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Today’s meeting was held at the Country Club of Lansing on a sunny, beautiful, perfect end-of-fall kind of day. President Jack called the meeting to order at 12:33 and the invocation, a touching National Day of Prayer prayer, was delivered by Dan McKean. The club then joined together to sing the patriotic song, My Country Tis of Thee.
Lisa Smith handled the introduction of guests, including her neighbors, Deb and Mark Campbell, who winter every year in Nicaragua and recently joined the Rotary Club there. Terry Terry introduced his guest Kendra Melons, Scott Keith introduced Jessica Yorko of the Lansing City Council, and Camron Gnass introduced Annie Rzepecki who has just moved back to Lansing as the community relations coordinator at the BWL.
Sandy Draggoo then gave the Remembrance Report, stating, “There is good news to report. The health of the club is fine.”
Announcements followed, beginning with a kind word about Joan Legg’s funeral that was held yesterday at St. Katherine’s Episcopal Church in Williamston. Several Rotarians attended and the setting was very beautiful.
A check presentation in the amount of $15,000.00 was then made to Julie Thomasma of Child and Family Charities (CCF) by Courtney Millbrook, president of the Rotary Foundation. In addition to thanking the club, Julie commented that this year’s proceeds from the 9/15 Rotary Golf Outing will be used to purchase a street outreach van to reach Lansing teens in crisis. CCF works with the Gateway Youth Program to house troubled teens in crisis, and this van will be a tool for significantly improving the work they can do.
It was then noted that LCC’s STEMfest will be held tomorrow for grades K-6 from 9am to 1 pm and that everyone must remember to turn their clocks back one hour on Saturday night (11/5).
Flags were exchanged between the Lansing and Nicaragua Rotary clubs. In their remarks, Deb and Mark Campbell noted that Nicaragua is the poorest country in Central America. Their club has 26 members, including 50% ex-patriates, and their work in Nicaragua includes giving dictionaries to all third graders, putting water into all local schools, and working to help the fishing industry.
Peter Ding Mejok, from the City of Lansing, then received his new member badge. Peter hails from the Rotary Club in District 9212, South Sudan. He came to the United States last year, after also being a Rotarian in Khartoum, Bahrain, Dubai, Qtar and other places. He had to move here to be safe and is glad to be part of a new Rotary family. At this point, President Jack commented on the global nature of Rotary and how incredible it is to have both Nicaragua and South Sudan represented here today.
Finally, there was an announcement that the Hands-On Committee will now be called the Special Projects Committee. A meeting will be held on Friday, 12/2, at 11:15 am, before the Rotary meeting that day. Anybody interested is invited to attend.
There was no special music today although President Jack noted that Beethoven’s 9th will be performed at the Wharton Center tonight by the Lansing Symphony and the MSU Choral Union. President Jack also remarked that this uplifting, joyful concert might help to assuage the football and election angst presently impacting our community.
Fellow Rotarian Melissa Nay then introduced today’s guest speaker, Fellow Rotarian Berl Schwartz, the 2001 founder of the Alternative newspaper, the City Pulse, whose career started as a copy boy at the Toledo Blade in 1966. After 35 years and numerous prominent journalism jobs all over the country, Berl initially came to Lansing as the State News’ Managing Editor.
Highlights of Berl’s Speech:
Originally from Toledo, Berl noted that Jamie Farr (MASH fame), Danny Thomas, and even President Jack Davis have significant ties to Toledo. In fact, Jack, who grew up here, would regularly visit his relatives in Toledo and ride his bike to the soda fountain (following pick-up baseball games) at Berl’s dad’s drugstore, Schwartz Drug. It’s a small world!
As a copy boy in Toledo, Berl was charged with changing typewriter ribbons and cutting off (and delivering) the stories as they came in on the long-distance news feeds. One story he delivered was of sharpshooter and mass murderer, Charles Whitman, who killed 49 people from atop the bell tower at the University of Texas on August 1, 1966. Berl’s best friend, Tom Eckman, was killed by Whitman that day. Fifty years later, when Berl finally had the nerve to visit the bell tower, the tour guide made no mention of the mass killing. It turns out that all tour guides are forbidden from mentioning the incident… And now, exactly 50 years later, it is legal to openly carry guns in all campus buildings in Texas. It makes no sense.
Berl graduated from the University of Pennsylvania where he was the managing editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. While there, he had the opportunity to show Ted and Bobby Kennedy around the university, and then introduced Bobby Kennedy at a campus event during his presidential race against Eugene McCarthy. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated two months later and Berl was the only college student invited to cover the funeral at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. He remembers Teddy’s voice cracking during the eulogy and even traveled on the train that took Kennedy’s body for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. So many people lined the railroad tracks that the train had to go slowly and the burial did not take place until after dark. On his train ride back to Philadelphia that night, Berl decided that journalism would be his career.
After college, Berl went to work for the Philadelphia Bulletin, a widely read paper that produced eight editions a day but ultimately folded in 1982. This is where Berl was eventually hired to conduct interviews from a young person’s perspective, during the Vietnam War period. During this time he interviewed: Noam Chomsky, Margaret Mead, Averill Harriman, Janice Joplin, Mama Cass, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Alice Cooper, Fats Domino, and even John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Later in his career, he interviewed the likes of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Judy Brown Clark (from Lansing), and Al Gore.
With no disrespect intended, listening to Berl’s recollections was on par with watching Forrest Gump. Berl has intersected history at so many important junctures and did a fabulous job providing the Rotary Club of Lansing with a glimpse into his esteemed career. For example, he had an amusing story about taking a painfully long time sorting out why his microphone was not working while interviewing Averill Harriman. He interviewed Margaret Mead in the rafters of the Natural History Museum in NYC. Berl spent more than an hour alone with John Lennon and Yoko Ono sitting on the floor of their Waldorf hotel room in Philadelphia, at the peak of their fame. Berl witnessed the agony of the Carter-Ford debate, when the sound system went silent and the two candidates stood staring straight ahead for minutes on end, refusing to acknowledge one another. He was with Gerald Ford at Iowa State University when Ford made one of his many gaffes, calling Iowa ‘Ohio’. As the Washington Bureau Chief for UPI, he was even the boss to legendary journalist, Helen Thomas, who even participated in Berl’s father’s 80th birthday celebration, presenting him with a ‘this is your life’ scrap book.
So why did Berl give all this up to come to Lansing? He made this conscious and difficult choice as he learned to confront his lifelong issue of coming to terms with being gay. During the time when the expectation was to marry and have kids, there were no openly gay depictions anywhere. It was a very closeted time with horrible headlines. If found out that he was gay, his journalism career would have ended instantly. Nevertheless, he wanted to run stories on George McGovern (a firm gay rights supporter in a time when this was not popular) and Rock Hudson (who was a gay man battling AIDS) but, at that time, journalism bureaus would not cover anything of this nature.
While serving as a visiting professor at the University of Oklahoma, Berl knew it was time to deal with his sexuality. He saw an advertisement that the State News at MSU was looking for a general manager and knew that East Lansing was the first community in the country to protect the rights of gays in the workplace. All of this played into his decision to come to Lansing, where he has now lived longer than any other place. He started the City Pulse in 2001.
Berl stated that his story is relevant during this time when our state’s position on gay issues is changing for the worse. Our Attorney General, who might one day be Governor, recently argued against same sex marriage. And there is a push for anti-bullying legislation to not include ‘gays’ in its language. Last, young people are leaving the state because it is not considered gay friendly. With another election cycle looming, it is imperative that we do what we can to reverse this negative reputation of Michigan. He came here because Michigan was a friendly place. Why are we allowing it to slide backwards?
At the end of his talk, Diane Sanborn noted how nice it is having the City Pulse, praising it for providing access to the other side of stories and for supporting groups not otherwise represented. Likewise, Jack Bates remarked how nice it is having Berl a member of Rotary.
When asked what story from his career stands out most of all, Berl told about being thrown out of the White House during the Ford presidency. One must never leave the press quarters while the President is in the room but Berl did not know this and wanted to leave because he was facing a deadline. He ended up tussling with a photographer seven feet from the President, a woman shrieked, and the Secret Service jumped into action. In the end, Berl made headlines himself in the Louisville Times, instead of the story he was trying to get published. His editor only remarked that he likes a man who fights for his story…
Pam Miklavcic's email is: tdppammiklavcic@gmail.com
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