The Cemetery Keeper's Wife

     The murder of Tillie Smith, a kitchen worker at the former Centenary Collegiate Institute, in 1886, is the subject of speculation to this day. 

    Like the Changewater murders 40 years before, Tillie's murder was "solved," but not without suspicion.

    Although it occurred in more recent times, the Tillie Smith murder had less evidence than the murders of John Parke and his family in their home near the Musconetcong River in the 1840's. There wasn't a fortune to be inherited. There weren't myriad relatives. The victim was related to prominent figures, the Smith's of Waterloo, but not prominent herself. There wasn't even a Methodist pastor with a firey delivery.

     Local historian Denis Sullivan wrote a book about the trial of James Titus who was convicted of murdering the teenage Tillie.
But Sullivan concentrated on the trial and Titus. MaryAnn Abromitis McFadden was curious about Tillie herself. And a little angry about why she wasn't the central figure in her own story.

     When the Abromitis family moved to Hackettstown from Brooklyn, MaryAnn went exploring and found Tillie's monument in the cemetery.
Later, as a real estate agent, she found herself in Titus' house.
Other coincidences plus her familiarity with Centenary where she both studied and taught led her to decide to write Tillie's book.

   The author of three novels, McFadden had to decide how she wanted to approach the story. A historical novel? Straight nonfiction?
She settled on a hybrid, a well-researched novelization centered around the wife of the cemetery keeper at Hackettstown Union Cemetery where Tillie is buried.

    Her main character, Rachel, also stumbles across coincidences with Tillie's life, including one very big one. She becomes obsessed with Tillie's life and death, to the dismay of her husband and his family. She can't keep away from digging into the story of what led Tillie to her death on the Centenary campus.

     Which is sort of what McFadden found happening to her. She found more and more reason to doubt Titus' guilt and more interesting facts about Tillie.

    The book took about five years to research, not unexpectedly for this coldest of cold cases.

    McFadden introduced the book, appropriately, in the Victorian parlors of the Seay Building at Centenary, the structure that replaced the original Collegiate Institute that burned on Halloween Night 1899. (Yes, legend has it Tillie's ghost set the fire.) She packed the parlors as she did the Clinton Book Shop a couple of weeks later. 

    The crowds had to do with the popularity of McFadden's earlier books and also with the hold Tillie has on the populace around Hackettstown, especially around the college.

     She may be known as a real estate agent in her brother's firm, but McFadden started her career as a reporter and proved with The Cemetery Keeper's Wife she still knows how to find and tell a good story. 

     The book is compelling. Don't start reading it if you need a early night because you won't want to put it down. I read it with a booklight clipped to the pages during the recent power outages. 
McFadden is a fine writer and a terrific researcher, but most of us knew that from her novels. But this book is on another level. I can imagine how much research went into the effort and I'm not sure I'd take it on.

MaryAnn Abromitis McFadden at the Clinton Book Shop

  As I always say with Mike Daigle's books, I am a friend of the author, but I also know a terrific read when I read it. And The Cemetery Keeper's Wife is more than that. It is the necessary piece in the Tillie Smith puzzle. It is the book that, finally, gives Tillie a voice.

  Only one thing makes me a little sad about the book. A very important figure (besides Tillie) was missing from the exuberant book launch, MaryAnn's mother, Angie Abromitis, who died last year. But Angie was supervising the book and its launch. No doubt about that. 
 
 

A Voice for Tillie

MaryAnn Abromitis McFadden calls herself a former journalist. Sharon Decker, English and Humanities Department Chair at Centenary University takes issue with that because of McFadden's extensive research into her latest book, The Cemetery Keeper's Wife.  I take issue with that because the book does exactly what journalism is supposed to do, it gives voice to the voiceless. MaryAnn proves she's still a reporter.

Since 1886 when Tillie Smith was murdered at the school, then called the Centenary Collegiate Institute, many of the stories have been about the case but not the victim.

To be sure, there are serious questions about the guilt of John Titus and Denis Sullivan's book about the trial was important to the story overall, but McFadden had another goal: to let people know who Tillie was.

Too often, the victim is lost in the sensationalism of a trial. That is exacerbated by the possibility of injustice. Titus wasn't helped by possibly incompetent counsel and yellow journalism that was only too prevalent at the time, but, guilty or not, he was only part of the story.

McFadden chose to tell the story as a novel. She created a modern-day character, Rachel, who auctions houses and discovers Tillie in much the same way McFadden did. Coming to Hackettstown from Brooklyn as a child, McFadden found Tillie's gravestone in the Union Cemetery and was intrigued by this young woman. Years later, while selling real estate, she ended up listing the house where Titus lived. These coincidences sparked an interest in the story and in Tillie herself.

The Cemetery Keeper's Wife was introduced on Tuesday, April 24, in the parlors of the Seay Building at Centenary to a packed house of family and friends as well as fans of McFadden's earlier books.

I can't review the book yet, but I can recommend anything by MaryAnn McFadden, former and present journalist.

Beware the Flying Cuisinart

     Once Upon a Time when there existed small towns with Main Streets and businesses on Main Streets, (like banks with tellers for humans, not cars, and hardware stores with nail bins and actual five and dimes) there also existed the home town newspapers, generally  weeklies.

     Even more amazing, the weekly newspaper generally had a lawyer. Not in-house counsel like those big, fancy, city newspapers, but a small-town lawyer with an office on Main Street.  He handled house closings and wills and the day to day stuff of people and businesses, including the local paper. So should there be an unfortunate altercation at a library board meeting resulting in a board member hauled out of the meeting room screaming to the chair, “Margaret, you’re not a lady.” And should the local newspaper have an actual reporter actually in the room, covering the library board meeting. And should the aforementioned Margaret not be happy with the coverage, the paper would have an attorney on Main Street. In this particular case, the paper’s attorney was also Margaret’s attorney, at least until she told him and story and he laughed so hard she hung up on him.

     It was a simpler time.

     Times are not simple anymore.

     The first Right-to-Know law, which later morphed into the Open Public Records Law, was supposed to make some things easier. It delineates what records may be kept private, very few, and how citizens can access the public ones. Like many things designed to make things easier, it doesn’t. It is overall a wonderful law because it does keep towns from hiding the many, many things they would love to hide, but it doesn’t always make things easy. Towns try to hide stuff, papers sue (requiring lawyers, again). Often they win. Towns appeal. . . .

     In an attempt to shed some light on the complications, Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and Law, the New Jersey News Commons, NJPA and SPJ held a session called “What’s New in Media Law” on Friday, Feb. 19, at Rutgers Law School in Newark.  It was originally to be held in New Brunswick, but nobody registered, proving once again if there was a pot of gold at the end of Route 287, it would be left to the Leprechauns because nobody with any sense will drive there.

     The panel was arranged by Ellen Goodman, a professor at Rutgers Law in Camden. The first session featured three lawyers:  Jennifer Borg, general counsel to North Jersey Media Group/The Record (a verifiable endangered species), Thomas J. Cafferty, NJPA general counsel, and Eli Segal of Pepper Hamilton, LLP.

     Borg spoke about the Open Public Records Act and how to get past intransigent officials. “Reach out to the municipal attorney,” she said, adding, “honey works better than vinegar.” She urged reporters to help educate the officials and work with them, adding, “for every police chief who doesn’t want to tell you are two that do.”

     Cafferty reminded the group that the feisty and formidable Loretta Weinberg is trying yet again to tighten the laws with the League of Municipalities once again opposing her. Stuck in the middle are the municipal clerks who just want to stop commercial users from data mining and making money on the hard work of municipal clerical workers.

     Another concern of the press is the Shield Law, which is absolute from a civil standpoint and nearly so from a criminal standpoint, but that “nearly” is a little nerve-wracking for reporters trying to do a good job, get all the facts and protect their sources.

    The second panel of the day got away from academic language and into the practical, with Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, discussing drones, which he described as “flying Cuisinarts.”  He pointed out that just because someone registers a drone doesn’t mean he’s going to operate it safety. Besides the problem of accidentally decapitating someone is the problem of invading that person’s privacy. He advocated using drones in cases where it is impossible to photograph from the ground and advised anyone who operates one to do so only within the line of site, during the day, under 400 feet in altitude and making sure the drone is less than 4.4 pounds. He also reminded photographers they cannot operate within five miles from an airport without notifying the airport.

    Katherine M. Bolger of Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, LLP, explained that hacking into people’s communications has caused judges to perceive privacy differently. Osterreicher pointed out it was George Eastman’s invention of the Brownie, which first make photography portable, that led to Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren to write “The Right to Privacy.”

    The panel all agreed the law moves glacially.

     Josh Stearns, director of journalism and sustainability at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, summed it up by saying, “at a time when laws are being written, don’t do anything stupid.”

     Good advice.

Fear and Loathing (or not) in Montclair

     Back in the old days, people got their news from a kid on a bicycle stuffing a daily newspaper into a metal tube wired to a telephone pole or mounted on a stake in front of their house.  They paid for the newspaper and they left a big tip for the kid on the bike to make sure the paper made it into the tube and not stuck on the gutter or buried deep in a rose bush requiring extrication by someone wearing heavy work gloves.

     Nobody considered it terribly expensive. People believed news of their town, their county, their state, their country and their world was worth paying for. They would never have thought about getting that for free. Even when they got their news from radio or television, they were cognizant that the news wasn’t free, it was just being paid for by Phillip Morris and Lincoln/Mercury and CocaCola. Knowing what’s going on in the world is worth paying for. Or at least putting up with tap dancing polar bears.

     Suddenly, enter the internet, and news is free. But is it news?

     Too often, no.

      I’m not saying you have to have a journalism degree, or even any degree, to write journalism. I’m saying you have to practice not-so-random acts of journalism.

     A roomful of journalists, journalism teachers and others interested in the future of news made up the New Jersey News Summit at the NJ News Commons on the campus of Montclair State University. Facilitator (or in this case, cat-herder) of the unruly, noisy and opinionated group (meaning typical journalists) was Chris Satullo, a consultant with the News Commons who had a distinguished journalism career in newspapers and radio.

     Chris asked us what our hopes and fears for local news were and, naturally, the demonstrated unwillingness on the part of the public to pay for news came up. Frequently. Loudly.

    Other fears are that we have become a click-bait-driven world. We are more interested in cat videos (ok, well, yeah), quizzes that tell us we are actually Batman or that the person most likely to bail us out of jail is Great Aunt Tillie or recipes for wasabi tequila parfaits than in news.  Well, we aren’t (except for the cat videos), but we are worried that other people are.

    We are also worried that people are losing the ability to distinguish fact from agenda.

    I hear otherwise bright, intelligent, professional people cite “facts” that just aren’t facts. They form an opinion of a political candidate based on a movie made by a director whose only noticeable interest is in blowing things up. They actually read the comments on a Facebook post as if they are fact rather than the ramblings of someone with too much time on his hands. We are bombarded with “agenda” verbiage.

     Unfortunately, much of what is attempting to pass as local news is agenda.  Many people who run hyper-local news sites are hard-working, concerned people who are attempting to cover their municipality while selling ads (which is a lot like selling air) to local businessmen who are overworked and have limited money. But, some are people with a particular political bias who are trying to pass their agendas off as news. And people are buying it.

    That is scary.

    Also scary is the obsession with speed.  Even after news outlets identified the wrong suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing case. Even after news outlets identified the wrong brother as the possible Sandy Hook shooter, they rush to get something, anything, on the air.

    Sure, we all want to be first. But, it’s more important to be right. Speed kills. It kills credibility.

    Another fear was that people are consuming trashier “news.”

    Does that mean we aren’t making real news interesting? Or does it mean people just want trash? Neither is a good thing.

    Adolescent girls always read celebrity news. I remember perusing any magazine featuring Paul McCartney. But, I was in junior high. Today, celebrities have “reality” television shows. And, I’m not sure why most of these people are celebrities. They don’t appear to have any talent. Or to have done anything important. They just are. Weird. And people seem more interested in them than in actual newsmakers.

    Did this group of distinguished journalists actually fix anything? Well, no. But we started a dialogue. And we will continue meeting and talking and supporting real journalism and real journalists.  Because, we have hopes as well as fears.    

Free the America. . . .Millions

     The provisions of the First Amendment do not halt at the schoolhouse gate, the US Supreme Court ruled in Tinker vs. DesMoines Independent Community School District (1969).

     Practically, that isn't always the case.

     After Tinker, the Hazelwood vs. Kuhlmeier School district (1988), harshly curtailed student press rights.

     High school and college students and their instructors have been fighting to get those rights back ever since. 

     Even with Tinker, not all the concurring justices believed students shared the same rights as adults. Justice Potter Stewart wrote a separate concurring opinion saying children are captive audiences without full capacity tomake individual choices.

     And this became the basis for later decisions giving administrator authority to protect students from themselves. 

     Stewart's "captive" comment provided the name for a 1974 survey of high school journalism teachers and advisers, "Captive Voices." Nearly 40 years later, the Society of Professional Journalists Journalism Education Committee went back to that survey, expanded upon it and created Still Captive, a definitive book on "History, Law and the Teaching of High School Journalsim" as its subtitle reads. 

     The book recaps survey results and profiles successful journalism teachers, but its main impact is in the chapters that discuss the importance of journalism classes to students regardless of the career path they choose. 

     Journalism teaches skills needed in professionals with no obvious relationship to the media.  Attention to detail (nursing), organization (engineering) critical thinking (pretty much everything).  It fits in with many of the goals of the much-maligned Core Curriculum. 

     But, the most important role of journalism education, the book concludes, is providing diligent public watchdogs. 

     Two of the authors, Rebecca Tallent and Lee Anne Peck, point out "today's elementary and high school students have never seen a truly free press in action -- only a wartime press established in the 1990s that is hobbled by free press restrictions such as media pools and limited access to information -- and it is easy to see the need for incubating press-press, free-thinking people with strong, all-around communication shills and all levels of education."

     This is what we need to do. 
 

More Jhumpa Lahiri

     There is good literature and good reading.

     Sometimes, good, even great, literature does not equal everyone's taste in good reading.  I have trouble with some Joyce Carol Oates and E. L. Doctorow. But, give me Saul Bellow or Joan Didion -- well, I find them elucidating, illuminated and entertaining.

     Jhumpa Lahiri falls in that category as well and for the same reason.Her characters are compelling, her settings are spot on, her plots are familiar even when they feature people in far different circumstances than the reader. 

     You really see this in short stories where many different characters come at you, story to story. Like Alice Munro or Pam Houston, Lahiri is a master of the compact. 

     Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri's 2008 collection, brings the reader into the lives of young Bengalis in the United States. Lahiri was once one of them, although she was born in London and came here at only 2-years-old. She describes herself as "a daughter of parents who spoke accented English."

     The young couples and individuals in the stories are all well-educated, smart and, to one extent or another, successful. But, each has a different outlook, a different set of circumstances.

     The relationships between the accented-English spearkers and their more fluent adult or nearly adult children afre often emphasized. In the title story, a widowed fther visits his daughter and grandchild with a secret. 

     Relationships with Americans are portrayed in the stories Hell-Heaven, Nobody's Business and A Choice of Accommodations."  Siblings dominate "Only Goodness." The stories in Part 2 are linked.

     Lahiri expertly weaves the settings into her fascinating plots and her characters into each others' lives.