Gotta Love It

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” This is what I was taught when I was very small. Just because someone’s appearance matches a widely-accepted image of how this or that person or people usually are … doesn’t necessarily mean that’s how that someone really is.

Every once in a while, though, image and reality are one and the same.

As a high school student, years and years before I succumbed to the truth that I really wanted music to be my vocation, I had clung to the philosophy that “you can’t make a living at it”. So, as I tried to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, I considered that writing had always been one of my “other” favorite activities — and my experiences with school newspapers and the like suggested that journalism might be the path to follow. Following the time-honored tradition of 17-year-olds being asked to decide on a collegiate major that would in turn influence their life’s work, I looked for a college that had a well-regarded journalism major program. (Considering what I knew and didn’t know at age 17 … and what I didn’t know that I didn’t know! … I now believe that time-honored tradition to be entirely unrealistic. On the other hand, there are people who fret that if their kid doesn’t get into the right preschool, Harvard and Yale won’t be an option later, so what do I know?)

I found such a school, right in my backyard, more or less: the University of Massachusetts.  At the time, research could not be done online, since there really was no such thing as online … so, utilizing the information gleaned from the card catalogs and reference books of various local public libraries and guidance department bookshelves, I got the sense that UMass-Amherst had journalistic things happening.

Plus, a heck of a band. We’re immediately into the double bonus here.

Fast-forward to a couple of semesters into my college life. One particular journalism class that I needed to take was taught by just one professor – and my thought was, “ah! At last.”

The professor’s name was Howard Ziff.

I’d occasionally glimpsed him on my way through the halls of journalism (well, okay, the one hallway in UMass’ Bartlett Hall wherein the Journalistic Studies program offices were located): a grizzly bear of a man, with a voice that rumbled at about a comfortable 2.1 on the Richter scale.

I hadn’t had a single conversation with him yet, but somehow I knew that he fit my stereotypical image of a genuine journalist perfectly.

As the Pulitzer prize-winning UMass journalism professor Madeleine Blais said recently, Ziff “was more of a city editor than even a real city editor. Young men and women came to feel like they had met the real thing. He had a gruff exterior, was good with one-liners, smoked a pipe and claimed to have a bottle of Scotch in his desk.”

And so, I attended his class at the wintry beginning of an Amherst spring semester.

First impressions don’t often lie. I left the first meeting of the class wishing that the second one would start right away. As the semester went on, I did the readings, wrote the papers, completed the course requirements. But, to paraphrase an old saying, I came for the coursework but I stayed for the stories. The man was the city editor at the Chicago Daily News in the 1960s, for heaven’s sake! He had an air of authenticity that simply cannot be bought at the local 7-11.

 

Howard M. Ziff passed away yesterday. Already, myriad Ziff stories have begun to surface publicly, brought forward by legions of former students and other admirers; and most of them in some way point to that quality of being the Real Deal, the (forgive the pun) genuine article. (The stories were always there, of course … but as always seems to be the case, it’s after someone passes away that people are moved to wax eloquent. It’s not wrong; though it is sad that so often that’s what it takes for us to tell people what we think of them. I could honestly have written this very piece last week, last month, last year… last decade?  Once upon a time I heard someone suggest that they wouldn’t mind hearing how they’d be eulogized – and I heard someone else suggest that we should hold “memorial services” for people while they’re still with us … though I do get a slightly odd sense about that idea.)

One Ziff story goes this way: word came in to the Chicago Daily News city desk in April of 1968 that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Ziff turned to a reporter and said, “Find Rosa Parks.”

Holy cow.

In the Daily Hampshire Gazette’s article about Ziff’s passing, there is a proliferation of nouns such as editor, teacher, mentor, raconteur (love that one!), friend; and adjectives including dedicated, ebullient, streetwise, legendary, gruff, wise. All accurate. Most important – and most desperately needed nowadays – was his philosophy of the teaching of journalism: that, as UMass journalism professor B.J. Roche put it, “it should be not just a vocational field but a humanities-based thing where professors were not just teaching people how to type but to understand the role of journalism in the world. [Ziff] thought there were certain obligations that went beyond interviewing celebrities.”

Anyway, back to the mid/late-1980s. This journalism major … whose life was at least as much wrapped up in music made while on one’s feet and wearing a bright red uniform and a hat with feathers sticking up out of it … received the benefit of Howard Ziff’s wisdom for several semesters. He took me seriously as a journalism student – seriously enough that I made sure to take his subject seriously right back. You cannot fool the Real Deal. You cannot fudge an assignment, not if you’re going to pass it in to a professor who, as UMass Alumni Association fixture Jon Hite put it, “could very easily be the most interesting man in the world.”

And yet … here I am, making a living as a music teacher now. Ordinarily, I’d be unsure as to how to square that reality with the fact that one of my professors was as committed to journalism as anyone could be, and that I had reacted so strongly and positively to that commitment. I had been considering moving on from the editorial world, as I was starting to doubt my ability to make an actual living within it (how do those words taste, Rob?). Weirdly, when that editorial world laid me off, even though the layoff cleared the way for me to pursue a next career, I felt just a wee bit … well, if not guilty, then at least odd … about the fact that not quite seven years after having invested all that time and money in a journalism degree, I was pulling the ripcord.

There was one conversation, though, that occurred somewhat before that layoff … which eased my mind a bit.

 

I was spending a fall weekend back on the UMass campus, staying overnight with local friends and visiting the Friday afternoon and Saturday morning rehearsals of the Minuteman Marching Band – followed of course by the Saturday football game, and all the halftime and postgame pageantry that went with it. I wore my band jacket all weekend – badly faded, but still evidence of all the school spirit that came with four years in the band.

After the Friday afternoon rehearsal, I walked away from Old Chapel, then the home of the band, and past the nearby Bartlett Hall, on my way to my car … and crossed paths with Professor Ziff.

A great big rumble of a greeting: “Rob Hammerton, how are you.” There was no question mark at the end of that sentence, so I have dutifully not included it here either. I was beyond pleased: years later after my graduation, I was still somewhere in his database. I obviously would have hoped so, but … at the same time, I wasn’t quite sure. He was a busy man; and how many hundreds – thousands? – of names and faces has he had to keep straight over the years?

We exchanged questions and answers that were just this side of small talk. “What’re you doing now. How’s it going.” (Again, no question marks.) Well, there’s not much actual journalism in my current editorial job; in fact, the writing that I do, according to the style sheet of the magazine, doesn’t even get me a byline. Tough to develop a portfolio that way. It’s a trade magazine, after all, not the Boston Globe. To my employers, Chicago isn’t an editorial style, it’s a trade show locale.

Ziff grunted sympathetically. Then he asked a question that he seemed to know the answer to, already.

“So, it’s after business hours. What brings you back here tonight?” There was a definite question mark there.

Well, tomorrow’s High School Band Day, and I came out from eastern Mass. to lend a hand wherever they might need it. It’s going to be the usual 3000-person-strong day of organized chaos, …so.

“Ah yes,” said Ziff. “Makes sense.” Without a trace of guilt-laying, or sarcasm, or disappointment. “It’s great that you still come up and stay connected with this.” Well, I’ve got friends and a sister who are marching right now, so I get to hang out with them as well. “Which is important.” And then, Ziff said it:

“Anyway, yes, you were a good journalism guy, but let’s face it: you were really majoring in band.”

In the hands of a different person, that remark might have reduced me to a smoldering pile of journalistic ashes. But Ziff said it with a conspiratorial twinkle in his eye and a smile in his voice (he might have been actually smiling, but his beard and pipe made it tough to spot sometimes). So instead, I was able to smile a bit, to abashedly agree with him, to be not at all surprised that all that time he’d seen right through me … and to walk away not just alive (!) but reassured that it was probably okay if I pursued a career other than journalism. I’d been reassured by one of the titans of the industry that I should do something I love, even if it was in someone else’s industry. Perhaps if it had been any other (lesser?) journalism professor, I’d have spent the rest of the weekend with the weight of that world on my shoulders. But Howard Ziff made it clear: you need to do what you love.

That’s not all I miss him for; but it counts for a lot, I think.

Have We Learned Nothing From “Drumline”?

[ABSTRACT: It figures … the big story of the first day of March Madness 2012? One of the bands makes national headlines by screwing up. Great.]

 

While I’ve been a playing member, assisting instructor, and director of high school and college bands, I’ve had a decent amount of experience with the question of “how should we behave?”, specifically while wearing any apparel directly identifying us as band members.

 

During my freshman year with my college band, on one early-season game day, I overheard a member of the band’s student staff quietly reading the riot act to another marching member about profanity in uniform … i.e., there is none, please. Read the handbook.

 

Same band, same year, in Washington, DC, for Ronald Reagan’s second Inauguration: as I have chronicled previously, we observed a member of another band smoking in uniform. Setting aside whatever you think of smoking, and whatever your particular band’s controlled-substances policy happens to be … either everybody smokes or nobody does, gang: it’s the definition of “uniform”. It didn’t help that the smoker was on his own, with his uniform jacket hanging open. Sigh.

 

While serving as grad assistant for bands at a member school of the America East collegiate athletic conference, I got to observe the behavior of another band, which I was quietly pleased that we did not emulate. Our men’s basketball team made it to The Big Dance, so we traveled to Kansas City with them, to root them on to victory. We were involved in the second game of the afternoon at Kemper Arena, and while the first game was going on, we sat in the stands behind one of the other bands and watched – politely scouting not just the two hoop teams (for use when our team, we were sure, would meet one of them in the second round) but also the other two bands.

To kill the suspense: our team froze in the headlights. They got beaten mercilessly. Welcome to the world of national-level basketball competition. We went home the next day.

But by the end of that first game, a lot of us were shaking our heads: the band sitting in front of us, from the University of Southern Northwest Eastview [names have been changed to protect the guilty], had done nothing but make awful remarks about everyone and everything around them, except of course for themselves, and sometimes those remarks didn’t feature strictly the King’s English. What we took from that tournament experience was: well, there’s a band we don’t want to be like, no matter how well they play.

 

During one football game early in my first season as director of a small college band from central New England, the action was getting pretty suspenseful – a close score, the other team (in our view) benefiting from a couple of cheap shots not flagged by referees, and our team getting flagged for fouls they of course did not commit! In frustration, one of our low brass guys (a fine gentleman) expressed his view of the officiating somewhat loudly and very profanely. Instantly I ran halfway up the stands to where his section was and described for him exactly how often I ever wanted to hear anything like that. “I don’t care if you’re right – and you probably are – but you’re in uniform. Never again.”

To his credit, he immediately (before I finished my first sentence) turned all kinds of colors, apologized, and indeed, he uttered not one more word outside the dictionary for his remaining two and a half years with the band – although his enthusiasm never dimmed. For the rest of my time with that band, my formerly-profane friend and everybody around him were people with whom I was happy to travel anywhere, any time.

 

So, yesterday, during the first round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, at a game between Kansas State University and Southern Mississippi University, which was nationally (or at least regionally) televised, a Kansas State player of Puerto Rican origin named Angel Rodriguez stepped to the foul line and was greeted by several members of the Southern Miss pep band chanting, “Where’s Your Green Card?”

Take a moment on your own to imagine how many things are wrong with that utterance. I’ll wait here till you get back.

…

Yeah. Me too.

From a distance, it might be easy for almost any of us to righteously declare, “here’s what I’d do in that situation, if I were in charge of that group.” I don’t know all the details about this incident … or details about this band that I would probably know better if I were among the band’s leadership: were all the kids chanting? Just some of them? Is it a student-led pep band with an advisor, or do they have a faculty or staff-level conductor? What’s the band’s history with regard to public behavior, or more secluded on-campus/off-hours behavior, or even hazing? Do they have a good or bad reputation? …

But it may be that none of that matters. The chant was ridiculous on its face … even if it wasn’t a full-band chant … even if it was an isolated incident (as the president of Southern Mississippi University has asserted in her official apology to the world).

Reportedly, the Southern Miss athletic director either has dragged or will drag the SMU band director in front of the Kansas State player (and, presumably, other KSU officials) to offer his/their own apology, and this is at least what ought to happen. I don’t want to spend time preaching about what else the school “should” do about all this – I wouldn’t want the whole Internet world to be telling me what to do if I were in that band director’s shoes, because as I said, the whole world doesn’t have all the information it needs in order to make the right decision about that particular situation. And I don’t want to be the equivalent of an Internet commenter/flamethrower, all knee-jerk righteousness and long-distance pontification. I’ve been on the receiving end of that, and it ain’t no fun.

But yesterday my imagination inevitably went to “what would I do in this case?” – from the perspective of someone who has led similar ensembles which were very much in the public eye, and yes, they were on national TV too.

If it were my band … as much as I would have tried to “set the example” and otherwise lay out codes of conduct for my band (which I’m reasonably sure the SMU director would have tried to do; I am presuming he’s a decent sort of fellow who likely doesn’t deserve to have to deal with this sort of silliness) … I am pretty sure that if my team had won its first-round game (SMU didn’t) and stayed in the tournament’s host city, my band would not have. With the blessings of my athletic director, I hope I would have sent my band back to the hotel, had them collect their luggage, and headed straight to the airport. I hope I would have had the opportunity to instantly, in that moment (with the blessing and presence! of the athletic director) approach the opposing team’s bench and offer an immediate apology to the entire team. I’m even pretty sure I would have considered sitting the band down and having them not make a single sound for the rest of the game; possibly from the safety of our bus outside.  It’s okay: our cheerleading coach would have understood.

I hope I would have done something appropriate, in that moment. Obviously, the only way I would know exactly what I would have done in that situation would have been to be in the middle of it. Happily, with the bands I’ve been associated with, I never had occasion to know.

 

The official statement from SMU’s president reads thusly:

“We deeply regret the remarks made by a few students at today’s game. The words of these individuals do not represent the sentiments of our pep band, athletic department or university. We apologize to Mr. Rodriguez and will take quick and appropriate disciplinary action against the students involved in this isolated incident.”

The problem with this is that whether the chant does or doesn’t represent the sentiments of the band, and whether this is in fact an isolated incident, that’s not the point now. Whatever uniformed members of a school band do – good or bad – affects public perception of that school. Observers of a band’s behavior are not required to do heavy research in order to find out whether they should condemn or admire that organization or that school. The WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) rule applies in these cases, for better or for worse.

And in this case, thank you so much to the possibly isolated members of the Southern Miss band for reflecting poorly not only on their fellow band members, not only on their school, but on pep bands in general, because that’s how the public reacts: with scorn for bands.  All bands.  Yours and mine.  They’re all unruly college kids.

My college band director once made a statement in an article about our band that wasn’t technically one of his Starred Thoughts®, but it could have been, and it may be the point of all this:

“There are standards — standards of behavior, standards of how to project the image of the band, which is the image of the university, which is of course the image of themselves.”

Distractions

So a couple of weeks ago, the defending Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins were invited to the White House, so that President Obama could officially congratulate them on their ice hockey victory over the Vancouver Canucks last June, and also so the team could present the President with a Bruins jersey with his name on the back. Flash bulb, flash bulb, handshake, flash bulb, athletes in suits and ties, flash bulb, speech, flash bulb. A fluffy and fun tradition.

Goaltender Tim Thomas opted not to attend. Pressed to explain his decision, he denied that it had anything to do with politics – his, or the President’s, or anyone else’s. Multitudes of observers have begged to differ, but they were not inside Mr. Thomas’ head and so could only surmise about the subject. Attendance at the event was not mandatory, so no team rules or policies have been violated.

Some members of the media noted that Mr. Thomas’ politics were demonstrably right-of-center, and supposed that indeed, Mr. Thomas’ views might have had more to do with his absence from the White House visit than he was letting on.

Given my own views (demonstrably left-of-center), I had occasion to wonder: if my team had won something large and had been subsequently invited to be honored at the White House during the years of the Bush administration, would I have gone? Heck yeah, I’d have gone. Partly because during my eighth grade class trip to Washington, DC, I got into just about every building in town except the White House; so, a chance to make amends. Also, …it’s the White House! An important building in American history. My grade-school social studies teachers might have looked at me funny – “and you didn’t go?” Also, whoever is the President at the moment is (as Molly Ivins used to put it) “the current occupant” of the Oval Office. As a mentor of mine once said, “It’s not you, it’s the position.” It’s not Mr. Bush or Mr. Obama; it’s the Presidency. It’s a big deal.

(During my freshman year in college, my college band was invited to participate in Ronald Reagan’s second Inaugural. I went to school in Massachusetts, which does not exactly sport a reputation as a bastion of Republicanism. Some band members probably had voted for Walter Mondale instead. But it was the Inauguration, for heaven’s sake, and a pretty big honor for the band. We all went.)

This morning, I watched a local sports roundup show that revealed unto me an extension of this story: that Mr. Thomas’ politics have been on display to the world via his Facebook page since he joined, this past fall. And of course, members of the media weighed in on what this might mean to Mr. Thomas’ team, which lately has lost four of their last six games, scoring just ten goals in that stretch – and sporting a markedly increased goals-against average, which is a bigger deal to observers of goaltending. So, the question has been raised:

Are Tim Thomas’ political commentaries a distraction to his team?

During that broadcast, Bruins television play-by-play announcer Jack Edwards said that he believed that those comments were indeed a distraction to the team. He said so firmly and unequivocally. If you know Jack Edwards, you know that “firmly and unequivocally” is an accurate descriptor for just about anything he says; but I was struck by his (unequivocality?) within the context of most of the rest of the sports media articles I’ve read about this subject.

Many online columnists and radio personalities have opined that of course Mr. Thomas’ political commentaries are not a distraction to the team; the team is comprised of hockey professionals who will likely not be turned into hockey amateurs merely by their goaltender’s online postings. In one way, I find this an odd thing for some members of the Boston sports media to insist: if you listen to sports-talk-radio hereabouts long enough, you’ll find a lot of sports-talk-radio guys who agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Thomas’ politics. It can be a pretty right-wing place, consider we’re supposed to be talking sports here…! In another way, though, I find this a sensible notion: Mr. Thomas’ teammates probably already know his politics, because he’s been on the team for awhile, and as you may be aware, sports teammates do occasionally talk to each other off the field, court, or ice. I remember knowing people in my college band whose politics I did not agree with; but during halftime shows, I elected to remain in my assigned field-drill location even though it placed me (a liberal person) next to her or him (a conservative person). I don’t even know whether Mr. Thomas is the only conservative Republican on the Bruins’ roster. He may not be.

 

Curiously, the questions that have occurred to me since I heard Jack Edwards’ commentary have had less to do with politics than with issues of public expression.

We can extrapolate from the text of the First Amendment that we’re all allowed to express ourselves freely. The way my journalism professors interpreted this and expounded on it, Americans should be allowed to say or print what we like, as long as it doesn’t libel or slander others. If we care about civility in public discourse, other more lofty standards come into play, such as the unnecessary injury of others’ feelings, but some might see that concern as overly solicitous.

I am a Facebook person. I frequently post thoughts and opinions as Facebook statuses, much like Mr. Thomas has done. I am also a member of a couple of teams (teaching faculty, church staff). As it happens, I am not “Facebook-friends” with very many people from either community, which is an individual choice of mine; so a more limited number of my teammates have the opportunity to read my rants and raves on that platform, whether they are political or not (and often they are).

On the whole, my Facebook friends (mostly people with whom I attended junior high, high school, or college, or members of college bands I’ve worked with who have long since graduated) do understand what a serious AND silly person I can be.

But if I were Facebook-linked with a lot of my teaching teammates, I might be more cautious about what I post. (I very rarely post about my public-school teaching experiences on Facebook anyway, in case you were curious.) If I were connected with any of my current public-school students – which I am not, at all – I would absolutely be much more cautious, since as a teacher I have to “set the example”, and “a teacher is always on stage”. And I recognize that how I comport myself (live or online) can have an effect on my ability to develop or maintain a positive, productive, trustworthy environment in which to make church music. Some of my colleagues have created separate Facebook profiles for their personal selves and their more professional lives, the better to keep their interactions and their expressions directed toward the appropriate audiences.

I visited Tim Thomas’ Facebook page, and noted that it is viewable by the general public. He is a public figure, after all; and he’s in a business where an online presence not only reflects awareness of that public-figure-ness, but also is just one more tool in the publicity toolbox.

In my roles as public-school music teacher and as church choir director, I am perhaps not as public a figure as Mr. Thomas is. My Facebook profile is much more private than his, and as much as possible, I try to be in control of who in the world gets subjected to my silly or snarky or incendiary ideas. From this perspective, Mr. Thomas and I are not too similar.

But, since I established this blog seventeen months ago, and especially since my well-chronicled brush with a pack of young-singing-sensation-admirers, I have had occasion to think long and hard about the question of what I write or say publicly … and who could be reading it … and to what extent the things I write could positively or negatively affect readers’ assessment of me, or my work, or whether I’m an appropriate person to be doing the particular work I’m doing.

“I don’t think that when you become an athlete that you sign away your right to be an individual,” Mr. Thomas said, “and to have your own views and to be able to post them on Facebook, if you like.” It is true, however, that when you become a professional athlete, you do become a public figure, and with that status comes an added layer of scrutiny, no matter what you would like. Basketball star Charles Barkley famously declared that he did not want to be a role model. Bad news: if you’re a public figure, at least one reporter asks you a tough question, and at least one parent reads your postgame comments in the paper and decides whether you’d be a good influence on their kid.

In one sense, I’m thrilled that I’m not a public figure of Tim Thomas-grade – the media and the general public do not regularly discuss, analyze, dissect, and judge my job performance via newspapers, television and radio broadcasts, and the Internet. So I don’t have to deal with Fred from Scituate calling a talk-radio show and demanding that I take a pay cut because my beginner instrumentalists can’t play sixteenth notes yet, or that I shouldn’t be the choir director anymore if I don’t start programming more Mozart. And happily, due to union-negotiated contract stipulations, my employer can’t just put me on waivers. (At least not the last time I read the contract.)

[Although I will say that one topic for another post is … the ability of the media and the general public to pass judgment on the performance of educators even though they know just about as much about teaching as they do about professional ice hockey goaltending.]

Maybe Mr. Thomas’ teammates really don’t give a wet slap about his politics, if they even have his Facebook page bookmarked at all. Maybe the Bruins of February 2012 are not the Bruins of December 2011 because other teams have scouts that tell them how to counteract the Bruins’ current strategies; or because injuries pile up; or because every team (or band or choir), even the great ones, goes through bad patches.

When Mr. Thomas was questioned by one Boston sportswriter about his online expressions and their potential effect on his team, he curtly replied, “This is my job. Facebook is my personal life. If you guys don’t understand the difference between individual and job, there’s a problem.”

Fair enough. I would not always want my employer or my teammates to read my Facebook posts, just because they might have their suspicions that I can be pretty silly sometimes … confirmed. And keeping my personal life and my professional life separate has most often been a worthy strategy.

But I will suggest this. If your job includes being part of a team (and that team is invited to a public ceremony honoring its accomplishment), and if elements of your personal life appear to cause you to be less of a teammate than the rest of your mates (by opting not to attend that ceremony) … then, outside observers may misunderstand the difference between your job and your personal life (because even if the absence had nothing to do with your political views, outside observers have been known to put two and two together and get something that looks a lot like four) … and …

Yes, there may be a problem.

 

Postscript; or perhaps Appendix I:

On the day of the Bruins’ visit to the White House, possibly anticipating controversy over his absence from the event, Tim Thomas posted this on his Facebook page:

“I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People. This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers['] vision for the Federal government. Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL. This is the only public statement I will be making on this topic.”

Which is fine.

Until you dig a bit deeper into Mr. Thomas’ Facebook presence. He insists that his lack of interest in visiting the White House was bipartisan disappointment. When you visit his “photos” page, you find images that reflect not only a bit more partisan dissatisfaction; they reflect partisan disrespect, from the mild to the snarky to unvarnished name-calling.

(So … it appears that both Mr. Thomas and Arizona governor Jan Brewer want to shake their index fingers at the President. Say what you want about Gov. Brewer; at least she came to the meeting.)

This raises a different question than “do Mr. Thomas’ politics constitute a distraction to his team?” And never mind whether his politics are right-wing or left-wing. The question this postscript raises is, “is Mr. Thomas being honest with the general public and his fans in particular about his reasons for skipping the White House event?”