I don’t really know how to say goodbye. But I must.
I’ve had a good run at this thing we call the “work” of journalism.
But after a 48-year addiction to news and the written word, I’m retiring and heading into garden therapy to work on becoming a recovering journalist. I won’t lie: I’m not sure I’ll ever fully recover. It’s been too much fun.
I’ve met and questioned a vice president, George H.W. Bush, who later became president, and another vice president, Al Gore, who won the popular vote but missed the presidency — no thanks to “hanging chads” and a regretful Supreme Court ruling.
I’ve wandered homeless camps and recorded the stories of people down on their luck or who never had any luck. One of them later painted me a picture I framed and hung in my office. Some children sheltered locally also crayoned pictures for me and colleagues.
I’ve stared in disbelief at the more than 300 acres of toxic ash sludge that slid in 2008 from a failed mountainous TVA landfill onto a finger of the Emory River and into Roane County yards and farm fields of 300 or so residents near Kingston, Tenn.
I’ve shaken my head trying to understand the disconnect of TVA’s then-senior vice president for environmental policy saying the ash was “inert,” and she would be willing to swim in the contaminated water, even while the head of the Tennessee Department of Health was making then-Gov. Phil Bredesen wash his hands with a medical cloth immediately after touching the sludge. That same state health official then quickly admonished journalists in the governor’s entourage not to wear their ash-covered shoes into their homes that night. EPA called the ash toxic as well, saying it was full of arsenic, lead, mercury and radium.
(Fast forward 15 years and TVA has spent nearly $1.2 billion just on site cleanup, bought out about 300 property owners and was found by a federal court to be liable for the ultimate failure of the landfill. The utility also has agreed to clean up other wet ash landfills. In 2014, a federal judge ordered TVA to pay $27.8 million to victims, and in April 2020, 52 cleanup workers rejected a $10 million settlement from the TVA contractor for whom they had worked. Since the cleanup, hundreds of them have been sickened and more than 50 have died, according to news reports.)
I have covered more tornadoes than I care to think about. I’ve walked up on a scene where a woman stepped out of her splintered closet — the only thing left of her house.
I’ve written investigative stories that sent a small-town Alabama mayor to prison for public corruption.
I’ve interviewed a very old Black man in Northeast Alabama who could not contain the hate in his eyes. He lived in a house that had never — even in the 1980s — had running water. The cracks in the plank walls were so big you could see daylight through them.
I have interviewed people who just lost a child to a horrible accident or fire or a gunshot.
And I’ve interviewed people who were deliriously happy over the fact that they won a lottery. And others who realized they’d won life’s lottery simply by staying alive.
Here in Chattanooga, I covered the first steam shovel in and last steam shovel out in the cleanup of decades of coal tar that lined a mile of Chattanooga Creek — coal tar left over from a time when ditching it there was not against the law because there were no environmental laws against polluting our water or our air.
I’ve walked door-to-door on Chattanooga’s Southside to talk to people whose yards contained dangerous levels of lead — left from a time in another century when Chattanooga land was built up to guard against flooding before TVA dams like Chickamauga were built to control the often raging Tennessee River.
I’ve covered the federal proceedings of people like a former Hamilton County sheriff charged with public corruption and a couple of white-collar managers charged with fraud.
In the last decade or so, I’ve opined about some of these and other outrages.
Yes, on this page I can call something an outrage. On news pages, the best I and other reporters can do is contrast the differences in things — like TVA’s insistence that the Kingston ash sludge was inert and the water safe, even while the EPA and Tennessee’s top health official insisted it was not.
On these pages I could call out what I have seen as political grandstanding about “fiscal conservatism” while local leaders wouldn’t vote to build needed new schools or add teachers and counselors to classrooms where our students were — are — failing to learn. What’s conservative about growing children into adults who won’t be able to land jobs because they can’t read well enough?
That’s the difference between news journalism and opinion journalism.
But no matter what job title I’ve had or what hat I wore over those years, news or opinion, I’ve had more fun — and been paid for it — than anyone probably has a right to claim.
An editor I long admired years ago referred to the jobs in journalism as “the most fun you can have with your clothes on.” He was right. At least he was right for those of us who have more curiosity, energy and drive to ask real people questions and then write the answers than we have good financial sense. But I digress.
I’ve enjoyed reporting and writing for you. Now it’s time for me to say thank you. Thank you to my publishers and editors. Thanks to my colleagues: fellow reporters, photographers and page designers. Most of all, it’s time for me to say thanks to all of you.
In my view, the greatest honors were not talking to the vice presidents or governors or lawmakers. It was talking with you readers about things right here in our backyards — our schools, our roads, our police and our courts. It was talking with you about developers building new communities or squeezing neighborhoods. It was talking with timberers razing forests and with the conservation advocates trying to stop them. It was talking to you about what I wrote on this page.
In the long run, the end game of news professionals (especially me since this is my hometown and you folks are my friends, family and neighbors) is to help you know what’s going on. And to listen when you tell us what’s going on, and what you think about it.
Now, it’s time for me to be one of you. After 48 years, I’ve earned a rest — at least until gardening time in the spring.
I’ll pet my puppies more, spend more time with my family, be like Emily Dickinson and go to church in the orchard more. Garden more.
In the meantime, I’ll watch and wait for the next time you good people rise up and confront a county commissioner, a police chief or sheriff, a mayor, and say to them: No, we don’t like that decision. This is our community, and we want to see X,Y,Z.
I know you can do it. I’ve watched you do it. I’ve reported on you doing it. Keep on making me proud.
No, I don’t think I’ll say goodbye. How about this instead:
Until later.
Staff file photo / October 25, 2011. Pam Sohn talks to Mary Priestley in Sewanee as they look for Cumberland Rosinweed after it was reported that TVA herbicided the area by air which caused damage to the native (and endangered) rosinweed and Eared Goldenrod populations.Source link
