The Swamps of Jersey

I just finished reading a good mystery.

Not that there’s a shortage of good mysteries, but this one was written by a friend (so, take this blog any way you want) and it’s set in New Jersey.

I can’t say I’m fond of the title, The Swamps of Jersey. I mean, sure it has as many meanings as you want it to have, but many things are swampy in New Jersey, so I probably wouldn’t have used that as a title.

But, title aside, it is a fine mystery.

It starts a little slow, but the same can be said for a lot of books. And, since I know the author, Michael Stephen Daigle, is a fine writer, I was highly motivated to persevere.

It’s the kind of book where the setting is almost a character. Like Trenton is for Janet Evanovich, although it’s not funny like her books. In this case, it was obvious to me almost from the very beginning that Ironton, the fictional town, is Dover, a very real town. But the time Mike used some Dover street names, like Baker and Blackwell, I already had mental pictures of many of the settings.

I was born in Dover and Dover was the place you went shopping when I was a kid.  My mother shopped at the Acme Market. I bought my first LPs in Woolworth’s basement.  We bought fabric for all my school clothes in Newberry’s. Every girl I knew got her first bra from Annie Fink. And all the kids got their good winter coats from Crown Friedland. Our fathers got their suits from The Quality Shop. We saw all the Disney movies at The Baker Theater. I also learned all the swear words I ever learned from the ladies room wall at the Baker.

Dover was the center of the universe.

Then the Rockaway Townsquare Mall was built. How, we weren’t quite sure. I remember fishing with my dad in McKeel Brook right where the J C Penney store is now. . .But, built it was and Dover started going downhill. It soon became the town described by Mike in the book.

I’m not going to go into all the political and social reasons for Dover’s decline and the decline of every other downtown. Some of those reasons are part and parcel of the story in The Swamps of Jersey.

Being a New Jersey story, it involves political corruption. Being a story written by an old newspaperman (and I know Mike won’t take offense at that) it deals with musty files and budgets and a somewhat curmudgeonly cop and a quite curmudgeonly reporter.

All in all, a good read.

Mike Daigle speaking at a Society of Professional Journalists event

Ginger Baker

                When I was a teenager, if someone said the word “heroin,” the word association was “Ginger Baker.”

                That was before we knew Clapton did it too.

                Heroin was something exotic, out of our field of knowledge. We knew weed. We thought we knew weed, it was probably heavily cut with oregano. We knew beer. Well, we knew Gennessee Cream Ale because it was cheap.

                By college, we knew heroin was closer. And by closer, I mean a guy I dated was returning a pysch book to a friend and was greeted at the apartment door by the NYPD. He ended up handcuffed to a girl wearing a towel and a mechanic who rang the wrong doorbell. The cops dragged Eric into the living room and asked him if he knew his friend was selling pot. He figured if he acted stupid the cops would get pissed so he said yes. Then they pointed to some glassine envelopes on the coffee table. Eric said something to the effect of “Holy S___, is that H?” The police knew he couldn’t possibly fake that degree of shock and let him go, preserving in the process his fellowship to grad school at Tulane.

                Remember, this was New York City, weed was not a concern, even for the police.

                When I discovered a few years ago that my kids actually knew someone who used heroin, I was as floored as Eric when he saw the envelopes on the table. 

                This is East Bumbleputtz. Kids drink Sam Adams and smoke ganja.

                But now it really hits home. I know someone who overdosed.

                This was a young man who, were I asked his drug of choice, I would have said Jack Daniels. My son said perhaps an occasional joint. They worked together a few summers.

                A guy we didn’t know at all, obviously.

                Some people said his new girlfriend, who I hadn’t met, used drugs.

                So the question became why would he become involved with someone who used drugs. He had a good job, a loving family. Why would he become enticed into drugs?

                Of course, we’ll never know. There must be an allure that I don’t get. Caffeine is my drug of choice.

                And maybe it doesn’t matter. It is just so very sad.

                Especially for his daughter who will always remember the last words she said to him were in anger.

                This is not a blog with answers.

My First Ethics Column

You can't say we didn't have fun in the old days

                The first column (an Iron Age term for blog) I ever wrote on ethics ran on May 13, 1986.

                I had just returned from an SPJ Regional Conference, my first, and wrote a few “inside baseball” columns in our weekly newspaper.

                The May 13^th column covered the topic of journalism ethics. Most of what I wrote was exactly what I would write today. The biggest difference was I was writing on an early desktop computer networked into the production department. I think they were made by Texas Instruments and were probably outdated when we got them.

                The modernization of technology is only one reason SPJ updated its ethics code in 1996 and again in 2014. Another change has been in the day to day job of being a reporter.

                When I started as a “reporter” I edited recipes, ran a contest called the “Puzzlegraph” worked in the darkroom, filled in on the stat camera (if you have to ask, don’t) rad ad proofs to Mr. Goldberg at Cohen’s of Washington and answered the phone. Even took classifieds if necessary. When I worked nights, any call that came within 15 minutes of when the bars closed was answered “the Yankees in seven.” That probably covered it.

                I also covered meetings and police beat and took photos of cub scout blue and gold dinners and the first day of trout season.

                In a way I feel sorry for rookies today. They spend so much time sitting in front of a computer screen. Papers are so understaffed the reporters aren’t given the time to hang around the cop shop, to drink lousy coffee and schmooze. We may have had to be very careful not to get too close to the cops, but at least we got answers from them.

                Today, I probably would think more about taking those proofs to Mr. Goldberg at the dress shop. Not that I ever really spoke to Mr. Goldberg. I just handed him the proofs and waited while he looked them over. He always initialed them and handed them back without a comment.

                And, in those days, the ad department carried cameras and took photos of the accidents they came across. And, they passed along tips they heard while seeing their accounts. That was in the days when Main Streets still had shops and the ad reps did a lot of walking and a lot of running into people.

                These weeklies may have had staffs so small you needed two departments to get free eggrolls with your Chinese restaurant order (again, if you have to ask, don’t), but we all worked together. We were in the same office in one of the towns we covered. And we were all producing the same product.

                What does that have to do with ethics? Just that there was the feeling that all the departments were on the same page, ethics-wise. Sure, occasionally, the ad department would have liked a favor, but they understood why it couldn’t happen.

                Today, I’m not even sure people in different departments speak to each other.