own leaders, as well as the Americans, so the more we could help them deliver on things, from electricity to staffing clinics, the better they looked and the smoother everything went.
As she went about her duties in Tikrit, Captain Peters says there was an eerie feeling that the Iraqis “always knew.”

“Many times when you went out,” she says, “you were either letting the people and the local government know that some kind of a combat mission was coming, and you wanted them to know how it was going to affect them, or you were delivering something to them keeping good on a promise. And, I never knew it to fail. They had this unerring sense of what was coming; if it was from a combat commander, the trip would be tougher and there would be more IEDs (improvised explosive devices) along the way. Of course, all of this was supposed to be kept secret. But just let us be out to give them some goodies, or help somebody out and we’d never have a problem. How they knew, I still don’t now. But they did.”

Just before she returned to the United States, Captain Peters was awarded the U.S. State Department’s Superior Honor Award, for conducting exemplary actions and operations, a prestigious award that reflected her service to both State and the Army. “I’d love to continue in some capacity with the State Department,” she says, “but that will be entirely up to the Army.”

In Television, There’s Nothing Like Playing To Your Weaknesses

Reality programming hasn’t killed television yet, but after last night’s 60th annual Primetime Emmy Awards, butchered beyond belief by ABC-TV, those non-scripted ciphers pretty much slammed the coffin lid shut on what used to be one of the medium’s stalwart and entertaining traditions.

Just in case you were expecting snappy one-liners, witheringly on-target political satire or touching emotion oozing from deserving stars, you had to be sadly disappointed.

The Emmy Awards Show 2008 came hurtling out of the most troubled year in television history officially DOA. Pray that next year’s winners and losers will be notified by mass email, thus providing some modicum of quiet dignity for their hard work and long hours.

How bad was this year’s show? If Washington spent every ounce of gold that’s left in the coffers at Fort Knox to rescue the worst awards show in the long annals of television, the money would be wasted down to the last penny. Lehman Brothers and AIG crammed more entertainment value in their annual reports than did ABC’s weak effort last night.

If you thought the ungainly Miss America Pageant had succumbed to a shabby, embarrassing fate the last few years, bounced from network TV to cable TV to a smoke-choked, low budget lounge act in Vegas, that was humane compared to what television did to itself last night.

An immutable law of the television universe was once again re-established on the final summer night of 2008:

Reality program hosts, minus their familiar sets and sleazy participants and over-hyped contests, cannot carry on a decent conversation among themselves, much less handle an unwieldy three-hours plus of not-particularly-suspenseful awards-giving.

If the TV programs being recognized were as bad as the Emmy Show that honored them this year, people might suddenly turn to besieging the libraries and re-discovering their reading muscles. It was that bad. It was worse.

Then again, I would love to meet the network numbskulls who gambled an entire Sunday night, plus all those lost ratings points, that a rank combination of Jeff Probst (Survivor), Heidi Klum (Project Runway), Ryan Seacrest (American Idol), Tom Bergeron (Dancing with the Stars) and Howie Mandel (Deal or No Deal) – as co-hosts — could somehow take the place of a professional master of ceremonies, one with the ability to tell a joke, offer topical commentary, or even articulate the heritage of television. Those five did for narcissism what serial killer Gary Heidnick did for cannibalism.

From Los Angeles to the East Coast, television commentators and insiders were as one in their broad rejection of any quality elements in last nights’ debacle. One critic noted that those five no talent hosts, left to their own devices, apparently without scripts or idiot-cards, were “unwatchable.” Another confessed that five minutes worth of their “banter” seemed to go on for 20 years.

If anything, the weight of morning-after evaluations was too easy on five of the most annoying people in the reality TV ghetto and on an appalling disaster of a an awards show.

Sunday night’s competition in the Philadelphia TV market mainly consisted of a very bad pro football game, abundant re-runs and dueling episodes of Masterpiece Theatre, including a Victorian mystery starring Dr. Who’s best companion, Rose, the real life Billie Piper. HBO gave us another incomprehensible installment of True Blood. All I remember is that this time the HBO vampires had plastic slipcovers on their furniture.

But they may all end up beating the 2008 Emmy Awards – based entirely on Neilson ratings merit. The early numbers indicate that this year’s Emmys broke all previous records for low viewership, even falling below Fox’s 12.3 million from over a decade ago. It’s understandable, because you had to watch the Emmys this year like it was homework with a quiz on Monday morning.

The New York Post may have had the best idea of all – instead of bothering to recap what may have been the most disappointing Emmy Show of all time, the tabloid mocked the whole process and created its own category of Emmys for outstanding performances that should have been given out. If only the show had been that amusing.

We should have guessed that it would come down to this: Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten, who used to be married to Governor Sarah Palin’s sister, Molly, was accused of illegally shooting a moose.

That’s part of the amusingly convoluted case against Wooten that the Governor and her family created in their scorched-earth war on Mr. Wooten.

They also claimed that he used his Taser gun (or threatened to) on assorted Palin family members, Governor Sarah, presumably, among them. I bet the moose up there wished that Tasers were the worst things they ever had aimed at them.

We know all this because the Alaska state legislature is in the process of wasting still more tax dollars (of course, we’re talking millions here) on an investigation into just how scandalously Governor Sarah abused her official power to try to have Wooten fired, punished, ruined and, in general, gotten-even-with.

In fact, someone connected with the state legislature just announced that they are “fast-tracking” the investigation to get it completed before November “in fairness to the Governor.”

Oh, No! You are thinking, does that sound like a whitewash and a cover-up, or what?

Yes, it certainly does. Maybe there’s a reason we don’t yet know about that explains why the Russians were so anxious and happy to sell us Alaska in the first place.

Trooper Wooten, for his part, probably more surprised than anyone else in the United States that Gov. Palin somehow found her way on to the Republican ticket, has stated that he holds “no ill will against anybody.”

Yeah, right. That would also make him the first husband in any divorce case in the history of mankind who bore no ill will against anybody.

One question keeps making me get up and walk into the bathroom in the middle of the night. With an economy that looks more and more like it’s-fallen-down-and-it-can’t- get-up, why do I (and most of America) know far more about the Palins and their squalid little soap operas of lives than we do about what John McCain will do to fix the economy?

Here’s another one: Why do we all know that Sarah Palin claims to shoot moose legally (Is there a correct plural? Will Katie Couric tell us?) in contrast to her despised former brother-in-law, who shoots them illegally?

If all this is beginning to sound like borderline madness, don’t blame us. I heard from an old friend today who called and announced, “So, what do you think about this girl McCain put on his ticket?” There was the sound of hope and conviction in his voice.

I think I was supposed to say that I was thrilled and that my life could now end happy and fulfilled because McCain had had the last laugh on his fellow Americans by front-loading his stalled ticket with a failed beauty pageant contestant from Idaho who shoots moose and is proud of it.

I didn’t say that, but just mumbled that I was very unimpressed with Governor Palin. The guy practically hung up on me. But, isn’t that exactly what politics is supposed to do: turn friend against friend and brother against brother – not to mention in-laws against former sons-in-law.

Keep in mind, that John McCain, who miraculously survived five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, is the mastermind behind all this. McCain is in destructible. You have to give him his due. The entire nation of North Vietnam underestimated him and so did his Republican and Democrat political foes, beginning with Mitt Romney (and how good does Mike Huckabee look right now?) and probably ending with Senator Barack Obama.

Which brings us to the point of all this, namely, that John McCain survived his imprisonment by distracting himself and his mind and spirit by thinking other, better thoughts instead of dwelling on the direness of his situation at the Hanoi Hilton.

What if he’s doing the same thing now? What if he’s teaching us the only rule in politics that counts: No matter how noble your intentions, you can’t do a thing about saving the world until you win and put yourself in office.

Barack Obama said that he picked the tough, estimable Senator Joe Biden as a running mate because it was the right thing to do and because Biden would “help me govern.”

Wow! What idealistic generosity of spirit. There’s only one problem. Left unsaid is the fact that at a very premature point in the 2008 campaign Senator Obama obviously felt that he had the whole thing wrapped up; he didn’t have to worry about John McCain. He didn’t even have to worry about the almost 20 million Democrat voters who hated him because he wasn’t Senator Hilary Clinton.

He had it wrapped up. Barack Obama was getting ready to govern. He had anointed himself President and he was getting ready to pick out his cabinet, beginning with Joe Biden. That’s a little presumptuous.

Meanwhile, John McCain was getting ready to win, once again getting ready to survive. That’s how you manage to get out of a North Vietnamese prison camp, alive and relatively well, and prepared to get on with what’s left of your life.

And maybe John McCain reached all the way back to his Hanoi Hilton days and gave us Sarah Palin and her family soap opera and rimless glasses and hockey mom up-do to distract us from the really bad, distressing stuff, like war and economic meltdown, until he could put himself in a position to win and get on with it.

If that’s the case, that offers a whole new spin on “presidential.”

The first goal of copywriting is to sell a product or service. It can be anything from solar panels to soap. But in the end, your copy will sell the product. Only through writing down and developing your product or service through words will you learn the true essence of what it is you’re selling and develop a powerful copywriting strategy.

At the heart of every ad, there are only words. Words tell the webmaster what to upload. Words tell the director what to film. Words tell the musician what notes to play. Without words, there is no communication. And copywriting is the persuasive use of words.

The second goal of copywriting is to inform. If the copywriter has done his or her job correctly, there will be clues and concepts that best reflect the compelling selling points. With these clues and concepts, any medium will benefit from good copywriting.

The third goal of copywriting is to communicate. The copywriter has an impossible task. That is to sell a product without sound, pictures or the moving images of TV and video. Using only words, the copywriter must make a product or service jump off of the page and turn the reader into a customer.

Expect to fail at copywriting. This isn’t what you want to read, but it’s true. Only with a balanced portfolio of failures and successes can a copywriter acknowledge and learn from experiences.

A top copywriter is someone who is curious about the world around them, engage themselves in various hobbies and activities, travel to exotic locations, master many skills, get bored and move onto something else. Copywriting doesn’t come from seminars or academia. It comes from a voracious individual.

Whether we want to or not, we have all had failures. Maybe the car wouldn’t start, the presentation didn’t impress the higher-ups, or the copy we wrote didn’t sell a single product. We have all failed one way or the other and copywriting is no exception.

But the great thing about failing is learning. Learning is valuable. And to learn is to live. The more experiences and knowledge we have, the easier it is to come up with dynamic copy and phenomenal marketing concepts. Copywriting is the culmination of both success and failure.

And the more you know… really goes a long way. Check out the Wikipedia entry on Edward de Bono. He coined the term lateral thinking. Lateral thinking breaks a problem down to black and white by thinking in shades of grey. Copywriting is presenting the black and white in shades of grey.

Copywriting is a skill. It is a muscle you can workout and improve. Just like working out the arms or abs, don’t expect immediate results overnight. It takes time to find your voice and recognize your strengths and weaknesses. But don’t worry, there’s no rush. And there will be plenty more articles to help your copywriting. If you have any questions, contact us at support@consultmallowe.com.

Do People Still Read Press Releases?

They do, but the uses and the value of print press releases have changed significantly over time.

The What? When? Where? Who? approach is usually confined to an email or fax-blast communication now, followed up, as always, by a friendly reminder telephone call.

People – that is over-worked, under-staffed editors – are anticipating that the standard print press release is now a self-contained story that could, with just a little editing, be dropped into a trade magazine or a weekly newspaper as a ready-to-use story.

In bigger publications or broadcast operations, the press release will still be considered a jumping off point for a reporter to follow-up.

Be very careful about one thing: the press release handout was never designed to waste an editor’s or reporter’s time. If it’s feature material, let them know that; if it really is that rarity, a legitimate “news’ release, let them know that, too.

Every journalist is rushed and short of time. Save them time and effort and you will be playing to your strength as a good public relations officer.

Below is an example of a feature-oriented press release that could easily be used as a small story.

Summer Stroll Kicks Off From Forbidden Drive in Fairmount Park

Support the Epilepsy Foundation of Eastern Pennsylvania’s biggest annual event.

PHILADELPHIA, JUNE 9, 2008 — Imagine a disease that strikes without warning; one that can occur at any point in a person’s life, one that robs people of all consciousness and awareness without a moment’s notice. Entire chunks of time can be lost to uncontrollable seizures, which often result in traumatic injury.

The disorder has been with mankind since the beginning of recorded history. Ancient cultures referred to it as “the falling down illness.” Now, couple this horror with the fact that, for the great majority of victims, there is no known cause, genetic or otherwise.

This disease is among medicine’s most under-reported; at least three million Americans are known to suffer from it, but millions more almost certainly are victims, or may become victims at any time. About 180,000 new cases are diagnosed every year.

In the Philadelphia area alone, over 65,000 men, women and children are fighting the condition.

This is just a snapshot of epilepsy. About 75 percent of the time, sufferers who are otherwise healthy, intelligent and, in many cases, gifted people suddenly develop the condition.

Sometimes, children miraculously outgrow it; other times, it can disrupt a person’s life in mid-career and mid-family, and stay with them forever; athletes, scholars, scientists, celebrities and some of the most celebrated figures in history, from Julius Caesar to the present, have suffered from epilepsy.

“It takes so much of your life away,” says Maura, 22, who was stricken with Juvenile Myoclonic Seizure Epilepsy at age 13. “You don’t know why it’s coming or when it’s coming. The only thing you know is what it does to you. The seizures, or worrying about the next seizure, or trying to be so careful taking your medicine and not doing anything to bring one on – it just takes over everything. You can’t know what it’s like unless you have it.”

Next weekend, on Saturday June 22, 2008, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., the Epilepsy Foundation of Eastern Pennsylvania will hold its annual Summer Stroll, along Forbidden Drive in Fairmount Park. Teams of volunteer walkers are organizing and seeking sponsors for every mile. Last year over 500 people took part. A picnic and children’s entertainment will follow.

“It’s a five-mile walk, completely noncompetitive,” explains Christina Pipitone, the Epilepsy Foundation’s director of development. “This is our biggest annual event to raise money for education, outreach and awareness. We focus on two distinct groups – the people who suffer from this disorder, and the public. It’s a fight every day to dispel the myths and misconceptions.

“Above all, we want to reach out to people who suffer from the isolation of epilepsy and make sure they know they are not all alone,” Pipitone said.

Every summer, in August, the Epilepsy Foundation’s Camp Achieve, in Green Lane, Pennsylvania, gives children affected with seizure disorders a weeklong camping experience and an opportunity for fun and companionship. Proceeds of events like the Summer Stroll, an annual golf day and a holiday dinner help fund scholarships to Camp Achieve.

For information on the Summer Stroll, Camp Achieve or any other programs and activities sponsored by the Epilepsy Foundation of Eastern Pennsylvania, please call Mike Mallowe, Communications Director, at 215-875-3382, or email him at
Support@ConsultMallowe.com

Many people don’t realize the impact copy can have. Good or bad, copy is going to dictate a potential consumer’s decision. Copywriting is the art of persuasion. It is the job of the copywriter to entice their readers and close the sale. In this article, we will review some basic strategies to make your copy more effective.

As a copywriter, you always have to be on top of your game. The copywriter’s last task is to write. Before s/he can put a pen to paper, or a finger to a keyboard, the copywriter must study. The subject areas are as limitless as the media is vast.

A good copywriter will always pay attention to their surroundings. Reading, watching and, most importantly, listening to what other people have to say are paramount attributes when it comes to writing effective copy.

What is Copy?
Copy is the synopsis of a product or service, usually placed next to a picture of the product. It is an age- old technique of summarizing the values and benefits of any given product or proposition – it is marketing in its simplest and purest form.

Yet, as basic and fundamental as great copywriting is, no other tool or technique has a more immediate and decisive impact on a potential customer’s actions.

If a consumer is interested in buying a product, or using a service, they will want positive reinforcement to justify their purchase. The copywriter can provide the definitive and authoritative voice that reassures a consumer that he or she has made the right decision.

In the end, copywriting that really works is a form of communicating that delivers the message and seals the deal.

and never forget…

KISS
Yes, they were a kick-ass band in the 70’s. But KISS has evolved into a much more useful acronym for any copywriter: Keep It Short and Simple.

In the event a high profile organizational setback or emergency occurs, what is know as the crisis communication mode takes over.

At these crucial times, the corporate communications office immediately becomes the face and voice of the organization, especially when dealing with the media.

Corporate Communications blends the roles of public relations, advertising and marketing into a single, highly focused campaign.

This involves carefully managing talent. A corporate communications consultant will accurately assess each person, with a goal of utilizing of their relative strengths, weaknesses and personality traits.

Under the old model in which outside firms were contracted for PR or advertising help, any organization, no matter how big or influential, was still just one of many clients, regardless of the circumstances.

While this approach is fine for the consultant, it denies the client – it denies you – continuity, quality control and the kind of accountability that can only come from a long-standing relationship.

These methods are and always were expensive and time-consuming. It also limits marketing to either sales or fundraising, and tends to put communications in a box and exclude it from a client’s overall strategic mix.

The new model for any corporate communications strategy must employ a focused and strategic approach. Ideally, the consultant will set up an in-house communications office that acts as an on-call liaison for all other departments in the organization.

The consultant will support the various departments in writing, editing, public speaking, speech writing and provide assistance to existing publications and websites. The communications consultant will ensure a single message is reported to affected audiences and media outlets.

In any crisis situation, the only successful strategy is for the corporate communications consultant to bring any bad news to the media, first. The worst possible posture is for the organization to find itself reacting to bad news that is generated by the media.

Can Corporate Communications and the principles of communication benefit virtually any organization in vital and relevant ways?

Yes. There are three primary categories of organizations that a corporate communications consultant can effect most directly:

(1) Corporate, or for-profit, businesses and corporations, embracing companies of any size and any industry. They can vary from industrial and service-oriented businesses, to professional sports teams, leagues, entertainment venues and everything in between.

(2) Not-for-Profit organizations, which usually range from schools, to labor unions, to cultural settings like museums or foundations, to charities of all types.

(3) Government at the local, state and federal level.

The real goal of corporate communications is to send the right message to the right audience at the right time, using the most effective tools available.

You need to be able to create those messages, identify the target publics or audiences, and make wise selections in the channels used to send out those messages.