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The only sports story I’ve ever written…

January 21, 2012
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Found this J2100 artifact in a Facebook note?

(December 2, 2009)

COLUMBIA — Stephens College cross-country coach Dane Pavlovich worried as he watched his top runner’s first mile at the American Midwest Conference Championships in St. Louis’ Forest Park. Gracie Boelsems, a freshman basketball recruit who had never run cross-country in her life, was competing for one of five nationals spots that the AMC allots for runners not part of the conference champion team.

Boelsems clocked in at a 5:59.00 mile pace, a fast time that secured her third place. But the time was also 16 seconds faster than she typically runs her first mile. Pavlovich was concerned that she has gone out faster than she could maintain. His gut told him his top runner might be in trouble.

Boelsems, a California native, ran recreationally throughout high school, but never planned on cross-country until a casual e-mail inviting Stephens students to try running caught her eye. Boelsems figured the team would keep her active and in shape her basketball season. But it was immediately clear to her teammates and coach that she was fast.

“She came to me and said she wanted to give it a try which is funny because from the first practice it was evident that she would be our top runner,” Pavlovich said.

“She hadn’t run before so I didn’t know if she would be fast,” said Kelsi Simpson, a teammate of Boelsems who is running on scholarship for Stephens. In the season’s first meet, the Maryville Cross Country Classic, Boelsems got 11th overall against competitors from Washington University, one of the top Division III running programs in the country. By October, Boelsems had consistently scored enough that Pavlovich believed the NAIA National Championships in Vancouver, Washington was obtainable. 

“It was a big surprise. My coach sat me down and said, ‘Gracie you don’t realize this but you’ve put yourself in a position to go to nationals,’” Boelsems said. The opportunity depended on her conference meet results.

By the second mile of conferences, Boelsems began to pay for her speedy start. She slipped to fifth place and began to slow. Her stride shortened and became choppier. A William Woods University competitor gained ground with every second that passed. At one point her competitor was so close that Boelsems could heard her breathing.

But coming up on the course were the hills.

Her junior and senior year in high school Boelsems would get up before school, throw on the running gear she had laid out the night before and slip out the door to run. She’d run three to four mile loops that led through Huntington Beach marshlands, showcased great white herons and scenic paths and led to local hotspots such as Seal Beach and Sunset Beach. She ran simply because she enjoyed the exercise, wanted to maintain a healthier lifestyle and needed to get faster for basketball. In the summers, after working as a lifeguard, Boelsems ran on the soft sand. Pavlovich attributes beach running to her shorter, choppier stride. But beach running also provided her with a unique base that she used to excel on hills.

Boelsems used that base during the hilly part of the course to put some distance between herself and her competitor. There was 600 meters to go. Boelsems exploded down the hill and rushed toward the finish line at a strong pace. “200 meters to Washington,” thought Pavlovich. Boelsems heard her coach scream, “Kick it in.” She pushed past her competitor on the last leg and aimed for the finish line.

It’s “lonely” being a two-sport athlete, Boelsems said. She is constantly tired. Her body aches. She doesn’t see a lot of people. Megan Brown, a freshman teammate of Boelsems’, said that Gracie was fascinated by the personal free time of her teammates this season. Between classes, two sports practices and homework, Boelsems didn’t have a lot of down time to relax with friends.

Pavlovich also recognized the physical and mental strain playing two sports can put on a student athlete. A couple of times Boelsems hit a wall in her training, he said. Athlete and coach discussed how to predict these occurrences so they could lay off the work during those times. Already, Boelsems does not run at basketball practice.

“It’s a very careful balance,” Pavlovich said.

But according to both Pavlovich and Boelsems, the conference race was a healthy day for the latter. The surge she gathered after the hills propelled her to a 10th place finish. Because she was the fifth runner not part of the AMC champion team, Park University, she earned the last national spot. Despite her excitement, Boelsems was more concerned about cheering her teammates on after her race. This wasn’t unusual. According to Brown, Boelsems is always an encourager, always positive and always humble. She also occasionally provides moments of comic relief for her team.

Boelsems never experienced autumn before coming to Missouri and was fascinated by the changing colors of the leaves on the MKT trail. One rainy day when the team stopped running, Boelsems walked to the side of the trail next to a tree, threw up her arms and stared at the colorful canopy. She was caught up in what Brown called a “charming innocence,” and taken by the leaves and their colors. 

“If you are ever feeling down just go underneath a tree and look up,” Boelsems told her teammates, much to their amusement. Boelsems’ optimism towards simple things like changing leaves carries over to her training. After placing 286th out of 330 runners at the NAIA National Championships on Nov. 21, Boelsems is already excited for next season.

“I think I’m always going to want to run,” Boelsems said.

When school picks up after Thanksgiving break, there will be no down time for the athlete. Already, she is training as a forward on the basketball team and Pavlovich, who is also the Stephens basketball coach and associate athletic director, expects that she will be brought off the bench often to gain valuable playing time for a freshman. Between cross-country and basketball, he sees Boelsems every day. But her determination and drive make every interaction valuable to him as a coach.

“I’m lucky because I get to be around her from August to March,” Pavlovich said, “hopefully, for the next three years.”

Paul Sullivan hosts P.S. I Love Music series

July 15, 2011
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Brooklin-resident Paul Sullivan likes to tell a good story.

The acclaimed composer and pianist laughs as he explains the sorry state of his Grammy award — pieced together with scotch tape after a dramatic fall onto concrete. He jumps out of his seat to tell the story of the time he played the Blue Danube Waltz at a party in Leonard Bernstein’s living room in New York City years ago.

With an imaginary cigarette in one hand and an imaginary drink in the other, he imitates Bernstein, who dashed over to the piano and commanded him to play the song at the proper tempo — Sullivan had been speeding it up to keep the dance going.

“How many people have been yelled at by Lenny Bernstein?” Sullivan says breathlessly, the experience still bringing a happy smile to his face.

It’s these reflections on a diverse and successful career, as well as the reflections of the talented artists he’s grown to call friends, that Sullivan hopes to share with Maine audiences at the Stonington Opera House’s “P.S. I Love Music” series.

The June 19 live concert aims to combine performance, story-telling and conversation in the style of the Prairie Home Companion or Marian McPartland’s WICN show Piano Jazz. Another performance is scheduled for October.

“I want the listeners to feel like they are backstage with this variety of musicians,” Sullivan said. “It’s access to a world that you wouldn’t have access to.”

Joining Sullivan at the event are Orland singing sensation 16-year-old Rosie Upton, 16, cellist Eugene Friesen of the Paul Winter Consort and Lorin Hollander, a former child prodigy whose 50-year career has allowed him to perform all over the world.

Sullivan hopes the show will highlight what musicians often talk about when they gather to “jam”: anecdotes, embarrassments, inner-thoughts while performing, future goals and how they make the music that so many people love. Audience members will also have the opportunity to ask questions of the performers.

The recorded concert will be produced by the Stonington Opera House, edited and packaged to be sold and broadcasted on the radio. Though this is the first time he’ll participate in a show like this, Sullivan has delved into many facets of music-making.

Born in Boston, Sullivan started playing the piano by age 3; though he said he struggled to reach the keys.

“Music for me was like a language I always understood,” Sullivan said. “I always felt like I knew what it meant and I could communicate in it.” His first gig was in kindergarten, playing the march calling kids to and from recess and sometimes performing for his classmates during “quiet time.”

After graduating from Yale, Sullivan quickly found work in New York City, composing for ballet performances and Broadway productions and playing at jazz clubs. After twelve years in the city, Sullivan fell in love with Maine on an impromptu drive through New England and moved to Brooklin with his wife, Jillson, in 1988.

Together they continued to build Sullivan’s music company — River Music — the name Sullivan chose to represent the culmination of his many talents: composing, playing, performing, arranging, writing.

In 2006, Sullivan won a Grammy for Silver Solstice, an album created by the Paul Winter Consort. He’s produced 13 albums, played with the Boston Pops and the Philadelphia Orchestra, won 5th place in the International Songwriting Competition for his song “Whisper” and wrote the music for a performance piece called “A Terrible Beauty,” which was performed off-Broadway in May 2010.

His music style runs the gamut; his music celebrates jazz, nature-sounds, cinema, choral and even his Irish heritage. Picking a genre for his music still stumps Sullivan.

“I’ve spent my whole career wondering what to call my music,” he said. But Sullivan feels strongly that any art should have purpose and work to connect people. Music, he said, by its very nature does this.

“Music-making is story-telling,” Sullivan said. “You have to be saying something.”

Tickets to the P.S. I Love Music show are $15. (Island students are free.) To purchase tickets or get more information, call (207) 367-2788 or visit www.operahousearts.org.

 Published in the Ellsworth American, June 16, 2011

Come Sail Away

July 12, 2011
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With a blast from a conch shell, the Friendship sloop Alice E. pulls away from Dysart’s Great Harbor Marina’s dock in Southwest Harbor.

It’s an intimate setting. No microphones. No large crowds. Just six passengers and a captain, exploring the harbor in perhaps the most historic model of sailboat still plying Maine waters.

Named for the Midcoast Maine town of Friendship, where builders of this model were prominent, the Friendship sloop was used primarily for catching lobsters at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Onboard the Alice E., Capt. Kurt Brunner explains how to predict wind gusts by the color of the ocean. The Downeast Friendship Sloop Charters proprietor also tells the sloop’s history and points out various sights  (Seal Harbor, Somes Sound, East Bunker Ledge) on the water.

Suddenly, a Hinckley power boat roars by, drowning out the sound of Brunner’s voice, the sound of the harbor, the sound of the water. There is a thoughtful silence.

“Something about that loses the mystique of the sea,” a passenger finally says wistfully. Brunner smiles in agreement.

Aboard the “pick-up truck of the sea,” Brunner’s name for the once-handy boat, it’s hard not to feel a simple nostalgia. The Alice E, built in 1899, is the oldest friendship sloop in the harbor, and was rebuilt. After the invention of the engine, Friendship sloops, once working vessels, are now mostly used as racing boats and pleasure boats.

No one knows the rules of thumb for the sloop’s design plan better than Ralph Stanley, 82. The Southwest Harbor native, now retired, guesses he has made about 70 boats in his lifetime, many of them friendship sloops.

The mast should be 1/5 of the length from the bow. The width of the boat should be a third of the length, he said. According to the Friendship Sloop Society website, friendship sloops are also identified by gaff-rigged sails and clipper bows.

But the guidelines are loose.

“Each one (builder) has his own idea,” said Stanley, who built his first Friendship sloop, Hieronymus, in 1962. “They vary a little bit, but not much.”

He said it was not uncommon for lobstermen of the past to build a boat in the winter, use it in the summer and sell it in the fall, only to start the process over again come winter.

“Old sloops didn’t last very long,” Stanley said. “They needed a lot of care and rebuilding.”

Years ago on the Alice E., lobster would have been hauled up in traps, thrown in a barrel below deck to keep the critters cold and out of the sun and subjected to the occasional bucket of water. Others sloops had built-in, watertight wells.

Now the Alice E. affords a chance of to see wildlife such as seals and eagles, an opportunity hoist the sails, steer the sloop and pull up a lobster trap, and see the sights on the water. Brunner runs a similar cruise on the Helen Brooks from Northeast Harbor.

Brunner grew up sailing on the Maine Coast and, after college, never stopped. He’s frequently sailed between the Caribbean and Maine, but finds handling a Friendship sloop special.

“She’s a stable boat and easy to handle,” Brunner said, “A great boat for the coast of Maine.”

Written for the Ellsworth American, Out&About, July 2011

Six months

July 3, 2011
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I’ve poured the last six months of my life into one story. This is what has become of it:

First, after spending significant time and speaking with members of 40 Days for Life, Missouri Right to Life, the Catholic church, Planned Parenthood, MU School of Law, NARAL and pro-life advocate (and former Planned Parenthood director) Abby Johnson, I got an extensive look at how the pro-life movement in American has utilized specific strategies to successfully limit abortion in America, what motivates the modern movement and the impact many groups are having on Missouri legislation.

Pro-life: The new face of the modern movement

Also included in the package is a side-bar delving into Planned Parenthood’s strategy to promote reproductive freedom as well as their defense against an increasingly powerful anti-abortion movement:

Q&A: A discussion with a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman

And when the story ran on the front page of the Missourian on July 1, the newspaper was chosen to be featured in Washington D.C. Newseum’s top 10 front pages in the nation. Congrats to photographer Daniel Longar and designer Mallory Redinger!

The text part of the package was edited by Jacqui Banaszynski and also included:

Photos by Daniel Longar (front page, above)

Photos by Matthew Busch (inside, below)

A timeline tracing abortion history and an abortion statistics chart by Matthew Kane

Acadia National Park: Cadillac Mountain

July 1, 2011
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They come to catch a sunrise on Cadillac Mountain armed with blankets, cameras and patience. The stillness before the world lights up is a chilly one.

Visitors to the highest point on the Atlantic Coast perch on pink-granite boulders somewhere along the .3 mile summit trail and wait. The sunlight teases at first, but steadily makes its ascent.

Crowds come to this spot to be the first in the nation to see the sunrise, and while scientifically, this fact is only true during the months between October and March, when watching the harbor come alive with magenta and fiery gold light, it doesn’t much matter.

For some, the adventure begins in solitude. But by the time the sun has crept above the horizon, where indigo sky meets a hazy green landscape, the summit parking lot has quietly filled and a crowd gathered to view the splendor.

1530 feet below are the spruce and pine forests of Acadia National Park, the deep blue waters of Frenchman Bay and the twinkling town of Bar Harbor.

The crowds come by car on Park Loop Road, past the Blue Hill Overlook on the western side of the mountain, a popular place to watch the sunset. They come on trailheads where blue blazes lead hikers of varying levels up rocky paths to Cadillac’s peak. They come on bikes on the 3.5 mile summit road.

Crowds have come to catch sunrises for centuries, but years ago, the journey was more complicated.

In 1883, the Green Mountain Cog Railway was built to bring visitors to the top and people traveled from Bar Harbor by carriage, took a ferry trip across Eagle Lake to the railroad terminal and rode 6000 feet up the mountain in an open rail car.

Today, as people visit the summit center with its gift shop and restrooms, many don’t realize that once a hotel stood here. It was built with an observatory tower and wide veranda so that people could watch that rising and sinking sun, but was torn down in 1896 after the railroad went bankrupt.

And when a summit road was built in 1931, catching sunrises became much easier by car.

The United States Geographic Board changed the name from Green Mountain to Cadillac in 1918 to honor Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Sieur de Cadillac, a French explorer who came to Acadia in the 1680s and went on to found the city of Detroit. The iconic car is name after him.

Cadillac is a must- see for tourists with its spectacular views, scenic trails and extensive history.  It’s also a popular destination among local folk.

When the Cadillac sun has sprung high in the sky and the fleeting sunrise captured only in pictures, the mountain will start come alive with bus tours packed with excited tourists, hikers exploring several trails, rangers running programs and giftshop fanfare — key chains, postcards, a Wabanaki Tribes of Maine exhibit, canned soup!

For now, people enjoy a rarity — a brief but serene moment on the most-visited place on Mount Desert Island. The crowd here is a quiet one.

Written for the Ellsworth American, Out&About

The mail carrier

May 16, 2011
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A week after the Good Friday tornado hit St. Louis, members of Jacqui Banaszynksi’s Intermediate Writing class were sent to the St. Louis area to tell one person’s story. Here is one:

BRIDGETON — The mail carrier returned to Beaverton Court three days after a Good Friday tornado carved a warpath through the Bridgeton neighborhood of Harmann Estates.

In place of the tidy, immaculate homes Tom Branneky remembered were toppling frames of former houses and towering heaps of siding, shingles and brick. The landscape was missing windows, missing roofs, missing walls.

Missing mailboxes.

A mail carrier can’t deliver mail to a home without a mailbox, but Branneky, like other U.S. Postal workers, is doing what he can to deliver mail to everyone he can reach after the Good Friday storm.  He’ll make arrangements to deliver the mail of those without mailboxes to neighbors. He gives mail in-person to people he knows.

Otherwise, undeliverable mail is sent to the Hazelwood station to be picked up. Hazelwood is a larger facility than Bridgeton’s regional station and a central location for many of the neighborhoods affected by the storm.

Branneky first saw his route on television at his home in Hazelwood the morning after the storm. The decimated houses of Harmann Estates were plastered on his screen.

And when he returned to work on Monday, people saw his familiar red, white and blue truck coming down the street and walked to meet him.

They wanted him to know where they were and what happened to them.

They joked too. He marveled at how upbeat they could sound surrounded by destruction.

“You’re going to deliver our bills even though we don’t have a house?” he remembered them saying, but they weren’t angry, just excited for something as simple as a letter amidst the disaster they were dealing with.

Disaster struck some and spared others. Down below Beaverton Court, some homes of Admiralton Drive seemed unchanged. But each day of the week after the storm, Branneky noticed something new out of place.

The family at 3627 had strapped their mailbox to a five-gallon bucket they placed at the edge of the curb. The post lay cracked on the sidewalk. There are requirements surrounding an appropriate mailbox, but Branneky wouldn’t bring mail back to the station because a box wasn’t regulation height.

A gutter of the house next door blew back and forth in the wind, hanging like a string from the porch roof.

And for the first time, Branneky stood on Admiralton and looked across the naked gulley where just a week ago, a thick, wooded forest separated a parallel section of Admiralton and Old St. Charles Road.

The absence of trees and that new, unfamiliar sky still unnerves him. The splitting stumps of former giants looked like a moonscape — a permanent, unnatural alteration on a vision he thought he knew.

Branneky understands it will be a long time before the neighborhood builds itself up again. And so he does what he can to make sure the citizens of Harmann Estates get their mail.

And he listens.

He hears how Lyle Woodruff — who lives at the top of Admiralton Drive and affectionately refers to Branneky as the “mayor of Harmann Estates” — swept and painted his stairs on Good Friday to prepare for a showing for a prospective buyer. The next day he swept drywall and insulation out of his damaged home.

He hears of the Old St Charles Road woman who took her husband home from a senior care facility for the weekend. They had no basement to run to when their concrete slab house began to collapse, but were pulled from the wreckage unharmed.

He hears a story that’s circulated quickly through the neighborhood — of an area man whose daughter’s graduation picture was found plastered to the Lambert-St. Louis International airport — four miles away.

The stories continue. The neighborhood starts to rebuild.

When Branneky returned to Beaverton Court on Tuesday, he could not get passed the dumpsters and piled debris and wheelbarrows of concrete and insurance inspectors and electric trucks and Service International volunteers in bright orange shirts.

Each day though, he inches forward, marking his progress by the appearance of new mailboxes. By Thursday, three have been put back up.

Soon, he’ll once again reach the top of the hill.

Until then he persists — a bearer of normalcy in the wake of a tornado’s mercurial path.

All that is left of the thick forest between Admiralton Drive and Old St. Charles Road are stumps of former trees. Photo: Katy Bergen

You show up.

April 13, 2011
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

In February, as I sat in the Student Center, my cell phone rang. I thought nothing of the non-local number until I heard the voice on the other end.

Gay Talese was on the phone.

I had sent a small, humble letter to Talese requesting this call. (By small, humble letter I mean a meticulously-printed-strategically worded-store-bought-stationary-kind of letter, the kind my generation struggles to remember how to write…who would have thought that when you mess up a letter, you have to start over from scratch?)

As I plopped the letter in the mailbox I sighed and crossed my fingers, hoping that Talese would get back to me in the next month.

He called three days later.

He asked where I was. I told him a cafeteria. I told him I was sans-notes. I told him I had wanted to schedule a interview. He told me he’s not around phones much. Then:

“You’re not in New York City, riding a bicycle with a cell phone…Can’t you talk now?”

I took this to mean two things:

  • 1. Somewhere in New York City Gay Talese was riding a bicycle with a cell phone pressed to his ear.
  • 2. I was never going to get an opportunity like this again.

My boyfriend, following the conversation through shocked facial expressions, shoved a notebook and pen into my hand. My stupor was broken. I asked a question. Talese began to speak. I began to listen.

For Jacqui Banaszynski’sIntermediate Writing class, students take a writing piece of their choice and host a discussion on it. The assignment involves doing everything possible to interview the author of that piece.

Talese grew up in Ocean City, N.J., about ten minutes from my house in Linwood. We both wrote for the Ocean City Sentinel in high school. I’ve always had a strange fascination with the famous writer that grew up down the road and went on to be a pioneer of New Journalism and revered author and journalist. I chose The Silent Season of a Hero for my piece.

Talese spoke of getting kicked out of Joe DiMaggio’s bar, working for access and how at the heart of things, traveling from Ocean City, N.J. to Millville, N.J. for a Sentinel sports story really wasn’t much different from traveling from N.Y.C. to Moscow for the New Yorker. (The former being a reference I would appreciate.)

And somehow I wasn’t surprised Talese proved more enlightening than most of my journalism lectures…if only professors compared access to dating and used Black Swan to illustrate the writing process.

Coincidentally, today, the day of my presentation, Talese sold his Ocean City home. Our small, Jersey-resident connection’s broken. There’ll be no stalking the Talese beach home this summer, hoping for a face-to-face run-in.

Still, I’m glad I have a 17 minute phone conversation to hold onto as I slowly make my way from the Jersey shore to an unknown career path. It’s a conversation I’ll never forget.

Danielle Austen, The New York Times (Click for the NYT slideshow of the Talese home in Ocean City.)

Words of Wisdom

from Gay Talese

On Access:

“You work for access. You are polite. You used good manners. You are always respectful. You write about being rejected.”

On Taking Time To Write Stories:

“You can afford to do it when you can afford to do it and you afford to do it when you’ve been doing it for awhile.”

On Tape Recorders:

“Tape recorders make your interview just a Q and A. You are not listening, you’re transcribing.”

On Respect:

“You don’t have to destroy people in print to be a good writer.”

“I never do hatchet chops.” (In response to above.)

“I’m never rude to people in print. My tone is always respectful.”

On the Writing Process:

“Did you see that movie Black Swan that just won an Oscar? It’s like the choreography in Black Swan…(he talks about how the dancers had to learn the dance step by step)…You go from the first scene to the second scene and the third scene and you rewrite and rewrite and rewrite….and you bury yourself in a private place, organize it and creatively put it together.”

The Writing Process, in two words

Show up.

On Interviewing:

“Interviewing is like dating. Are you going to go on a date with someone who is rude to you. If I ask you to coffee, or the movies and I am rude, are you going to go out with me?”

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