Great Plains 2016 book by Great Plains Awards

the 2016 great plains journalism awards

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Letter From the Tulsa Press Club President

imes, they are a-changin’. But not always for the better. The journalism industry is experiencing a state of crisis. People have been talking about this crisis for the past 10 years, but I want to share a few recent statistics with you. • Outside of D.C., L.A. or New York in the past 10 years or so, one out of every four reporting jobs vanished – some 12,000 jobs. – U.S. Department of Labor • Twenty-one of 50 states do not have a local daily newspaper with its own dedicated D.C. correspondent accredited to cover Congress. – Pew Research Center 2016 • Over the past decade, weekday circulation of U.S. newspapers has fallen 17 percent and ad revenue more than 50 percent. – Pew Research Center 2015 This mass exodus from the journalism industry is to the detriment of our society, which is based on freedom of information and freedom of the press. If newsrooms are shrinking, who is asking the tough questions of business leaders, politicians and decision-makers? Who is there to search through public records or attend community meetings? If it doesn’t involve blood or fire, will it lead the evening news? And who is factchecking news releases before posting them online? We must support the future of journalism by supporting and rewarding both today’s and tomorrow’s journalists. I am proud the Tulsa Press Club is fulfilling its mission and honoring talent in the region through the Great Plains Journalism Awards. If you are a finalist or recipient of an award at this year’s event, thank you for the tremendous work you are doing for your community and our society. If you are student receiving a scholarship today, congratulations, and know that your future in journalism means so much to me, to the Tulsa Press Club and to everyone who will ever read or listen to your stories and learn something new, be inspired or decide to make positive change. Finally, I want to thank all of our honorees, sponsors and guests for being a part of the Great Plains Journalism Awards. Cheers to a great year for journalism in the Great Plains states.

Best,

Rachel Anderson 2016 President, Tulsa Press Club VP, Schnake Turnbo Frank

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 3

Great Plains Journalism Awards and Conference April 18 | Historic Mayo Hotel | Downtown Tulsa Bringing together award-winning journalists from an eight-state region.

Meet the presEnters Erik Logan

Since 2011, Erik Logan has served as president of OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network. With Sheri Salata, Logan oversees the day-to-day operations of the network, which has seen success with programs like “Oprah’s Lifeclass,” “Super Soul Sunday” and “Oprah’s Master Class.” Soon, the network will debut the race riot miniseries “Tulsa” starring Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer.

Logan has had a successful career in media, working at Citadel Broadcasting and for more than 10 years at CBS/Infnity Broadcasting. He eventually landed at XM Satellite Radio where he helped grow a subscriber base to more than 9 million. In his role as vice president of programming and broadcast operations with XM, he negotiated partnerships and managed day-to-day relationships with major content providers including Major League Baseball, PGA Tour, CNN, Clear Channel Communications and Fox News. It was with XM that he met Oprah Winfrey, who would lure him to Chicago in 2008 and eventually help launch her namesake network.

ma Nation stem ahoma & Design y Center

The Oklahoma native’s first foray in radio was as Oklahoma City station mascot “Chuck the Duck.” Today, Logan lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, Erin, and two daughters. 2016 Great Plains Journalism Awards and Distinguished Lectureship Schedule

JOIN US APRIL 18 Great Plains Journalism Awards and Conference April 18 | Historic Mayo Hotel | Downtown Tulsa LECTURER FEATURED Bringing together award-winning journalists from anSPEAKER eight-state region.

DISTINGUISHED 10:15 a.m. Q&A withErik Erik LoganLogan

Diana Marcum

10:15 a.m. Student session with Diana Marcum

President ofAsOWN: Oprah Winfrey LA Times reporter and 2015 Pulitzer Prize 11 a.m. staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, Diana Awards luncheon registration Network and Oklahoma native, with a long winner Marcum covers the 900-square-mile Central Valley for her narrative portraits of farmers, professional11:30 career in radio andshe television and others experiencing of California. In 2015 won the Pulitzer Prize fieldworkers for a.m. Awards luncheon feature writing for her series of narrative portraits of broadcasting California’s drought-stricken Central Valley. Welcome and introduction

those farmers, fieldworkers and others experiencing the California drought. Awards presentation RESERVATIONS CAN MADE AT SHOP.TULSAPRESSCLUB.ORG (Read it at BE bit.ly/dianamarcum) (Lunch served during presentation) President’s remarks

OR BY CONTACTING SHAUN LEE AT SHAUN@TULSAPRESSCLUB.ORG AND 918-583-7737. Presentations of the Dan Harrison Memorial Scholarships Marcum

has spent her career in journalism and on staff for various outlets in SPONSORED BY southern California. Presentation of Distinguished

Distinguished Lectureship Speaker: freelancing Erik Logan

EDITOR LEVELCalifornia, and Today,EXECUTIVE Marcum lives in Fresno, currently is on leave from the Times to finish the 1:15 p.m. - Your Story “The Tenth Island.” with Dianabook Marcum

PUBLISHER LEVEL

Lectureship Award

1 p.m. - Break

3 p.m. - Break

3:15 p.m. State of the Media panel discussion 4:30-6 p.m. - Reception

DISTINGUISHED LECTURER Erik Logan

FEATURED SPEAKER Diana Marcum

President of OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network and Oklahoma native, with a long professional career in radio and television broadcasting

LA Times reporter and 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner for her narrative portraits of farmers, fieldworkers and others experiencing California’s drought-stricken Central Valley.

Meet the emcee

WORKSHOPS: FREE Distinguished Lectureship Luncheon the AQHA Cup. Dickerson and Awards Presentation: $40; co-anchors Tulsa’s Channel 8’s evening Before graduating from Oklahoma State University, Kristin came newscasts at 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. $35 for students and RESERVATIONS CAN BE MADE AT SHOP.TULSAPRESSCLUB.ORG OR BY CONTACTING AT SHAUN@TULSAPRESSCLUB.ORG AND 918-583-7737. to Channel 8 as an intern. After nearly six months of free labor, she Kristin spent five yearsSHAUN on theLEE morning shows. media personnel

Kristin Dickerson

For Good Morning Oklahoma and Good Day Tulsa, SPONSORED BY she could be found skydiving, rock climbing, EDITOR LEVEL EXECUTIVE EDITOR LEVEL noodling for catfish, or most often on horseback. Bank of Oklahoma A native of Las Cruces, N.M., Citizen Potawatomi NationKristin moved to Oklahoma to ride St. John Health System horses for the Oklahoma State University Women’s Equestrian Team. Trust Company of Oklahoma During her senior she earned Mad year, Chicks Marketing & Designan individual national championship Dennis R. Neill Centerhonor in intercollegiate equestrian, and was awarded the topEquality national

somehow convinced the station to hire her. Kristin considers the opportunity to mingle in the community LEVEL the best part of her job. When not and meet her fellow PUBLISHER Oklahomans at work, she can be found volunteering at local events, emceeing fundraisers, and serving as a board member for The Center for Individuals with Physical Challenges.

Tulsa World

4 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Meet the Judges Brian Malasics

Malasics serves as copy desk chief of The Virginian-Pilot. He previously worked at the Lexington Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com before joining the Pilot in 2012.

Buddy Moore

Moore is a sports designer at The Virginian-Pilot, where he has worked in a variety of design roles over the years.

Michael Workman

Workman directs the design and user experience team of BostonGlobe.com. He joined the Globe in 2011 after 14 years as a print and online designer at The Baltimore Sun, where his work was recognized by the Society for News Design.

Mike Semel

Coffield is business editor at The Denver Post, where she has worked previously as city editor, features editor, Sunday editor and as a feature writer. She also worked at several other publications during her 30year journalism career.

Semel is metro editor of The Washington Post, managing a staff of 80 journalists. He led The Post’s coverage of the shootings at Virginia Tech, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news and the paper’s coverage of former Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell’s gifts scandal, which won the 2013 Polk Award.

Landon Nordeman

Mike Sielski

Dana Coffield

Nordeman is a New York City-based freelance photographer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Time, Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, W, Vanity Fair and Vogue as well as museums in Beijing, Houston and Columbus.

Mark Di Ionno

Di Ionno is a columnist in North Jersey’s largest newspaper, The Star Ledger. He is a former sports writer for the New York Post. He is the author of three nonfiction books and a novel, “The Last Newspaperman.” He was finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

Martin Smith-Rodden

Smith-Rodden is an assistant professor at Ball State University. He previously worked as a photojournalist and photo editor at The Virginian-Pilot and at the San Antonio Light. He holds a Ph.D. in psychology.

Sielski is an award-winning sports columnist for The (Philadelphia) Inquirer, which he joined in 2013 after spending three years as a sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He was previously the sports columnist for Calkins Media, a chain of daily newspapers in suburban Philadelphia, and has written two books.

Paul Nelson

Nelson is director of presentation for The Virginian-Pilot, a position he has held since 2007. He has worked at the Pilot since 1990 with a brief stint at the Detroit Free Press.

Sam Hundley

Hundley is a designer/ illustrator at The VirginianPilot, where he has worked since 1994. He previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News and Arizona Daily Star.

Bill Herbst

Herbst has 23 years of experience in Grand Rapids television journalism - 10 years at the ABC affiliate, 13 years at the NBC affiliate - in a variety of roles, including producer, executive producer, assignment editor and assignment manager.

Jeff Greer

Jeff Greer is the University of Louisville beat writer for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky. He is a threetime AP Sports Editors award winner and has won multiple regional awards for his work.

Carol Marbin Miller

Carol Marbin Miller is a senior investigative reporter for the Miami Herald. Writing about children and vulnerable adults, Marbin Miller’s stories have had significant impact, leading to the passage of several Florida laws. She has won a number of awards, including the Goldsmith Prize, Selden Ring Award, Worth Bingham Prize, Heywood Broun Award, Eugene Pulliam First Amendment Award, the Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service Award, and the the ONA Public Service Award. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for public service.

Jill Burcum

Burcum has been an editorial writer since March 2008, joining the Editorial Board after working in the Star Tribune newsroom as an editor and reporter. She writes on a broad range of topics, including health care, water quality and American Indian issues. Her “Separate and Unequal” series on dilapidated Bureau of Indian Education schools was a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist for editorial writing.

Megan Garvey

Megan Garvey is a deputy managing editor at the Los Angeles Times where she oversees the news and enterprise hub and data team. She was a member of the team that won the 2004 Pulitzer for breaking news for coverage of wildfires in Southern California.

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 5

Meet the Judges Tracy Brown

Brown is deputy managing editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution where she oversees the Education, Lifestyles & Entertainment and the Print Presentation team, which includes A1 and Sunday editors. She’s joined the AJC in 2008 after 12 years with the Dallas Morning News as a news editor and arts editor. She has also worked at the St. Petersburg Times and The State in Columbia, S.C.

Ashlei King

King is a general assignments reporter for the NBC and FOX affiliates in San Antonio, Texas. She has won a Texas Associated Press Award for deadline editing and won a Society of Professional Journalist Award.

Bill Pitzer

Debbie Leiderman Geiger

Leiderman is a staff editor for The New York Times, where she has worked on the National, Science, Styles, House and Home, Dining and Arts sections. She is a longtime member of the American Copy Editors Society and is the co-captain of the New York City regional chapter of the Journalism and Women Symposium.

Diana Fuentes

Award-winning journalist Diana R. Fuentes has been in news for 35 years in various roles at several papers, from police reporter to publisher. She is president of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas and past president of Texas APME.

Elizabeth Hudson

Pitzer, former graphics editor for The Charlotte Observer, is an illustrator, educator and writer who specializes in visualizing information and creating compelling content for print and online. His informational graphics have won numerous regional, national and international awards.

Hudson is the editor in chief of Our State magazine, an 83-year-old regional publication in North Carolina. Under her leadership, Our State won two Gold Eddies for Best Full Issue from Folio. (Our State Design Director Claudia Royston and Art Director Jason Chenier helped Hudson with judging.)

Catherine Matusow

Emily Linnert

Matusow is the current executive editor at Houstonia magazine and the former managing editor at the Houston Press.

Daniel Brown

Brown is in his 20th year at the San Jose Mercury News. His profile of Giants pitcher Sergio Romo was voted the top sports feature of 2014 by APSE.

Linnert is the morning anchor at WOOD TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she has worked as a producer, reporter and a morning anchor for 10 years. A graduate of Michigan State University, she started her career at WLNS in Lansing.

6 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Jeremy Ross

Ross joined CBS 2 Chicago in 2014, after working in Milwaukee as a reporter/ anchor at FOX 6. He has won a regional Edward R Murrow award, Eric Severeid Award, and multiple Emmys, Associated Press, Milwaukee Press Club and Wisconsin Broadcasters Association awards.

John Timpe

Timpe is the Tampa Bay Times’ Enterprise Editor. He’s taught narrative journalism to media students at the University of North Florida and reported for the New York Times bestseller “Under the Tarnished Dome.”

Kevin Siers

Siers is the editorial cartoonist for The Charlotte Observer. His cartoons won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014, and his work, syndicated by King Features, has appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today and The New York Tiimes.

Kristen Go

Go is the San Francisco Chronicle’s Managing Editor, Digital. She oversees SFChronicle.com and runs The Chronicle’s Incubator, a program that provides digital and social media training to the entire staff. She joined The Chronicle in 2008 and prior to that worked at The Arizona Republic and was part of the team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news at The Denver Post.

Leroy Chapman Jr.

Chapman is a deputy managing editor with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He oversees teams that cover local government, the economy, state and federal government, short-term enterprise and breaking news.

Meet the Judges Meredith Cohn

Susan Bahorich

Cohn is health and medicine reporter at The Baltimore Sun. She’s won several reporting awards, most recently for stories on medical errors made by hospitals and dysfunction at the state’s new health insurance exchange.

Bahorich is originally from Maryland where she went to college at Towson University outside Baltimore. She worked at WDBJ7 in Roanoke for more than 10 years before coming to NBC12 in Richmond, Virginia. She has won several awards from the Virginia Association of Broadcasters.

Mindy Matthews

Matthews has been an editor at The New York Times for 21 years. She is a Kansas City native and University of Missouri graduate. Previous jobs include the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Seattle Times and International Herald Tribune in Paris.

ALSO:

Pat McDonogh Katharine Shilcutt Zach Ryall Rachel DePompa Sharon Chapman Tom Johanningmeier Megan Garvey Mary Tyler March University of North Carolina Daily Tar Hell staff staff

Bill Henry

As one of two senior editors at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Henry serves on the newsroom leadership team while overseeing coverage of three cities and several regional topics, including health care, the environment and transportation.

A Top 50 Private University

THE UNIVERSITY OF TULSA is Oklahoma’s only Top 100 doctoral university and a Top 50 private institution with personalized attention. At #86 on the U.S. News and World Report’s list of the nation’s best colleges, TU offers small classes, study abroad opportunities, community and professional organizations and exciting Division I athletics.

TU is home to four undergraduate colleges, the College of Law and the Graduate School. The London-based Times Higher Education, which publishes World University Rankings, listed TU among the Top 20 best small universities in the world in 2016. TU also holds the distinction for more nationally competitive scholars than all other Oklahoma universities combined.

admission.utulsa.edu

918-631-2307 ■ 1-800-331-3050 ■ admission@utulsa.edu Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 7 TU is an EEO/AA institution. For information, contact the Office of Human Resources, 918-631-2616; for disability accommodations, contact Dr. Tawny Rigsby, 918-631-2315.

Hosted by Jennifer Loren Cherokee Nati on Ci ti zen and Emmy-wi nni ng J o u rn a l i s t

Winner of 37th Annual Telly Awards’ Silver Award for cultural programming

WATCH ANYTIME AT OSIYO.TV 8 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

With appreciation Great Plains Journalism Awards and Distinguished Lectureship committee Nicole Amend Kevin Armstrong Dan Bewley Marcia Brookey Anne Brockman Blayklee Buchanan John Clanton Matt Clayton Michael Overall Ashley Parrish Vanessa Pearson Ariana Pickard James Royal Mike Simons Brian Sittler Jerry Wofford Saint Francis Health System for printing our booklet Tom Gilbert and Tulsa World for printing our gallery Tulsa Press Club Foundation

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.orgâ&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; 9

Table of Contents Great Plains Newspaper of the Year.................. 14 Great Plains Newspaper of the Year Finalists....... 15 Great Plains Writer of the Year........................ 16 Great Plains Writer of the Year Finalists............. 20 Great Plains Newspaper Photographer of the Year............................... 21 Great Plains Newspaper Photographer of the Year, Finalists................................................ 23-24 Great Plains Designer of the Year..................... 25 Great Plains Designer of the Year Finalists.......... 26 Great Plains Magazine of the Year.................... 27 Great Plains Magazine of the Year Finalist....... 28-29 Great Plains Magazine Writer of the Year............ 30 Great Plains Magazine Writer of the Year Finalists. 36 Great Plains Magazine of the Year Finalist........... 37 Great Plains Magazine Photographer of the Year... 38 Great Plains Magazine Photographer of the Year, Finalists................ 39-41 Great Plains Website of the Year...................... 42 Great Plains Website of the Year Finalist........ 43-45 News Package Winner................................... 48 News Package Finalists.................................. 49 Project/Investigative Reporting Winner.............. 50 Project/Investigative Reporting Finalists............ 51 General News Reporting Winner....................... 52 General News Reporting Finalists..................... 53 Narrative Story/Series Winner......................... 54 Narrative Story/Series Finalists........................ 55 Beat Reporting Winner.................................. 56 Beat Reporting Finalists................................. 57 Feature Writing Winner................................. 58 Feature Writing Finalists................................ 59 Business Reporting Winner............................. 60 Business Reporting Finalists............................ 61 Business Feature Winner................................ 62 Business Feature Finalists.............................. 63 Sports Reporting Winner................................ 64 Sports Reporting Finalists............................... 65 Sports Feature Winner.................................. 66 Sports Feature Finalists................................. 67 Sports Column Winner................................... 68 Sports Column Finalists................................. 69 Review Winner............................................ 70 Review Finalists.......................................... 71 Food Winner.............................................. 72 Food Finalists............................................. 73 Entertainment Feature Winner........................ 74 Entertainment Feature Finalists....................... 75 Specialty Feature Winner............................... 76 Specialty Feature Finalists............................. 77 Special Section Winner.................................. 78 Special Section Finalists................................ 79

News Page Design Winner............................... 80 News Page Design Finalists............................. 81 Feature Page Design Winner........................... 82 Feature Page Design Finalists.......................... 83 Sports Page Design Winner............................. 84 Sports Page Design Finalists............................ 85 Graphics/Illustration Winner........................... 86 Graphics/Illustration Finalists......................... 87 Editorial Cartoon Winner............................... 88 Editorial Cartoon Finalists.............................. 89 Editorial Portfolio Winner.............................. 90 Editorial Portfolio Finalists............................. 91 Personal Column Winner................................ 92 Personal Column Finalists............................... 93 Headline Winner......................................... 94 Headline Finalists........................................ 95 News Writing Winner.................................... 98 News Writing Finalists................................... 99 Feature Writing Winner................................ 100 Feature Writing Finalists............................... 101 Profile Writing Winner.................................. 102 Profile Writing Finalists................................ 103 Column Writing Winner................................ 104 Column Writing Finalists............................... 105 Page Design, Magazine, Winner....................... 106 Page Design, Magazine, Finalists..................... 107 Magazine Cover Winner................................ 108 Magazine Cover Finalists............................... 109 Specialty Photo Winner................................ 112 Specialty Photo Finalists............................... 113 Portrait Photography Winner.......................... 114 Portrait Photography Finalists........................ 115 General News Photography Winner.................. 116 General News Photography Finalists................. 117 Spot News Photography Winner....................... 118 Spot News Photography Finalists..................... 119 News Photography, Multiple, Winner................ 120 News Photography, Multiple, Winner................ 121 News Photography, Multiple, Finalists............... 122 Feature Photography, Single, Winner................ 123 Feature Photography, Single, Finalists............... 124 Feature Photography, Multiple, Winner............. 125 Feature Photography, Multiple, Finalist............. 126 Sports Action Photography Winner................... 127 Sports Action Photography Finalists.................. 128 Sports Feature Photography Winner................. 129 Sports Feature Photography Finalists................ 130 Magazine Portrait Winner.............................. 131 Magazine Portrait Finalists............................ 132 Magazine Specialty Photo Winner.................... 133 Magazine Specialty Photo Finalists................... 134 Magazine Photography, Multiple, Winner............ 135

10â&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Table of Contents Magazine Photography, Multiple, Finalists.......... 136 Magazine Photography, Feature, Winner............ 137 Magazine Photography, Feature, Finalist............ 138 Spot News Video Winner............................... 140 Spot News Video Finalists.............................. 141 General News Video Winner........................... 142 General News Video Finalists......................... 143 Feature Video Winner.................................. 144 Feature Video Finalists................................. 145 Sports Video Winner.................................... 146 General News Video Finalists......................... 147 Multimedia Project Or Series Winner................ 148 Multimedia Project Or Series Finalists............... 149 Best Website Design Winner........................... 150 Best Website Design Finalist.......................... 151 Best Overall Website Design Winner................. 152 Best Overall Website Design Finalist................. 153 News Blog Writing Winner............................. 154 News Blog Writing Finalists............................ 155 Entertainment/Specialty Blog Winner............... 156 Entertainment/ Specialty Blog Finalists............. 157 Sports Blog Winner...................................... 158 Sports Blog Finalists.................................... 159

Web Special Section Winner........................... 160 Web Special Section Finalist.......................... 161 Great Plains Student Photographer of the Year.... 164 Great Plains Student Photographer of the Year Finalists................................165-67 Great Plains Student Editor in Chief of the Year... 168 Great Plains Student Editor in Chief of the Year, Finalists................................169-71 Great Plains Student Designer of the Year.......... 172 Great Plains Student Designer of the Year Finalists................................173-75 Great Plains Student Writer of the Year............. 176 Great Plains Student Writer of the Year, Finalists. 178 Great Plains Student Newspaper of the Year....... 179 Great Plains Student Newspaper of the Year, Finalists................................180-81 Great Plains Student Website of the Year........... 182 Great Plains Student Website of the Year Finalists................................183-84 Great Plains Student Website of the Year Finalist.184 Great Plains Student Broadcaster of the Year...... 185 Great Plains Student Broadcaster of the Year Finalists.................................... 186

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.orgâ&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; 11

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12 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Best of The Great plains

The 2016 Great Plains Journalism Awards

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Great Plains Newspaper of the Year Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Staff Judges’ Comments: The staff at the Omaha World-Herald stood out not just for the range of storytelling from the 40th anniversary of the tornado, to the officer’s husband hoping for citizenship, but also for the strong use of photos, graphics and illustrations. The idea to recreate the likeness of Warren Buffett was a fun idea, and the artist’s description of how he did so was a nice addition. MAY 3, 2015 • SUNRISE EDITION • LOCALLY OWNED SINCE 1885

Blunt talk for Berkshire faithful SATURDAY, MAY 2, 2015 • SUNRISE EDITION • LOCALLY OWNED SINCE 1885

City’s rage gives way to relief when cops charged

LOOK BACK ON 50 YEARS OF SUCCESS

Check out the Berkshire Hathaway 26-page special section in today’s paper or see it at Omaha.com/berkshire.

Saying ‘no one is above the law,’ prosecutor calls Freddie Gray’s arrest illegal and unjustified

VIDEO OF FRIDAY’S BUYING SPREE

BALTIMORE (AP) — Rage turned to relief in Baltimore on Friday when the city’s top prosecutor charged six police officers with felonies ranging from assault to murder in the death of Freddie Gray. State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby said Friday that Gray’s arrest was illegal and unjustified. She said that his neck was broken because he was handcuffed, shackled and placed head-first into a police van, where his pleas for medical attention were repeatedly ignored as he bounced around inside the small metal box. The swiftness of her announcement, less than a day after receiving the Police Department’s criminal investigation and just hours after official autopsy results — in which a medical examiner classified the death as a homicide — took the city by surprise. So, too, did her detailed description, based in part on her office’s independent investigation, of the evidence supporting probable cause to charge all six officers with felonies. Three of the officers are white, three of them black. “I heard your call for no justice, no peace,” Mosby, elected five months ago, told protesters gathered at the marble steps of Baltimore’s War Memorial building. “Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to bring justice for Freddie Gray,” said Mosby, 35, a former assistant state’s attorney and the daughter and granddaughter of police officers. “To those that are angry or hurt or have their own experience of injustice, I urge you to channel your energy peacefully.” As demonstrators erupted in shouts of approval, Mosby told them, “No one is above the law.” But she also reassured police officers that the charges “are not an indictment of the entire force.” Those arrested were: Officer Caesar Goodson Jr., Lt. Brian Rice, Officer Garrett Miller, Officer Edward Nero, Officer William Porter and Sgt. Alicia White. The officers were booked Friday on charges ranging from assault and manslaughter, carrying 10-year prison sentences,

‘The crowds are bigger than we thought,’ Borsheims rep says. Omaha.com/berkshire

IN CASE THE ORACLE IS OUT OF IDEAS

We asked ﬁrst-graders for advice on spending their ﬁrst billion. Living

WHEN THE MEETING BEGINS

Tune in early today for live coverage online, and read the full report in the Sunday World-Herald.

Crowds keep vendors hopping Extra day of shopping proves popular as shareholders snatch up once-a-year deals BY BARBARA SODERLIN AND PAIGE YOWELL WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITERS

A party 50 years in the making kicked off early Friday as tens of thousands of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders ﬁlled the CenturyLink Center, packed airport terminals and prepared to toast their collective investing success. At the CenturyLink Center — opened on Friday for the ﬁrst time to accommodate an extra big crowd — visitors from South Dakota, Colorado and Minnesota brushed shoulders with those from India, Bolivia and Spain as they shopped, jostled for a slice of Dairy Queen ice cream cake and tried to catch a glimpse of their host. If they didn’t see Warren Buffett when he made a brief early afternoon appearance, the shareholders seemed content with their postcards from Omaha: bags heavy with See’s Candies, Fruit of the Loom boxer shorts, Heinz ketchup bottles, Justin boots and Borsheims bling. Vendors did not know what to expect or how much merchandise to have on hand.

Governor isn’t tipping his hand on veto, but he’s still against granting documents, despite rising support

DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT

Tracking Huskers drafted by NFL We break down the 79-year history of Nebraska football players who go pro. Sports, Pages 5-7C

Caesar R. Goodson Jr.

It’s a princess for William and Kate Mom leaves the hospital the same day she delivers the 8-pound, 3-ounce girl. Living, Page 2E

We can help with your travel plans

Garrett E. Miller

A trip along the Oregon Trail can create a lifetime of memories. Learn more in today’s Spring-Summer Travel Section.

From his vantage point at the Ak-Sar-Ben grandstand, track photographer Bob Dunn captured perhaps the most vivid photos of the tornado that hit Omaha May 6, 1975.

BY NANCY GAARDER

Communication and forecasting were primitive by today’s standards, so an eyewitness account from someone like Campbell would be life-saving. The 23-year-old ﬁgured he was far enough away that he could parallel the storm by driving north up 72nd Street. “It seemed like it was going to be a good idea.” What he didn’t know was that the tornado that had formed in Sarpy County and had touched down near 96th and Q was shifting to meet him. The F4/EF4 tornado would cause $1.1 billion in inﬂation-adjusted damage during its 15-mile rampage. Yet only three people died.

COMING NEXT SUNDAY

Scholars Section The paper’s annual salute to high school seniors showcases the 2015 All State Academic Team.

Omaha weather

Today’s forecast High: 84 Low: 58 Full weather report: Page 10B On Omaha.com: the latest updates

CHILLING 911 AUDIO

Campbell’s harrowing account, relayed to the public in real time by TV, radio and the National Weather Service, saved lives. For some six miles, the tornado pummeled Campbell’s cruiser as he steered it through the dark chaos and torrential rain. At the peak of the tornado’s destruction, Campbell feared he might die. Utility poles snapped around him, wires grabbed at the cruiser lights and siren, his rear window exploded and a brick smashed through the windshield. “I thought I might cash in my chips. ... It didn’t happen, so I continued on.”

Listen to frantic calls to 911 and take a ﬂyover journey of the storm’s rampage.

RETRACING HIS PATH

Ofﬁcer David Campbell drives the same route he followed while tracking the twister 40 years ago.

MAPPING THE DESTRUCTION

We chart the tornado’s path and the havoc left in its wake in an exclusive interactive map.

Debate on raising state gas tax boils down to shortfall vs. windfall Legislators say a backlog on repairs has the state shy on funding, but opponents of a hike say roads revenues are at a 20-year high

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BY HENRY J. CORDES WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

A recent infusion of sales tax dollars has Nebraska’s road construction budget at its highest point in recent history. So why the Legislature’s push for a 6-cent gas tax increase? Count Gov. Pete Ricketts among the skeptics. “The take-away here is we have the resources to deal with our roads,” he said in an interview, noting the recent healthy revenue. “We’ve got a problem that no one has deﬁned for me.” Advocates for a tax hike counter that even at the higher current spending, the

roads budget remains short of the improvements needed to ensure Nebraskans won’t increasingly find themselves stuck in traffic, or risking damage to their cars or safety on potholed, degrading roads. “We’re short,” said Lou Lamberty, a former state roads director now working for an Omaha engineering firm. “When there’s a shortfall, it catches up to you over time.” As the Legislature and Ricketts appear headed for a showdown over the proposed gas tax hike, defining how well revenues balance with needs could prove critical to the debate. Ricketts last week questioned whether See Roads: Page 2

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politics surrounding the driver’s license bill. In recent weeks, the state’s leading business groups have called for the bill’s passage, as has Jean Stothert, the Republican mayor of Omaha. “As a matter of principle, I don’t believe in giving beneﬁts to people who came here illegally,” the Republican governor said Friday in an interview with The World-Herald. Nebraska is the only state

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THE WORLD-HERALD

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Alicia D. White

INSIDE

THE NEBRASKA 100, REVISITED

Coloring books aren’t just for kids anymore

Starting today, we share our updated ranking of the state’s greatest athletes. Sports

6 OFFICERS HAVE MIX OF EXPERIENCE A look at the ofﬁcers charged in Gray’s death. Page 3A

Books ﬁlled with intricate designs that can take hours to complete are becoming hot sellers. Living

Collaboration offers a new take on local medical care New venture uses team approach to emphasize wellness, manage chronic conditions. Money

Carrying on after Kerrie is hard

Meet the athlete selected as W-H’s Ware Award winner

Hector Orozco is working, raising their kids, pursuing citizenship BY ALIA CONLEY MORTON

AND JOSEPH

WORLD-HERALD BUREAU

WASHINGTON — Hector Orozco always worried about the safety of his wife, Kerrie Orozco, when she headed to work as an Omaha police ofﬁcer. “I’d say to her every day ‘Be careful,’ ” Hector said. But the terrifying thought that the worst could happen, that she could be killed on the job, never entered Hector’s

ONLY IN THE WORLD-HERALD mind. “No. No. No,” he said. “Never. Maybe that’s because ... you don’t want to think about it.” In an exclusive interview with The World-Herald, Hector broke down and wept as he spoke about 29-year-old Kerrie, who was fatally shot May 20 while attempting to arrest a fugitive on a felony warrant. Her slaying left the Omaha metro area grief-stricken and

NU’s Ameer Abdullah is saluted for his achievements as well as his character. Sports, Page 3C

reverberated across the nation. Thousands lined the streets of Omaha and Council Bluffs for her funeral procession. Those who knew her have talked about her compassion and about her dedication to the job and to her community. In the wake of that terrible loss, Hector, 33, is trying to provide for his family as a single father. One challenge he faces is that he is still a long way from obtaining his U.S. citizenship. Hector came to the United

Hector Orozco with his wife, Kerrie, an Omaha police ofﬁcer who was killed in the line of duty in May.

See Orozco: Page 2

City library system is at a budgeting crossroads

BY ROSEANN MORING WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

$1.00

For prosecutors, it’s the crux of their case: A struggling doctor — bent on revenge for the ﬁring that has dogged his career — commits a double homicide in Omaha, ﬁve years after another double homicide in Omaha. For the defense, it’s a poisonous accusation that could rob Anthony Garcia of a fair trial. In the most substantive hearing leading up to Garcia’s trial, attorneys Bob and Alison Motta of Chicago will ask Judge Duane Dougherty on Monday to order separate trials for Garcia in the March 2008 slayings of Shirlee Sherman and 11-year-old Thomas Hunter and in the Mother’s Day 2013 slayings of Dr. Roger Brumback and his wife, Mary. The Mottas also want the judge to order a separate trial in the May 2013 attempted burglary of the home of another Creighton doctor, Chhanda Bewtra. The Mottas argue that trying the cases together could unfairly sway jurors. If the judge’s schedule is any indication, See Garcia: Page 2

The president of the Omaha Public Library Board wants to start a discussion that could lead to major changes in the library system’s funding and governance structure. Library Board President Mike Meyer wants to see Omaha’s library system become one of the best in the country. To that end, the board has launched a privately funded study about the future of Omaha’s libraries. One option likely to be considered is whether to move the library system out of city government and give the library taxing authority. The discussion comes as tension grows between the board and Mayor Jean Stothert over next year’s budget. Library officials are pushing for $850,000 more in city funding than the mayor recommends. Meyer said he doesn’t know in what direction the library should go but prefers a radical change to what he calls the annual City Hall ritual of fighting over small items in the library system budget. Meyer said public libraries are an important part of serving the community — along with schools and parks — and the city should strive for the best. “Why wouldn’t Omaha want to have the best public schools, the best public library and the best public parks?” he said. “My passion is for the library aspect.” Stothert said she’ll consider any specifics offered by the study but said the library should continue to operate as a city department. “Do I want a good library system? Yes, I do,” she said. Meyer said he didn’t want to speculate about a possible gov-

Due to a low participation rate and lack of an official push, it’s as if residents are tossing money into a landfill

See Libraries: Page 5

BY HENRY J. CORDES With a roar and clatter, the Deffenbaugh waste truck dumps its load of crushed cardboard boxes, soup cans, plastic drink bottles, week-old World-Heralds, beer cans, cereal boxes, milk jugs and soap bottles to the concrete ﬂoor of Omaha’s Firstar Fiber. Don’t call it trash. After the mountains of recyclables picked up in the City of Omaha’s green bin program have been sorted by the machinery and workers at Firstar, they’ll be compacted into bales weighing as much as a Volkswagen and sold for reuse — in some cases, bound for halfway around the world. “Trust me, no one buys trash,’’ said Firstar CEO Dale Gubbels. But that’s the way many in Omaha and Nebraska treat such recyclables today. When it comes to recycling, Nebraska is a state with low participation, lagging commitment and no solid plans for

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Forty years ago, one of the costliest twisters in U.S. history cut a path of destruction through the heart of Omaha.

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Construction budget Identified road needs

$338

SOURCE: Compiled from Nebraska Department of Roads data

WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

A world turned upside down

in the nation to deny driver’s licenses to a category of young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, was started in 2012 with an executive order by the president. Legislative Bill 623 would reverse a directive by former Gov. Dave Heineman to deny licenses to DACA immigrants. The bill has yet to be debated in the Nebraska Legislature, but it already has the support of a veto-proof majority of See Licenses: Page 2

In millions of dollars, adjusted for inflation (2015 dollars)

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CLOSING THE ROADS BUDGET GAP Thanks largely to a recent infusion of Nebraska sales tax dollars, the annual gap between the state road construction budget and documented road needs has been cut by more than half. But a $53 million gap remains. Nebraska’s construction budget also includes federal funds.

Garcia’s lawyers will ask judge to split case into separate trials

COMING SUNDAY

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1975 TORNADO 40 YEARS LATER

Proponents seek more money and restructured governance to help propel it to the upper echelon

Emmy Johnson, left, and her sister, Mattie Johnson, both of Lincoln, try on boots at the Justin Boots booth Friday at the CenturyLink Center. The Johnsons said they decided to take advantage of the early shopping day because when they went to buy boots last year, the boots were sold out.

Ricketts unmoved on immigrant licenses BY JOE DUGGAN

City contracts are missing the target

See Ofﬁcers: Page 3

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WORLD-HERALD BUREAU

INSIDE W-H analysis ﬁnds the small-business contracting program sends only a trickle of business and jobs to high-poverty areas. Midlands

RYA N S O D E R L I N / T H E W O R L D - H E R A L D

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LINCOLN — Nebraska’s governor won’t reveal his veto plans if state lawmakers pass legislation granting driver’s licenses to young immigrants who came to the country illegally through no fault of their own. But Gov. Pete Ricketts has not softened on illegal immigration despite rapidly shifting

Economic reality mixes with annual hoopla as Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger defend tough decisions. Money

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RULE BREAKER Glass isn’t wanted but still shows up a lot in recycling bins. Page 8A

GREEN OR BLUE Omaha bins versus the larger carts used elsewhere. Coming Monday

improvement. The state’s rate of waste recycling falls far short of the national average, a recent study by the state’s recycling association found. It’s not just a matter of failing to keep up with all those tree-huggers on the coasts. Nebraska’s recycling appears to lag all neighboring states, including Iowa. And a World-Herald analysis found that Nebraskans per capita rank ﬁfth in the country in the amount of garbage they send to landﬁlls. Even in Omaha, with its free and user-friendly system in which recyclables can be left at the curb in green bins, recycling rates are low. It’s believed that a little more than half of eligible households participate. The program also is lacking in energy and momentum, total recycling tonnage having plateaued years ago. In Omaha and across the state, millions of Story continues on Page 6

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osu Tragedy Woman, 25, arrested on suspicion of DUI after crashing into spectators

Parade shattered with four dead and more than 40 hurt, several critically

OSU community rocked as more lives lost in horrific accident

Bystanders help the injured after a vehicle crashed into a crowd of spectators during the Oklahoma State University homecoming parade, causing dozens of injuries, on Saturday in Stillwater. DAviD BiTTOn/The news Press via AP

ArreSteD

By BILL HAISTEN

World Sports Writer

TILLWATER — Gail Lamb was among the hundreds who massed near the southwest corner of Main Street and Hall of Fame Avenue, securing a prime location from which to view the Oklahoma State University homecoming parade Saturday. Lamb is a Stillwater resident who attended OSU. Her daughter is a university employee. Her son-inlaw is a university professor. Lamb says she was excited to attend the parade because her 8-year-old granddaughter and other members

Adacia Chambers: The 25-year-old was arrested and jailed on a complaint of driving under the influence.

of a dance troupe were to be featured passengers on a float. The granddaughter’s float rolled past the Main and Hall of Fame intersection only moments before a car careened into a crowd of specSEE CrASh A8

Too many days like this for OSU

Watch videos • Witnesses discuss the tragedy they saw unfold Saturday in Stillwater. • OSU, Stillwater officials share their thoughts.

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For more Locals among victims. A8 For fans, a solemn, surreal game. A9 For third time in 15 years, OSU hit with tragedy. A9

TILLWATER — There have been too many days like this for Oklahoma State. “The Cowboy family pulls together,” said OSU President Burns Hargis. “Unfortunately, we’ve had to do it before. We’ll do it again.” Oklahoma State, wrestling with the emotions of yet another tragedy, played a football game Saturday. OSU coach Mike Gundy said he went into a meeting room with his team in the morning and “we told them the truth.”

John Klein Senior Sports Columnist

john.klein @tulsaworld.com 918-581-8368 Twitter: @JohnKleinTW

Atwell

SEE Klein A9

‘Little kids were sitting all along that curb, getting the candy and everything. I just realize that they all could have been taken so quickly, when they were all so happy.’ — Gail Lamb, bystander Today High 71, Low 43

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School, store not warned of sting • Elementary students were playing outside and people were shopping near the site. By ANDREA EGER AND DyLAN GOFORTH World Staff Writers

The Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office gave no advance warning to the busy neighborhood

store where it set up a sting operation with a known gun and drug dealer, nor the elementary school to the south where kids were playing outside. Mid-morning on April 2, an undercover gun buy in the parking lot of the Dollar General at 1906 N. Harvard Ave. — a store with a steady flow of pedestrian and car traffic — ended in a short foot pursuit. Suspect Eric Harris headed north from the store and was tackled moments later and

USE oF ForCE

then shot by Reserve Deputy Robert Bates, who said he had intended to use a Taser and not a gun. Sheriff’s Office officials said if Harris had fled south toward Celia Clinton Elementary School, pursuing deputies likely would have shot him as he ran. “The dynamics would have changed because we would have shot him,” Capt. Bill

Capt. Bill McKelvey: Had suspect Eric Harris fled toward a nearby school, the dynamics of the chase “would have changed, the full-time deputies chasing him would have shot him. We would have probably used deadly force on him.”

SEE ShootiNG A3

20 YEARS LATER REMEMBERiNG OkLAHOMA CiTY

A p R i L 1 9, 1 9 9 5 | A p R i L 1 9, 2 0 1 5

WHAT THEy LEfT BEHINd A child’s shoe. A clock forever frozen at 9:02. Remnants of a tragedy preserve memories of the Oklahoma City bombing.

By CARY ASpiNwALL | world Staff writer

uther and LaRue Treanor were faithfully punctual and devoted people, pitching in often to care for their eight grandchildren, including their 4-yearold granddaughter, Ashley Eckles. § Luther, a former dairy delivery man, was looking forward to his pending retirement, so he could do things like take Ashley to lunch and shopping in Oklahoma City with her grandma. That was the plan that day: Go to the Social Security Administration office, sign retirement paperwork, take Ashley and LaRue shopping afterward. § Luther Treanor’s appointment was just after 9 a.m. on April 19, 1995, on the first floor of Oklahoma City’s Alfred p. Murrah Federal Building. He was never, ever late.

InSIdE Time passes, but the memories of loss remain. A8 A graphic look at the bombing. A10 Photos from the attack and its aftermath. A11 A hard question remains: Did we achieve justice? G1

SEE BEhiNd A9

From top, Ashley Eckles’ shoe, broken coffee cups, a clock stopped at 9:02 and a telephone are among the items at the oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum. JOHn CLAnTOn/Tulsa World

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OnLInE: tulsaworld.com/okcbombing Watch videos and read stories sharing the tales of survivors of the bombing, victims of the attack and the families they left behind, and examining how the bombing changed our state. Also, share your thoughts and memories of April 19, 1995.

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Great Plains Writer of the Year Publication: Lincoln Journal Star By: Peter Salter Judges’ Comments: An important part of being a great writer is finding a great story to tell. Peter Salter found great stories to tell and executed the writing beautifully. Love the variety of the stories. I have a range of emotions after reading all of his work. That’s a beautiful thing. Job well done.

Death of a salesman

On his last known night, Carl Christiansen helped his two little boys write their letters to Santa. On his last known morning, he carried those boys downstairs on his back, so they could all eat breakfast together. He picked out a brown suit, brown tie, blue shirt. When the buckle on his dark belt broke, he put on a white one instead. He was in a hurry. He asked Ruth: What difference does it make? Nobody will see it anyway. The car salesman was eager to get to Seward, to deliver a Chrysler to a

young farmer. Christmas was coming, and the commission from this sale would help with the holiday. He kissed Ruth and stepped out of their home on North 30th Street, into the icy day. He wore a light Stetson on his head and a dark overcoat, the letters to Santa in his pocket. He wanted his boys to believe he mailed them. He called later with an update. He’d be home between 5 and 6, after he dropped off the car and picked up the farmer’s trade-in. On his last known afternoon, Dec.

14, 1937, Carl Christiansen was seen driving south through a darkening sky, $825 in his pocket. Looked like he was headed toward the road home, the farmer would tell police. Blood on the road Ruth Christiansen waited for Carl that night, and the next day, and all of the weeks and the months and the years that would pile on her like weight, slowly smothering any hope she held of his return. It would be enough to simply know

16 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

what had happened to him, she would tell reporters when they visited her a year later, and then five years later, and then 15. “I’ve got to the place,” she said as early as 1938, “where I want to hear some report — one way or another.” Time was covering Carl’s tracks from that night, too, and the few clues investigators had uncovered were promising and slippery at the same time. Taken together, they seemed to point to his violent end in the hills north of Crete. But if they were indeed the dots that mapped the end of his life, they were never solid enough for investigators to connect them. There were just too many questions. Why was the farmer’s trade-in abandoned in Crete the afternoon Carl disappeared? Was that his blood and hair found on a seldom-used road five miles to the north? What role did a poker game play in the case? Ruth watched lawmen from three counties and at least two decades search for those answers, and for her husband. She watched the state sheriff grow personally invested. William Flake would leave his office at the Capitol for days at a stretch to work the case, and he would take the Christiansen boys to the movies. But three years after Carl disappeared, Flake would be found dead in an Omaha hotel room, his door locked from the inside, a bullet between his eyebrows. Authorities closed the case in hours, ruling that he had been drinking and that he had taken his life, but there were doubters. When the new state sheriff inherited the case, all of the files from Carl’s case had vanished. Just like the salesman. Ruth never remarried. She never dated. She fought her poverty by learning to sew for other wives and mothers. She learned to rejoice in her sons’ successes, their college graduations, their families, their careers. She learned to wait. But nearly a quarter-century after Carl vanished from her life, she let herself let go of him. She began writing a long letter that still has no ending. “As I sit here alone with my thoughts, at this very time 11:30 a.m. Thursday, December 14, 1961, never

thinking I would be saying ‘goodbye’ for the last time to the most wonderful husband and father of our two sons ...” The nightmare before Carl Viggo Christiansen wasn’t a big man, but he was described as stout: 5-foot-5, 150 pounds. He was born in Falster, an island off the coast of Denmark, in 1896. He served both the Danish and U.S. armies as a balloonist, though he never saw action. He’d been trained as a machinist but learned to fix cars in Detroit, at the Chrysler training school; his sons grew up hearing how their father, one of the company’s super mechanics, had met Walter Chrysler himself. The company put him first in Iowa, but he traveled, servicing cars and teaching other mechanics. He was given three counties in Nebraska, and he met Ruth Peterson at an Armistice Day banquet in Stromsburg. They were a little later in life when they married in 1929: Carl was 33, Ruth 38. After Dannie Paul was born in Stromsburg in 1930, the new family moved to Lincoln, where they were joined by little Allen Dale. “Carl was such a family man,” Ruth wrote. “He thought he was the only one who could take care of his boys. He used to tell his fellow workers when his boys were grown, they would be different and clean morally. The fellows laughed at Carl, but they couldn’t discourage him.” Carl owned a repair shop near 18th and O, but he was growing tired of the grease that gathered behind his nails. He wanted more, for himself and for his family. So in the summer of 1937, he started selling Chryslers — the car he believed in — for Nebraska Motor Co., around the corner from his shop, on the edge of downtown. That November, he started dealing with a 26-year-old who farmed 9 miles southeast of Seward. The farmer had wanted a used car, but Carl convinced him to order a new Royal, dark blue with gray trim. Looking back, 24 years later, Ruth was able to inventory her concerns, the signs that now seemed clear and strange in retrospect.

She remembered one of Carl’s friends had warned him against working for “those people” at Nebraska Motor Co. She remembered the farmer had called constantly, checking on his car, but claimed he didn’t have a phone of his own. She remembered that when the Royal finally was delivered to Lincoln, the farmer bought time. Don’t come tomorrow, he said, come the day after. Ruth had asked Carl: Why doesn’t he just come to Lincoln to get it? “Oh, Ruth, I guess you don’t understand the car business,” he answered. “I’ve delivered cars all over the state. Think nothing of it.” He was so happy, she wrote. They had great plans for Christmas. She remembered his nightmares, too. He had warned her once not to interrupt his terrors, but to agree with him, to comfort him. The night before he disappeared, she wrote, he sat up in bed and called: Ruth, Ruth. “Do you see those fellows coming up with those white things over them towards me?” Yes, she said. She saw them. He asked: “Who are they? And what do they want or are they going?” She answered, softly: Well, Carl. I think they are going to work. Don’t you? He woke then, and apologized. He’d been anxious about this car deal, he explained. Waiting, worrying on North 30th The salesman and the farmer conducted their business at the Sunshine Cafe in Seward, the farmer giving his ’31 Chevy and $825 for the Royal. They stopped at the courthouse for the paperwork, and then the farmer took Carl into the country to meet potential customers. They talked to a man at a farm sale and paid a visit to a minister’s home. Late in the afternoon, they returned to Seward, and both men headed home. They took the same route initially, south on the oil road toward the Milford Corner. The farmer told police he turned east on his road at about 5:30 p.m. and watched Carl continue toward his turn on West O Street. From there, the salesman would

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 17

have been only 20 minutes from Lincoln, and from Ruth and his two growing boys. That day had been filled with ice and snow and travel warnings. At first, the family on North 30th thought Carl might have slipped off the road. Ruth and their boys and her mother, visiting from Stromsburg, were waiting; he had said he would be home no later than 6. “My mother sat by the window, I can see her yet, she was so worried,” Ruth wrote. “I said, ‘I trust Carl,’ such a good driver, thought nothing could ever happen to him.” She didn’t know that earlier that evening, 30 miles south of Seward in Crete, Marian Wagner was working at her downtown photo studio when she watched a man pull up, get out of his car and dog-trot across the street. Wagner thought little of it until three days later, when officers identified the car as the farmer’s trade. From her description, investigators thought its driver could have been Carl. They dusted the car for fingerprints but found no signs of violence. Two days after Carl vanished, and about 5 miles north of the Wagner Photo Shop, a child walking to school found a splash of red on an icy rural road, 50 feet from a bridge. He told his teacher. Later, the boy’s father would say it looked like something tragic happened. But what? Nobody had stopped at his farm, nobody had needed his phone to call a doctor. When Flake investigated, the state sheriff told Ruth he found what looked like a quart of blood in one spot, and another pool nearby. He also found scalp and hair, some pulled by its roots. “He told me it was about the worst he had seen and no one could have lived after losing so much blood,” Ruth told reporters a year later. Ruth and her boys scoured their home for samples of Carl’s hair. They found a few strands in his comb, a few more on a coat. The state sheriff sent it off to the FBI in Washington, which concluded the hair from the road “seemingly” was Carl’s, and that the victim had sustained a terrific blow. But then, nothing. No new leads. No

suspects. No Carl. “Investigators ran up against a blank wall at about that point,” a reporter wrote 13 years later. ‘Still-hopeful mother’ Ruth held her hope for years. She hired a lawyer. She hired a private investigator. She didn’t shield her sons from their father’s disappearance. “I haven’t tried to keep anything from the boys,” she said months after he disappeared. “It was hard to make them understand at first — and I’m not sure they do yet.” The newspapers were kind to Ruth, catching up with her every few years. Reporters called her “a small pleasant woman with blue eyes and a touch of red in her hair.” They described the “heart-broken letters from Denmark” Carl’s mother wrote, asking if they’d found her son. They called Ruth “a still hopeful mother, who for 15 years has raised her two sons in the image of their father.” They let her make her case: “Carl was so fine, so clean, he never even smoked and he had no reason to leave. He wouldn’t lose his mind as some people thought, for he was too alert.” And they let her make her plea: “I want the story of what happened — one way or another.” But really, Ruth was keeping her husband’s case alive. “For years,” she wrote, “we caused the Lincoln Journal and Lincoln Star newspapers to print stories with Carl’s picture.” The stories generated calls and tips that she’d forward to police. One stood out, a coarse voice. Get a pencil, he told her. “Then he said, ‘Put down car salesman, fisherman, lazy, drives an old Ford coupe, married, divorced, now married to a young woman. Fishing at a dam near Crete. Near these dams is where this happened to Carl. This is the last clue. He lives on Washington between 10th and 17th. I’ll be watching the papers.’” Like all the leads, though, any promise this tip held faded away, and it wouldn’t get Ruth any closer to Carl. But she was persistent. She wrote the Salvation Army’s missing persons bureau in Chicago, asking for help. “It has been hard to stand. If we could only hear something or find some

clue. The uncertainty of whether Carl has been done away with is terrible.” She visited the rural road north of Crete and was dismayed to see it had been graded, any clues turned under. Her little boys poked in the dirt anyway, searching for their father’s pocketknife. “I stood on the bridge and a million thoughts raced through my mind,” she wrote. “And I felt so close to Carl.” She met the young farmer near Seward, and was surprised to see a telephone in his family farmhouse. She challenged him: I thought you told Carl you didn’t have a phone? The farmer explained it away; he hadn’t wanted neighbors to hear his business on the party line. Ruth’s younger brother was a dentist who had worked on Carl’s teeth. And for years, whenever an unidentified body was found in Nebraska or a neighboring state, he would get in his car and drive to inspect a dead stranger’s mouth, trying to find answers for his sister. Investigators were persistent, too. In 1939, Flake brought the co-inventor of the lie detector, Leonarde Keeler, from Chicago to Lincoln to question the young farmer. The last person known to see Carl alive passed the polygraph twice, clearing his name, the newspapers reported. Two cases haunted Flake, both from 1937: The June slaying of Boone County Sheriff Lawrence Smoyer and the December disappearance of Carl Christiansen. He would leave his office for days to try to solve them. And he grew close to the Christiansen boys; his own son wasn’t much older. He befriended them, bought them Christmas gifts, took them to movies. But on Feb. 5, 1940, the state sheriff was found dead in an Omaha hotel room. Investigators found the locked door, the signs of drinking, his .38-caliber snub nose, his powder-burned skin, and quickly concluded he had killed himself. Still, there were questions. He didn’t leave a note. He wasn’t in debt. His job was stable. And he had checked into the Castle Hotel but was found at the Hill, in a room that had been rented by a Wayne implement dealer.

18 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Newspapers would later hint the ruling was rushed, questionable — even suggesting the specter of an assassin — but they didn’t elaborate. In Lincoln, two women met, connected now by the loss of their husbands. Ruth asked Flake’s widow: Had the sheriff been slain by the same men who killed Carl? No, Flake’s wife said. He had told her he was a failure. But Ruth was left with the impression Flake had learned more about the case than he could take, or he could tell, she wrote. The new state sheriff met with Ruth, too. Lloyd Mengel was starting from scratch, he told her. All of Carl’s case files were missing. More than a decade later, the Saline County sheriff reopened the case. John Tesar wasn’t in office when the salesman disappeared, he told the Crete News in 1952, but his county had played a part in the case and the lawman intended to solve it. A few weeks later, the Lincoln Star reported Tesar had made “hopeful developments,” which he refused to reveal. The Lincoln Journal went further, saying the sheriff was searching for anyone who remembered a poker game in Crete at about the time Carl vanished. Then the stories ceased. Carl Christiansen’s name would make the Lincoln newspapers again only in his sons’ wedding announcements and stories of unsolved murders. “Time marches on and everything about Carl’s case stopped,” Ruth wrote in 1961. “Now my boys are grown and wonderful men and respectable citizens … Carl would be proud of them and their families. They are exactly what he wanted them to be.” ‘Our last goodbye’ Carl Christiansen was declared legally dead in 1945. He has no grave, no marker, no obituary. Ruth spent her last 36 years waiting for him. She died in 1973. She’s buried in Stromsburg. Of Carl, her obituary said: “Her husband disappeared … and no trace has ever been found of him.” The farmer also died years ago. As a young man, he had been questioned by police, confronted by Ruth, subjected to

hours of polygraph testing. But he didn’t speak a word of it to his children, who were born a few years later and still live in the area. And who were surprised, interested and, ultimately, a little wary when they heard about this chapter in their father’s life. “Keep us posted if you learn anything,” wrote his daughter, now in her mid-70s, “although not sure how much digging into this matter we want to do.” The places still exist, too. Something important happened here, something that forever interrupted the trajectory of a family. The oil road, now paved, connecting Seward with Milford, where Carl was last seen. The county route where blood was spilled, the same trees that stood witness to whatever happened beneath them in 1937. And the house on North 30th where, nearly 80 years ago, a father helped his boys write letters to Santa on his last night and carried them down to their final breakfast together. One of those boys sits at his own table now, in a bright retirement apartment near Holmes Lake. Allen Christiansen was 4 when Carl Christiansen vanished. He is 82 now. When asked about his father, he talks about his mother, because he has so many more memories of her, and of what they went through together. His father’s disappearance thrust them into poverty, he said. They moved from their home on North 30th to what he called hovels, on South 31st, on H Street, on Q. “My mother trained herself to be a seamstress, to work from home, and she literally wore herself out doing that.” The boys worked, too. As an 8-yearold, Allen delivered papers and swept up at Demma’s market and collected dirty drive-in trays at the Mug, earning a nickel apiece. He gave all of his money — sometimes $200 a month — to his family. His mother had friends, and people who helped her, but never another man in her life. “She devoted herself to trying to find Carl, her husband,” he said. His older brother, Dannie, went to Germany as a radar technician and returned to attend the university. He found a career as an accountant for

George Abel’s construction companies. He died in 2000. Allen had worked for Abel, too, and for State Farm Mutual downtown. He helped manage Hillcrest Country Club and then helped run minor league ball teams; his signature was on Bob Gibson’s first pro contract. Then Allen’s career in TV advertising took him and his wife, Norma, to Tennessee, where they lived for decades and raised their family. They moved back to Lincoln three years ago. A daughter and her family followed. Carl Christiansen had been gone from Lincoln for nearly eight decades, but now three generations of his roots had returned. Allen thought hard about whether to tell his father’s story. He prayed about it. He called his pastor. So many people are gone now, unable to speak for themselves, and he didn’t want their names smeared. But he also didn’t want his father forgotten. He knows it’s unlikely the case will ever be solved, but at least people should know. “Now I’m just looking forward that hopefully my wife and I will go to heaven,” he said, “and we can be with my father again.” So much of what he knows of his father he learned from his mother, and from the collection of clippings, papers and photos that tell Carl’s story. Pictures of Carl with his violin, and with the car he raced around dirt tracks. The receipt for his passage across the Atlantic in 1920, $72.50. An extra swath of brown fabric from the suit he wore when he disappeared. And, most importantly, Ruth’s long letter. She wrote it in longhand in 1961. When Allen typed it up, it filled 15 pages, single-spaced. She told Carl’s story in detail. She listed those who helped, those who hampered. She wrote of her hope and her despair. She called it “Our Last Goodbye.” At the end, she wrote: “Someone knows, I’m sure.” But the story wasn’t finished, even after she wrote her last word.

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 19

Great Plains Writer of the Year Finalists Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Erin Grace

Publication: The Frontier By: Casy Aspinwall

Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Matthew Hansen

Excerpt from “The unstoppable stalker”

Excerpt from “Rogers County Hustle: The Mark”

Excerpt from “A perfect fit”

Sitting in the prosecutors office, the victim stared at the conference table and could barely speak. Her leg bounced up and down, up and down. Sometimes she cried. LaTasha Edwards was beyond nervous. She was scared to death. Julie Medina, who prosecutes some 2,000 domestic violence cases a year, could understand why. Medina had done a little homework before their meeting. Edwards’ ex was no run-of-the-mill abuser. Dammon Haynes was different. He was a stalker. He had a long history of ignoring protection orders, of calling, texting or otherwise harassing ex-girlfriends, even breaking into their homes. “Do you really think locks are going to stop me?” Haynes once asked Edwards. Edwards told Medina she wasn’t sure anything would stop him. But Medina promised she would try. *** For years, Dammon Haynes was rather unstoppable. He had been arrested plenty of times, charged plenty of times, and he even served jail time plenty of times, though usually just for short stints. Some of his crimes stemmed from how he treated women. Between 1999 and 2009, Haynes burned through at least 10 girlfriends, each of whom had called police for help because Haynes had hurt them, threatened to hurt them or harassed them. Fourteen people, including parents and friends of some of his exes, sought protection orders against him. But their complaints didn’t easily translate into criminal cases.

Diana Thurman pulled her blouse down, tousled her bleached-blonde hair and strutted her boots inside the rodeo gates. There he was, right at the entrance: Rogers County Sheriff Scott Walton. “Just the sonofabitch I was looking for,” she thought. Diana went to the Will Rogers Stampede Rodeo in May 2014 to meet Walton, flirt and cause a scandal for the sheriff. She was also there as a 48-year-old mother desperate to help her son, who was jailed and facing serious prison time for repeated charges of drunken driving. Diana believed she was there on marching orders, that if she followed through on plans to catch the sheriff’s eye, a certain Rogers County power couple might make her son’s mounting legal troubles go away. Diana claims she was approached with an offer: “How far are you willing to go to help your son?” A drinking problem In October 2013, just five days after 26-year-old Justin Thurman signed a court document promising not to drink or break any laws as conditions of his eight-year probation for DUI, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol responded to a rollover accident in Mayes County. Thurman was pinned in his red Chevy and first responders had to cut him out of the pickup. Witnesses told police he’d been driving erratically and passing everyone before his car flipped. His breath smelled like booze. The patrolman noticed his speech was slurred.

Sarah fell in love the moment she opened the front door. She fell in love before she even understood why. Sure, this house had all the obvious things that Sarah Lorsung Tvrdik and her husband, Jon, were searching for: more room than their first home; a location in a nice Westside neighborhood; a big basement and big yard for their newborn son, Hugo. Sarah liked all that, but what she loved was harder to describe. It was there in the mirrored shelf beside the fireplace. It was there in the thick cream shag carpet that many 30-year-olds would hate, but Sarah adored. It was there in every nook and cranny, every detail that felt so purposeful, so perfect. “It seemed like the sort of place you want to come home to and cuddle up in a lazy chair,” said Sarah, who co-owns Hello Holiday, the popular Omaha-based women’s clothing boutique. From my vantage point, Sarah also serves as a sort of fashion North Star for the city’s millennial women, many of whom borrow heavily from her retro glamorous style. “It seemed like somewhere familiar,” Sarah says, searching for the right words to describe the house. “Somewhere kind of like your parents’ home. Somewhere you could exhale.” Sarah didn’t know it yet, but she had fallen in love with a style, and a history, and a woman she hadn’t yet met. She had fallen in love with a house. She had also fallen in love with Ione.

20 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Great Plains Newspaper Photographer of the Year Publication: Lincoln Journal Star By: Francis Gardler Judges’ Comments: A well edited and varied portfolio with several nice moments. The competition was close between this portfolio and #2.

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 21

22â&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Great Plains Newspaper Photographer of the Year, Finalist Publication: The Daily Republic By: Matt Gade

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 23

Great Plains Newspaper Photographer of the Year, Finalist Publication: Tulsa World By: Ian Maule

24â&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Great Plains Designer of the Year Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Tim Parks

THE SERIES

An analysis of college football coaching hires continues through Sunday. Friday Big 12 and coaches 60-88 14.8%

{

25.9%

25.9% 33.3%

Opinion underlines profound shift in public opinion

2 1 1 4 1 1

1 0 0

2014 2013 2012

4 1 0

2011

0 0 0

2010

THE MAJORITY OPINION

BY ALISSA SKELTON AND ROBYNN TYSVER

Kennedy, Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, Sotomayor

WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITERS

Jenna Stanley and Kaily Brokaw woke up to the best possible news on their wedding day. • The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states cannot deny a same-sex couple the dignity of

“Here the marriage laws enforced by the respondents are in essence unequal: same-sex couples are denied all the beneﬁts afforded to opposite-sex couples and are barred from exercising a fundamental right.” Justice Kennedy

THE DISSENTING OPINION

marriage. The ruling allowed gay couples across the nation to apply for marriage licenses and afforded them the ability to enjoy all the rights, privileges and responsibilities of married couples. • Brokaw and Stanley, both 30, got engaged last

Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas

July, planned their wedding details and applied for a marriage license in Iowa. • But the couple from Bellevue were pleased to ﬁnd that they would be allowed to get a Nebraska marriage

“If you are among the many Americans -— of whatever sexual orientation —- who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new beneﬁts. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.” Chief Justice Roberts

KENNEDY AND SCALIA

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

WORLD-HERALD EDITORIAL

More on the justice who authored the majority opinion, and the most pointed critic on the bench. Page 4A

A look at the impact on churches and states, and the new realities for same-sex couples. Page 5A

The court has spoken, and it is important for us all to treat one another with respect. Page 4B

license before their Friday nuptials. • “We did not expect the Supreme Court to make this decision when they did,” Brokaw said. “But it’s about time.” • As with any couple on See Wedding: Page 6

STATES THAT ALLOW SAME-SEX MARRIAGE It wasn’t too long ago that legal same-sex marriage seemed impossible. We examine how the landscape changed in Sunday’s World-Herald.

One escapee killed not far from N.Y. prison MALONE, N.Y. (AP) — One of two convicted murderers who staged a brazen escape from an upstate maximum-security prison three weeks ago was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent in a wooded area about 30 miles from the prison on Friday, and the other is still on the run, authorities said. Authorities tracked down

and killed Richard Matt after a person towing a camper reported that there was a bullet hole through the back of it, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state police said at a press conference. David Sweat hasn’t been spotted, Cuomo said. The shooting of the camper led ofﬁcers to a cabin Friday afternoon in Malone where they

could smell gunpowder, said Joseph D’Amico, superintendent of New York State Police. There were indications that someone had recently been there and ﬂed out the back door, he said. While searching the property, ofﬁcers heard coughs and detected movement, and tactical

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See Escapees: Page 2

Omaha weather

Obama gives stirring eulogy, talks frankly about racism

CHI-Blue Cross standoff is over, but some still smarting

The president honors a slain Charleston pastor and delivers an unvarnished lecture on America’s racial history, saying “God doesn’t want us to stop” with taking down the Confederate ﬂag. Page 3A

Relief proved to be the main response to the agreement between Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska and CHI Health, but questions and bitterness lingered for some. Midlands

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STITCHES TO RICHES Once upon a time (50 years ago), in a land far away (New England), a textile mill (Berkshire Hathaway) was acquired by a young lad (Warren Buffett). Today, a hero’s legions gather in Omaha to celebrate a golden anniversary.

sports copy editor Zach Tegler

Ratings and analysis by World-Herald

Bielema’s ﬁnal league title comes with an asterisk, as neither Ohio State nor Penn State was eligible, but he and Andersen excelled under Alvarez’s shadow.

{

THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2015

Team records include wins and losses from interim coaches.

{

1 0 0

2003

1 0 1

2004

BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY: 50 YEARS UNDER BUFFETT

SATURDAY, MAY 2, 2015

2 2 0

2005

2 0 0

2006

3 1 0

2007

2 1 1

2008

1 0 0

2009

RYA N S O D E R L I N / T H E W O R L D - H E R A L D

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s historic ruling Friday granting gays and lesbians an equal right to marry nationwide puts an exclamation point on a profound shift in law and public attitudes — and creates the most signiﬁcant and controversial new constitutional liberty in more than a generation. Though the court’s 5-4 opinion is tightly focused on the question of same-sex unions, its broad wording and soaring rhetoric will reverberate beyond the two-decadelong battle for marriage equality and almost surely lead to the striking down of any remaining laws that directly discriminate against people due to sexual orientation. The decision was cheered by some as a long overdue validation of a basic human right and condemned by others as an effort by liberal justices to usurp states’ See Ruling: Page 5

2002

10-3 7-6 Bret Bielema 12-1 9-4 68-24, .739, hired by Arkansas 10-3 9-3 7-6 8-6 5-7 117-74, .613, retired Wisconsin

< 1990: Barry Alvarez

Bitter disappointment for advocates of traditional marriage

TRIBUNE WASHINGTON BUREAU

3 2 0

8-6 11-3 11-2

9-4 4-8 9-4 8-5 8-5 11-2 7-5 4-7 5-7 Rutgers

After 10 straight losing seasons, the Scarlet Knights have made bowl games in nine of the past 10 years, and Schiano’s hiring was the catalyst.

Hope was largely a victim of Tiller’s success — which included a Rose Bowl berth — and Hazell started from scratch with the Boilermakers two years ago.

Paterno’s legendary career ended suddenly and in scandal, and NCAA sanctions have contributed to O’Brien’s and Franklin’s struggles.

Tressel reignited the program but left the Buckeyes with sanctions. Meyer ended his “retirement” and picked up where Tressel left off, at least on the ﬁeld.

Fitzgerald took over after Walker died of a heart attack in June 2006, and he guided the Wildcats to their ﬁrst bowl win since 1948, followed by two losing seasons.

Callahan’s West Coast offense never caught on in Lincoln, and neither did Pelini’s “here-to-stay” promise after the Huskers’ win in the 2009 Holiday Bowl.

Kill, who also laid the foundation for Northern Illinois’ current success, has turned the Gophers into one of the league’s most respected programs.

The Spartans whiffed on Smith, but Dantonio won a conference championship and made them, at least for a while, the face of the Big Ten.

Rodriguez oversaw the Wolverines’ ﬁrst back-to-back losing seasons since 1962-63, and Hoke’s ﬁrst season lent what turned out to be false hope.

Friedgen led the Terps to an ACC title in his ﬁrst year but faltered with a 2-10 season. Edsall’s teams have improved each year as he’s led them into the Big Ten.

Every few years, the Hawkeyes seem to be on the verge of a breakthrough under Ferentz, but they haven’t been able to sustain that success.

After more than a decade of futility, the Hoosiers were on track with Hoeppner, but he died of complications from brain cancer after ﬁnishing his second year.

EMOTIONS RUN HIGH ON HISTORIC DAY

Jenna Stanley, left, and Kaily Brokaw exchange rings as Royal D. Bush, who is the chaplain at the Inclusive Life Center, presides at the couple’s wedding ceremony Friday in Omaha. The couple had planned to get married Friday in Iowa, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage led to a late change in plans. Watch video of the ﬁrst same-sex marriages on Omaha.com.

2001

126-57

Gary Andersen 9-4 10-3 19-7, .731, hired by Oregon State

90-83 7-5 6-7 Kyle Flood < 9-4 22-16, .579 Joined in 2014 (AAC)

4-8 4-8 8-5 8-6 5-6 7-5 9-4 7-6 Purdue

Greg Schiano 2-9 1-11 68-67, .504, hired by Buccaneers (NFL)

3-9 7-6

6-7

Darrell Hazell < 1-11 4-20, .167 Danny Hope 5-7 22-27, .449, ﬁred

< 1997: Joe Tiller

6-6 87-62, .584, retired

interim coach

9-4 7-6 11-2 11-2 9-4 9-4 11-1 4-7 3-9 9-4 5-6 409-136, .749, ﬁred

< 1966: Joe Paterno*

Penn State

11-2 Ohio State

Jim Tressel* -0 7-5 14-0 106-22, .828, resigned

80-94

109-64 Bill O’Brien 8-4 7-5 15-9, .625, hired by Texans (NFL)

James Franklin < 6-6 6-6, .500

148-32 12-1 12-2 12-1 11-2 10-3 -2 11-2 -1 12-1 10-2

5-7 10-3 6-7 7-6 8-5 9-4 6-6 Pat Fitzgerald < 4-8 60-53, .531 7-5 6-6 6-7 3-9

< 1999: Randy Walker

Northwestern

4-7 37-46, .446, died

10-3 7-7 11-2 58-19, .753, ﬁred Nebraska

Joined in 2011 (Big 12)

8-4

9-4 10-4 9-4 10-4 10-4 9-4 66-27, .710, ﬁred 5-7 8-4

9-5

Bo Pelini

Bill Callahan 5-6 27-22, .551, ﬁred

< 1998: Frank Solich

Urban Meyer < 12-0 36-3, .923

8-5 6-7 3-9 6-7 8-5 4-7 64-57, .529, ﬁred

< 1997: Glen Mason

Minnesota

7-5 15-17, .469, ﬁred Michigan State

< 2000: Bobby Williams

4-8

10-3

John L. Smith 8-5 22-26, .458, ﬁred

7-5

5-7

7-5

5-6

6-7

4-8

Tim Brewster 1-11 15-30, .333, ﬁred

7-6

9-4 Mark Dantonio < 7-6 74-31, .705

9-4 11-2 7-5 9-3 10-3 8-4 10-3 122-40, .753, retired Michigan

Luke Fickell 6-7 6-7, .462,

13-1 7-6 11-3 11-2 6-7

7-6 5-7 Rich Rodriguez 3-9 15-22, .405, ﬁred

< 1995: Lloyd Carr

Jerry Kill < 3-9 25-25, .500

7-6 Brady Hoke 11-2 31-20, .608, ﬁred

8-5

5-7

9-3

8-4

86-87

121-61

84-90

107-70 10-2

110-66 5-7

95-79 7-6 9-4 2-10 8-5 6-7 9-4 5-6 5-6 10-3 11-3 Ralph Friedgen 10-2 75-50, .600, ﬁred Maryland

10-3 11-2 7-5 115-84, .578

ﬁred

< 1999: Kirk Ferentz <

Iowa

Joined in 2014 (ACC)

7-6 8-5 11-2 9-4 10-2

7-5

6-7

6-6

Terry Hoeppner Bill Lynch 4-7 5-7 7-6 9-14, .391, leave of absence, died 19-30, .388, ﬁred 3-8 2-10 Gerry DiNardo 3-9 8-27, .229, ﬁred 5-6 18-37, .327,

< 1997: Cam Cameron

Indiana

Randy Edsall < 2-10 20-29, .408

4-8

7-5

111-65 8-5 4-8

7-5

5-7 4-8 Kevin Wilson < 1-11 14-34, .292 5-7 3-9

4-8

3-9 5-7 9-4 2-10 Ron Zook 2-9 34-51, .400, ﬁred 3-8 1-11 5-7

< 1997: Ron Turner

Illinois Turner and Zook oversaw trips to BCS bowls but the Illini haven’t done much else, leading to Beckman’s ongoing rebuilding project.

INDEPENDENT. IN-DEPTH. INDISPENSABLE.

SUPREME COURT SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

Hires Improved Got worse

Rodriguez 89} Rich Michigan

Beckman 91} Tim Illinois

Kiffin 90} Lane USC

Dorrell 92} Karl UCLA

Jagodzinski 93} Jeff Boston College

Golden 94} Al Miami

Stewart 95} Bill West Virginia

Strong 97} Charlie Texas

Wilson 96} Kevin Indiana

Franklin 98} James Penn State

Teevens 99} Buddy Stanford

MacIntyre 101} Mike Colorado

Graham 100} Todd Pittsburgh

Robinson 102} Greg Syracuse

Muschamp 103} Will Florida

Hoke 105} Brady Michigan

Chizik 104} Gene Auburn

Holgorsen 107} Dana West Virginia

Shula 106} Mike Alabama

Neuheisel 108} Rick UCLA

Tuberville 109} Tommy Texas Tech

Weis 111} Charlie Kansas

Hazell 110} Darrell Purdue

Doba 112} Bill Washington State

O’Brien 114} Bill Penn State

Zook 116} Ron Florida

Erickson 113} Dennis Arizona State

5 55-111 4-8

6-6 4-8

Tim Beckman < 2-10 12-24, .333 7-6 7-6

2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 School Overview

Two Big Ten powers have stumbled since their glory years, and two others have seen their programs deal with scandal. As Michigan and NU struggle to return to relevance, Ohio State is back on top with one of the era’s best coaches.

The fallen giants

COLLEGE FOOTBALL COACHING HIRES: BIG TEN

SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 2015

A joyful rush to wed seen as ruling nullifies state bans

{ { { { { { { { { { { { { {

{

10-2 35-57, .380, ﬁred

Flood 117} Kyle Rutgers

Clawson 115} Dave Wake Forest

3 66-103

W-L Coaches 2013 2012 2011

Still with program

vacated by the NCAA

* Includes wins later

> Program regressed

Program stayed the same

Program was up, then down

Program improved

Interim or hired before 2001

National champion

Conference champion

BCS bowl victory

Lost national title game

2014

{Bowl games not included}

2.71

2.98

Power Five average

{

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Average

COACHING COUNTDOWN

Ranking the college football hires of the past 14 years based on winning percentage, longevity and program status.

Judges’ Comments: There’s so much to like in this entry - presentations based on photographs, illustrations, a combination of illustration and graphics, and pure charting. And then there’s the spadea and cover that cleverly pulls you into the story with a turn of the page. It’s the sort of idea that makes you wish you’d thought of it. Great work!

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 25

Great Plains Designer of the Year Finalists Publication: Tulsa World By: Katie McInerney

Sports

B1 Sunday | June 14, 2015 | tulsaworld.com

Southern Hills’ wait for Open may grow

Publication: St. Louis Post-Dispatch By: Josh Renaud

Mason & Jason

It’s a busy week for Locust Grove recruits Mason Fine and Jason Pirtle. B4

S ERV I NG THE PUB L I C S I NCE 1 878 • WI NNER O F 1 8 PUL I TZER PR I ZE S

Sunday • 10.18.2015 • $2.50 • EaRLy EdITIOn

ANATOMY OF A

Juvenile life terms still up in air after court case

T’S A NeW day in golf. Chambers Bay hosts the U.S. Open this week. The virtually brand new course just outside Seattle has interchangeable tee boxes, alternating pars on 1 and 18 and, hey, one tree. It’s the USGA’s first time to stage its national championship in the Pacific NorthJohn E. west, part of an ongoing effort to Hoover broaden the sport Sports Columnist into a wider (if john.hoover not cooler, edgier @tulsaworld.com and younger) 918-581-8384 demographic. Twitter: And Fox, not @JohnEHoover NBC or CBS, is broadcasting the 115th Open beginning Thursday. “This is a new age and a new era for the USGA,” United States Golf Association president Tom O’Toole told the Tulsa World. Of course, that might ultimately mean Tulsa and Southern Hills Country Club may have to wait a bit longer to host their next U.S. Open. Southern Hills last hosted the U.S. Open in 2001. Future Opens are currently booked through 2021, although numerous reports say the 2022 Open (The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts) and

RAMPAGE

Missouri has not decided what to do if sentencing rule is made retroactive

When Joseph Aldridge killed seven neighbors and cousins, then himself, some assumed he had snapped after finding his cancer-stricken mother dead at home.

By JEnnIFER S. Mann St. Louis Post-Dispatch

SEE HOOVER B7

How a group of rascals created tHe pinnacle of

Chambers Bay in Washington will host the U.S. Open this week, but the course is a mystery to most because it is only eight years old. AP

Wrestling can show soccer a few things

igh above the Arkansas river, she is our Vesuvius, and boy, is it something to see when she erupts. She sleeps for 364 days of each 365, a dormant hillside lined with indistinguishable single-level homes and condominiums. That one day, though, that one Sunday in June, she blows. She spews water from a hose, beer from a can, the excess of both from the couple-thousand partygoers who climb her highest point at West 13th Street and South Jackson Avenue. She screams — ecstatic yelps from the crowd, melodies and mixes from the bands and DJs who take stage, whooshes from the cyclists — those poor cyclists — who must ascend and descend her multiple times in pursuit of glory. Oh, and the earsplitting ding-ding-dings of the cowbells, those cheerleading boons and hangover exacerbators.

Tulsa Tough

NTerNATIONAl SOCCer MIGHT learn from the experience of wrestling. When the International Olympic Committee threatened to drop wrestling from future Olympics, the international wrestling community responded with reform and a new-era transparency. FIlA, the international governing body of wrestling, cleaned house. It was out with John the old, and the old ways of doing Klein things, and in Senior Sports with the new, Columnist including a newjohn.klein found structure @tulsaworld.com of transparency 918-581-8368 and leadership. Twitter: @JohnKleinTW “The fight we had to save our sport in For more the Olympics Find the latest has turned out from the Women’s World to be the best thing that ever Cup. B7 happened for us,” said rich Bender, executive director of USA Wrestling. “We now have a totally different posture in international wrestling. “Our sport was being run in a

She shines a bright light on Tulsa’s most creative and most grotesque: the blonde woman in a lobster suit, the man test driving the sunglasses/white necktie/ short-shorts combo, the heroes who wear merely their Speedos. One resident prefers to call her the “Hill of Half-Naked Women.” Almost a decade old now, our Vesuvius knows to alert the neighbors and the masses of her eruption. The warnings appear in the days before she rumbles, in neon orange paint as the hill ascends, in the form of

By marK Cooper • world SportS writer

Above: Josh Gifford, one of the founders of Cry Baby Hill, waves a baby doll at racers during the 2013 race. JOhN CLANTON/Tulsa World file

her credo and her common name: Mind the Gap. Mind the Gap. Cry Baby Hill. She is growling again this weekend, perhaps for a crowd larger than she has ever seen. Word continues to spread that Cry Baby Hill is the party of the year in Tulsa, and maybe even the party of the year in cycling in the United States. But as Cry Baby Hill once again welcomes swaths of cycling fans and people looking for a good time SEE HILL B10

INSIdE: Results from Day 2 of Tulsa Tough in the Brady Arts District, plus schedules and maps for Sunday’s events. PAGE B10

In a tied NBA Finals, James ready for whatever • leBron says neither team has the momentum going into Sunday’s Game 5 against Golden State. By BRIAN MAHONEy Associated Press

OAKlAND, Calif. — leBron James casually swished a jumper from the corner, an otherwise ordinary shot with a higher degree of difficulty given the backpack hang-

SEE KLEIN B7

ing over his shoulders. In the NBA Finals, James might have to carry something much heavier than a backpack. He might have to put the Cleveland Cavaliers on his back. “Well, I’m in a spot where I have to be very productive, and that’s

just the spot I’ve always been in,” James said Saturday. He’s certainly been in this very spot in the finals, Game 5 of a tied series, the game that has historically foretold who would win the title. So it’s all about the next game, with no reason to get hung up on what happened in the last one — no matter how bad things appeared. “I think when you get to a championship-level type game with it

NBA FINALS: GAME 5

being 2-2, I don’t think anyone has the mo7 p.m. Sunday m e n t u m ,” James said. TV: KTUL-1008 “Obviously, everyone would say them because they’re coming back home, and then after

Cleveland at Golden State

SEE NBA B4

ALL-WORLD 2015

ST. LOuIS • Their crimes are among the worst of the worst. An elderly man beaten, then suffocated in a freezer in his Maplewood home in 1985. A 15-year-old girl strangled with a speaker wire in 1993 at the doughnut shop in Spanish Lake where she worked. In St. Louis, a security guard killed in 1990, then a police officer slain in 2007. They are the types of callous, premeditated acts that send killers away for life without any chance of release. And in each of those cases, that’s exactly what happened. Tommy L. Thomas, Tony W. Jones, Edward Anderson and Antonio Andrews were all convicted of first-degree murder, and sentenced to forever behind bars. But there’s a twist: Each was a kid when he committed his crime. In a changing legal landscape, that factor now could mean their eventual release — along with that of dozens of others — in Missouri, a leading state for sending juveniles away for life. The U.S. Supreme Court has over the past decade moved away from the harshest sentences for youths, recognizing

But new information suggests the gunman planned ahead. By JOEL CuRRIER and JESSE BOGan • St. Louis Post-Dispatch

See RaMPaGE • Page a14

See LIFE • Page a9

THE ROOM

Vaccines for cancer get personal

Aldridge’s bedroom offers clues to his life leading up to the shooting — pipes for smoking marijuana, books on how to make munitions and psychedelic drugs.

WU research looks to immune system to fight tumors By BLyTHE BERnHaRd St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Is the best treatment for cancer already inside of us? Research is underway at Washington University to test a new approach to cancer treatment. Beyond traditional therapies like surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, scientists want to know if the human body’s own immune system can attack tumors. They’re testing personalized vaccines designed to target deadly cancer cells in each patient. A vaccine is any substance that prevents or treats a disease with properties of the disease itself. Scientists know that fighting fire with fire works for many viruses such as flu, measles or polio. Now they want to test that theory with cancer, but since every tumor is different, every vaccine will be different. Advancements in genetic sequencing, or decoding the DNA of cells, have made it easier to figure out what makes tumors unique. Scientists have found potential targets in tumor cells that could cause them to

THE SHOOTER

THE WEAPONRY

Aldridge had spent time in prison on a 2008 drug and weapons charge. And there were other red flags that now haunt people who knew him.

As a felon, Aldridge was legally barred from having guns. And yet he carried three firearms on the night of the murders, including one police still cannot trace.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF MISSOURI HIGHWAY PATROL AND MOUNTAIN VIEW, MO., POLICE

McClellan finds dark humor in scary time •

In search of offense in the offseason

On target

TODAY B1

63°/46° MOSTLY SUNNY

Helping your teen grow up in an online age • H1

TOMORROW

73°/53° MOSTLY SUNNY

Overcoming decline in production has come to define Cards

See VaCCInES • Page a17

More than 100,000 votes have already been cast in the 2015 All-World contest. Make sure yours is one of them by heading online to OKPrepsExtra.com to vote for your favorite football player See the nomineeS for thiS year’S Squad and find out who iS leading So far inSide on page B4.

TyROnE, MO.

black billboard with yellow and white letters notifies drivers rolling down U.S. Highway 63 near here that they are entering a “prayer zone.” Last winter, in this deeply rural and religious part of south-central Missouri, a man momentarily caught the nation’s eye by carrying out one of the deadliest mass shootings of 2015. It has since been overshadowed by even deadlier ones in Charleston, S.C.; Waco, Texas; and Roseburg, Ore. And yet the reasons for it remain more elusive because its mastermind knew all of his victims but left investigators with few clues. On a frigid February night, a convicted felon armed with guns and knives donned a military-style vest and fatally shot seven of his neighbors and cousins. He then took his own life.

SPORTS • C1

Railroads say they can’t meet safety deadline • E1

WEATHER A25

Brown killing inspires theater piece • D1

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Vote as many times as you want up until Aug. 2 at 11:59 p.m., and follow our summer series as we profile the candidates and tell their stories. Find more on Twitter at @OKPrepsExtra and on Instagram at @OKPrepsExtra.

B 4 n n Thursday, November 19, 2015

2015 american league cy young winner AL LEADER

N0. 2 in AL

INN. PITCHED

SEASON ERA

232 2.48

SERVING THE PUBL IC SINC E 1878 • WINNER OF 18 PUL ITZER PRIZE S

216 Tied - 5th in al

SUNDAY • 09.20.2015 • $2.50 • FINAL EDITION

STRIKEOUTS

TitleMax is thriving in Missouri — and repossessing thousands of cars in the process

QUICK LOANS, BIG BUCKS 2015 AL GoLD GLovE WINNER

AL LEADER

20-8

DALLAS 2015 record

IN THE BLACK

A LEGAL LOOPHOLE

Lender writes off millions in losses annually, but repeat customers, multiple loans — 49,000 in the state last year — keep cash flowing

Though it advertises itself as a title lender, TitleMax avoids consumer title loan protections by operating under a different statute

Two-year loans can have triple-digit interest rates. Borrowers who pay on schedule repay more than twice what they borrowed.

2015 gamE-By-gamE 9

4/12 @TeX w, 6-4

4/18 LAA 4-0

4/24 @oAk w, 5-4

INNINgs pITched

4/29 @sd 7-2

5/4 TeX L, 2-1

5/9 @LAA 6-5

eARNed RUNs

5/15 ToR 8-4

5/20 oAk 6-1

5/25 @bal 4-3

sTRIkeoUTs

5/30 chW 3-0

Practice of collecting checks from lobbyists on days votes are being cast is illegal elsewhere BY KEVIN McDERMOTT St. Louis Post-Dispatch

See LOBBYING • Page A7

OUT OF THE BLUE Shawn Bryant of Alton and his daughter, Aria, 2, watch the launch of the Great Forest Park Balloon Race on Saturday in Forest Park. MORE PHOTOS • B1

BY WALKER MOSKOP St. Louis Post-Dispatch

low (min. 10 game): 1.76 • high (min. 10 game): 2.56 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 .5

4/6 cLe 2-0

Legislators take time in session to raise funds

HOUSTON ASTROS

GRAy Oakland

2015 ERa pROgRESSION

WINS

Former state Rep. Rick Stream, R-Kirkwood

JEFFERSON CITY • Like collegiate bar-hoppers they go, walking in chattering packs from one tavern to another, crowding the doorways and spilling out onto the sidewalks, creating an unusual Tuesday night buzz in the normally sleepy little bar district near the state Capitol. But they aren’t college students. They’re political lobbyists, most of them, as evidenced by their suits, ties and conversational topics: legislative bills, election campaigns, predictions about the next day’s veto session. In dark, rented back rooms of the restaurants and the commandeered storefront bars, everyone knows everyone. Balancing paper plates of

KEUCHEL no. 2 DAviD PRiCE Toronto • no. 3 Sonny

“I frankly cannot be bought.”

6/4 bal l, 3-2

6/9 @chW 4-2

LOSSES

6/15 coL 6-3

6/20 @seA 6-3

6/25 NYY 4-0

INNINgs pITched

6/30 kc 4-0

7/6 @cLe 9-4

7/11 @Tb 3-0

eARNed RUNs

7/19 TeX 10-0

7/26 @kc 5-1

8/1 ARI 9-2

sTRIkeoUTs

8/7 @oAk 3-1

8/14 deT 5-1

NO DECISION

8/19 Tb w, 3-2

8/25 @NYY 15-1

8/31 seA 8-3

INNINgs pITched

9/6 MIN 8-5

9/11 @LAA 3-2

9/16 @TeX 14-3

eARNed RUNs

9/21 LAA 6-3

9/27 TeX 4-2

10/2 @ARI 21-5

sTRIkeoUTs

Lawrence Perry knows he should have read more closely before he signed. Behind on several bills, Perry, 62, who lives on Social Security disability payments, decided he needed a quick loan. He’d seen lots of ads and storefronts for TitleMax, so in June, he went to a shop on North Grand Boulevard and took out a $5,000 loan. He said a store employee told him he’d pay back $7,400 over two years. As he would soon realize, $7,400 was the finance charge. The loan’s annual interest rate was 108 percent, and if he managed to make all payments on schedule, he would repay a total of $12,411.

HUY MACH • hmach@post-dispatch.com

Parole board works with empty seats, behind closed doors BY JESSE BOGAN St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ST. LOUIS • The area around North KingshighCHRIS LEE • clee@post-dispatch.com

Rob VanderMyde, a former TitleMax store manager, stands Wednesday outside a TitleMax in Crystal City. He now works as a caseworker at a counseling center.

See TITLEMAX • Page A10

TitleMax of Missouri by the numbers $1,112

8,960

96%-180%

Average loan amount

Vehicles repossessed (2014)

Range of annual interest charged on two-year contracts reviewed by the P-D

TODAY

Pressed for cash

75°/54° MOSTLY SUNNY

TOMORROW

78°/56° SUNNY

WEATHER A27

arkansas 2006-09

Tulsa world all-meTro firsT Team • 2006 Class 5a sTaTe Champion • 2004, 2006 Class 5a runner-up • 2005

19 wins • 4.56 Career era 7Th-round seleCTion • 2009 mlb amaTeur drafT assoCiaTed press and Tulsa world file phoTos. sourCe: baseball-referenCe.Com

Operating income

See BOARD • Page A5

Gail’s Emmy predictions

Black and white are hot for fall

This has to be Jon Hamm’s year

‘Infill’ housing reshapes cityscape

• E1

A&E • D1

Cards lose but clinch playoff spot

• C1

POST-DISPATCH WEATHERBIRD ®

BISHOP KELLEY 2002-06

$59.4 MILLION

way and Cote Brillante Avenue has changed a lot since Cranston Mitchell grew up there in the 1950s. McBride High School closed. DePaul Hospital moved on, and so did many of the doctors and educators. Mitchell’s field of expertise in criminal justice has also undergone a metamorphosis. “My God,” he said, about starting on the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole in the early 1980s, a position he held nearly two decades. “There were three of us.” Back then, they weighed cases for Missouri’s

• H1

Find true value of college choice

• E1

BommaritoAudiWestCounty.com

26 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

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Great Plains Magazine of the Year Publication: Midwest Living

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.orgâ&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; 27

Great Plains Magazine of the Year Finalist Publication: Hail Varsity

28â&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Great Plains Magazine of the Year Finalist Publication: Sauce Magazine

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.orgâ&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; 29

Great Plains Magazine Writer of the Year Publication: St. Louis Magazine By: Jeannette Cooperman

“Scared New World”

When you are a camera, nobody can see who you are; You get to see them. You get to decide what they see. —From “Dear Digital Camera” by Stephen Burt In a time of hot debate over drones and bodycams, security cameras are about as sexy as peering into a porn star’s window and finding her knitting. Cameras are already operating all over St. Louis—in alleys and neighborhoods, on bridges and the riverfront, in stores, warehouses, businesses, schools, and hospitals. There are cameras that record license plates, thermal cameras that sense body heat, infrared cameras that see at night, facial recognition cameras that can flag people from a database. Jonathan Finn, author of Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society, calls surveillance “the dominant metaphor of our soci-

ety.” With our selfies and social media, drones and nanny-cams and People of Walmart, “we are always on watch. Always on the lookout for something, anything that’s an aberration from the norm.” Cameras have become an antidote to anonymity, an almost comforting, almost parental oversight of what’s otherwise a fast urban blur. And when it comes to crime-fighting, they’re accepted without question as the next best thing. In 2001, the global mass surveillance industry was worth so little, there’s no number out there. By 2013, it was worth more than $13 billion, and a ReportsnReports market analysis forecasts $39 billion by 2020. The technology and our cultural fascination with it have grown apace with our fear, since 9/11, of terrorism and violence. We’re used to trading privacy for convenience, and

we’re downright eager to trade it for safety. Assured of popular support, Mayor Francis Slay and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department are building a real-time center that will “systematically start federating private cameras,” letting law enforcement use their video feeds to track suspects and fugitives and share data with other agencies. Yet there’s still no public policy consensus about how all this surveillance should be conducted, how long data should be archived, who should monitor it, what ethics are involved, and how our laws must bend to accommodate the new reality. And though cameras rank right up there with fingerprints and DNA in helping solve crimes, studies don’t show much evidence that they reduce crime.

30 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

The fact that so many cameras are already up and running with neither proof nor consensus tells us just how eager people are for security cameras— and how much they trust their efficacy. Last October the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri issued a report, “Caught in the Web of Mass Surveillance,” warning of the dangers of this kind of aggregated surveillance: The cameras aren’t terribly effective; they eat public money; monitors can be biased; data can be sold or reused in ways impossible to predict; new technologies violate civil liberties; unchecked power rests with the police; mixing public and private cameras makes accountability and transparency unattainable. Yet for all its outrage, the ACLU knew better than to expect anybody to turn off cameras. The report just begged for a little more oversight and transparency—and even that caused many folks with security cameras to roll their eyes. Have privacy activists just not caught up to technology’s new reality? Or are we not thinking ahead? Real-Time Intel Capt. Angela Coonce, commander of intelligence for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, steps into the big raw space down the hall from her office and draws a deep breath, inhaling the smell of fresh-cut wood and the promise of, at long last, efficiency. This will be the new Real-Time Crime Center, formerly dubbed the Real-Time Intelligence Center but shrewdly renamed to emphasize crime-fighting. Phase one is mainly for demo; the mayor’s looking for funding for the rest of the project. But the long wall, freshly painted a drab taupe, will eventually be a wall of camera monitors, fed by private cameras all over the city. And the tiers on the opposite side are built out for platform seating, with the back row the chief’s bridge. SLMPD crime analysts will use the room to determine crime trends and hotspots. Neighborhood associations’ tech-savvy volunteers will be invited in for training, and federal agents and analysts will stream in and out. “Our plan is to have people from different agencies here all the time,” Coonce says, “so when there’s something happening…” The room will become command

central. Relying this hard on technology is called intelligence-led policing. Critics see it as nationalization—and, to some degree, militarization—of the police force. But from Coonce’s perspective, it’s just working smart. “Before, we’d have to send a request to the Downtown Partnership and wait 24 to 48 hours to get their video. Having a snapshot of what’s happening in real time, as the officers are responding, helps not only with solvability but also officer safety.” From her perspective, the genius of this center is precisely what worries the ACLU: that it’s “truly a private-public partnership,” able to give multiple agencies instant access, but with private companies paying for—and controlling—most of the cameras and their data storage. “Chicago has about 20,000 cameras, and the city owns only 3,000,” she notes. “What they’ve done that we want to do is exploit what’s already out there. Businesses like BJC, Peabody Coal, Bank of America already have systems.” The police won’t be monitoring all those feeds live, but a 911 call will automatically pull up 15 seconds of video. “If there’s a robbery, assault, or homicide, we can click on cameras and push that information out in real time to the investigators.” The police keep video for six months; they’re waiting for the state to set a standard policy, with any luck in the next session. If someone moves a camera, it’s tagged with that person’s name, Coonce says. “We wanted those audit trails in place for the privacy concerns, to be able to see who is zooming in on people.” Cameras are best at preventing crimes of opportunity, she says, not impulsive violence (such as the domestic homicide that recently took place in full view of multiple cameras at Tucker and Chouteau). But they do make any crime they capture easier to solve and prosecute. Just this morning, her team used video to ID a bank robber. A few weeks earlier, they found the solitary shooter in the Drury Inn homicide. I ask for comparative data showing how cameras reduce crime. “It’s hard to quantify,” she says. “There are ebbs and flows. We did a five-month snapshot

analysis last year of Grand and Osage, getting as close as we could to what we’d identified as a hotspot.” Calls for service originating within 200 feet of the camera dropped by 42 percent between the spring and summer of 2013 and the same months in 2014. The biggest decreases involved calls about suspicious persons (26 fewer) and general disturbance calls (36 fewer). “We can’t say for certain that the camera caused the drop, but it’s those little pieces of data I took to the chief.” Later, she sends a study that evaluated surveillance systems in Baltimore, Chicago, and D.C. About four months after Baltimore saturated its downtown with live-monitored cameras, crime dropped by about 30 incidents per month. But in other Baltimore neighborhoods, the effects on crime were mixed. After Chicago installed an extensive camera system, crime spiked in one location, then dropped; in another location, crime didn’t change. In D.C., the cameras had no obvious effect. The report emphasized that cities should invest in live monitoring. Our center will be staffed around the clock and capable of live monitoring, but “we can’t watch 22,000 cameras a day,” Coonce says. Instead, the system will be triggered by 911 calls. This won’t replace officers on the ground, she adds. (The SLMPD has proposed spending $8 million to add 160 officers over the next two years.) “But as technology moves forward, we have to move forward also.” Watching the Watchers While Coonce was fighting to strengthen SLMPD intel, John Chasnoff, former program director of the St. Louis ACLU office, was trying to figure out just how much surveillance was already up and running throughout St. Louis. He’s an unintimidating sort, with a gentle voice, wire-rimmed glasses, and a ball cap over a graying ponytail. But he’s as persistent as a schnauzer. He first worried about cameras when two residents of the 21st Ward protested outside Alderman Antonio French’s office and promptly had their photos posted on Facebook. That was in the spring of 2012. Chasnoff made a few Sunshine Law requests, trying to find out whether those cameras were public or private.

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 31

What he found was that the city was full of cameras, and the line between public and private had been erased. “I couldn’t go to the city, even, and say, ‘Tell me about all your cameras,’” he says. “They had no idea. The cameras they were monitoring belonged to the Locust Business District. And the guy who answered our Sunshine request didn’t know the Port Authority had cameras; didn’t know there were 120 alley cams to catch people disposing of trash improperly.” Then Chasnoff saw the PowerPoint, prepared by the SLMPD for Mayor Slay, proposing a real-time intel center that would rely on private camera feeds. “To me, that’s a real dangerous model,” Chasnoff says, “to build an infrastructure for other people’s cameras.” He worried about the biases that come into play when human beings monitor live cameras. (A 1999 study by the Centre for Criminological Research, in England, found that monitors disproportionately focused on people who were young, black, or both. A 2004 study conducted in Oslo found a pattern of targeting people who looked “scruffy.” A 2011 study in Criminal Justice and Behavior found that monitoring was heavily biased toward minorities, males, and youth.) Chasnoff also worried that “the law has not caught up with the realities of this technology.” The old standard of privacy was measured by the human body: If you were in public, where strangers could see and hear you, you couldn’t very well expect your movements to be private. But today’s camera networks “can record a whispered conversation; track individuals as they go to the doctor, engage in political activities, or attend their house of worship; even zoom in on someone’s diary while they are writing on a park bench,” Chasnoff notes. Meanwhile, the FBI’s Next Generation Identification database is already collecting the DNA profiles, iris scans, palm prints, voice profiles, scars, and tattoos of millions of Americans. Video of people’s movements could be integrated with that data or shared with other agencies. Chasnoff asked SLMPD Chief Sam Dotson whether he planned to coordinate this real-time center with the St. Louis Fusion Center, which

pulls together scores of federal and state agencies for homeland security. (In 2012, a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee pointed out instance after instance in which fusion centers had violated civil liberties.) “He said there were no plans and then finished by saying, ‘I am thinking about asking the county fusion center to move into our building when we get the real-time intelligence center.’” But the biggest surprise, Chasnoff says, was that the effectiveness of intelligence centers remains unproven: “Boston had a 10 percent reduction in crime after their center opened in 2010; Houston had a 15 percent reduction in violent crime in the three years after theirs opened in 2008. With no intelligence center in place, St. Louis had comparable or better numbers: a 9.25 percent reduction in crime for 2010 and a 15.6 percent reduction in violent crime for that year alone.” The Caveats Jeff Rainford returns my calls in January, just after announcing his coming resignation as the mayor’s chief of staff. “The feedback we’re getting from the people of St. Louis is, ‘We want you to do more to keep us safe,’” he says. “This is all an initiative of the mayor, being carried out by public safety and the police department. We are in favor of cameras for public safety, for crime prevention.” I ask what gave the mayor’s office confidence that cameras would prevent crime. “We partnered with [the University of Missouri–St. Louis] and asked them to advise us on cameras,” Rainford says. “The answer comes back that they work if they are monitored live—which can be by human beings or by sophisticated software that is monitored by human beings. What UMSL has told us is that surveillance cameras do in fact have a significant impact on crime when they are monitored live, both deterrence and solving. I’m convinced it will make the city safer.” Rainford calls the UMSL report “the strongest basis for my thinking” and urges me to talk to its main author, UMSL criminology professor Richard Rosenfeld. Actually, I already have. Rosenfeld and his colleagues studied the 21st Ward’s closed-circuit TV cam-

eras. “There was a reduction in crime for a relatively short period of time,” Rosenfeld says, “and in a few months we found crime levels returning to baseline. That’s not unlike other studies about the impact of CCTV cameras on crime. They sometimes have a relatively immediate and short-term effect. But over time, especially if people began to perceive that the footage was not regularly monitored…” The key is indeed live monitoring, he says. “But my own view is that cameras work best when they are accompanied by regular police patrols. People draw a connection between the presence of cameras and the presence of police.” He thinks the Real-Time Crime Center will be a good idea “to the degree that the police are successful in collecting and centralizing images from all over the city.” But he’s not sure that it will reduce crime. “It certainly can make the investigation of crimes more efficient,” he says, adding, “I do have reservations. The question always has to be ‘What are the additional benefits of compiling, centralizing, and disseminating up and down the chain of authority all these kinds of information?’ The benefit has to outweigh the risks and be worth the effort. I don’t know that I’m fully convinced that it is.” I call another academic, Neil Richards, an internationally recognized privacy expert who’s on Washington University’s law faculty. Born in Liverpool, he’s well accustomed to surveillance cameras, and Oxford University Press just published his first book, Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age. “CCTV is interesting,” he says. “CCTV does not really deter crime. It can move street crime around. Violent crimes, people don’t think about cameras. And they don’t deter terrorism.” The case inevitably cited is the Boston Marathon. Yes, Richards says, cameras confirmed the Tsarnaev brothers’ presence there, “but all the CCTV cameras in the world would not have stopped those guys—and in the end, they got found by a guy walking out his door and saying, ‘There’s a bloodstain on my boat.’” Private Eyes From the glass walls of Downtown STL’s conference room, I notice a nondescript little brown bird perched on the wing of the American eagle atop the

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Old Post Office. The statue’s a replica of “Peace, Vigilance, and the American Eagle,” which, it occurs to me, is exactly what we’re talking about—the vigilance needed to make the streets peaceful, and how to balance that vigilance with liberty. Missy Kelley, chief operating officer, and Doug Woodruff, president and CEO, bring out a big map of downtown’s security cameras. There’s no central registry, so they walked the streets and asked who had cameras. The board’s clustered with so many red and blue dots, it looks like an epidemiologist’s trying to track the common cold. The 100 red dots are cameras that Downtown STL actively monitors. The blue dots are private cameras, but not all of them, Woodruff says: “There are cameras people don’t want you to see.” I ask whether a common code of ethics seemed to be emerging. “I’m not sure how to answer that,” Kelley says. “We hand-select the people that monitor, and there are very strict rules.” (I later learn the minimum requirements: Monitors must be highschool graduates, 18 or older, with no criminal record.) “The police department trains them,” she continues, “and we have a manual.” May I see it? “I don’t know that it’s something we can turn over to you.” (When I ask Coonce, she says that a new manual’s being prepared but isn’t yet approved for release.) How long is video archived? “Well, we don’t have a policy,” Woodruff says. “I think that’s an issue with the police department more than with us.” Does it concern him that all those private cameras are exempt from public accountability yet will be networked into a public system? “That’s not our issue,” he says, “other than the benefit of having 700 cameras downtown and we ought to be able to access them.” Could we show readers that cool map? After all, to work as deterrents, cameras have to be visible. “Flashing lights, police logo—that’s what we are encouraging even private businesses to go toward,” Coonce told me. “No,” says Kelley, “we can’t let you have the map.” Walking back to my car, I stop on the sidewalk below one of the cameras and ask passersby, “Do you know where the

downtown security cameras are?” “Gosh, no. I’ve lived here all my life, so I thought I could help you,” says a nice young man in a suit. “No, but I’m lost myself,” says another man, slightly harried, with a briefcase. “Haven’t a clue,” a woman says with a shrug. “No, ma’am,” says the hot-dog vendor on that corner. “I have been here 11 years, but I do not know where that is.” Next I stop by the office of the Locust Business District. Its cameras went up more than five years ago. “You have to be careful,” treasurer Barry Adelstein tells me, “because we don’t necessarily want folks to know where all the cameras are. We think people knowing we have them is enough.” He gets regular crime-comparison reports from a supplemental security firm, The City’s Finest, staffed by current and retired police officers. But when I call his liaison there, I’m told “those reports are not public information.” My next stop, the Central West End Neighborhood Security Initiative, looks like an outdoors shop in the Pacific Northwest, with pale hardwood floors and a row of black mountain bikes hanging on one wall. Executive director Jim Whyte is an affable guy, eager to show privacy advocates that the cameras aren’t violating any civil liberties. A former police officer, Whyte points out that “cameras do prevent crime,” in the sense that they remove a particular criminal from the street for a time. They won’t stop somebody from robbing a bank. But when the Bank of America at Euclid and Lindell got robbed, various cameras showed which way the robber ran and captured him getting into a car—all in real time, with helicopters circling overhead. The CWE cameras have helped in more than 20 incidents since mid-2013, Whyte says, often sorting out exactly who did what. The CWE’s securitycamera policy states that “signage, which is still in development, will be posted to disclose this activity.” But the group still hasn’t put signs up notifying people of particular camera locations— they worry that it might produce a false sense of security, plus it’s “an aesthetic issue,” Whyte says.

“I don’t get the whole privacy argument,” he adds. “It’s something that is perpetuated by the media.” Partnering with Washington University Medical Center, the NSI has $465,000 to expand its system; soon the office will control more than 80 highdefinition cameras. “It’s very expensive,” Whyte says, “but there’s no better feeling than to come in here after some innocent person has been victimized and be able to review the footage, call the police, and say, ‘We have them.’” The Perception of Safety At every neighborhood or business office I visited, someone spoke fervently about cameras “giving people confidence” or “creating the perception of safety.” But there are ways that perception can backfire. First, there’s the danger of overconfidence. Reasonable, law-abiding people park near cameras thinking they’ll be somehow safer there—maybe they can even leave their laptop in the car. But impulsive, aggressive criminals don’t even register the cameras’ presence. Second, there’s the lessening of community cooperation and vigilance. “It takes a lot of work to be vigilant about crime and come down to court to testify,” says St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, “and sometimes, in more affluent neighborhoods, the feeling is, we spent money on cameras, so we don’t have to do that anymore.” Then there’s what’s called the CSI effect: Jurors think that if something wasn’t caught on camera, it didn’t happen. Fourth, “you can see a video that only shows you part of what’s happening and assume you know what’s happening,” notes Joyce. “A couple years ago, on New Year’s Eve, an officer was at a gas station at I-55 and Arsenal. Two guys took video and were narrating, saying things like, ‘Wow, he’s really punching him.’ You could only see the officer from the waist up, because a car was in the way. He was hitting with his baton, and it was a disturbing video. “We talked to people at the scene and found out this individual had lunged at the police officer and had him in a wrestling hold around his legs. If an officer gets knocked over, he can lose

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 33

control of his gun. So he was hitting— on the meaty part of the thigh, where you don’t break any bones, just as he’d been trained to do. “Video’s just one piece of the puzzle,” Joyce concludes. “You have to be really analytical when you review it, but it’s powerful.” She mentions a recent murder-for-hire case that was solved because there was video: “Those three people would have murdered a victim of domestic violence, and we would never have found them.” The City’s Finest After hearing that both Locust and the CWE hire The City’s Finest, I visit its office—founder Charles Betts’ old apartment in Forest Park Southeast. He was a beat cop down here before rising to homicide detective, he says, and after an injury forced him to retire, he founded TCF, offering supplemental security patrols. Now he’s adding hightech surveillance. The office is immaculately clean— with fragrant candles, a pale wood floor, and a leather sofa—and freezing cold, for the new computers’ sake. One room holds a bank of eight large screens. Betts shows me how the software allows him to move cameras and pan, tilt, zoom (PTZ) remotely. “The thermal camera on the perimeter says there’s a person, the fixed camera sees them, and the PTZ follows to get a close-up, and the monitor can then take control and zoom in on facial features. He can warn the person through an Internet Protocol microphone—there are two loudspeakers at the site.” The entire system can be controlled from a cellphone, Betts says. Business owners “can even watch employees to make sure they’re doing a good job. And we can monitor remotely at night instead of putting a police officer in a dangerous area alone. “All our camera systems are designed to feed into the SLMPD system,” continues Betts. “We are going to be giving them information all the time. But we are not subject to the Sunshine Law. I can do whatever I want, because I’m private. The private sector has unlimited resources. You just say, ‘Hey, I want 30 monitors in this room, and I want to store video for a year. You could do that.” (He doesn’t, as a rule; after 60 days, it gets recorded over.) Betts doesn’t worry about invading

privacy, because “when we put a camera in, if there’s anything we feel is a privacy concern, we put a mask over it. The computer has drawn a virtual line around that window and blocked it out. The mask is controlled by the administrators of the system.” Facing the Future A Starbucks cup clamped in his teeth, Joe Spiess digs out his security card so he can swipe his way into Blue Line Security Solutions’ conference room. “We need facial recognition right here,” he jokes, rescuing the sloshing cup before it spills. Spiess retired as a major with the SLMPD; now he’s the chief operating officer of Blue Line, promoting a facial recognition system whose users enter photographs of people they want recognized. Called First Line, the software can stop thieves, sexual predators, employees turned violent, abusive spouses, baby kidnappers, or corporate spies, Spiess tells me. The system just went online at St. Mary’s High School, one of the first in the nation to use facial recognition. And the city’s 32 circuit judges have allowed it to be set up in the downtown courthouse. It’s working, Spiess says. “A father made a threat, so his photo was put into the system, and when he showed up for the termination hearing, he was searched twice and escorted to the judge’s chambers.” First Line differs from the myriad patent-pending facial recognition systems, because it uses small, user-created databases. All those shoplifter photos pinned to cork in Walmart back rooms? They’d go into a First Line database, and a security alert would come up if that shoplifter returned. He or she then could be greeted—and tracked—by a courteous security agent, not just waved in by a cheerful retiree. I wonder aloud: Can somebody say, “No, you can’t take my picture,” if he or she hasn’t been charged yet? “I don’t think so,” says Blue Line CEO Tom Sawyer, who worked 21 years for the SLMPD, “but it really wouldn’t matter, because this is all videotaped anyway on 5.0-megapixel cameras. You’d just pull off a still.” That’s the trick of facial recognition—short of a Mardi Gras mask, there’s little anyone can do to prevent his or her image from being collected.

And it’s another reason that access to these databases needs to be tightly controlled, Spiess says. “If I want to mess with him”—he gestures to Sawyer—“I can change him from green to red in 1.2 seconds and tell everybody he’s a pedophile.” What if the camera gets it wrong all by itself and misidentifies Sawyer as a pedophile? “Most facial recognition uses 160 to 180 data points” measuring a face’s features, Spiess says. First Line uses 380, and it reads them in a tenth of a second. Granted, even the best facial recognition systems can be fooled by hoodies or sunglasses, aging or plastic surgery or cryptofashion’s tribal paint makeup. “But we dressed my wife up in a burqa,” Spiess confides, “and it got her, because it was all in her eyes.” Sawyer steps into the hall, and a black speck on the wall about 18 feet away identifies him, claiming 99 percent accuracy. “You can extract the video to see what else he’s wearing,” Spiess says. “You can snip it and mail it to anybody.” I leave Blue Line with a slight tingle down my spine, realizing that I’m still on their cameras and someday could be tracked all the way to my next meeting—with a privacy rights activist—and our whispered conversation could be overheard, taped, and sent God knows where. I used to comfort myself with the thought that there was too much information being gathered for anyone to sift through anyway. Then I read about software programmed to automatically detect anomalies in a camera feed. About computers that train themselves, using an annotated database, to recognize what’s happening in a photograph. About private companies that are now building license plate photo databases available to all buyers. People assure me video’s never going to be kept long, because it costs too much to store—but storage costs are in freefall. John Villasenor, a professor of electrical engineering and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that by 2020 the cost to store a year’s worth of around-the-clock high-res video will be $6 per camera. “Why would a mall throw away their footage?” asks Frank Ahearn, an author and privacy consultant. “There’s too much money in data.” It can be

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resold for marketing purposes, national security purposes, private purposes. “Let’s say Frank Ahearn was the guy sitting behind the buttons. I’d contact all process servers and tell them I can locate all their people for them and charge them $100 a head. You have a grudge against somebody, you find the bar and say, ‘He’s there now.’” The Chinese government has installed more than 20 million surveillance cameras, along with advanced video analytics and facial recognition software, to prevent crime, track criminals, and—according to human rights groups—monitor political dissidents. In 2012, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Gansu province told a New York Times reporter, “ There are video cameras all over our monastery, and their only purpose is to make us feel fear.” The Times also reported that a fund run by Bain Capital had bought the video surveillance division of a Chinese company that produces infrared “anti-riot” cameras for Chinese police—and has set up an emergency command center in Tibet “for the maintenance of social stability.” This is what privacy activists mean when they talk about “function drift” or “mission creep.” It doesn’t take a science-fiction writer to come up with a scenario in which we’ve played into a future authoritarian government’s hands. And it’s perfectly possible that some organizations will save data and, a decade from now, it will be analyzed in ways that we can’t possibly foresee. A Careful Policy The director of protective services at Washington University School of Medicine, John Ursch, has been quietly overseeing an extensive, tightly controlled CCTV system for many years. Its cameras are passive, not live-monitored, so they’re not catching criminals in the act. Is the system worth it? “Well,” Ursch says, “I’m prejudiced. I’d say so. Could I give you a cost-benefit analysis that proves this on paper? Probably not.” The med school “would be crimefree if people were actually afraid of

doing things in front of a camera,” he says. “It isn’t enough of a deterrent. But in a lot of theft situations, without the video, we’d be pretty much stymied. And there’s a soft value to it that I would say is invaluable. It builds confidence.” Will the medical school’s camera system be merged into the SLMPD’s real-time center? “If it’s up to me, no,” Ursch says firmly. “We will always be good partners with the police. We can burn images and have the video ready by the time a patrol car gets here.” The police want his cameras to be part of the network, I remark. “Yeah, I know they do,” he responds. “They want it all. But quite frankly, I don’t think they can effectively manage it all. I would be very hesitant about throwing in and saying we are all part of this single integrated system.” Ursch is a retired Army intelligence officer. “There’s part of me—with my background in law enforcement and intelligence—I’m not comfortable with that level of aggregation and single point of control.” Safeguarding Security Surveillance tech brings with it the ultimate irony: Just at the point when we don’t trust anybody, we’ve got to trust a whole lot of people to do this right. Chasnoff thinks that there should be a record of who logs into a camera network, that a third party should collect the data, and that police should need a warrant to obtain it. “You can’t build a system where it’s entirely at the discretion of the police department to show restraint,” he says. “If I were in charge?” says Ahearn, the tough-talking privacy consultant, “everything would be incident-based. You can’t consolidate it. Get a subpoena for a copy of the CCTV footage. What happened to the idea that there had to be probable cause?” The Electronic Privacy Information Center, an independent nonprofit in D.C., wants legislation “that provides for penalties and public oversight.” The United Kingdom has appointed

a surveillance camera commissioner and directed users to regularly reassess their camera systems: Are they effective? What’s their privacy impact? Is there adequate signage? Is the images’ integrity safeguarded? The European Forum for Urban Security says equipment should be proportional to the problem it is intended to address, and citizens should receive regular reports about costs, the areas being surveyed, and what the results are. “Surveillance is dangerous for two reasons,” says Richards, the law prof. “When we’re talking about surveillance of our intellectual activities or social behavior, it inclines us to the boring, the bland, and the mainstream. And two, it changes the power balance between the watcher and the watched.” Sure, there’s talk of “sousveillance,” in which citizens turn the tables and conduct surveillance of those in power. There’s even a new app for Android smartphones, Alibi, that records your audio, video, and location data—for an hour. But for most of us, protection will have to come from the law. And when it comes to the newest forms of surveillance, Richards says,“legally, we have a mess. The rule for public surveillance is that things in public aren’t private. It’s not very deeply theorized! And we haven’t thought about the consequences” of today’s surveillance capabilities. “We have to ask what privacy does for us, what values it serves,” he continues. “Protecting political defenses, protecting individual eccentricity, promoting equality. You have to weigh those values against the prevention of crime. They are both important. That’s the point. We don’t want to live in a society in which we have perfect prevention of crime and perfectly efficient policing; that means there are no civil liberties. And we don’t want to live with perfect civil liberties, if it means we can do horrible things to each other. “We need to be always vigilant in striking that balance,” he finishes. “It’s become too easy, post-9/11, to pick security.”

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Great Plains Magazine Writer of the Year Finalists Publication: St. Louis Magazine By: William Powell

Publication: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Magazines By: Nicholas Hunt

Publication: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Magazines By: Katie Bridges

Excerpt from “Heat of the Nite”

Excerpt from “Casting a spell”

Excerpt from “Of house and home”

Kenny Williams loves milk. To stay trim, he’s switched to 1 percent, though he misses whole milk, thick and creamy, like melted ice cream. He’d like to switch to skim, but he’s yet to acquire a taste for white water. Last year, Kenny traveled to Paysandu, Uruguay, to begin his career as a professional basketball player. Everything about his new home was a shock: the architecture, the cars, the language, the food, and most of all, the milk. It came in plastic pouches, not jugs, and the flavor was all wrong. For the first few days, he wondered whether he could survive in this strange land with its strange milk, 5,000 miles from his family. Then he picked up a basketball. With that ball in his hands, Kenny is a marvel on any continent. A prototypical swingman, he stands 6-foot-7, with a chiseled physique—washboard abs and long, wiry arms. He’s fast, strong, and an impressive leaper; he’s a vicious dunker, a capable shooter, and an imposing defender. The language barrier didn’t matter. A teammate or manager would translate the coach’s Spanish instructions. And, anyway, the message was always the same: “Get the ball to Kenny.” The season was a grind. The team crammed dozens of games into just a few months, playing night after night, and the action was much more physical there, like cage fights with dribbling. Rival teams quickly realized that beating the Paysandu Wanderers meant stopping Kenny Williams. He won’t accuse opponents of trying to hurt him, but they would bring goons off the bench to commit hard fouls, send a message.

Walking down Birmingham’s tree-lined avenues or driving past its youthful restaurants, boutiques and breweries, it’s strange to think that, for many reasons, this city shouldn’t exist. In fact, for much of Alabama’s storied history, it didn’t. There was no river flowing through the city’s heart to give it life, no harbor to attract the nation’s commerce. But then, after the Civil War had run its course, the railroad came, and what was once a collection of three small farm towns became something else. It became “The Magic City.” Despite lacking the traditional geography of many of the South’s other great cities, Birmingham had something else—something special. Just outside downtown in the long, low ridges of the once-mighty Appalachians could be found iron ore, coal and limestone: the three main ingredients for steel. And in a rapidly industrializing nation gearing up for what would become the American Century, that was enough for a city to seemingly materialize overnight, as if by magic. In 1910, just 39 years after it was founded, Birmingham’s population had boomed to more than 132,000 people. By World War I, the city’s famed Sloss Furnaces was one of the foremost producers of pig iron in the world. But things change. During the 1950s and 1960s, Birmingham became synonymous with the brutal tactics used to suppress civil-rights demonstrators, and white flight to the suburbs saw the city’s population decline. At the same time, Birmingham’s industrial heart was struggling to keep going. In 1971, the great Sloss Furnaces shut down. A year later, the last of the region’s ore mines shuttered.

It’s shaky because his hands are shaky, the way your hands would be if you knew you were about to lose the very thing—the physical thing, mind you—you loved most. And it’s jerky, shifting left to right, left to right, because he’s filming the video as he’s walking, as he’s retracing the steps he’s trod daily through his 1954 Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian home, the one he and his wife, Sharon, lovingly, painstakingly brought back to life over the course of decades. He’s retracing the 25 years of footsteps he’s taken across his home’s threshold, through the entryway, past the open stairway and on into the living room, a room that explodes in soaring glass and mahogany and trees and New Jersey sky. It’s bright and it’s warm and it’s morning. It’s just the way you’d want to remember it, if you had to. And Lawrence Tarantino had to. You could follow his footsteps, too, by viewing the video on YouTube, and you’d watch it again, and again, because there’s just that much to take in. At first you’d see the polished board and batten, the mezzanine that blurs the line between indoors and out, the towering hearth. And then you’d see other things, more personal things, like a throw pillow set slightly askew, an orange ceramic coffee mug left on a windowsill, a pair of wind chimes, a framed photo of Wright affixed to the concrete wall. That is to say, you’d first see the architecture. And then you’d see the home. It was a home that deserved to be saved. And saved, it was—first, when the Tarantinos bought the house and tracked down its original owner, got the original blueprints and set to work restoring it piece by piece.

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Great Plains Magazine Photographer of the Year Publication: ALIVE Magazine By: Attilio D’Agostino

INTO THE

WOODS Explore new territory with daring combinations of luxurious knits that channel the romance of the great outdoors.

Haute Hippie dress available at Neiman Marcus, Plaza Frontenac, 314.567.9811. Gucci bag available at Neiman Marcus, Plaza Frontenac, 314.567.9811. Sofia Cashmere cape available at Saks Fifth Avenue, Plaza Frontenac, 314.567.9200. Earrings available at Vie, Ladue, 314.997.0124. Boots, socks and sweater, stylist’s own.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO Stylist: Trudy Hayden Model: Kasia Krol, NY Models Hair: Angela Schoolfield for Notch Salon Makeup: Randi Davis

Beltshazzar body chains available at beltshazzarjewels.com. Vince “Dempsey” boots available at vince.com. Tights and vintage fur coat, stylist’s own.

Sleek tailoring, heavy knits and a touch of sportswear usher in a new era of femininity.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO

Rag & Bone cardigan available at Neiman Marcus, Plaza Frontenac, 314.567.9811. Slip available at Parsimonia, Tower Grove East, 314.659.8467. Neck scarf, necklaces and socks, stylist’s own.

Stylist: Fashion Editor Sarah Stallmann Model: June Downs, NY Models Hair: Angela Schoolfield for Notch Salon Makeup: Randi Nicole Shot in White Hall, Illinois, at the historic home of Eloise Seekamp.

Purple Haze A rock ’n’ roll revival brings about a new season of headlining acts, from jewel-toned velvet to multi-colored graphic prints—all with a dash of ’70s-inspired opulence. ’Scuse us while we kiss the sky…

Rogue Warrior

“DADA DADA DADA, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.” -Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto,” 1918

ANGEL

Chanel vest available at Byrd Designer Consignment Boutique, Ladue, 314.721.0766. Flower pin available at The Vault by WCE, Brentwood, 314.736.6511. Scarf, stylist’s own.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO

THE WIND CRIES MARY

Stylist: Fashion Editor Sarah Stallmann Model: Sija with NY Model Management Hair: Caitlin Ford for Notch Salon Makeup: Kat Hinkle for ABTP

Photography by Attilio D’Agostino Fashion Editor: Sarah Stallmann Contributing Creative Director: Tania Beasley-Jolly Styling: Sarah Stallmann and Tania Beasley-Jolly Model: Alanna Arrington for Mother Model Management Hair: Valerie Brown Makeup: Kat Hinkle Shot on location at the historic Fabulous Fox Theatre in Grand Center.

Assistants: Kayla Meyers, Jeremy Gatzert, Shannon Logan and Ashley Titone

ALIVEMAG.COM

MONTH 201x

Eight Sixty vest available at The Vault by WCE, Brentwood, 314.736.6511. Top available at YuMe, Cherokee Street, 618.550.8676. 7 For All Mankind jeans available at Saks Fifth Avenue, Plaza Frontenac, 314.567.9200. Michael Kors clogs available at Byrd Designer Consignment Boutique, Ladue, 314.721.0766. Arrow necklace available at The Designing Block, Clayton, 314.721.4224. Vintage hat available at Retro 101, Cherokee Street, 314.762.9722. Belt available at Retro 101, Cherokee Street, 314.762.9722. Scarf, stylist’s own.

MONTH 201x

ALIVEMAG.COM

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Great Plains Magazine Photographer of the Year

Today’s girl takes minimal dressing to the next level with monochromatic looks that channel beauty inside and out.

(left) Prada top, belt and skirt and earrings available at Byrd Designer Consignment Boutique, Ladue, 314.721.0766. Necklace available at Vie, Ladue, 314.997.0124. Shoes, stylist’s own. (right) Akris Punto poncho available at Neiman Marcus, Frontenac, 314.567.9811. Earrings available at Byrd Designer Consignment Boutique, Ladue, 314.721.0766.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO

Stylist: Trudy Hayden Model: Olivia Anakwe at NY Model Management Hair: Caleigh Hampton Makeup: Sharday Johnson

Happy Stepping into the

BY SAR PHOTOS BY

Today’s girl takes minimal dressing to the next level with monochromatic looks that channel beauty inside and out.

In the heart of The Hill, among some of St. Louis’ top dining destinations, lies an unmarked building a block wide with whited-out windows. While the outside is rather nondescript in comparison to The Hill’s motley style, inside is an eclectic world of its own: the home of SKIF International. SKIF has been a staple of the ‘made in St. Louis’ movement since its launch in 1994 by designer Nina Ganci, whose vision and early investment in fashion in STL created a thriving, collaborative design studio that specializes in knitwear. The space serves several purposes. It’s a home base of operations and manufacturing for the internationally successful SKIF-branded knitwear line that is sold in well over 300 boutiques, an incubator for emerging St. Louis artists and designers like Michael Drummond, DJ Kennedy

(left) Fendi dress available at Byrd Designer Consignment Boutique, Ladue, 314.721.0766. Brunello Cucinelli white button-up and Oscar De La Renta drop earrings available at Neiman Marcus, Plaza Frontenac, 314.567.9811. Vintage Chanel bag, stylist’s own. (right) Giorgio Armani jacket available at Byrd Designer Consignment Boutique, Ladue, 314.721.0766. Necklace available at YoroCreations.com. Belt, stylist’s own.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO

Stylist: Trudy Hayden Model: Olivia Anakwe at NY Model Management Hair: Caleigh Hampton Makeup: Sharday Johnson

MONTH 201x

38 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

ALIVEMAG.COM

and Qun Liu and a re shoppers can snag th SKIF and friends ju ments are created.

The line consists of showcase the artisa The garments are fr their nature—unsiz a sweater designer f “Once you wear it, it tive to your style.”

Inside, the spirit is c very good for the ma there every day to cr a month that make t some of the most fas Week founder Fern

Great Plains Magazine Photographer of the Year, Finalist Publication: Omaha Magazine By: Bill Sitzmann

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.orgâ&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; 39

Great Plains Magazine Photographer of the Year, Finalist Publication: 405 Magazine By: Simon Hurst

Tak i n g O ff By Timothy Fields // Photos by Simon Hurst

JUST IN TIME TO CELEBRATE THE ALL-IMPORTANT DADS IN YOUR LIFE, WE’VE COLLECTED A FEW “AIR-WORTHY” LOOKS GUARANTEED TO HAVE HIM JUMPING FOR JOY. WITH THE HELP OF OUR MODEL ANDY SHANE TOFA, MUSIC THEATER MAJOR FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA, MEN’S FASHION IS TAKING OFF.

With no time to waste – Cremieux Super 130 blue suit, Kenneth Cole pink glaze shirt, Murano paisley and floral tie, Johnston and Murphy leather and canvas belt, with Magnanni monk strap dress shoe and Polo by Ralph Lauren leather briefcase, all from Dillard’s Penn Square in OKC.

54 SLICE // JUNE 2015

JUNE 2015 // SLICE 55

Knits are an outstanding staple for any closet – this Missoni Zebra knit dress answers the call in style. The gold earrings by Julie Vos and the Stella McCartney black kid suede bag with gold chain detail add a deftly fashionable finishing touch; all available at Balliets in Classen Curve.

Stephanie Tolson for Roughhouse Boxing and Fitness AUGUST 2015 // SLICE 45

52 SLICE // SEPTEMBER 2015

For years, sections of downtown’s west side have been abandoned, derelict or decaying, with few permanent residents and little new development. That may be about to change.

OCTOBER 2015 // SLICE 47

40 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Great Plains Magazine Photographer of the Year, Finalist Publication: St. Louis Magazine By: Kevin A. Roberts

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.orgâ&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; 41

Great Plains Website of the Year Publication: St. Louis Magazine, stlmag.com By: Steph Zimmerman Judges’ Comments: St. Louis Magazine has a strong visual identity and an intuitive navigation that allows readers to explore new topics and to also quickly find what they came to find. The First Bite videos have a strong sense of place and deliver good information to consumers. the Best Restaurants guide, a staple of city magazines, is also well done and easy to use.

42 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Great Plains Website of the Year Finalist Publication: The Frontier, readfrontier.com By: Robert E. Lorton III, Ziva Branstetter, Cary Aspinwall, Kevin Canfield, Dylan Goforth

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 43

Great Plains Website of the Year Finalist Publication: The Oklahoman, NewsOK.com By: NewsOK .com

44 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Great Plains Website of the Year Finalist Publication: TulsaKids Magazine. tulsakids.com By: Abby Rodgers, Betty Casey, Charles Foshee

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.orgâ&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; 45

46â&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Newspapers

The 2016 Great Plains Journalism Awards

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News Package Winner Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Alia Conley, Maggie O’Brien, Alissa Skelton, Bob Glissmann

THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2015

METROPOLITAN EDITION

Judges’ Comments: Superb coverage, under time pressure, of a is major story inofficer the community. Rather than Grim milestone Kerrie Orozco city’sbreaking first female to be killed a straight news approach, the lede zeroes in on the central tragedy — that Officer Kerrie Orozco would never go Armed,That dangerous Suspect was sought September shooting home to raise her newborn daughter. was a great choice. Profiles of the in slain officer and her killer, thumbnails on other officers killed in the line of duty, an explanatory graphic on the shooting — all the elements work together Time off was set She was ready to take her preemie home from hospital today seamlessly to answer every key question a reader would have. A follow-up package several days later on the officer’s funeral continues the strong reporting and visual storytelling, starting with a simple but powerful front-page design showcasing a photo, shot from above, of the funeral procession and the crowd lining the street.

‘TOP-NOTCH’ OFFICER AND PERSON MOURNED

Excerpt from “City mourns a mother, a mentor, an officer killed in the line of duty” BY ALIAPolice CONLEY, MOfficer AGGIE O’BRIEN A month ago, Omaha AND ALISSA SKELTON WORLD-HERALD WRITERS Kerrie Orozco was proud of theSTAFF weight A month ago,gained. Omaha Police her premature daughter had Officer Kerrie Orozco was proud of theto weight her premature daughter “She’s pretty close 6 lbs!” Orozco had gained. wrote on Facebook, underneath “She’s pretty closephotos to 6 lbs!” Orozco wrote on Facebook, underof her two stepchildren baby neath holding photos of her two stepchildren holding baby Olivia Ruth. Olivia Ruth. Orozco had been looking forward today — the day when she Orozco had been to looking forward to could take Olivia home after three months in the neonataltake intensive today — the day when she could care unit. Butmonths she didn’t make Olivia home after three init.the Orozco, 29, was killed Wednesneonatal intensive care unit. day, her last scheduled day of police duty before taking the rest of But she didn’t make it. leave to spend with her maternity her firstborn child. Orozco, 29, was killed GunfireWednesday, erupted when Orozco other officers attempted to arher last day of policeand duty before taking rest Marcus D. Wheeler, on a felony warrantleave for first-degree assault, the rest of her maternity to spend about 1 p.m. Orozco, who was part of the gang with her first-born child. unit, is the first female police offiGunfire erupted when and cer in the Orozco department to die in the line of duty. She is the 25th Omaha other officers attempted to arrest Mar-and officer killed on duty overall first since 2003. cus D. Wheeler, on athefelony warrant for Wheeler, 26, also died of injuries from the shooting near 30th Street first-degree assault about 1 p.m. and Martin Avenue. Wheeler was a felon and gang a known gang Orozco, who wasconvicted part of the member, police said. a press conference unit, is the first femaleInpolice officerlate Wednesday afternoon, Police Chief said Orozco, in the department toTodd dieSchmaderer in the line of who was a seven-year-veteran, dedicatduty. She is the 25thedOmaha officer her life to service. See Officer: Page 5 killed on duty overall and the first since 2003. TO DONATE to the Officer Kerrie Orozco Wheeler, 26, also Donations died of injuries Family Fund are being accepted at: from the shooting near 30th Street and » Police Federal Credit Union at 3003 S. 82nd Ave. in Omaha and 10791 S. Martin Avenue. Wheeler was a convict72nd St. in Papillion. » Omaha Police Foundation at ed felon and a known gang member, omahapolicefoundation.com police said. Police are planning a 4:30 p.m. Wednesday press conference to provide more information on the shootings. In a press conference late Wednesday afternoon, Police Chief Todd Schmaderer said Orozco, who was a seven-year-veteran, dedicated her life Omaha Gives to service. a doggone hit “This isNonprofit a somber day for the city groups across the Omaha area had celebrationssaid. “Officer of Omaha,” Schmaderer Wednesday for Omaha Gives, a 24-hour online fundraiser individual, Orozco was a top-notch in its third year. The events generated excitement among and the city of Omaha owes her a debt donors, who gave $8.9 million to theand drive. Here, Ellis of gratitude, herAaron family, like no plays Snuggles the dog in other.” an Omaha Gives program at the Bookworm store. Ellis is a paid actor with RESPECT, Schmaderer laid out aa basic timeline group that helps youths form of events: healthy relationships and resist bullying. At 12:58Seep.m., Orozco and other more in Midlands. members of the Metro Area Fugitive

O M A H A P O L I C E D E PA RT M E N T

Omaha Ofﬁcer Kerrie Orozco, here at a National Night Out event in August, was known as a committed community volunteer who worked with Girl Scouts and coached baseball for the Boys & Girls Club.

Task Force were near Martin Avenue en by ambulance to Creighton SCHMADERER UniverSPEAKS police chief and Read Street, looking for Wheeler, sity Medical Center in The extremely critical remembers Kerrie Orozco, when they spotted him about a block condition. They were pronounced dead and video from the scene of the shooting. Videos away, near 31st Avenue and Vane at the hospital. on Omaha.com/metro Street. Angela Valentine, who livesPAST just A CHECKERED The fugitive who died Wheeler shot at officers, then ran east of 3057 Martin Ave., was taking a was a felon who had faced charges in multiple north through a wooded area toward nap Wednesday afternoon when her shootings. Page 5A the backyard of a house at 3057 Martin son walked in and said, “I think I heard ‘A SOMBER DAY’ John Barber pauses after placing Ave. shooting.” heard what flowers ThursdayValentine at a makeshift then Sacrifice is not too big memorial outside Omaha a word for this tragedy. Orozco, another officer and a sershePolice thought were police outside the Headquarters for Orozco, Editorial, 6B shown above with her newborn geant confronted Wheeler, and shots house say, down! Get down on the daughter, Olivia “Get Ruth. RYA N S O D E R L I N / T H E W O R L D - H E R A L D were exchanged. ground!” The officers were yelling toOrozco collapsed. ward the back of the neighbor’s house. While officers rendered first aid to Valentine then heard two shots, then Orozco, Wheeler ran east and collapsed many shots. in the backyard at 3042 Read St. A She looked outside and saw a female semiautomatic handgun with a drum police officer on the ground near the magazine was found near him.DEATH PENALTY corner of her house. “There was blood A man living at the Read Street on her pants and the upper part of her house said he saw Wheeler lean against body,” Valentine said. Other officers a downspout and fall to the ground. He were trying to keep the officer calm, she said Wheeler was pointing at his chest, said, and were “going into CPR mode.” where he had been shot. Following the news of Orozco’s Officers performed CPR on Orozco death, condolences began pouring BY JOE DUGGAN However, it would leave the DEATH PENALTY IN NEBRASKA state nawith no way to carry out and Wheeler, Schmaderer said. into socialA timeline media from across the WORLD-HERALD BUREAU showing the method of their executions. execution has changed, notable “It was really sad,” ValentineLINCOLN said, — The Nebraska tion. Hundreds ofthepeople, including The governor and McCoy executions and ongoing Legislature’s monumental vote lamented that sentences debate. Pages 2&3A “really heart-wrenching, watching theto repeallaw enforcement officers and police Wednesday the death affirmed by juries, judges and penalty intensified a political, reappellate courts could not be officer.” departments, posted comments, many 11 MEN STILL ON DEATH ROW ligious and philosophical debate carried out against those responRYA N S O D E R L I N / T H E W O R L D - H E R A L D The repeal wouldn’t convert their over the meaning of justice. sible for the Rulo cult killings, Both Orozco and Wheeler were takcontaining the hashtag #SupportBlue. sentences to life in prison, but As lawmakers waded into an the Norfolk bank shootings and

Repeal vote renews debate over meaning of justice

Islamic State now may control half of Syria

emotionally charged two-hour discussion, Gov. Pete Ricketts made a last-minute attempt to turn votes against the repeal but ended up losing ground. Lawmakers voted 32-15 to pass Legislative Bill 268 — two more votes than the measure received

48 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Islamic State militants overran the famed archaeo-

only days after it captured the strategic city of Ramadi in Iraq’s largest Sunni province.

activists said. In Damascus, state TV acknowledged that pro-government forces had

there’s no legal way to execute them. Page 3A

WHAT ABOUT NIKKO JENKINS? Jenkins and two notable murder suspects, if convicted, would face life in prison instead of death. Page 3A

other infamous murders. Repealing capital punishment has been one of the surprising and deﬁning developments of this legislative session, the ﬁrst for 18 senators newly elected last year. What made this repeal effort different from those in

News Package Finalists Publication: Tulsa World By: John Hoover, Katie McInerney, John Clanton, Mike Simons, Jason Powers

Publication: Lawrence Journal-World By: Karen Dillon

Excerpt from “Mason & Jason: Proving them wrong”

Excerpt from “Web of lies”

The sun has warmed the turf at Leonard Yarbrough Stadium, and teenagers sweat and strain as they finish their conditioning sprints, some wheezing a bit, some groaning, but most pushing through the fleeting torment. A cool north wind has begun to blow away the afternoon heat. The day is changing. Evening storms loom to the west. At the front of the pack, well ahead of everyone else, hurrying from one sideline to the other and back, changing direction every 5 yards, is Mason Fine, shirtless, slender, focused on his pace, focused on winning. Not far off his flank is Jason Pirtle, trying to chase down a plucky freshman who has somehow slipped ahead of him and well behind Fine. As usual, Fine is the winner. “I still haven’t beat him at that,” Pirtle said. “He just runs for days. I came close one time. But yeah, we compete in everything.” The Locust Grove High School football team has finished another fast-paced spring day, with some clarification needed between the play-calls of “Red Panther” and “Red Cougar” and a seemingly endless encyclopedia of two-point conversion plays and a 2,050-yard fitness run. Fine, the Pirates’ impossibly precise quarterback, probably has thrown some 60 passes during the 45-minute session, most of which were caught by Pirtle, Locust Grove’s glue-gripped receiver. “Read the corner,” head coach Matt Hennesy shouts to Pirtle. “If he bails, you’re gonna hook that safety.” “Bubble! Bubble!” shouts offensive coordinator David “Pookie” Blevins. “Coaches, work on his bubble!” “Hey,” Fine says to Hennesy, “I did that wrong. Let’s do it again.” It’s just another day in Locust Grove, where football is better than ever, fast and fun and fortified by the recordsetting Fine-to-Pirtle connection. They’re only finishing up their junior year, but Fine and Pirtle already are Oklahoma’s most prolific passing duo. Fine completed 68 percent of his throws in 2014, amassing 5,006 yards and 71 touchdowns — all state records. Pirtle caught 99 passes, gained 2,096 yards and scored 29 touchdowns. Fine’s career total of 113 touchdowns also is an Oklahoma prep record, and Pirtle now has 40 career TD catches. The football comes out of Fine’s hand blurry-fast, like a T-shirt out of an air cannon. He almost never throws a bad ball. But when he does, Pirtle catches it, twisting, sliding, falling or diving like a trapeze artist. These are two high school football players at the absolute top of their game.

In the beginning, even before the 14-year-old girl’s body was found on that unusually warm November day in 1999, authorities knew it was Tom Bledsoe who killed her. After all, he said so himself. He told his parents he did it. He left messages on his pastor’s phone saying he was sorry for doing it. With his attorney, he led the police to the body hidden by a trash dump near his parents’ home outside Oskaloosa. He also handed over the Jennings 9mm handgun that was used to kill her. Zetta Camille Arfmann, a ninth-grader, lay in a shallow grave, a bullet hole in the back of her head, an exit wound in her face. Her shirt was pushed up, exposing her chest, which was riddled with an additional three bullet holes. Tom Bledsoe, then 25, was arrested and charged, but 48 hours later he began to change his story dramatically, often to dovetail with facts emerging from the crime scene investigation, court testimony revealed last week. His new story eventually was this: He did not kill Arfmann; his younger brother, Floyd Scott Bledsoe, did. Tom told detectives he was driving to work when he saw his brother Floyd on Nov. 8, two days before the girl’s body had been found. He stopped to talk to him. Floyd was upset and nervous, Tom told detectives, and he finally admitted to Tom that he “accidentally shot her” and sexually abused her. It was Floyd who told him the girl’s shirt was pushed up, Tom said, in an attempt to explain why he knew that detail. And the gun that belonged to Tom? Floyd had somehow taken the gun from Tom’s car to shoot the girl and returned it without Tom’s knowing, Tom told detectives. Tom told detectives he initially confessed to the murder because Floyd forced him to. Tom had been caught having sex with a dog, according to court files, and Floyd was going to tell his friends about it unless Tom took the blame for killing Arfmann. Tom also had other sexual predilections that his brother threatened to reveal. Tom still lived with his parents, Floyd L. and Catherine Bledsoe, and they provided him an alibi and an attorney, and they testified in support of their favored son. From the moment Tom accused his brother of the crime, Floyd was clearly on his own. Floyd’s court-appointed attorney, John Kurth, whose practice is in Atchison, was later criticized by state and federal judges for not providing his client with a proper defense.

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100

GREASE WHEELS

restaurants WEALTHY? WELL-CONNECTED? NO PROBLEM. in St.Project/Investigative Louis Reporting Winner Our critic picks the 100 Publication: St. Louis Post-Dispatch greatest places to eat in Ian Froeb’s STL 100, By: Jennifer S. Mann, Jeremy Kohler, Stephen Deere a special issue of GO! Magazine. Comments: The Post-Dispatch dove deep into an issue that had been generating

Judges’ national headlines FROM: Judge TO: Prosecutor SPECIAL SECTION • K1 Wes Dalton Keith Cheung — and got the goods. With crisp, compelling writing, reporters showed how the minicipal court system had restaurantsgame and sort in which well-connected lawyers did favors for each other — while poor people paid become anBrowse insiders’ them by cuisine and price range. the full freight. This was watchdog reporting at its best. STLTODAY.COM/STL100

CAN’T AFFORD A LAWYER? GET IN LINE. Excerpt from “Municipal courts are well-oiled money machine”

The email in Keith Cheung’s inbox was from a judge asking for a favor. The subject line: “Help!!!” The sender was Wes Dalton, then an associate circuit court judge in Warren County. It was about a case in Frontenac Municipal Court, where Cheung was prosecuting attorney. The defenPAC was a front for dant was Dana Baker, 18, one of three political operative teens who had been written summonsmanaging es for illegal possession of alcohol. Hanaway’s run Dalton’sfor email said that the 18-yeargovernor old was the daughter of “our connection” to Porto Cima, a private golf club at the Lake of the Ozarks, the resort area where an annual conference of municipal judges is held. Roe Hanaway Firmisclaims “Her Dad WayneDenies Baker (owner of 81 percent involvement LAURIE SKRIVAN • lskrivan@post-dispatch.com Warrenton victory Oil and rate a ——load in political adof other People wait this month for the doors to open for the municipal courts at Dellwood City Hall. Cheung is one of the most promilawyers are stuck with answering to stuff),” Dalton wrote. “Can we make VIRGINIA YOUNG BY JEREMY KOHLER, JENNIFER MANN AND STEPHEN nent figures inS.the system. HeDEERE is the the original charge, and sometimes end this one go BY away??? By the way, we’re MUNICIPAL COURTS St. Louis Post-Dispatch St. Louis Post-Dispatch prosecutor in Frontenac, St. Ann and upWORK in jail ifIN they miss court appearances hooked up for golf at Porto Cima at the SECRET, JEFFERSON CITY • When Normandy, and the judge in Ladue. because they cannot pay. Conference!!! (is no cost okay???)!!” bars, bowling alleys and other he email in Keith Cheung’s inbox He TRY HARD TO KEEP businesses in St. Joseph, worked as prosecutor in Ballwin, A blistering report released by the was dated MayMo., 2. The email mobilized to fight a smokwas has from a judge asking for a favor. IT THAT WAY Town and Country and Hazelwood. Department of Justice on March 4 The police report that a ing ban on lastindicates April’s ballot, they formed a political acline: Cheung and“Help!!!” his colleagues at the calledBYFerguson’s police department aThe subject dispositiontion of “nolle prosequi” committee and gave it a was enJENNIFER S. MANN wholesome-sounding name: AND STEPHEN DEERE The sender was Wes Dalton, then an associate court judge in Clayton law firm Curtis,circuit Heinz, Garrett collection agency for a “constitutiontered on the case the next day. It meant Citizens for Fairness in St. Louis Post-Dispatch Warren County. It was about a case in Frontenac Municipal Court, where Missouri. attorney. Thethe defendant was Dana Baker, 18, one & O’Keefe are judges, prosecually deficient” court. The reportCheung said was prosecuting the daughter would not be prosecuted. The businesses argued that of three teens who had been written summonses for illegal possession of ST. LOUIS • Some of the best deals tors or city attorneys in more than 20 city officials were dismissing tickets The other two teens pleaded guilty to the anti-smoking proposal alcohol. that are made in the region’s municwas unfair because it affected Dalton’s email said that the 18-year-old daughter of “our connecipal friends courts never see the light of day. municipalities inwas St.the Louis County. for and family while blaming amended charges, paid fines and were their establishments but not tion” to Porto Cima, a private golf club at the Lake of the Ozarks, the resort When prosecutors dismiss a citalocal Still, the orarea where the annual Missouri Bar Association conference is held. tion it is often done at a whisper, in aof “personal Those positions, typically part time, African-Americans’ lack ordered to the take a casino. three-day alcohol dinance passed. So the com“Her Dad is Wayne Baker (owner of Warrenton Oil and a ----load of other side room, or out of court altogether. paid more than responsibility” for their instuff court. course. mittee went dormant, its ),” Dalton wrote. “Can we make this$1 onemillion go away???combined By the way, we’re Then the record is sealed under woes a to $2,062 at Porto Cima at the Conference!!! (is no cost okay???)!!” state law that is ostensibly to protect year. city up for golflast After the report, Ferguson’s hooked That wastreasury 2006,dwindling but favors are still as of Dec. 31. the falsely accused but in reality oflast month, ten hides favors. See COURTS • PageThe A10 Justice Department report manager, police chief and municipal traded just asThen freely todaytheincomSt. Louis mittee resurfaced. Citizens for It’s just one example of how the criticized one of the firm’s lawyers, Ferjudge theoperate city in court clerk was County’s municipal courtrooms. Fairness sponsored a radio ad region’sresigned; municipal courts that aired across the state. The secret, keeping uneven treatment guson prosecuting attorney Stephanie fired; and the Missouri Supreme Court Sheltered from the scrutiny of the ad belittled Missouri Auditor private and using laws and court appearance, rules tothe justify it. Tracking thefor money thein dismissals Karr, fixingand a ticket Hazelwood, took extraordinary step of assignstate courts,Tom theSchweich’s municipal courts are inanother municipal courts.she INSIDE, A11prosecutcity where is the ing all pending cases to the a system run and Seeby ADSmunicipalities • Page A8 See SECRECY • PageFerguson A12 ing attorney, at the request of Ferguson circuit court. lawyers that often serve to enrich judge Ronald Brockmeyer. The government report noted that municipalities TODAYand lawyers. Wining andThose dining in Parenting myth-making exposed • H1 Some lawyers in the firm are among Ferguson was not alone in its practices. power hand68°/46° out favors and ensure the MOSTLY SUNNY How long will bull market last? • E1 the major players who are involved The Justice Department said it was a municipalities and lawyers stay in busiTOMORROW in just about all aspects of the courts’ case study for how other municipal ness by using the state’s point systemCards CF 76°/45° Jon Jay St. Pat’s Parade kicks off spring • B1 CLOUDY operations throughout the region — departments and courts are run. for drivers PARTLY as leverage. ignorespolice naysayers 2 M WEATHER advising on charges, deciding charges deliv-bee champion People who C10 municipal court systemSpelling repeats • A3 A23 can afford lawyers canSPORTS • The Vol. 137, No. 73 ©2015 and in some cases, working by day to ered more than $52 million to St. Louis get even serious cases amended to midefend people facing traffic charges. nor infractions. People who can’t afford County municipalities last year.

Consultant linked to ad against Schweich

A ‘winning’ player

POST-DISPATCH WEATHERBIRD ®

50 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Project/Investigative Reporting Finalists Publication: The Frontier By: Dylan Goforth, Ziva Branstetter, Kevin Canfield, Cary Aspinwall

Publication: Oklahoma Watch By: Nate Robson

Excerpt from “Tangled truths from Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office” “This is going to be bad.” The day after Eric Harris was fatally shot during a botched undercover gun sting, Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office Maj. Shannon Clark learned that a reporter was about to identify department booster Robert Bates as the killer. Clark’s response on the phone was short and ominous. As predicted, the fallout for the sheriff’s office has been bad following Harris’ death and revelations that Bates had power and privileges based on his financial largesse, favors and friendship with Sheriff Stanley Glanz. The sheriff’s office and its representatives haven’t quelled the furor, engaging in a series of missteps, issuing conflicting statements and failing to produce or release records that would fully support their claims. Now, a grassroots organization is trying to gather 5,000 signatures by the middle of June to call for a grand jury investigation, based on allegations that Glanz had essentially lost control of the sheriff’s office. The grand jury petition is asking for Glanz’s removal from office — Glanz has already publicly stated he will not step down, but will not seek re-election in 2016. In response to the petition being filed last week, Tulsa County spokesman Terry Simonson said the sheriff’s office was prepared to file a “libel or slander” suit against the petitioners. Bates’ initial story was that he inadvertently shot Harris after mistaking his own handgun for a Taser.

Excerpt from “The Punishment Gap: Disparities in School Discipline” In Jenks Public Schools, campus police physically restrained and handcuffed a second-grade special education student. His crime? He ran to the playground to escape a noisy classroom. At Tulsa Public Schools, officials called a father and told him to pick up his 6-year-old daughter, who was having an emotional meltdown. He arrived to find four armed campus police officers holding her down, saying she assaulted one of them. In the Deer Creek School District in Edmond, a member of the school staff slapped an autistic child on two occasions, but a judge tossed out the federal lawsuit, saying the employees acted out of frustration. Across the state, students with physical and mental disabilities are bearing much of the brunt of classroom discipline, government data show. They’re more likely than their peers to be suspended, expelled, arrested, handcuffed or paddled. In dozens of schools, special education students are anywhere from two to 10 times more likely to be disciplined, the data show. At some schools, every special education student has been physically disciplined, suspended or expelled. The discipline trend has angered and frustrated some Oklahoma parents and triggered calls for reform from groups that advocate for special-needs children. They say excessive discipline is hurting students academically and psychologically. Teachers and administrators need better training on how to educate students with emotional and learning disabilities, not simply punish them or drive them out of the school, advocates say.

Publication: The Argus Leader By: Mark Walker, Emily Spartz Weerheim

Excerpt from “‘No other option but to plead guilty’” James Marken thought he was getting better. It had been more than five years since his last major schizophrenic episode. Medication had helped stabilize his life after a handful of arrests in his 20s and early 30s. At 37 he had a stable job at Applebee’s. He had an apartment on the city’s eastside. He had his cherished 1996 Jeep Cherokee. Then he lost it all. Marken spent nearly eight months behind bars in a legal limbo prolonged by South Dakota’s long wait times for court-ordered mental health exams. An Argus Leader Media investigation found the state is routinely locking up mentally ill defendants for half a year or more without trial because of delays in scheduling mental competency evaluations. Marken felt like he was regaining control of his life. He started to wean himself off his medication in hopes of lessening side effects. On March 8, he went into a manic state. A police officer found Marken lapping water from a drainage ditch near Lincoln High School. When the officer approached him, a confrontation ensued. Marken ended up being hit with a Taser and charged with felony assault on a law enforcement officer. He also broke a rib during the struggle. Marken’s criminal case was suspended, and he waited five months in jail after a judge ordered a competency evaluation in his case. The exams assess a defendant’s understanding of their actions and legal proceedings.

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Bullish on the Mayor

American Pharoah first horse to capture Triple Crown since ’78; Iowa’s Keen Ice third. Page 1C

General News Reporting Winner

ALSO: PROS, CONS OF TOP 4 ISU COACHING CANDIDATES. PAGE 1C

✃ OVER $100The IN SAVINGS WITH COUPONS Publication: Des Moines Register By: Lee Rood

Judges’ Comments: This was exceptional journalism. There are so many good things to say about this project. First and foremost, it was well-told. It found the nexus of people and policy — something that is becoming too rare in journalism — and that resulted in an important piece. It also told me something I didn’t know. It used | METRO EDITION JUNEgraphics, 7, 2015 | THE NEWS IOWA UPON | complement DESMOINESREGISTER.COM web-only, multimedia elements (video, etc.) toDEPENDS perfectly the writing. It was tightly written and well-edited and the sparseness really worked with the topic. Well-done.

A GANNET

2016 IOWA

Excerpt from “After six decades war, refugees still WITH flee FEW Myanmar” BURMA TOof IOWA REFUGE RESOURCES Way Moo had struck his son back in the Mae La refugee camp in Thailand or in the hill villages of southeastern Burma, where many of his people still live, no one would have batted an eye. Jobmu, his 5-year-old, had been acting up back in December at McKinley Elementary School in Des Moines. The father’s choice of discipline: hitting the boy with a clothes hanger. But in Iowa — a place that couldn’t be more different from the lawless camps where Way Moo and his wife, Mu Mu, lived for more than 15 years — bruises led to child protection workers and many questions. In mid-January, Way Moo, 32, walked into the cavernous Polk County River Place building on the near-north side, looking for someone to translate a letter. It was the first time the depressed, outof-work father of two had sought any help since he was accused of child abuse a month before. What happened after Way Moo learned the contents of that letter has shaken all those who crossed paths with his family since they moved to Des Moines in 2007. Way Moo, sitting alone in his living room, covered himself with a blanket. In a brief phone call, he told his wife he loved her and asked her to look after their children. Then he took a .22-caliber rifle and shot himself twice in the chest. Hopeful beginnings, gauntlet of obstacles The U.S. Department of State this year is winding down one of the largest refugee resettlements in recent history — more than 100,000 people from Burma, the country renamed Myanmar. Roughly 6,000 to 7,000 have settled in Iowa, many of them secondary migrants

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General News Reporting Finalists Publication: The Oklahoman By: Staff

Excerpt from “Four killed, dozens injured as car crashes into crowd at Oklahoma State University homecoming parade” STILLWATER — Oklahoma State University’s homecoming parade quickly turned into chaos Saturday morning when a car with a driver accused of being impaired barreled into a crowded street corner, killing at least four people and injuring dozens. Three adults were declared dead at the scene soon after the accident, and a 2-year-old boy died later in the day at The Children’s Hospital in Oklahoma City, where the child had been taken for treatment. The crash occurred about 10:30 a.m., and 35 people with injuries ranging from minor to severe had been taken to Stillwater Medical Center by 12:35 p.m. Saturday, said Shyla Eggers, the hospital’s director of public relations. In addition to the four fatalities, at least seven of the injuries were critical and nine serious, the Stillwater Police Department reported. By 7 p.m., the list of injured had grown to 44 people. Seven people were evacuated by air ambulance, police said. University of Central Oklahoma President Don Betz identified one of the victims as Nikita Nakal, of Mumbai, India, a MBA student at UCO. The names of the other fatality victims and the injured were not immediately released. The driver of the vehicle, Adacia Avery Chambers, 25, of Stillwater, was arrested and was being held in the city jail on a complaint of driving under the influence, said Capt. Kyle Gibbs of the Stillwater Police Department. He said it was too early to say whether the crash was intentional.

Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Roseann Moring

Publication: Oklahoma Watch By: Clifton Adcock, Arianna Pickard, Christina Nihira, Brad Gibson

Excerpt from “Stothert’s flying fingers raise records concerns”

Excerpt from “After Many Years, a Grasp at Recovery”

Dozens of people came to Omaha City Hall a couple of weeks ago to hear a public discussion about how the city can direct more jobs to highpoverty areas. It was their chance to directly and publicly speak to the City Council about a controversial ordinance. That day, Mayor Jean Stothert also made her opinions known to the council. But not from the podium. She used text messages instead. Stothert sent the ordinance sponsor, Councilman Chris Jerram, a text message asking if he would delay his proposal. “You told me - you would table it. What is the reality of this?” Jerram responded, also via text message. “Nothing has changed.” He added that if the mayor agreed to part of his plan, he’d back off the rest. “You have not agreed to the pilot yet so the ordinance continues.” “Are you kidding me?” Stothert fired back. “Blackmail Chris?” And they continued to trade heated text messages during the meeting and after. As a method of communication, texting has become a common practice among Omaha city leaders. City business is increasingly conducted by text message, particularly by Stothert — who has garnered a reputation as a frequent texter. Councilman Franklin Thompson, a fellow Republican and a close ally of the mayor, said Stothert has texted him during council meetings. He described texts that contain both positive and negative interactions. “She texts most people, I think, when she’s unhappy,” he said. “That’s just her style. And it’s a style that’s different from the other mayors.”

The earliest jolts of trauma in childhood can last for a lifetime, unless help is offered and embraced. Patricia “Trisha” Munz said she was sexually molested when she was 6 years old. She said her mom used to blame her for the abuse, so she grew up believing it was her fault. “I hated myself because of this one event,” Munz said. At age 10 her grandmother adopted her and took her to a counselor, who diagnosed her with post traumatic stress disorder. Yet her self-blaming followed her through adolescence, and she fell into abusive relationships. Munz said she began smoking marijuana at age 12 and later began taking harder drugs like cocaine. At age 15 she left home. “As I got older, in relationships I’d be with guys who would beat me, get me high and sexually abuse me,” Munz said. “I always blamed it on myself and thought everything that happened was my fault.” Munz was convicted of robbery with a weapon twice in 2005 and 2006 and sentenced to prison. Munz said she didn’t realize she had a serious mental disorder until fall 2013, when she began participating in cognitive processing therapy at Women in Recovery, a Tulsa diversion program. Now, she no longer gets startled easily or has nightmares. She also doesn’t need medication for anxiety. As part of her therapy, she wrote down what she has control over, what is her fault and what she can do to change her thinking. “I realized I never had control over what happened to me as a child,” Munz said. “I have control over what happens me today.”

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Narrative Story/Series Winner Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Dirk Chatelain Judges’ Comments: This story balanced strong scenes with summary narrative, but even more importantly for a piece like this one, the character development shone through. We got to know the brothers, as well as how alike and different they were. The writer adhered to strong, straight-forward structure and properly placed insightful details. It was a joy to read.

Excerpt from “Twin brother still fuels Fremont phenom” Ty Hansen rose from his front-row seat, walked by the casket topped with a Tiger football helmet and turned toward the congregation. Not an empty seat in the church. He looked down at four sheets of paper — the eulogy he’d written the night before — and took a deep sigh. I don’t know where to start. I could stand up here forever and talk about this goofball. Ty was 16 — two weeks removed from his sophomore year at Fremont High, three weeks removed from medaling at the 2013 state track meet. Just before his race started, he looked over and saw a familiar face behind the chain-link fence. I remember when we were little, Trey and I would go into mom and dad’s room right before bedtime and we’d go snuggle with my mom and watch TV. I’d always lay on her left shoulder and Trey would always lay on her right. We’d kinda have a tug-ofwar with her to, you know, snuggle with her the most. He’d barely slept since Monday night, when he got the phone call. Now it was Saturday morning, June 8, and in five days, he’d dropped from 130 pounds to 115. Trey really liked to check himself out. Every time I’d walk in the bathroom, there’s Trey with his shirt off, checking his muscles. He looks at me and he’d always say, “I’m bigger than you, I’m stronger than you.” He called me Tiny. When me and Trey got into arguments, we threw all weapons at each other. One time, I threw a chair at him. One time, he threw a baseball at me. But ... we always hugged it out. They shared T-shirts and birthday parties. They shared a car and a cellphone and a summer job. Sharing is the worst part of being a twin. It’s the best part, too. He was the person who taught me how

to dance. We all know Trey could dance. I remember everyone circling around him at dances and watching him do the “Dougie” and “Cat Daddy.” And as we were going home, he’d be like, “Ty, that is how you get girls.” For seven minutes, 10 seconds, he stood at the pulpit and told stories. He said that God had a plan, and “even though I hate God’s plan right now — and it sucks — I still love and trust in the Lord.” He didn’t comprehend what lay ahead. Who was Ty going to mock for picking a new favorite NFL team every season? With whom was he going to write rap lyrics for a math project? Who was going to wear the penguin costume to pep rallies? For the next two years, Ty wondered, how much better would I be if Trey were here? Then came a sunny afternoon in Omaha, two weeks before graduation, a triumph that reinforced he was going to be OK. I know he’s listening to this right now. I just want him to know that mom, dad and

Hope love you. I love you. And we all love you. Seven minutes, 10 seconds. He didn’t stumble. His voice didn’t crack. And when the words on the paper ran out, he ad-libbed the last line. Rest easy, buddy. *** Todd Hansen watched the ultrasound wand move over his wife’s belly. The technician studied the screen. And studied. And studied. Did she know what she was doing? “Guess what, kids,” she said. “Double trouble.” It was May 1996, the last day of the school year. They had planned to take a California vacation. They had planned to buy patio furniture. By the time they got home, Todd nixed both. “I still don’t have patio furniture,” said Shannon, who continues to teach special education at Fremont High. Todd was 6-foot-4, a former defensive end at Kearney State College. Shannon was 5-2, the daughter of a football coach.

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Narrative Story/Series Finalists Publication: The Wichita Eagle By: Roy Wenzl

Publication: The Oklahoman By: Juliana Keeping

Excerpt from “When your father is the BTK serial killer, forgiveness is not tidy”

Excerpt from “Saving the Last Dance”

The FBI man knocked on Kerri Rawson’s door 10 years ago Feb. 25. She looked out from her tiny apartment near Detroit. He was holding an FBI badge. She almost didn’t answer. Her father, a code compliance officer in the Wichita suburb of Park City, had taught her to be wary of strangers, and this one had sat in his car next to her trash dumpster for an hour. She’d called her husband. But after the FBI guy knocked, she let him into her kitchen, where she’d made chocolate bundt cake. From now on, the smell of chocolate cake would make her queasy. He asked whether she knew who BTK was. Yes. BTK – Bind. Torture. Kill. – was the serial killer who scared her mom decades ago. The FBI guy was her dad’s age – late 50s, wearing glasses and a necktie, nervous. She was a substitute teacher taking a day off, still wearing mint-green pajamas, though it was past noon. Her dad had been arrested as a BTK suspect, the man said. He needed to swab her cheek for DNA. Lunch waiting At that moment in Park City, shortly after 12:15 p.m., Kerri’s mother, Paula Rader, sat down to lunch at home, waiting for her husband. Cops rushed in, guns drawn. A week later, Paula’s lunch still sat uneaten in the house she had lived in with her husband, Dennis, since the early ’70s. She would never sleep at that house again. Other cops had just arrested Dennis Rader as he was driving home for lunch, pinning him on the pavement as they cuffed him. Around Wichita, officers were picking up Rader’s family and friends for questioning. At the police station, Paula defended her husband. Had she ever noticed anything unusual? No. A daughter’s disbelief Back in Detroit, Kerri yelled at the FBI guy. The last time she had seen Dad was weeks before, in Park City at Christmastime. He looked sad. She remembered his bear hug, how he smelled, his brown code-compliance uniform. “See you in a while,” he’d said. This could not be true, she told the FBI agent. Dad had called last night, asking whether she’d checked the oil in her car. Now, with the FBI guy, she did something she would do many times over the next seven days – defend and then doubt her father’s innocence.

On a warm Tuesday evening in October, Shannon Primeau walks the short distance from her home to the Everything Goes Dance Studio in Oklahoma City’s Plaza District already having choreographed how she will deliver the devastating news. For the past 19 years, Primeau, a professional dancer turned instructor, has offered dance classes and produced an annual spring revue and, along the way, transformed the lives of thousands of young people, from the affluent to the underprivileged, through the power of her art. For this year’s production, the ebullient, raven-haired instructor will use more than 400 performers, most ages 3 to 18, who take part in the various weekly classes at her studio. They’ll practice nearly nine months leading up to the late-May performance. For Primeau, the perfect pirouette or the timely toe tap — technique — is important. Equally so, though, is sparking a passion for dance like that which alighted in her at a young age. From the girl who stood frozen during her first performance at age 3, Primeau grew into an artistic force, mastering a variety of dance styles, performing across America and, in 2010, earning induction into the Oklahoma City Community College Hall of Fame. Above all the rest, Primeau loves one dance: flamenco. The melancholic guitar solos, the evocative red hues and swishing ruffled skirts; the rhythmic, heavy steps and staccato clacks of her castanets — it is through flamenco that Primeau most lays bare her artist’s soul. Though small of stature, barely breaking 5 feet, Primeau, 45, casts a long shadow in the city’s Hispanic community. She often delivers her lessons, as well as her comments to parents, in both English and Spanish and is as happy performing for a crowd in a Walmart parking lot as she is on a stage before the state’s governor. For the past five years, she and fellow members of her troupe, Flamenco Fantastico!, have danced every Friday at Zorba’s, a northwest Oklahoma City restaurant. At this point in her life, it’s not about pageantry, attention or honors. And while she sets a tight monthly budget for the studio and keeps a meticulous ledger in a spiral notebook, it’s never been about the money. While determined to run a successful business, Primeau is driven to assure that each child, even the most disadvantaged, has access to the same opportunities she had. To do so, she strikes the occasional deal with parents, like the mother of seven desperate to keep her kids busy and away from the harsh life of the street. Instead of paying for lessons for the children, Primeau agreed to let the woman clean the studio at night.

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Beat Reporting Winner Publication: St. Louis Post-Dispatch By: Christine Byers Judges’ Comments: Writer does an excellent job of telling one of the defining stories of our time — the tension between communities of color and the police. The sample of coverage has impressive range. It includes sharp watchdog reporting on the use of deadly force, a searing portrait of what it’s like to live in one of the most notorious communities in St. Louis and struggles police officers endure when they’ve been involved in a deadly force situation. Readers of this coverage got a full view of a complicated problem, from the street to the precinct to the inadequate bureaucracies that fail to keep count of essential information on use of force. Most outstanding entry with consistently superior work.

Excerpt from “Troubled housing complex illustrates St. Louis homicide crisis” Eric Davis lives with a bullet near his spine. He said it lodged there in a drive-by shooting last year that killed his cousin, Joseph McGhaw, 27, as they walked in a public housing complex known simply by the name of its street: Hodiamont. Four months later, Davis’ mother, Juliette Davis, 46, was shot to death in another drive-by a distance away as she walked with her grandchildren to a store. “When I came out, she was lying on the ground bleeding,” he said. Violence is part of everyday life in Hodiamont, Davis said recently, as he stood near a wall scrawled with RIP eulogies. Residents in and around the small complex of 22 apartments presume that every one of them has been shot, or shot at, or is connected to a killer or someone killed. “It shouldn’t be like that,” Davis, 24, said. It is within troubled communities like this one, in the 1900 block of Hodiamont Avenue, that the surge in St. Louis homicides and other violence has been felt most. It is where homicide detectives say they see hopelessness take hold. Where people tell police they imagine themselves as either dead or in prison in five years, said Capt. Michael Sack, commander of the Crimes Against Persons Unit. “If that’s your reality, then why not engage in a robbery or other crimes?” he asked. As this year’s homicide total rolls into the 130s — two-thirds higher than the same time last year — Sack’s team tries to get a sense of the victims. Mostly, they represent more of the same: an overwhelming majority are young black men

slain by other young black men. As of Aug. 18, when the toll stood at 128, police determined that 118 of the victims had misdemeanor or felony records. In all of last year, it was 144 of the 159 killed. One thing is a little different this year: an increasing number of female victims. There were 25 at that point, compared to 23 in all of 2014. And in a new role. “We’re seeing more women engaging in a lifestyle that is similar to their male counterparts,” Sack explained. “They’re setting up robberies, or getting involved in the drug trade as they move into that lifestyle. They’re putting themselves more at risk. “Drugs, especially heroin, is driving a lot of it. But drugs, regardless of what kind, equal profits and greed as an incentive. We had a triple (homicide) over a $60 drug debt. It doesn’t take much money to set someone off.” The violent atmosphere is making it

harder than ever for police to get cooperation from witnesses. “I think (mistrust) has always been there, but now the public is getting a better understanding as to why people don’t talk to us,” he said. “The downside to them not talking to us is that a case doesn’t advance and there is an increased potential for retaliation.” Charges have been filed or are under consideration in only about one-fourth of the murders. The city is not suffering alone. There have been 34 homicides this year in St. Louis County as of Friday, only five fewer than in all of 2014. County police are handling 23, municipal police the rest. County Police Chief Jon Belmar said that for his agency, it’s three more murders than at this time last year. “There doesn’t seem to be a big pattern or rhyme or reason to them,” Belmar said. “All seem to be situated in North County at the moment.”

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Beat Reporting Finalists Publication: The Oklahoman By: Jaclyn Cosgrove

Publication: Oklahoma Watch By: Nate Robson

Excerpt from “Driving to deliver”

Excerpt from “In Oklahoma Schools, Record Numbers of Homeless Children”

The police officer looked past Travis Gray in the driver’s seat and saw Krista Gray, leaned back in the passenger seat, her feet on the dash, in mid-contraction. Travis Gray had been driving 80 mph in a 70-mph zone, trying to get to an Amarillo, Texas, hospital so his wife could deliver their second daughter, Audrey. “Her contractions are about five minutes apart,” he told the officer. The officer’s face turned pale, and he tossed their insurance card and Gray’s license back. “Good luck,” he told them as their car sat on the side of the road near a cattle feedlot in Dumas, Texas. “I don’t think he wanted to deliver a baby on the side of the road,” Krista Gray, a Boise City resident, said. Gray chose to deliver her daughter, Audrey, now 8, in Amarillo, wanting a higher level of care than was available in her hometown. But that meant a two-hour drive when she started having contractions at 11 p.m. A lengthy distance Across Oklahoma, thousands of women must drive more than an hour for access to a hospital with a maternity center, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. And the problem doesn’t look to be getting better anytime soon. In Oklahoma and across the U.S., there has essentially been no increase in the number of obstetrician-gynecologists trained since 1980. In 2014, 48 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties did not have obstetrician-gynecologists, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reported. For women like Gray, living in rural Oklahoma can mean driving long distances for care, and in some cases, going without.

A resilient economy and low unemployment have done little to stem the tide of students who are finding themselves homeless in Oklahoma. Despite a five-year oil and gas boom and falling jobless rates, growing numbers of youths are finding themselves without a bedroom to call their own – a trend seen across the nation. Tonight, thousands of Oklahoma children will fall asleep on the couches or beds of friends or relatives, according to data reported by school districts to the state. Those adults have no legal obligation to care for the child or their family and can kick them out at any time. Hundreds more will stay in a hotel or motel. Others will sleep in a shelter or on the streets. The surge in homeless students has raised alarms among school officials, lawmakers and child advocates. According to data collected by the Oklahoma Department of Education, the number of homeless students shot up by 43 percent over two years, from 17,539 in the 2011-2012 school year to 25,114 in 2013-2014. Figures for the recent school year are not yet available but are expected to exceed last year’s total, education officials said. The state’s numbers also grew just after the recession of 2007-2009, federal data show. The rising counts spurred a state legislator to author a bill this year that requires the state to gather more precise data on homeless children. The bill, offered by Sen. Kate Floyd, D-Oklahoma City, and signed by the governor in April, will be used to shape future state policies addressing child homelessness.

Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Paul Hammel

Excerpt from “Mentally ill since 6, inmate in solitary confinement goes untreated” Long before he landed in solitary confinement, Chris Seaton struggled with mental illness. His mother says he used to “bounce off the walls” with hyperactivity as a child, defied authority at every turn and was aggressive to the point of being scary. He has been diagnosed over the years with numerous illnesses, including bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder. He has problems with impulse control and is so easily distracted that he’s been deemed officially disabled. He was on medication by first grade, was first hospitalized by third grade and was caught shoplifting in junior high. “When he’s in a good phase of his illness, he’s fun to be around. He’s witty, quick, a lovey kid,” said his mother, Barb Graeve, a wellknown Omaha swimming instructor. When he was at Boys Town for a couple of years, he played football, wrestled and swam. He made friends and, with some exceptions, his behavior was under control in that strict residential setting. But because he’s difficult to be around, he had few friends elsewhere, his mother said. He fell in with a crowd that did drugs and worse. Seaton has been sentenced twice to prison, most recently for conspiracy to distribute marijuana. Graeve blames much of her son’s criminal behavior on his mental illness. Seaton himself says he often can’t remember what he did or why. Now, at age 29, he spends 23 hours a day in a solitary confinement cell at the state’s highest security prison.

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Feature Writing Winner Publication: Tulsa World By: Michael Overall Judges’ Comments: An old man takes $34.46 worth of candy every week to nurses who cared for his dying wife years ago. And in that small-moment framework is a story about living and dying and marriage and human connections. It’s the sort of tale that has the magic to make you look at someone you come across in your daily life and take a moment to wonder what their story is. It could have been too sweet — but the humor of a deathside vow that the TV is paid for, the unflinching look at caring for a dying loved one and a great ear for dialogue — makes Michael Overall’s piece much more than a bon-bon. It’s a classic.

Excerpt from “The Candy Man: Chocolate becomes a sweet connection to the past” Her hand felt cold in his and her breathing slowed down until he could barely see her chest moving at all. Sitting beside his wife’s hospital bed, Bill Salwaechter leaned over to whisper in her ear. “It’s OK,” he told her softly. “It’s OK to go on.” Ann Salwaechter had been in the hospital for nearly a month after suffering a stroke, but her health had been declining for at least a year and a half. Every morning at home, Bill would lift her out of bed to change her diaper, then try to feed her something soft and mushy before laying her down again. Every morning for 18 months, until one morning Ann couldn’t even talk. He carried her limp body to the car and drove her to a doctor’s office, where the staff told him to take her on to St. Francis Hospital. And for the next 28 days, Ann never opened her eyes or uttered a sound. Doctors described it as “a permanent state of unresponsiveness.” “It’s OK to go,” Bill whispered into her ear again. “I’ll take care of Beth, and if I buy a dog, I won’t let him in the house. I’ll change my underwear once a day and my sheets once a week. “And don’t worry.” Bill paused a moment for emphasis. “The TV is paid for.” Nobody else would get that joke. But if Ann could hear him — and part of Bill seemed pretty sure that she could — she would have laughed. Ann died Aug. 30, 2011, at the age of 73. And her husband actually felt relieved. “It’s over,” he told the nurses. “The suffering has ended.” They gave him a few minutes in the room alone with her. Then Bill called the funeral home and a couple of men came right over. He watched them unfold the

body bag and roll Ann into it. And he watched them zip it up, her face disappearing behind the black plastic. The sound of that zipper followed him out of the room, down the hallway past the nurse’s station to the elevator and all the way up the Creek Turnpike on the long, lonely drive home to an empty house in Claremore. “What now?” Bill kept asking himself. “What am I supposed to do now?” ‘Let’s get married’ The Linger Lounge used to sit on North May Avenue across the street from Oklahoma City’s Northwest Classen High School, a blocky mid-century building that was brand new and suburban at the time. In the late 1950s, the bar was always busy on a Friday night with young professionals — particularly unmarried 20-somethings who worked in the oil industry — drinking beer and playing shuffle board. Bill, a geologist not far out of college, went there to say goodbye to his pals before heading to Montana,

where he hoped to find a job close to the mountains. Plopping down in an empty chair next to one of his buddies, he glanced across the table to see “the prettiest girl in the world” — high cheekbones, curly dark hair and rosy lips. When his friend got up to order another round, Bill asked Ann if this was a serious relationship. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered. He was going to ask for her phone number anyway. And if his friend didn’t like it? Too bad. The very next day, he was driving across the plains of eastern Colorado thinking about that girl and almost turned around. Forget Montana. And maybe that explains why he didn’t find a job there after all. Maybe he didn’t try very hard. Maybe he wanted to come back to Oklahoma City. When he called, Ann said she was busy. “Well, how about Saturday?” he asked.

58 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Feature Writing Finalists Publication: The Des Moines Register By: Mike Kilen

Publication: The Oklahoman By: Jaclyn Cosgrove

Excerpt from “Holocaust survivor recalls the lie that saved his life”

Excerpt from “Costello family struggled for years to help son with mental illness, long before tragedy at Braum’s”

At the party, people asked to snap a photo of the tattoo on his left forearm. Each time he pulled up his sleeve, David Wolnerman’s unease faded further, as had the blurry blue numbers — 160344. For a long time, he didn’t show the numbers that the Nazis put on his arm in 1940 at Auschwitz or tell what happened afterward. But he is 88, and he and his wife, Jennie, are the last known survivors of the Nazi concentration camps left in central Iowa. He wants people to see it now, including the 12-yearold girl from West Des Moines who wrote about his experiences in “A Lucky Lie,” a book written for students that was unveiled at the April 16 party in Waukee. The hidden meaning behind that number, he told young author Sydney Pearl, came to him only later in life. Add the individual numbers together and they equal 18. Wolnerman had lied when he stood in line in 1940. Josef Mengele, the Nazi nicknamed “The Angel of Death,” stood before him with a stick, pointing it to a line to the left or right as each person approached him. Wolnerman, then 13, noticed that the old, young and sickly were in a line to the left. When Mengele asked his age, Wolnerman said, “I am 18.” Mengele pointed his stick to the right. The left line was eventually sent to the gas chambers. “I didn’t have brains to say this,” said Wolnerman on a recent afternoon in his condominium off Fleur Drive in Des Moines. “I believe God told me. If not, I wouldn’t be here.” In Hebrew, the number 18 is symbolized as chai, or “life.” At 18, he was liberated from the camp. And what a life. All these years, he has acutely understood the slim margin between death and life. It affected every day, the way he worked and the spoiled food he couldn’t throw away because he couldn’t bear to waste it. In the concentration camp, they didn’t talk much because they didn’t know what was going on in the world or even know what day or year it was. “We had no mind. You had mind like cow,” Wolnerman said in his broken English. “The only thing we could think was bread, bread, bread.” They got two slices a day. If a boy took the bread of another, a shovel handle was held to his throat, he said, because stealing bread was like a death sentence to the theft victim. He worked in the crematorium and gas chambers and watched them “throw the live ones in the oven.” He loaded cement blocks on trucks, and he prayed. He listened to boys tell of their castrations and watched people “die like flies.”

Cathy Costello’s home is starting to quieten down. Shortly after her husband’s death, Cathy announced she wanted to continue Mark Costello’s term as Oklahoma labor commissioner. In some ways, her campaign was a welcome distraction from immeasurable pain. But that campaign is over, and someone else sits at his desk. So now, Cathy has time to reflect. Memories roll through her mind, especially from the last few months of her husband’s life. Like that time they were in their bedroom getting ready to start the day. Cathy felt they were out of options to help their son, Christian. He was suffering from untreated paranoid schizophrenia, and the Costellos had spent six years trying any hospital, any doctor or any medicine they thought would help him. The 56-year-old mother of five abundantly loved her children, but all the time she spent helping Christian didn’t seem to make a difference to his disease. “I have lost hope,” she said to Mark one spring morning as she pulled on her shoes. “I have no hope anymore for Christian.” Mark turned to her, almost sternly. “There’s always hope,” he said. A few months later, Cathy watched as Mark took his last breath. Outside their minivan, bystanders pinned down their oldest son, bloodied from attacking his father in a Braum’s parking lot. That moment propelled Cathy and her family into the public limelight where thousands of strangers knew only the end result of years of a family desperately trying to save their son. Some nights, Cathy lies awake, replaying a movie of Christian’s life over and over in her head. She thinks about the love she and Mark showered upon Christian. She thinks about past holidays, like the Christmas when Christian was 4 and she stayed up late assembling a toy horse for him. Or the countless Halloweens when she made any costume Christian wanted — a green Power Ranger, a dinosaur or a gladiator. She thinks about the loving home that she and Mark gave Christian. And she tries to understand how all that love still didn’t bring forth a healthy child. Christian’s brain disease has been like a slow-growing tumor that infected his mind until the boy, the brother, the son that his family once knew, was gone. He was replaced by a paranoid man who lives in a universe that would terrify anyone if it was their reality: His car is rigged with bombs.

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Business Reporting Winner Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Russell Hubbard Judges’ Comments: Excellent writing. Clever point of entry for an obviously important Omaha story. Well researched. Tough concepts clearly explained.

Excerpt from “Leading ConAgra to crisis paid pretty well” The six highest-paid executives at ConAgra Foods collected about $63 million in aggregate compensation during the crucial three years when they were making many of the decisions that led to what employees face today: the payroll slashed, the headquarters moving to Chicago, the company splitting into two. In the rarefied world of executive pay, those figures aren’t out of line with what leaders at other consumer packaged food companies were paid from 2012 through 2014, according to a World-Herald analysis of four of ConAgra’s close peers. In fact, ConAgra during the period paid its top executives less than two of those four peers. ConAgra executives also faced pay cuts during the period as conditions at the company worsened. There’s a reason for that: Looking at the in-depth metrics Wall Street investors use to analyze a company, ConAgra badly trailed some of those peers, such as Hershey Co. and Campbell Soup, especially in key areas of profitability and cost control. Other peer companies of about the same size in the packaged-food business are Hormel Foods and J.M. Smucker. Such lagging performance has led ConAgra to where it is now: under pressure from impatient investors to improve its stock price, cut expenses and sell off business units. Some of the executives who made the fateful decisions are no longer around, victims of the Wall Street drama that has engulfed the Omaha food manufacturer. Even if those executives have found themselves without jobs, they’re likely not scraping to get by. In 2014, when the company was hurtling toward crisis, no executive named in compensation filings had total annual pay of less than $2.1 million. It was during those years — 2012 through 2014 — that people such as former Chief Executive Gary Rodkin were making decisions like the nearly $7 billion purchase of St. Louis-based Ralcorp, the maker of generic, supermarketlabeled groceries that was jettisoned this year in a fire sale for $2.7 billion; it was a money-loser for ConAgra from almost the day it joined the company in 2013. Ralcorp never succeeded for ConAgra, dragging down profits, increasing expenses and leading to this year’s management and board changes that have resulted in the current makeover scenario. The dream of teaming a company with high-profile brands such as Peter Pan with a manufacturer of generic equivalents — a bid to own both sides of the supermarket aisle — turned out to be a nightmare. Still, during that three-year period, Rodkin and a handful of other executives were awarded $62.5 million in total compensation, according to the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Rodkin himself col-

lected almost half the total: $30.1 million. The Omaha-based company, like all other publicly traded ones, must report the details of executive pay to investors and the SEC. Salary and other compensation paid to the CEO, finance chief and three other highest-paid executives must be disclosed each year in a form called a proxy statement. The World-Herald analysis used each year’s proxy statement, filed in 2012, 2013 and 2014, to determine what the five highest-paid executives collected for those years. Sometimes someone who joins the top five for the first time has compensation listed for prior years. The World-Herald has considered only the compensation they earned when they were part of the top five. Also, sometimes more than five people are listed as highest paid because of midyear turnover in the executive suite. Chris Kircher, ConAgra’s vice president of corporate affairs, said the company’s filings with the SEC on executive pay speak for themselves. “We are focused right now on taking the steps necessary to transform ConAgra Foods into a lean, competitive and profitable business that delivers sustainable, long-term shareholder value,” Kircher said. Another ConAgra spokesman, Jon Harris, said ConAgra shareholders have overwhelmingly supported the company’s executive pay. Stockholders are allowed to voice their views on such matters in a voting procedure whose outcome is purely symbolic and nonbinding on the company.

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Business Reporting Finalists Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Barbara Soderlin, Paige Yowell

Excerpt from “Naughty or nice, all companies now targets” Don’t take it personally, Nebraska. “Activist” investors study financial statements, not state maps, when hunting for their next corporate target. And there’s likely nothing about the state’s culture, laws or business climate that put both ConAgra Foods and Cabela’s in the cross hairs. “I doubt it’s anything in the water in Nebraska,” said Jay Lorsch, a Harvard Business School professor and expert in corporate governance. There are some similarities between ConAgra and Cabela’s: Both are longtime, homegrown companies that employ thousands of Nebraskans. Both have struggled recently to turn around falling sales. But when it comes to activist investors, the Nebraska companies have plenty of company: A growing number of the investors are casting their nets to encompass wider geographies and industries. Activist investors publicly subjected 344 companies to their demands in 2014, the majority of them U.S. companies. That was up 18 percent from the year before, according to Activist Insight, a London-based publisher of financial information. “It’s really across all industries,” Activist Insight Editor Josh Black said. “I don’t think it’s an issue with Nebraska.” Nebraskans are feeling the pain and worry, though, as Omahabased ConAgra and Sidney-based Cabela’s announced layoffs and changes in their businesses since activists got involved.

Publication: The Oklahoman By: Adam Wilmoth, Paul Monies

Publication: Oklahoma Watch By: Warren Vieth, Mark Lash

Excerpt from “Reading the rock: Scientists are trying to quickly answer Oklahoma geological questions”

Excerpt from “How New Subsidies Started”

As the state continues to shake under pressure from the ongoing earthquake swarm, researchers are focusing their attention on a well-used, but little-understood rock layer that underlies most of the state. Most scientists, state regulators and oil and natural gas industry leaders now say oil and natural gas activities have contributed to or caused the rapid increase in seismic activity over the past three years. While many of the specific mechanisms still are not fully understood, regulatory efforts have focused on water disposal wells drilled into and through the Arbuckle layer, which is the deepest sedimentary rock layer throughout much of Oklahoma. Oil wells in Oklahoma and much of the world recover large amounts of saltwater along with the oil and natural gas. Sometimes called fossil water, the produced water is believed to be remnants of ancient oceans, containing many times the salt content of seawater, along with other chemicals and components. Regulators focused first on depth, requiring companies to prove disposal wells do not extend into to crystalline basement, the dense crust that underlies sedimentary rock. Regulators also are looking at volumes, requiring disposal wells near the largest earthquakes to reduce or stop disposal activity. Localized high volumes can cause pressure to increase in that area, squeezing the water or pressure up or down into other rock layers or causing pressure between the Arbuckle and the basement, state hydrologist Kyle Murray said.

It all began with a Kerr-McGee spinoff. A “change-in-control” provision was added to the Quality Jobs program by the Legislature in 2006 and signed into law by then-Gov. Brad Henry. Commerce Department spokeswoman Leslie Blair said it was done at the request of McAfee & Taft, an Oklahoma City law firm acting on behalf of a new company called Tronox Inc. Tronox was a spinoff of KerrMcGee Corp., the big Oklahomabased oil and gas company. It contained all of Kerr-McGee’s former chemical operations. It remains one of the world’s leading producers of titanium ore, titanium dioxide and zircon. In 2006, Tronox was headquartered in Oklahoma City. Tronox received the state’s first change-in-control contract in August 2006. Over the next two years, it received $2.1 million in Quality Jobs payments for maintaining a minimum of 260 jobs in Oklahoma City. The payments ended in 2008 for unstated reasons. In 2009, Tronox filed for reorganization under federal bankruptcy law. It turned out Tronox not only got all of Kerr-McGee’s chemical operations, it also inherited billions of dollars in undisclosed legal liability for toxic waste sites in several states. Last year, the company that had acquired Kerr-McGee in 2006, Anadarko Petroleum Corp., entered into a $5 billion waste cleanup settlement with the federal government, the biggest ever. The spinoff emerged from bankruptcy in 2012 as Tronox Ltd. It is headquartered in Stamford, Conn., but maintains an Oklahoma City division office with about 130 employees.

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Business Feature Winner Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Janice Podsada Judges’ Comments: Great way to use an interesting stat to tell the story of your local economy. Great choices for subject matter — I liked that we heard from people who were in two jobs for so many reasons. Really nice writing. And excellent use of stats throughout.

Excerpt from “Meet some of the Midlanders who work more than one job — and learn why” Roughly one out of every 12 workers in Nebraska held down more than one job last year. Only two other states have a greater percentage of workers with multiple jobs, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Why do so many people in this part of the country work multiple jobs? Economists offer several theories: » The strong work ethic traditional to the Midwest. » The region’s relatively low wages, which push some workers into second and third jobs to make ends meet. » The large number of farmers who have skills they can use for odd jobs off the farm. Historically, Nebraska and other Midwestern states have chalked up some of the highest multiple job rates in the nation since the U.S. Labor Department began tracking them on an annual basis in 1995. In 2014, 8.4 percent, or more than 82,000 of Nebraska’s 984,000 workers, had more than one job, followed by Iowa at 8.2 percent, according to data the Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t published but provided to The WorldHerald. Only first-ranked South Dakota (8.7 percent) and Vermont (8.5 percent) had higher rates. By comparison, the national average of workers doing double duty — or more — has held steady since 2010 at 4.9 percent. People who work more than one job offer their own myriad reasons for working second and third jobs: They need to help their children pay for college. They don’t earn enough at their full-time jobs to provide for their families. They’re drowning in bills. Here are some of their stories: Marina Carson, 51: full-time teacher, part-time sales representative The Omaha music teacher hopes to

leave her second job within the next five years. Why does she work two jobs? “Bills accumulate,” Carson said. She depends on the extra income to pay down debt she and her husband incurred when they ran a golf shop at Rockbrook Village and also to help pay the college tuition for their two children. Her husband, a computer consultant, also works long hours, though at one job. “Teaching doesn’t pay as well as other jobs,” Carson said, “which is one of the reasons I have two jobs.” Since 2000, most of those who hold multiple jobs have a full-time job and moonlight at a second, part-time job. Some economists suggest the state’s relatively low wages contribute to Nebraska’s high multiple job rate. Others, such as Eric Thompson, economics professor at the University of NebraskaLincoln, cite residents’ “higher taste for work.” Nebraska has a strong rate of labor participation, or number of people in the workforce. During the summer, Carson gets a break from her full-time teaching job.

But during the school year — which starts this week — she’ll work from 7 a.m. to about 5 p.m. teaching music to children in kindergarten through fifth grade. After she finishes her school day, she’ll jump into her car for a 15-minute commute to The Maids’ corporate center, a sprint that doesn’t give her time to grab dinner. “I usually don’t eat until I get home,” she said. At The Maids, she answers calls from 5:30 p.m. to 8 or 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, and at least two Saturdays a month from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. — a schedule she’s maintained for the past 2½ years. “When the bills are paid, I hope I can stop,” Carson said. “I just didn’t want to ask friends or family for help with any debt.” In 1997, more than 11.2 percent of Nebraska’s workforce held two or more jobs — a state record — compared with the U.S. annual average of 6.2 percent. In 1995, 10.2 percent of Iowans held multiple jobs, a record high for the 20year period from 1994 to 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Business Feature Finalists Publication: St. Louis Business Journal By: Ben Unglesbee

Publication: St. Louis Post-Dispatch By: Tim Barker

Excerpt from “$436 million worth of love”

Excerpt from “Sustainable farming is full-time commitment”

An $800,000 wedding, for those who can afford it, can bring a stunning view of the Grand Basin in Forest Park from a tented ceremony. Or a special guest appearance by St. Louis recording artist Nelly or a band bussed in from Chicago for the special occasion. Shelli Alred, owner of Alred Wedding Consultants, has seen all of that and even booked horses, acrobats, professional dancers, fire throwers, caricaturists, palm readers and Chinese dragons for her clients in St. Louis, turning the traditional ceremony into a full-fledged festival. Grooms-to-be have even asked her for elephants (though she couldn’t produce one because of zoning regulations). Those exotic wedding additions can add up to as much as $800,000, and she’s heard of even bigger weddings. “I know there have been weddings in town over $1 million.” The most expensive design job for a wedding that Randy Shamel, owner of Artistry Florist and Event Design in the city of St. Louis, has booked cost as much as some houses in the area: about $125,000 — and that’s just for the flowers. “That job included large floral centerpieces that were about $1,000 each,” said Shamel, adding that the volume and type of flowers can run up the price quickly. “The wedding ended up with 35 guest tables.” As spending on weddings climbs ever higher here and around the country, tying the knot has become a $436 million industry in the St. Louis market, according to research by the Wedding Report Inc., an Arizona-based research company.

It was a bitter cold morning, with a light dusting of snow on the windswept pasture, when a little boy tried to save a pig named Taco. The morning — it happened last November — started like many others at Live Springs Farm. Rowan Weber was helping his parents round up a dozen of the farm’s pasture-raised pigs for slaughter later that day. But as they went about the business of sorting out the day’s selections, the 5-year-old realized that, with only two dozen pigs left from the season’s litters, time was running out. And so the tears started flowing when his mother gestured toward Taco — raised by hand after the piglet was stepped on by its mother. The outburst drew Bobbi Sandwisch to her knees in front of the child, offering a host of reasons why it was time for the hog to go. “Go give Taco a hug,” she urged. “You can give him an apple or a banana.” But eventually, the tear-streaked face won, with Bobbi agreeing to leave Taco off the trailer. “Fine, Rowan,” Sandwisch said, exasperation creeping into her voice. “But he’s going in two more weeks.” It was, in many ways, just another lesson to be learned on this small organic operation in rural Greene County, about 60 miles north of St. Louis. There have been many such lessons for Rowan and his parents, as they carve out a life on a farm that’s trying to do things a little differently. This is a place where the pigs roam wooded acres, rooting out acorns, pecans and grubs.

Publication: The Oklahoman By: Brianna Bailey

Excerpt from “Walk on Western Avenue shows Oklahoma City’s best — and its worst” I was sunburned and dehydrated when I finally saw Chester — the waving, neon cowboy that stands guard over the old Winchester Drive-In Theatre — appear on the horizon on S Western Avenue. I had come a little more than 19 miles on my walk down Western Avenue. I started four days earlier about 270 blocks north on a damp Monday morning, slogging down the muddy shoulder of a country road punctuated with brief respites of sidewalk. For days, I had been calling Winchester owner Lindy Shanbour seeking an interview as I slouched slowly south toward his drive-in at SW 70 and Western. “We’re still getting the place ready to open for the season,” Shanbour told me, seeming a bit more annoyed and puzzled with me each time I called. “Can’t you just come back in a few weeks when we’re open?” I’m sure it was hard for Shanbour — who is well past 80 and opened the Winchester in 1968 — to understand me as I shouted into my cellphone over the wind and the traffic. “But you don’t understand — I’m walking there. I’m walking there right now,” I said. “Right now? But I’m not there right now — I’m at lunch,” he would say. I called back again — and again — trying to explain. For the five days of my 26.7mile walk down Western, I marked progress in the major highways I would pass — the John Kilpatrick Turnpike; Interstates 44, 40 and 240.

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Sports Reporting Winner Publication: The Oklahoman By: Jenni Carlson, Jason Kersey, Berry Tramel, Ryan Aber

Excerpt from “Oklahoma football: Eric Striker can’t stay silent any longer” NORMAN — Less than 12 hours after viewing the video — and three hours before he would walk arm-inarm with teammates and coaches into the Everest Training Center in silent protest — Oklahoma senior linebacker and team captain Eric Striker sat in the OU library, calmly detailing his outrage and heartache over the racist chant that went viral Sunday night and embarrassed his school. Striker’s initial reaction to the video, showing members of the nowdisbanded Sigma Alpha Epsilon OU chapter cheerfully singing that they’d never accept a black brother, went viral itself. He posted an 18-second, profanity-laced tirade to SnapChat, angrily accusing the same fraternity members who sang that racist song of shaking athletes’ hands and hugging them after big games. Monday morning, Striker posted a much more subdued video in which he apologized for his language, but not for the substance of his message. Between those two video messages, though, Striker reached out to a reporter from The Oklahoman and asked to meet so that he could more fully express his feelings — and the feelings of other OU student-athletes — about the racist video, the struggles young black men sometimes face on OU’s campus and his profound desire to be seen as more than a football player. “I hate to be defined as a football player,” Striker said. “I’ve got a great personality. I’m humorous. I’m a political science major. I love everybody. I’m a people person. “Football is not who I am. All you know is the number ‘19’ on the back of my jersey.” Silent no more Striker grew up in Seffner, Fla., a suburb of Tampa, with a single mother and two siblings. Lia Skelton raised her children to treat others with respect, reject hatred and constantly pursue knowledge.

Eric, her youngest son, once said he got his “kindness,” “humbleness” and “relentlessness” from his mother, who is working her way through law school at age 44. After he saw the Sigma Alpha Epsilon video, Striker texted the link to his mother, then called her in tears. “He was very upset,” Skelton said. “My heart breaks for him. I was ready to get on the next plane and get up there to stand by him.” She didn’t see his rant video until Monday morning. As his mom, the language bothered her, but she also admitted having no idea how she might respond to something similar. “I told him he might want to apologize for the cursing, but that he shouldn’t apologize for what he said or what he feels. “He really doesn’t speak that way, but he was angry and he was hurt. I don’t know what it’s like to be a black man in America. I don’t know what it’s like to be a young black man in Oklahoma. I will never know.”

As Striker sat in a quiet corner on the fourth floor of OU’s Bizzell Memorial Library, he tried putting it into words. The All-Big 12 linebacker — perhaps best known for tormenting Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron in the 2014 Sugar Bowl — said he and his teammates have kept quiet about the way they’ve been treated in the past at fraternity parties — and not just SAE events. No more. Despite often being invited to parties because of his athletic prowess — and used to promote and create buzz about those parties — Striker said he’s been singled out and asked who invited him, then told he can stay, “as long as you don’t cause any trouble.” Striker recalled defensive end Charles Tapper being called the N-word at one fraternity party, and former OU running back David Smith overhearing someone whisper that people at a date party should watch out for Smith, because he might take a girl home and rape her.

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Sports Reporting Finalists Publication: The Oklahoman By: Jacob Unruh, Jenni Carlson

Publication: St. Louis Post-Dispatch By: Derrick Goold

Publication: Tulsa World By: Bill Haisten, John Klein, Andrea Eger, Mark Cooper

Excerpt from “Cache players say their coach tried to injure opponent”

Excerpt from “Pena, Jay join MLB tour in Cuba”

Excerpt from “‘Wholesome, happy’ OSU homecoming parade shattered”

MIAMI — When Cardinals catcher Brayan Pena got the call last month inviting him to return home to Cuba for his first substantive visit in more than 15 years, his initial reaction was uncertainty. “Must be a prank or something,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it.” His next was to catch his breath. “Is this really happening?” he said. Pena was 16 in 1999 when he defected while with the Cuban national team in another Latin American country, and save for a brief day trip a few years ago he has not been back to where he grew up, in Havana, since. He chased a career in professional baseball off the island, and now the game is bringing him back. Pena will arrive in Cuba on Tuesday as part of a traveling party that will represent Major League Baseball during a three-day visit. It is the first official visit by Major League Baseball to Cuba since March 1999, that same year Pena left. Described as a “goodwill tour,” the joint venture by Major League Baseball and the players union is scheduled to include Cuban major leaguers Jose Abreu, Alexei Ramirez, Pena, and possibly Yasiel Puig as part of an eight-player contingent. Most of them will be returning to their home country for the first time since they defected, a rare opportunity that Major League Baseball has worked with the Cuban government and other officials to make possible. “When I was young I left my family, my friends and my country to pursue my dreams,” said Pena, who signed a two-year deal with the Cardinals earlier this offseason.

STILLWATER — Gail Lamb was among the hundreds who massed near the southwest corner of Main Street and Hall of Fame Avenue, securing a prime location from which to view the Oklahoma State University homecoming parade Saturday. Lamb is a Stillwater resident who attended OSU. Her daughter is a university employee. Her son-in-law is a university professor. Lamb says she was excited to attend the parade because her 8-year-old granddaughter and other members of a dance troupe were to be featured passengers on a float. The granddaughter’s float rolled past the Main and Hall of Fame intersection only moments before a car careened into a crowd of spectators, leaving four dead, including a 2-year-old. “You think you’re safe at a parade,” Lamb said, “and you’re with your grandchildren, and you realize that they all could have been killed in the blink of an eye. “Little kids were sitting all along that curb, getting the candy and everything. I just realize that they all could have been taken so quickly, when they were all so happy. This is a trauma they will never forget.” Described by OSU President Burns Hargis as “probably one of the most wholesome, happy events in the country,” the parade was nearing its conclusion when a car driven by an allegedly impaired woman plowed into a cluster of stationary people. At 10:31 a.m., according to Stillwater police, a 2014 Hyundai Elantra — reportedly driven by 25-year-old Adacia Avery Chambers of Stillwater — crashed through a barricade, struck an unmanned police motorcycle and traveled into a crowd of parade-watchers.

Gary Holt is convinced the Cache High School girls basketball coach called an inbounds play designed to slam a basketball into his daughter Jentry Holt’s face, a play designed weeks before with the intent to “break her nose.” On Feb. 10 during Elgin’s senior night, Elgin star Jentry Holt was struck in the face by the pass late in the ballgame. In the eight months since, she has begun her college career at Oklahoma State with the Cowgirls while Gary has conducted his own investigation that has led him to believe that Cache coach Kenny White orchestrated the incident ahead of the game, that the punishment levied from Cache Public Schools is not enough and that the coach led a cover-up of the incident. Trailing nine points with 20 seconds remaining, Elgin set up its full-court press following a basket. With Jentry Holt holding her arms out and closely guarding the inbounds pass, and after two Cache players appear to be signaling something by touching their nose, Cache’s Nautica Butler threw the inbounds pass off Holt’s face. An official called a flagrant foul on Butler, but Jentry Holt does not remember shooting the ensuing free throw. She was not diagnosed with a concussion, though her parents did take her to the doctor after she struggled to sleep, was irritable and suffered anxiety over the next few weeks. During Gary Holt’s investigation through several open record requests, he acquired from both schools video he believes shows intent and multiple attempts to hurt his daughter.

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Sports Feature Winner Publication: Lincoln Journal Star By: Alex Lantz Judges’ Comments: This is a great idea and wonderfully told. The lede is a grabber and the pacing throughout is smart ... I could have gone for a few more specific, vivid examples (snatches of conversation, what the bus was like, etc.) but the overall impression felt genuine, fun and often moving.

Excerpt from “The drive to be the best” The Lincoln Stars spent four days on the road last week, traversing more than 1,000 miles of Midwestern highway to play hockey in Madison, Wisconsin, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. On paper, the result was one win and one loss, but sometimes the game is about more than that. This is a story about those times. It’s a story about the lives of those teenagers on the bus, the ones who drop everything and move thousands of miles to play in the United States Hockey League. It’s a story about the struggles of being away from home, and about the quest to fit in with a new family. And, in the end, it’s a story about why they do it. *** Inside this bus, Cam Lee can forget about everything on the outside. The Lincoln Stars defenseman can forget that he’s only 17 years old but 2,000 miles away from his family in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He can forget that his 49-year-old father, Tom — the man who taught him how to skate, the man who taught him how to hip check and defend an odd-man rush — is in his sixth year of treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He can forget how badly he wants to be by his dad’s side, watching hockey, helping him through the fight of his life. “It goes away when I’m joking around with the guys and just having fun,” he says. Like here on this eight-hour bus ride to Wisconsin, when he and his teammates pass the miles watching “Draft Day” and “Home Alone 2” and laughing as defenseman Dylan Woolf gyrates to his version of “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus. He can let loose with his teammates because they’re no different, living in Lincoln with host families (billets),

going through the same cramped bus rides and feeling just as homesick. There’s floppy-haired forward Ludvig Hoff from Norway; funny-talking Walt Hopponen from Finland; quiet Dominick Sacco from Brooklyn, and 19 more. “You meet these random people — your teammates, your billets — and at first it’s a shock,” Sacco says. “But over time you get a lot more comfortable, and they’re not strangers anymore. They turn into family.” They’re a team on the ice, but they’re just as close off it. They hang out in the basement of Hoff’s host family’s house, playing NHL 15 on the Xbox. They catch rides with each other to and from practice. The United States Hockey League has brought the game to 17 small cities from Kearney to Youngstown, Ohio. Its players represent 36 states, 12 countries and countless situations. Some are taking high school classes, others are taking online college courses. But for those hours together on this bus, they share a commonality that can’t be matched. They all have the same dream as

they ride this bus, with endless snowcovered fields rolling past outside. In the dream, they see themselves skating into another season, into another level, into an arena with more than 20,000 screaming fans. They see themselves as the next Sidney Crosby, hopping on charter flights to Chicago and New York and Los Angeles instead of this bus to Madison and Sioux Falls. *** Guys in this league understand that where they play isn’t up to them, and they know the jersey they wear today might be different from the one they wear tomorrow. The USHL exists as a place for players to develop, but it’s also a business. For Stars general manager Jon Hull, the line can blur between doing what’s best for the team and what’s best for a player. The league is a stepping stone for his players to get where they want to go, and that weighs on him when making roster decisions — he’s made three trades in January, each time altering a teenager’s life and career. But he also has to put the Stars in a position to win.

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Sports Feature Finalists Publication: The Oklahoman By: Jason Kersey, Bryan Terry

Excerpt from “How OU offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley’s brilliance carried him from Muleshoe and onto the coaching fast track” MULESHOE, Texas — As Debbie Conner stood at the chalkboard during her Muleshoe High School honors math courses, one student always sat in the back, rarely taking notes. It would have been easy to mistake him for a goof-off if not for the occasional question as Conner was explaining some difficult formula. “Couldn’t you just do it this way?” he would ask before detailing an alternate route to the right answer. Other students groaned. “Shut up! We don’t understand what you’re saying!” Thirteen years later, Lincoln Riley is using that uncanny brain power in a different realm as Oklahoma’s new offensive coordinator, hired by Bob Stoops in January to coach quarterbacks and reinvigorate a Sooner offense that had grown stagnant. The 31-year-old whiz is regarded nationally as one of football’s top young offensive minds, and his rapid rise in the college football coaching world affirms that label. “He had shortcuts that I didn’t even know about,” Conner said. “He’s one of the smartest kids I’ve ever taught. He’s brilliant.” His success can all be traced back to Muleshoe, a small West Texas farm town on the South Plains — located 70 miles northwest of Lubbock, 30 miles east of the New Mexico border and nearly 400 miles southwest of Norman — where four Rileys have quarterbacked the high school team and everyone insists Lincoln can do anything.

Publication: The Oklahoman By: Darnell Mayberry, Anthony Slater

Excerpt from “New OKC Thunder coach Billy Donovan honed his game and made his name in the toughest of basketball environments” The Wheelchair Classic is an annual hoops tournament that brings together the best amateur basketball talent from around New York City, dividing teams up into the boroughs. After the Big East formed in 1979, basketball interest in the northeast spiked. The early ‘80s produced a golden age for high school point guards in NYC, meaning the 1983 Wheelchair event, the 10th annual, was a must-see edition. That graduating class had Dwayne “Pearl” Washington, the playground legend and soon-to-be Syracuse star, and future NBA starters Kenny Smith and Mark Jackson. But it was a sub 6-foot white kid from an affluent area of Long Island who stole the show in that showcase game. His name was Billy Donovan. “Oh, Billy went off,” said his high school teammate, Frank Williams. Donovan’s Queens team faced the Brooklyn squad led by Pearl Washington, the game’s headliner. Months earlier, Donovan battled Washington’s in a six-quarter high school scrimmage. Pearl had 82 points. “We pressed the whole game and he just weaved in and out,” Donovan said. “I learned a lot.” Donovan was a game-control point guard. Slick ball-handling was his greatest strength. Pearl was a wizard with the ball, his moves legendary. At the Wheelchair Classic, Donovan put his mental notes from the scrimmage to use. “I don’t think Pearl was ready for it,” Williams laughed.

Publication: THe Topeka Capital-Journal By: Jesse Newell

Excerpt from “Portrait of toughness” LAWRENCE — The workout is just a few minutes old when a scream halts play in the Kansas practice gym. A scowl on his face and anger in his voice, Bill Self storms toward one of his players. “Cheick,” he yells, “the least you can do is play hard!” Cheick Diallo might only be a 19-year-old freshman forward, but that means nothing to Self. The Kansas coach is not going to let one of his best players slide. The message immediately is received. On the next possession, Diallo outhustles a teammate for a defensive rebound, gets the ball to a guard, races down the floor, then catches a pass and finishes with a dunk in transition. The display of ferocity isn’t something Self hopes for. It’s what he expects. The coach, who officially began 30 years ago as an assistant for Larry Brown at KU, has built a career preaching the same message to his players. Shots may go in. They may not. But one thing you can always control is your effort. And also your frame of mind. It doesn’t take much time around Self to realize what he believes is most important. The picture he is most proud of in his office features Darnell Jackson and Darrell Arthur diving for a loose ball in the Final Four against North Carolina, their bodies parallel to the floor. Go to Self’s practices, and you immediately notice there are no fouls called and no out-of-bounds lines, leaving players tumbling against walls and chairs as they chase down rebounds.

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Sports Column Winner Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Dirk Chatelain Judges’ Comments: Well reported. Cleanly written. Detailed. What columns ought to be.

Excerpt from “Nebraska’s Mike Riley has complimentary breakfast, but still no place to call home” LINCOLN — At 6:18 a.m., the longest-tenured guest at Embassy Suites steps out of his room and into the red carpeted hallway. He turns left for the elevators, where the middle door opens, and drops to the atrium. He passes the fake trees and stops at the omelet station, where a man in a chef’s hat stands. “Hey John.” “Good morning, how ya doing?” “Good. ... Over-medium.” He grabs a tray and fills his cup with ice and raspberry juice, finds a table near one of the fountains and sheds his backpack. Behind him, three glass elevators are marked with “Go” and “Big,” and “Red.” He’s in black and gray, wearing a T-shirt he bought in Texas hill country: “Gary P. Nunn and The Bunkhouse Band.” Outside this hotel, across Lincoln and hundreds of miles beyond, strangers dissect his fickle offense and his porous defense. They wrestle with Nebraska’s first 1-2 start in 34 years. But here at Embassy Suites, the fountains are always splashing, the breakfast is always hot. Eggs are ready. Mike Riley walks to the breakfast bar and adds bacon and potatoes, covers them in ketchup and splashes them with Tabasco. The usual. “Hey Tiff, how are ya?” “Good,” says the breakfast supervisor. “You guys got a quiet day today, huh?” “I know, it’s supposed to be 100 percent, but I don’t think it’s gonna hit that.” “One hundred percent full? Doesn’t feel like it.” Sometimes the omelet line is backed up to the lobby, Riley says. On this Tuesday morning, only three guests dot the dining area. He returns to his seat and digs in, a self-described “creature of habit” living a routine he never intended.

When Riley left the peace and tranquility of Corvallis, Oregon, he called Nebraska an adventure. Nine months and three games into his first year, he’s still playing the part of a traveling businessman. The Embassy Suites is a relocation headquarters for new Husker coaches. Riley checked in when he got the job last December. His wife, Dee, began hunting for a house almost immediately. It wasn’t easy. She has a chemical sensitivity to certain paints, varnishes and other materials. Throughout the winter and spring, she spent days touring Lincoln homes, seeking a place that didn’t make her sick. Meanwhile, she bounced back and forth from the Riley home in Corvallis, where their daughter, Kate, and grandson, Eli, still live. January turned to March, which turned to May. The other coaches found houses and moved out. Every time Riley was out of town for an extended period, he checked out of the hotel. But he always returned. When he came back from vacation in July, he moved into his current room on the third floor. That’s about the time the Rileys found a house. Closing was three days

before the season opener. One problem: their furniture wasn’t there yet. So when Dee and the kids traveled to Lincoln for the season opener, they checked into the Embassy Suites, too. The hotel is a Husker hub on game weekends. As Riley put the finishing touches on his first game plan, his family attended the Friday night pep rally in the atrium. They listened to the alumni band’s rendition of “Hail Varsity.” They felt “Go Big Red” chants bounce off the walls. Even Herbie was here, Riley says. On Saturday, Dee and the kids watched from Riley’s sixth-floor suite. Nebraska fell behind 24-14, then rallied to take the lead. One more play and they could celebrate. Then BYU completed a Hail Mary. “Heartbreaker,” Dee said. That night, Riley’s personal assistant and the Embassy Suites general manager teamed up to get Coach to his room without attracting a crowd. Embassy is a hard place to hide with its open atrium and glass elevators, especially on game nights when it’s wall-to-wall red. But the hotel staff often hosts VIPs; they know the drill.

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Sports Column Finalists Publication: The Oklahoman By: Jenni Carlson

Publication: The Oklahoman By: Berry Tramel

Excerpt from “Baker Mayfield and Baillie Burmaster: Love Bedlam style”

Excerpt from “Why Oklahoma’s football team is the wrong messenger in the protest against a racist fraternity video”

STILLWATER — Baillie Burmaster is sure of three things where Bedlam is concerned. She’ll be sitting near midfield Saturday night at Boone Pickens Stadium, she’ll be pulling for her boyfriend, Oklahoma quarterback Baker Mayfield, and she’ll be wearing orange. Yes, orange. “Believe me, I am loyal and true,” she said using a popular phrase from Oklahoma State’s alma mater. “I am loyal and true, OK?” But during a week when this grand rivalry puts at odds husbands and wives, priests and parishioners, teachers and students, there is no stickier situation than the Sooner quarterback dating a lifelong Cowboy fan. It’s not like I’m playing against her, but she’s been a Cowboy all her life,” Baker said. “Now, she’s dating the quarterback at the rival school, so it’s kind of a moral conflict for her.” Baillie said, “I’m going to be wearing orange, but Baker for Heisman.” This is love, Bedlam style. Both have lifelong allegiances to their school, both have family who are alums of their university, and both have played for the college that they love. So, how did this happen? Baillie and Baker met last fall. A tough, physical defender on the OSU women’s soccer team, she had played her final game of her senior season, and she needed some time away. Get out of Stillwater. Decompress a bit. So, she decided to spend a weekend in Norman. Baillie had become friends with Cowboy receiver Austin Hays, who is a close buddy of former school teammate and current Sooner quarterback Trevor Knight. She told Knight that she’d be in town the weekend of the Kansas State game, and they decided to hang out. That’s when Baillie met Baker. They talked. They exchanged numbers. But Baillie had her doubts. “This is going nowhere,” she thought. For several weeks, she didn’t hear from him. But then over Thanksgiving break, he texted her. He was back home in Austin, and since her parents moved there a few years ago, he wondered if she was around. She ended up still being in Tulsa, so that was that. They didn’t talk again until Christmas break. Baker was in Austin again, so he texted Baillie. “Where do you live in Austin?” he asked.

The Sooner football team skipped practice twice last week, both times to demonstrate against the racist video that came from the Sigma Alpha Epsilon party bus. You can understand the players’ outrage. Football is the most high-profile brand on campus. More than half the team is made up of young black men. And yet here comes a bigoted chant clearly rooted in and produced by members of an organization certified by the university. It’s a wonder the football team was so composed. It’s a wonder their anger didn’t spill into the streets. You’d think Eric Striker’s profanity-laced response would be the norm, not the exception. “First and foremost, we want to bring awareness to a nationwide issue of racism and discrimination on college campuses,” OU center Ty Darlington said Thursday while giving an opening statement for the team leaders who met with the media. Right message. Wrong messengers. Despite their obvious stake in the topic of campus racism, the Sooners have little room to stage campus protests or present themselves as an aggrieved party. Racism is horrible. So is violence against women. And OU football has been associated with the latter a little much in recent months for the Sooners to claim some kind of high road. Joe Mixon slugging the coed in Pickleman’s Café on Campus Corner. Frank Shannon being suspended from school after a Title IX sexual assault investigation. Dorial Green-Beckham being handed a scholarship after being dismissed from Missouri after being accused of physically assaulting two women. I am not prioritizing the sins. Racism is horrible. So is violence against women. I’ll let the angels sort out which is worse. I’m not here to even argue that Joe Mixon’s crime is worse than the SAE video. Legal minds debated for weeks whether Mixon should be charged with a felony or not charged at all, since Amelia Molitor pushed him first after Mixon uttered a homophobic slur. District attorney made like Solomon and charged Mixon with a misdemeanor. But I am here to say that the football team’s new act as OU’s campus consciousness falls short of legitimate. Where were the protests when violence struck their fellow female students, some at the hands of teammates?

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Review Winner Publication: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette By: Phillip Martin Judges’ Comments: Wide knowledge of literature past and present contribute to insightful critiques enhanced by lively writing.

“Bones author Marlowe: Underdog with feral voice” There’s a fairy tale that we like to believe about how cream always rises to the top and talent always will out. But that’s not true; there are all sorts of things that contribute to whethersomething gets noticed. The son of the boss has a better chance of being boss than the kidaging out of the foster care system, and it seems probable that our next president will be onewho has already spent considerable time in the White House. I’ll admit I give more attention to the boxes from Knopf, Pantheon or Algonquin than I do thehandaddressed envelopes that cross my desk. There are a lot of slim little paperbacks thatnever get read because I feel obligated to check out the newest Judy Blume or Paulo Coelho. And no, it’s not fair, but time is a nonrenewable resource and they’re not giving out gold starsfor working late these days. So it’s easier to do what most everyone else does, and completelydefensible too. I can’t do anything about the bestseller lists any more than I can make theGrammys smarter. It’s for purely selfish reasons that I pick up a book like Dale Marlowe’s Digging Up the Bones (Roundabout Press, $15.95). I just do it to make myself feel better, to pretend that I at leastgive the underdog a shot. It shows up unsolicited from a fairly new press I don’t know muchabout. I think maybe I’ll read the first chapter just to reassure myself that it’s ordinary enoughto skip. I don’t have to pan it, I don’t have to step on some aspiring

novelist’s neck - I can justpass on it. But I couldn’t pass on Digging Up the Bones and I couldn’t put it down. I don’t want to say it’sthe best book I’ve read all year because I always suspect that kind of hyperbole; after all, I’veonly read a tiny fraction of what’s available anyway. Still, it’s the best book I’ve read all year. It’s a brief (128 pages) suite of connected stories about cursed members of the meth trashNash family, originally of Ebb Holler, Ky., that take place over the course of a few decades,from 1969 to 2003. In these stories we meet all manner of scarred and stunted folks, fromwould-be presidential assassins to disillusioned white supremacists. They are all fantasticcreatures, yet they seem very much like people I have known, or might have known. Or mighthave been. But more importantly than these characters or what happens to them is the author’s voice - a ferocious, low-tothe-ground animal with yellow eyes. The easy reference points are Daniel Woodrell (Winter’s Bone) and Larry Brown, but there’s an economical mania to Marlowe’s prose that occasionally puts me in mind of Denis Johnson (The Laughing Monsters: A Novel): Lies and false reasons and makebelieve swirl around him like dithering leaves. Kyle decides he will not allow them to settle or pile up and cover this day, these truths, that kiss, not again,nevermore. He pounds the roof of his Pontiac with the side of his fist, and it rumbles like a timpani. He raises

his head to the light. No sense in fighting it. He will go back and knock onMarion’s door. When it opens he will enter, and once inside, he will stay. That paragraph is the end of a story, but it can stand as a story itself, a clot of clocked words,all rhythm and echoes, a resolving chord. Marlowe’s voice snarls and snaps - he can unwind it into a feral howl. It’s not always pretty music, but it’s surprisingly tight. It is as disciplined as it is dark. There’s a precision to his licks, and a stubborn insistence on the residual humanity of even the most thwarted and beaten down. It’s almost always a mistake to confuse an artist with his work. I’ve stalked Marlowe on the Internet and satisfied myself he’s not some backwoods wizard transcribing his hallucinations, but a reasonably comfortably fixed family dude living near Dayton, Ohio. He teaches at a community college and practices law. He’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. Pays his taxes. Quiet and normal as a serial killer. I didn’t expect that. But then I didn’t expect this. Don’t ask me to lend you my copy of Digging Up the Bones. I’ve already pressed it into the hands of a friend with the assurance that it’s the genuine article, the good stuff, the work of an original and fierce intelligence to which attention must be paid. I hope he sells a few books. I hope he writes a few more.

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Review Finalists Publication: The Oklahoman By: Brandy McDonnell

Excerpt from “Miranda Lambert fires up Chesapeake Energy Arena, with a little help from Blake Shelton” Miranda Lambert didn’t need any help firing up the sold-out home-state crowd Friday night at Chesapeake Energy Arena. But the pistol of a performer, who has called Oklahoma home for the past eight years, brought along extra ammunition anyway: her fellow superstar spouse Blake Shelton. “I don’t usually do two acoustic songs in the middle of my set, but I think I should tonight – because I brought my husband with me,” Lambert said to set up his surprise appearance. That casual declaration set off a sonic bombshell, instantly cranking the crowd noise from deafening to ear-splitting as the other half of the Tishomingo-based country music power couple took the stage. “Hello, Oklahoma,” Shelton drawled, inciting the audience to literally painful levels of shrieking joy as the Ada native strolled onto the stage in a bright red shirt and his usual jeans. “I wanted to do this song tonight because Miranda is the reason I recorded this song.” Perched on stools at center stage, Shelton and Lambert turned his hit ballad “God Gave Me You” into a lovely, unabashedly romantic duet as the fans blissfully sang backup. The couple, who celebrates its fourth wedding anniversary in May, smiled sweetly at each other as her stellar band lingered over the last notes. Shelton dropped an affectionate kiss atop his wife’s short blond hair before taking his leave of the ecstatic crowd.

Publication: Tulsa World By: Jerry Wofford

Publication: The Tulsa Voice By: Joe O’Shansky

Excerpt from “Nickelback at the BOK Center is ‘endurance challenge’”

Excerpt from “The Hateful Eight”

I never really thought Nickelback deserved all the hate and bad jokes thrown its way. Yeah, its songs can be generic and underwhelming, especially some of its earlier work. But I guarantee you know at least some of the words to “Photograph.” After seeing the band play the BOK Center on Tuesday night, I take it back. It was an hour and 50 minutelong endurance challenge, an assault that left me battered. But I was definitely in the minority at the show. The upper bowl was closed off, and the lower and floor sections were full of excited fans. They came to party, and Nickelback delivered. One time, it delivered that excitement with T-shirt cannons and by throwing cups of beer into the crowd. That actually was the point it lost me. If you need a T-shirt cannon to pump up your show, it’s time to really examine how things have gone. With 50 million albums sold worldwide, it’s impossible to deny that Nickelback is a remarkably successful band. Even with its most recent album, “No Fixed Address,” the band continues to give fans the industrial, hard rock they want. It found what works, and its fans love it. No fault there. The band members don’t take themselves too seriously, and they love to have fun. That energy on stage was reflected in the audience, hard-drinking, rock fist-flying folks singing along. It’s easy to get caught up in it. But the set was confusing, and the music was underwhelming. Lead singer Chad Kroeger has one of the most distinct voices in the genre, instantly recognizable with its deep, raspy tone.

Finally, a Quentin Tarantino film that isn’t a revenge fable. The controversial but oft-lauded writer/director’s previous four films are all about some form of vengeance. There’s the lone warrior woman out to kill a guy named Bill (“Kill Bill”), and the group of girlfriends bent on emasculating a serial killer armed with a deadly muscle car (“Death Proof”). In “Inglourious Basterds,” Tarantino seeks payback on behalf of the entire Jewish race; most recently, in “Django Unchained,” he followed a freed slave-turned-righteous hero in the antebellum South, on a mission to kick some cracker ass and save his woman. The genres were different, but the theme remained the same. There’s no doubt he grew as a filmmaker over the course of the last four movies, even if, as a stylist, he continued to crawl further up his own ass. These movies were exciting in ever more absurdist ways, yet began to feel a little shopworn as the work became suffused with the hubristic confidence of a filmmaker too obviously pleased with himself. Which brings us to “The Hateful Eight.” Tarantino has largely abandoned the navel-gazing indulgence of his recent output to give us his most disciplined, accomplished film since 1997’s “Jackie Brown.” Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) is an ex-slave who rose through the ranks of the Union army before becoming an infamous bounty hunter. He’s on the road to Red Rock, Wyoming, hauling the bodies of three dead men. Lacking a horse, he hitches a ride with John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell), another bounty hunter escorting the vicious outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to her date with a rope.

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Food Winner Publication: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette By: Kelly Brant, Celia Storey Judges’ Comments: Lovely, evocative writing, especially the article on pecans. Interesting subject matter (bean liquid to make meringue — who knew?)

Excerpt from “Heaven in a nutshell”

A pecan tree stands just on the other side of the fence on the southwest side of the house. Its tall canopy of branches is ample enough to shade two houses. In the summer squirrels scurry from bough to branch plucking the nuts from their clusters and tearing into the green fleshy coating, cracking the shell and gobbling up the meat inside. The remains are fervently discarded, hitting the roof in thuds and crashes. During pecan season, one does not sleep late in a second-story bedroom under such a tree. And one never walks barefoot in the side-yards between nearby houses. In the fall, the clusters that are not pillaged by the squirrels eventually ripen, their green husks turning to brown and opening, releasing the meaty nuts

that will fall to the ground, either on their own or with a nudge from a pole. It’s backbreaking work, stooping and gathering the nuts by hand, but there is something quite satisfying about eating a pecan that grew in your own (or nextdoor neighbor’s) yard. A smart gatherer with productive trees might invest in a pecan picker-upper — a wire basket with a handle that picks up the nuts (and the occasional rock) as it is rolled across the ground. For the rest of us, farmers markets and grocery stores brim with bins of nuts in their shells or, for a price, bags of pristine, shelled pecan halves just waiting to be eaten. The pecan is currently the only major nut tree native to North America, according to the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

The black walnut, though indeed native, is not considered a “major” crop, with just 25 million pounds harvested per year, compared with more than 300 million pounds of pecans. The American chestnut was all but wiped out by fungus in the early 20th century. The majority of U.S.-grown chestnuts are from Chinese-American hybrids. Acorns, produced by oak trees, are generally not considered people food. Pecans were a seasonal staple of the American Indian diet, and the name comes from the Algonquin word “pakan” or “paccan.” Pecans are most commonly associated with pie and pralines, but the native nut adds flavor and crunch to a variety of foods, sweet and savory.

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Food Finalists Publication: St. Louis Post-Dispatch By: Daniel Neman

Publication: The Oklahoman By: David Cathey

Excerpt from “Without loafing, you can make bread in one hour”

Excerpt from “Open Flame: Oklahoma City chefs fire up grills for fall”

I had an hour for lunch, so I baked a loaf of bread. Let me rephrase that: I just baked a loaf of bread in one hour. I don’t mean that it was in the oven for an hour. I don’t mean that I allowed the dough to rise for an hour. I mean that I just made a loaf of bread, from start to finish, in exactly 60 minutes. The recipe has been bouncing around the Internet lately. I had been holding off on trying to make it for several reasons. One is that the name given to it, or at least the name I saw, is “Easy-Peesy French Bread,” which offended my senses in many ways, only one of which is that it should be spelled “peasy” if it is going to be spelled at all, which it should not. Another is that it is not even remotely French bread. It would not be French bread if a French person made it in France while singing “La Marseillaise” and shouting “Vive la France!” Also, the image that accompanies the recipe says “4 ingredients. 1 hour, start to finish. Fool proof.” This gave me pause, because I counted all of the ingredients (water, yeast, honey, salt, flour) and I’m pretty sure that adds up to five. But the biggest reason I have avoided trying this recipe is that it takes an hour to make. That means very little time for kneading, little time for the first rise, no time at all for the second rise and not much time for baking. In other words, it doesn’t have enough time for bread to do what it has to do to become bread. On the other hand, it only takes an hour to make. What could I lose? So I set a timer for 1 hour and began. The recipe is easy to make, as befits a recipe that cooks in an hour and only has four (or four-ish) ingredients. Simply mix together yeast, honey and warm water, and allow the yeast to bloom for about 10 minutes. Add flour and salt, and stir. Knead and add more flour as necessary to make a smooth, non-sticky dough. Shape into a loaf and allow the dough to rise for just as long as it takes your oven to reach 425 degrees. Bake. That’s all. But how is it? Well, let’s say I’ve made better bread. But I’ve certainly never made faster bread. This bread has a nice, soft crumb, a soft crust and kind of a soft flavor. More than anything, it reminds me of the white bread made by Pepperidge Farm, which is quite good for what it is. There is nothing to startle you in this bread, nothing sour or sharp-flavored, nothing that picky eaters could object to. It makes a superb conveyance for butter and would be even better with peanut butter and jelly. And it is absolutely terrific for toast.

After taking the summer off to avoid heat that barely flickered, the return of Open Flame came on a gorgeous October evening for three of Oklahoma City’s most gifted chefs. For the event, I challenged chefs Josh Partain of Rococo, Henry Boudreaux of The Museum Cafe and David Henry of The Coach House to take standard grill items into composed, gourmet dishes. They did. But first, Alyson Fendrick of Homeland dazzled the crowd with a super-simple, extraordinarily delicious salad. Cheesemonger Dwight Darrow set up his usual spread of extraordinary cheeses. Meanwhile, I prepared some double-smoked bologna sliders for guests as they arrived. I rolled tubs of old-fashioned Schwab’s bologna in olive oil, added salt and pepper then popped them in my trusty HastyBake outdoor oven, which was burning pecan logs at 250 degrees. After 45 minutes, they were ready to pull. I let them rest until cool, then sliced them in slider-sized portions. Just before guests arrive, I spread the thick bologna slices to a Primo Kamado cooker, putting off pecan smoke at about 220 degrees, to help impart smokiness more thoroughly. Bologna, being a processed meat, is much more dense than typical smoking meats. If you don’t want to double-smoke the bologna, you can score the tub, but don’t expect the smoky flavor to be as balanced. Sliders were served in two ways. First, we spread slider buns from Homeland with Seikel’s Oklahoma Gold Mustard. The second was a play on the classic Oklahoma Theta burger, which was on the same bun but with a homemade Hickory Sauce, a dab of mayonnaise, sliced pickles and sliced shallots. Once guests were seated, saladed and partially satiated with bologna and cheese, chef Henry served his version of gyros. Instead of a fire-kissed processed lamb tub, he slow-cooked legs of lamb and sliced them thin into his version of flatbread and topped with his play on classic Greek Tzatziki sauce. Henry is keeping plenty busy celebrating 30 years at The Coach House. In fact, he will turn the keys to the kitchen over to his boss Kurt Fleischfresser for a special dinner at 6:30 p.m. Thursday. (Call 604-3015 for reservations.) Next up was Boudreaux, drawing inspiration from his grandfather, whom he says is such an avid fisherman he has a line in the water daily. Boudreaux said fish fries are his family’s default celebratory food.

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 73

Entertainment Feature Winner Publication: Tulsa World By: Michael Smith Judges’ Comments: Deftly handled — a seamless blend recounting the charming subject’s story, Hollywood history and the atmosphere of the WWII and early 1950s eras. Truly engaging.

Excerpt from “Star qualities” If you live in Tulsa, you may know the name Peggy Helmerich. Perhaps you’ve made a visit to the Peggy V. Helmerich Women’s Health Center at one of Hillcrest’s hospitals. Maybe you’ve read about the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author’s Award through the Tulsa Library Trust. Or visited the Peggy V. Helmerich Library on 91st Street. She has become that much a part of the fabric of Tulsa, which has benefited greatly from her philanthropy of more than 60 years. She and her late husband, Walter Helmerich III, the longtime chairman of Helmerich & Payne who died in 2012, made a point of donating money to Tulsa institutions — and she’s raised much more through her work with many nonprofits in the city. But did you know that Peggy Helmerich was a Hollywood movie star before she became one of Tulsa’s brightest stars? Do you know the name Peggy Dow? Those who do can probably tell you that Peggy Dow played the pretty nurse in the Hollywood comedy classic “Harvey,” starring opposite Jimmy Stewart. But even they might not be able to name her other films, despite her appearing in eight films released in 195051, three of which were nominated for Academy Awards and in which she was billed among the top four cast members each time. Peggy Dow was being groomed for big things in Hollywood. A Southern belle and a classic beauty, she was signed to a seven-year contract with Universal Pictures. Peggy Dow was on the cover of Life Magazine. She presented legendary costume designer Edith Head with her first of eight Oscars at the 1950 Academy Awards ceremony. She was, at age 23, the very definition of a rising star.

And then she fell in love with and married Walter Helmerich III and moved to Tulsa, stunning most everyone in Hollywood, including columnists like her friend Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, who wrote of Peggy Dow returning to the film set soon after the wedding. But Peggy Dow was now Peggy Helmerich. “I was very happy with my career. I was having a great time, and he was messing me up,” Helmerich said with a chuckle thinking back to that time. “But I loved him,” she said about her marriage of more than 60 years to the Tulsa oilman and father of their five sons. Helmerich has rarely spoken extensively about her Hollywood career, but she did so recently over lunch at a restaurant at Utica Square, the shopping center that Helmerich & Payne purchased in 1964. She will do so again on Tuesday at Circle Cinema — her 1951 film “Bright Victory” is screening twice that day as a benefit for the theater. She will speak about making movies during the “golden age” of Hollywood and will

answer audience questions. “I love what they do at Circle Cinema, and Clark (Wiens, co-founder of the theater’s foundation) has asked me to help with a few things,” Helmerich said. “They even put my name on their ‘Walk of Fame’ sidewalk, and that was the sweetest thing.” ‘That was my war’ The screenings come a few days before the Tulsa Library Trust’s presentation of the annual Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award on Saturday, Dec. 5. This year’s recipient is Rick Atkinson, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and military historian who has written extensively about World War II. “Bright Victory” is a WWII drama in which Helmerich starred opposite Oscar-nominee Arthur Kennedy, who played a soldier blinded by sniper fire in North Africa and who returns home and struggles to adjust to losing his sight. Dow plays a woman who befriends and falls in love with Kennedy’s character in the town where the U.S. Army General Hospital is located.

74 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Entertainment Feature Finalists Publication: St. Louis Post-Dispatch By: Judith Newmark

Publication: The Tulsa Voice By: Mitch Gilliam

Excerpt from “A princess is a wonderful thing to be”

Excerpt from “Cult of personality”

Call a man “a prince,” and it’s a terrific compliment. The title implies lithe good looks, gallantry, the bold elan of the youthful charmer everybody loves. But in our everyday speech, “princess” is far from a parallel. The woman called a princess is young, that’s true. But she’s also high-maintenance, spoiled and self-centered. Make her a Jewish-American Princess, the phrase that reintoduced the word to ordinary parlance, and it’s offensive to boot. Could the problem be the suffix? “Ess,” after all, has virtually disappeared from our language. Nobody calls Maya Angelou a “poetess” or Joyce Carol Oates an “authoress,” and “actress” is rapidly giving way to “actor” for performers of either sex. Maybe “princess” deserves the same fate. Would it strike a blow for equality if Kate Middleton and her husband were both called the “Prince of Wales”? No, it would not, and here’s why: A princess is still a wonderful thing to be — in the world of fairy tales. And that world matters, too. One of the most esteemed princesses comes to the Fox Theatre on Tuesday, when the tour of the Broadway hit “Cinderella” opens there. Prefer something more traditional? On Jan. 24, the famed Russian National Ballet will perform the story — told with music by Sergei Prokofiev and choreography by Rostislav Zakharov — at the J. Scheidegger Center for the Arts in St. Charles. The show at the Fox is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” not Disney’s 1950 animated version. A new Disney live-action “Cinderella” opens in theaters in March. The R&H “Cinderella” debuted on CBS in 1957 (just two years after “Peter Pan” proved there was a huge family audience for TV musicals) and was remade twice after that (starring Julie Andrews, Lesley Ann Warren and Brandy, respectively). That R&H show is a favorite in St. Louis, where it’s played the Muny six times. On Broadway, they kept the best songs from the original and added some others from the vast R&H catalog. Just as important, this production has a fresh script by Douglas Carter Beane (“As Bees in Honey Drown,” “The Little Dog Laughed,” “The Nance”) in which, among other things, Cinderella opens the prince’s eyes to inequities in his kingdom.

Johnny Polygon is a micro-manager. The emcee met my request for an interview by asking for this issue’s cover. He then asked to move this article back to promote an upcoming show of his; asked to postpone his photo shoot so he could “cop some freshness,” (not liking the results of this first rescheduled shoot, he asked for a do-over) and after his excellent interview was conducted (during which I asked all of ten questions over an hour and a half; he’s a verbose micro-manager) he requested a second chat. Ever the salesman, Polygon had more to say about his product. Since what he’s hauling door to door is Johnny Polygon, this vice grip on his image is simple business acumen. A one-time collaborator with Nas and Kid Cudi, Polygon fired his label in 2010. The move has only proved beneficial. “The music industry never chewed me up and spit me out,” Polygon said. “But I just didn’t like not being in control of my life.” The label’s marketing, Polygon said, was a blind shotgun blast. They simply shot and hoped something hit. Now, Johnny is half a decade into his ultra-targeted approach. “People don’t really buy music anymore, but they support their favorite musician,” he said. “So now the hunt and mission is to become people’s favorite fucking artist.” For members of his “Johntourage,” Polygon may already be their favorite fucking artist. The group is a subscription-based VIP list, where fans fund Polygon’s records and tours while receiving special perks and updates. “The way you treat your fans; the people that give a shit about what you’re doing, that’s the most important part of the music world. Period.” Receiving album funding directly from his fans (he’s known to say “my fans are my label,”) lends him a coveted artistic license. His content is influenced only by his vision, and albums are only released when he feels they’re ready. Those moving target release dates could be headaches for some, but Polygon makes sure to treat his “label” right. The march up to his latest album, I Love You, Goodnight, was fraught with missed deadlines. The patience of his Johntourage was rewarded though, when the unannounced Water Damage EP was released exclusively to them. Eventually released this past October, I Love You, Goodnight was clearly made by a man who answers only to his fans. Fortunately, those fans just ask that Polygon be Polygon.

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 75

STYLE

Matt Parrott focuses on a type of training that makes everyday life easier.

PAGE 6E

Specialty Feature Winner

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2015

ARKANSAS ONLINE www.arkansasonline.com

Publication: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette WELLNESS By: Cheree Franco, John Sykes Jr., Nikki Dawes

Comfort in clutter?

Judges’ Comments: A sensitive subject nicely handled.

Excerpt from “Help for hoarders” SEARCY — The front yard hosts a few cars, a no-trespassing sign, a porcelain toilet lying on its side, a tangle of scrap wood, unidentifiable mechanical Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/NIKKI DAWES bits and several cats who broadcast their relation via halfbobbed tails. Melinda LaFevers, 56, stalls near the closed door, making nervous small talk — the cats, the weather, the poisonous encounters her son has survived (his arm still bears rattlesnake fang marks), the plethora of brown recluse spiders CELIA STOREY ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE inside. Researchers studying how Finally shebacteria gulps and says, “OK, you move through buildings have found evidence that we are all ready?” and opens Pigpen. the door. Like the little boy in the Peanuts To the left,cartoon, the office is un-navigable, a new study finds, humans travel about inside personal clouds but a narrow ofpath leads ahead, our own creation. But whileweavPigpen’s was an obvious brown aura ing through the living room’s haphazof dust from dirt, these real-world are mostly invisible and full ardly stackedclouds ofboxes microbes.and floor-to-ceiling People exhale bacteria and books, past a other TV,microbes an empty water cooler and shake our skin and scalp cells and a old TV microbe-laden tray bearing cleaning into the air. Bacteria ride lint as it drifts off our clothing. supplies. Like Pigpen, every move we make stirs up whatever live or There is a makeshift sitting —a dead bacteria, dust, lint, hair area and other human debris happens to be tiny wooden Sunday School chair and lying around us. What’s more, researchers say, a stool — wedged among the piles on these invisible clouds can amount to a bioaerosol signature — traceeach side of the path, and LaFevers has able, under the right conditions, to specific people. the musk of lighted candles to cover Writing in the Sept. 22 edition of the journal a research mold. (Sometimes thePeerJ, living room and team from the University of Oregon at Eugene describes exkitchen flood.) periments involving just the right conditions: scantily clad people The path winds on, around the sitting quietly alone in a sanitized, climate-controlled chamber. Eleven cling island in the kitchen, where plants such people were found to emit clouds to a window, detectable bottlesmicrobial crowd theinto tops of surrounding indoor air. a genetic analysis that food appliances and Using boxes of packaged looked for 12 species of bacteria, researchers foundsurface. that test (some empty)thecover every Plassubjects also dropped around them different,dangle personal assortments of tic shopping bags from chairs, microbes. The researchers cabinets and handles, andobserved piles of how quickly heavier bacteria and particleson settled dishes jumblebacteria-laden on the floor, the counonto petri dishes set on the surtheir sedentary test ters and atop faces thearound washer and dryer. subjects. And they saw that other The bathroom isremained usablesuspended (“Notina microbes the air until they fetched up against hoarder’s bathroom,” something theyLaFevers stuck to — air profilters. claims, parroting a professional cleanup “Bacterial clouds from the occupants were statistically distinct,” service that once assessed home), the researchers write,her “allowing the identification of some individual with a clean sink and toilet. But the occupants.” The study, “Humans Differ in door doesn’t move, lodged halfway Their Personal Microbial Cloud,” can be downloaded free online at open by piles of clothes, magazines and See MICROBES containers of half-used toiletries and on Page 3E blocked at the top by draped towels. A few weeks ago, a friend helped LaFevers replace the wiring in her water pump, restoring running water to

Could a cloud of microbes be good?

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR.

clinical worker inshe Rogers who house firstintime in oftwo years. her Melinda LaFevers for sits bythe her laptop the kitchen her home in Searcy. In an effort tosocial understand her hoarding, blogs, posts on Facebook and has published a book, Meditations of a Hoarder (Just Cause, 2015). specializes in hoarding disorder. While her pipes were dry, she showEditor's note: This is the first itations of a Hoarder, available “Hoarding is a very complex disered at her of two articles on father’s hoarding. house. for $8 from the Yard Dog Press For expert advice on clearing a imprint Just Cause. order, in that it can come from a LaFevers isStyle unique in that she house, see Saturday's sec“Hoarding is thelot emotional, tion, Page 1E. problem that nobody of different triggers,”mental sheabout,” says. publicly acknowledges hoarding and talks she“A says.lot “Most CHEREE FRANCO people are so embarrassed, so ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE of times it’s triggered by something details her sporadic efforts to declutter guilty.” SEARCY — The front yard A 2008 Johns Hopkins UnihostsFacebook a few cars, a no-trespasstraumatic, a loss, someone hassuggests passed on and a blog (hoardinglife. versity study that 4 ing sign, a porcelain toilet lying percent of the population could on its side, a tangle of scrapShe has even written a away. … We used to think it was some wordpress.com). be hoarders (in the United wood, unidentifiable mechanStates, nearly 13 million peoical bits and several cats who of a Hoarder, availsort of obsessive-compulsive disorder, book, Meditations ple), while a 2002 National broadcast their relation via halfInstitutes of Health study found bobbedfor tails.$8 from the Yard Dog Press but we’re finding it’s really not.” able that women are twice as likely Melinda LaFevers, 56, stalls to hoard as men. A 1993 NIH near the closed door,Cause. making When the American Psychiatric imprint Just study found that 78 percent of nervous small talk — the cats, hoarders have anthe immediate the weather, the poisonous en- emotional, mental Association’s official family reference, “Hoarding is the member who hoards, counters her son has survived and a 2015 NIH studyof found (his arm still bears Diagnostic and Statistical Manual problem thatrattlesnake nobody talks about,” she that symptoms may appear as fang marks), the plethora of early as age 10, with a 2013, median brown recluse spiders inside. are so embarrassed, Mental Disorders, was updated in says. “Most people Finally she gulps and says, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR. onset between ages 20 and 30. Sheila Jo Kornblum is a li“OK,guilty.” you ready?” and opens the Hoarders turned down Melinda LaFevers hoarding was added as a stand-alone so when she applied for the ca- censed clinical social worker door. ble TV show because she did not have minor children at home and in Rogers whofor specializes ToAthe left, theJohns office is Hopkins disorder. But Kornblum says manyin 2008 was notUniversity in a crisis. hoarding disorder. un-navigable, but a narrow path “Hoarding is compoa very complex crowd the of applileads ahead, weaving through ers of half-used toiletries andalso includes people, hoarding study suggests that 4 tles percent oftops the disorder, in that it can come ances and boxes of packaged the living room’s haphazardly blocked at the top by draped from ahyperactivity lot of different triggers,” food (some empty) cover every towels. nents of attention deficit population be hoarders (in the stacked boxes and could floor-to-ceilshe says. “A lot of times it’s trigsurface. Plastic shopping bags ing books, past a TV, an empty A few weeks ago, a friend gered by something traumatic, dangle from chairs, cabinets disorder, and anxiety. United million people), water coolerStates, and a old nearly TV tray 13 helped LaFeversdepression replace the a loss, someone has passed and handles, and piles of dishbearing cleaning supplies. wiring in her water pump, reaway. … We used think it was “When you’re it’stoharder while National esInstitutes jumble on the of floor, on the There a is a2002 makeshift sitting storing running water to her depressed, some sort of obsessive-compulcounters and atop the washer area — a tiny wooden Sunhouse for the first time in two sivetake disorder, but we’reto finding to motivate yourself to things Health that women are and dryer. day School study chair and afound stool years. While her pipes were it’s really not.” The bathroom is usable — wedged among the piles dry, she showered at her faWhen the the house. curb. … Anxiety makes it American hard toPsytwice as oflikely hoard asa men. 1993 (“Not hoarder’sA bathroom,” on each side the path,to and ther’s chiatric Association’s official LaFevers proclaims, parroting LaFevers has lighted candles LaFevers is unique in that make decisions what the to Diagnostic throw and NIH percent of service she professional cleanup to coverstudy the muskfound of mold. thata 78 publicly acknowledgesaboutreference, Statistical Manual of Mental that once assessed her home), (Sometimes the living room hoarding and details her spoaway, and the ADHD can cause you hoarders have an immediate with a cleanfamily sink and toilet. and kitchen flood.) radic efforts to declutter on But the door doesn’t move, The path winds on, around Facebook and a blog (hoardSee HOARDING to get distracted member who hoards, and halfway a 2015 NIH open by piles of inglife.wordpress.com). the island in the kitchen, where lodged Sheand clean tiny bits clothes, magazines and contain- has even written a book, Medon Page 6E plants cling to a window, botin multiple areas, so that after a day’s study found that symptoms may apwork, it may look like you’ve done pear as early as age 10, with a median nothing,” she says.stirs disagreement onset between ages 20 and 30. Research Sheila Jo Kornblum is a licensed about chronic kidney disease

Yeast has promise as medical conduit

A hoarder knows she needs help — but when she is ready

ROXANNE KHAMSI er and more streamlined 76 / Read the full and winning photos at greatplainsawards.org THE NEW YORKstories TIMES way thanview traditional chem-

In August, researchers announced they had genetically engineered yeast to

ical synthesis. Using yeast also could shed light on the clinical usefulness of canna-

PAULA SPAN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Is it really possible that half of the population older than 70 has chronic kidney disease? International guidelines

specializes in treating older adults. “Patients worry about dialysis, because that’s what they associate with kidney disease.” Chronic kidney disease

Specialty Feature Finalists Publication: The Tulsa Voice By: Andy Wheeler

Publication: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette By: Kirk Montgomery, Ron Wolfe

Excerpt from “Better, not biger”

Excerpt from “SAVE Christmas”

The average size of a single family home in the U.S. has increased 50 percent since 1978, from 1,780 square feet to 2,662. Our nation has collectively eaten a lot of cheeseburgers, but surely not enough to necessitate that kind of expansion. Increased wealth and a culture of conspicuous consumption appear to be primary drivers. The backlash against building bigger gained some ground in 1997 with architect Sarah Susanka’s The Not So Big House, which extolled building better, not bigger, and a return to housing under 1,000 square feet. The economic collapse a decade later began with the subprime mortgage crisis, which made living smaller a necessity for many. The tiny house movement, building homes under 400 square feet, is becoming increasingly appealing for people looking for an alternative and more efficient lifestyle. Tulsans Cheyenne Butcher and Blake Peters had each been drawn to the idea before they met. Butcher is a local artist and photographer; Peters does commercial audio/visual installation. “We liked the concept of living small and minimal,” Butcher said. “And having something that you built yourself.” Searching online for inspiration to construct their tiny house, Peters found something else: a 2000 Blue Bird All American—a school bus—with 282,000 miles. “The bus is actually from Bixby Schools,” he said. “They received bond money to buy new buses, so they were getting rid of this one.” The mileage is low for a bus, and there’s 250-300 square feet of living space. The cost of their future home? “$2,500,” Peters chuckled. For them, preparing to downsize from their current 1,150-square-foot home was an easy decision. “We get sentimental attachments to things that aren’t necessary,” Butcher said. “You don’t need to use all the money; you don’t need to use all the electricity on daily consumption.” “You don’t really spend a lot of time in your house,” she said. “You sleep and you cook. We like camping and hiking. So really, wherever we go, that is our entertainment.” Making use of The School Bus Conversion Network (skoolie.net), a resource-sharing community of people working on similar projects, Butcher and Peters have found everything from basic conversion tutorials to tips for using alternative fuels like vegetable oil and biodiesel. They recently completed demolition on the bus, removing the seats, ceiling panels (a maddeningly grueling process, as anyone who follows them on Instagram has observed), insulation, flashers and stop signs.

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Special Section Winner Publication: St. Louis Post-Dispatch By: Staff Judges’ Comments: An in-depth look at a monumental project that engages the audience, provides quick tips, and has great design (graphics and photos) about the past and future of the arch.

The Arch turns 50

78 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Special Section Finalists Publication: Topeka Capital-Journal By: Staff

Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Staff

Publication: Tulsa World By: Staff

Volunteer Topeka

College Football Preview

College Football Preview august 23, 2015 • tulsaworld.com/cfb2015 • sECtION F

COVER WITH SPADEA

COVER WITH SPADEA OPEN

THE BEST YEAR YET!

SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 2015

•

SECTION ONE

e football seaso

THE 2015 colleg

COLLEGE FOOTBALL PREVIEW SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 2015

MIKE RILEY

One more adventure. One last

DEAR FANS:

YOU DON’T AtTO Oregon State, Mike Riley WANT MISS THIS! went home again, built a decent

shot at winning big in a program

program that everyone respected

— but no one particularly feared. A pleasant sort who most figured

SECTION ONE

STRAIGHT OUT OF WACO ...

THE FUTURE IN STIllWATER ...

THE AIR RAID EXPERT ...

THAN EVER!

went home again, built a decent program that everyone respected

•

NOW FEATURING ...

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE ...

BIG 12! decided to take one last leap. THE BETTER At Oregon State, Mike Riley

PREPARE TO BE AMAzED !

new & improved!

COLLEGE FOOTBALL PREVIEW

— but no one particularly feared.

that has all the resources to do it.

A pleasant sort who most figured

would retire in Corvallis, Riley

turned down many better jobs

More stakes. More pressure. More

so his Beaver teams could do

more with less — but not too much more. Which is what folks expected of him.

money. More staff. More media.

more with less — but not too

More players. Everything about

expected of him.

much more. Which is what folks

Nebraska is more than Oregon State. And Riley will have to recruit

lN lINCOY RIlE !

more, win more and be out front

more in Lincoln than ever before.

MO PHIlIP ON ! NTGOMERY! MAS H P l RUDO PASSES lIkE NEVER SEEN YOU’VE BEFORE!

Is he up for it? Is he more than a coach who loves his game and is a nice guy? Time to find out.

NO MORE MR. NICE GUY

Will they be AS GOOD AS ADVERTISED?

NO MORE MR. NICE GUY

The Tulsa World is here to cut through the hype.

Story, Page 10CF

Will it work?

Briles’ guy

It’s the question on the minds of people like you, us and probably samaje Perine: Will Lincoln Riley’s air Raid offense work? OU: PAGEs f14 and f15

He was by the Baylor coach’s side as the Bears went from cupcake to co-champion. But can Philip Montgomery pull it off up here? TU: PAGEs f4 and f6

give ‘em credit

FREE MASON

In tu’s second year, the american has the potential to shake things up around the country thanks to Houston and Cincinnati. AAC: PAGE f7

COMMUNIT Y IS

CHEERING TOGETHER

so what if he’s only started three games — gundy and Co. believe in the power of Mason Rudolph. that’s fine. But should you? OSU: PAGEs f8 and f9

word play

a simple slogan became a punchline for how the Big 12’s 2014 season ended. Baylor and tCu were left out of the first College Football Playoff, which led to calls for conference expansion and a title game. are those three words — you know which three — really that bad? PAGE F2 We build our own new campaign and preview the conference. PAGE F12

COMMUNIT Y IS

CHEERING TOGETHER

WHYCOMMUNITYMATTERS.COM

Sunday, August 23, 2015 n n F 9

oklahoma st. cowboys // preview Is mason rudolph as good as advertised?

How’s tHis for a promotion: “Little bit unique, but he can definitely sling it. A Ben Roethlisberger comparison is not out of the question by his movement in and out of the pocket and his ability to throw the football. That’s the scouting report on him.” That’s part of the brief synopsis of Mason Rudolph’s game that Fox Sports analyst Charles Davis gave while doing color commentary for the Oklahoma State-Baylor game on Nov. 23, Rudolph’s Cowboy debut. Excitement around these parts has continued to grow after Rudolph won Bedlam on the road and the Cactus Bowl over Washington. Entering the 2015 season, only Ohio State’s Cardale Jones and perhaps UCLA freshman Josh Rosen have comparable hype around them in relation to games played. Is it warranted? We’ll know in four months. But what Rudolph showed last year, at times in difficult environments, is that he’ll be unflappable no matter the opponent or elements for Oklahoma State. “It’s important to us at Oklahoma State that our quarterbacks are tough, durable, and they’re gritty and they’re good leaders,” Cowboys coach Mike Gundy said at Big 12 Media Days in Dallas. “I think he’s shown signs of that.” The Tulsa World watched and charted all 86 passes Rudolph threw last season. Some of what we learned: Rudolph throws an accurate deep ball. On passes of 20-plus yards, he

DOWN WITH THE DUMPS Urban Meyer quickly turned around Ohio State. An undefeated season in year one. A spot in the Big Ten title game in year two. And a national title in year three. The World-Herald is backing another Gatorade bath. See Page 37CF

other storylines to watch Line ‘em up

Oklahoma State’s offensive line was panned last season for its inability to protect the quarterback and the team’s 3.5 yards per carry average. Greg Adkins, the third offensive line coach at OSU in three years, has provided a much-needed reboot. UAB transfer Victor Salako and redshirt sophomore Zachary Crabtree lead a group that must revive OSU’s tradition of great line play.

Fancy new Car(son)

We’ll let Mike Gundy sell the running backs: He described Chris Carson as having “12-pack” abs. The junior-college transfer certainly looks the part, and junior Rennie Childs also looks improved. And don’t forget OSU’s other new Carr — Jeff, a freshman from Temple, Texas, who has dazzled in camp.

completed 11-of-23 for 421 yards, five touchdowns and one interception. He was 5-of-6 on deep throws down the left side of the field and 6-of-11 over the middle. In many ways, his only loss was his most impressive performance. He made his debut in Waco, Texas, on a day when it never stopped raining, in front of a raucous crowd. And despite the fact he was playing from behind the entire game, he made smart decisions aside from two interceptions. His game is not without kinks. He turned the ball over five times in three games. But he also has his teammates and coaches brimming with confidence, which must mean something. “I feel like he’s really matured and his confidence level is just way above his years,” senior cornerback Kevin Peterson said. “I can’t wait to see what he’s going to do this year.”

WTIB

That’s “We’re taking it back,” the self-declared credo of the 2015 OSU defense. The Cowboys’ offensive problems in Transfer Chris Carson. 2014 were exacerbated by a defense that didn’t recover a JAMES GIBBARD/Tulsa World fumble until the 12th game. This year, OSU is three-deep at linebacker and has an excess of talent and experience at cornerback, but the unit’s success will be measured by an increase in turnovers more than anything else. Best-case scenario for 2015 The Cowboys take their show on the road and impress the nation in early wins at Texas and West Virginia. They’re 8-0 heading into a treacherous November, which includes games versus TCU, Baylor and Oklahoma. All three are in Boone Pickens Stadium, though, and OSU takes two of them, including Bedlam. At 11-1, OSU wins the Big 12 championship and reaches the College Football Playoff at the expense of its rival.

CominG tHis fall

Worst-case scenario for 2015 Remember Troy, 2007? Like that trap game in Alabama, Oklahoma State is shocked by Central Michigan in Mount Pleasant. That dampens the mood before Mason Rudolph’s home debut. Worries continue when OSU falls on the road at Texas, West Virginia and — gulp — Texas Tech. After a win in Ames, Iowa, OSU is 5-5 with games left against Baylor and Oklahoma, just like 2014. But the magic is missing.

to a fiElD nEar YoU

Likely scenario for 2015 Oklahoma State is on the national radar after posting gaudy point totals in its three nonconference games. It stumbles on a road trip to Texas or West Virginia, but rebounds to be 7-1 when TCU comes to Stillwater. Though the Cowboys fall to the Big 12 favorite, they do beat Baylor two weeks later, setting up a Bedlam showdown with meaning: It could get OSU to 10-2 and, possibly, a New Year’s Six bowl game.

...

BUILDING a CAMPAIGN FOR mason rudolph Mason Rudolph: We’ve known he’d be Oklahoma State’s starting quarterback ever since he survived against Baylor, led the Cowboys to a Bedlam upset and brought home a bowl win over Washington. But what does last year mean for 2015? He’s been hyped all offseason, so we figured we’d create an ad to match it.

THE SLOGAN

DESPITE hIS

Despite a five-game slide before the Bedlam and bowl wins, Oklahoma State ended the season on a positive note. And remember — the 20-year-old from Rock Hill, S.C., still hasn’t started a game in front of the home crowd at Boone Pickens Stadium. That, and a renewed sense of enthusiasm from Mike Gundy following a renewed relationship with T. Boone himself, might imply fans are in for something fun this season.

LET’S pOiNT OuT HiS pOiSE

IT’S

maSoN LPh! DoSSIvE RUImPRE

yoUTh!

GETS BE UN TTER PRES DER SURE !

MAybE wE juST wON’T MENTiON ... You could chalk it up to inexperience, but Rudolph did throw four interceptions and lost a fumble in his first three games. He’ll have to prove in 2015 that he can take care of the ball. Three of the four picks came on short-tointermediate throws.

“BELIEvE ThE hyPE!” PHOTO BY TIMOTHY TAI/Tulsa World

PaT JoNES PITCHES OSU FOOTBALL From the Sports Animal to the Coaches’ Cabana, it’s hard to miss Pat Jones during football season. The former Oklahoma State coach is one of the most recognizable personalities in the region. In between his media work, he got a chance to see Oklahoma State practice in preseason camp. Jones shared his thoughts with the Tulsa World in a Q&A.

What impressions did you take from your time at OSU’s practice?

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“Well, I’d seen them in the spring and I’d try to start forming opinions there and then kind of have some questions I’d want to get answered when I went in the fall. I think lots of team speed, both sides of the ball. I knew that. Lots of receivers that can make plays, I knew that. Quarterback (Mason Rudolph) has a chance to be a good player, again, with his limited body of work, but he

It’s hard to to sell your pitch without a pitchman. We asked Pat Jones how he would pitch 2015 to OSU fans.

looks like he’s physically helped himself in that regard. I think (J.W.) Walsh is important to the program for a lot of intangibles. That’s a plus. Running back, the jury’s still out, although we saw (Chris) Carson, we don’t have any real body of work there although they’ve got a chance. (Rennie) Childs, the little kid (Jeff) Carr has had a pretty good preseason. He’s awfully little. There’s unknowns there, but they have a chance. They have a chance to be OK there. Offensive line, I watched (Greg) Adkins pretty good in the spring.

They don’t have much depth. I think they’ll be OK. I don’t know whether they can absorb hits there or not physically. But he’s sound and aggressive. They’re not the best I’ve seen out of them but they should be OK there.”

Have you formed an outlook on this season for Oklahoma State?

“If they were opening with Florida State or had a high-profile opener, I would worry a little bit simply from the standpoint that none of those backs have played and this will allow them to get going with those guys. So I think the schedule does set up and I don’t think this league’s very good. “They should, on form, be 3-0. I don’t think this first bunch will lie down for them but they should be 3-0 and I hear nothing good out of Texas, although I think that’s a very crucial ballgame the way it looks now.”

There’s a lot of hype around Mason Rudolph for a guy who’s only played three games. Do you think he’s going to be as good as advertised? “I don’t know. He’s not Troy Aikman. The ball doesn’t jump out of there. The guy’s still a young guy, obviously. But he should be a good player if he’s what we think he is mentally and all. He’s not the quickest, strongest arm I’ve ever seen. I think to paint the picture this guy’s Troy Aikman or something is probably not accurate. But he should be good enough to win a lot of games with if the right things happen.”

If you were making a pitch to the fan base of why this a team that’s worth watching, what would that pitch be?

Rudolph has the composure and focus of a veteran. It was evident right away against Baylor, both in completions — like a 34-yard pass deep down the left sideline that he dropped over David Glidden’s left shoulder perfectly on a third down — and in response to errors. After throwing his second interception, Rudolph hopped off the ground and chased down Baylor’s Orion Stewart, making the tackle.

BY MARK COOPER • WORLD SPORTS WRITER

ad 100147702-01

“I think team speed. I think momentum coming out of last year. I think favorable schedule and I think this league is ripe for somebody to go win it. I don’t think Baylor and TCU are the answer, personally.” — Mark Cooper, World Sports Writer

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 79

News Page Design Winner Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Tim Parks Judges’ Comments: A beautiful mix of approaches in which the designer let the imagery — be it an illustration, a photograph or a set of photos — really sing. In each case, the usage was spot on and helped tell the story at hand. MONEY

& NEWS

1.4% Whole Foods Market: Trader Joe’s: 1.1% 1.0% Dollar General: 0.7% Family Dollar:

1% r: 2. 8% Otheway: 1. 5% Fare di: 1. r: 1.5% Al ve

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015 SECTION D

Wa lma rt S up erc en te r:

r Sa Supe

20 .9

: 13.4% Baker’s

and the devastating 1913 Easter tornado to moments of ordinary life. This special section offers a sampling of his exceptional images.

period of expansive growth when the city’s population doubled. The scope of his photo collection is remarkable, from presidential visits

when men and women dressed up just to stroll through downtown. Louis Bostwick chronicled Omaha for four decades starting in 1901, a

MEMORIAL DAY 2015

Walmar t N eig Market: 4.hborhood 1%

Sa ve ,N o Fr ills,

‘N

VIEW MASTER

Sam’s Club: 6.6%

g Ba

He captured images of Omaha buildings now long-gone and snapped photos of people in an era

S Targ uperTa et F res rget, h: 5 .4%

Wh C ole os sa tco le :

2% 4.

Su nM art Foo ds, Sup erm erca do: 1 5.7%

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.6% 18 Source: Chain Store Guide; figures are estimates for 2014 grocery sales in eightcounty Omaha metropolitan area

A $2.5 BILLION PIE South Omaha resident Diane Giguere likes to mix up her grocery shopping, picking up items from stores as varied as Walmart, Trader Joe’s, HyVee and Aldi. But since a Walmart Neighbor hood Market opened near her home in 2013, she finds she spends more of her grocery budget at Walmart — enough that she joked, “I should be buying stock” in the company. She’s not alone: In the wake of a major Walmart push to open more stores here, shoppers in the Omaha area now spend nearly a third of their grocery dollars at Walmartrun stores. Mean while, competitors from Aldi to Whole Foods have seen market share slip in the area, accord ing to a WorldHerald analysis of data from na

Any way you slice it, Walmart is gobbling up grocery market share. But its competitors aren’t going hungry as total sales grow. Story by barbara Soderlin illuStration by Matt Haney

tional marketresearch firm Chain Store Guide. That doesn’t mean those competitors have seen falling sales — total area grocery sales grew 20 percent from 2012 to 2014, to $2.5 bil lion. It means that each company is getting a slightly smaller slice of a growing pie. Walmart widened its market share lead over secondplace HyVee in 2013 and 2014 as the re tail giant opened seven Neighborhood Markets, a third Sam’s Club and two additional Supercenters. Another new grocery chain coming to town in 2016 could take a fresh bite out of business for established retailers who are racing to meet

THE WORLD-HERALD

For some users, newer isn’t always better with smartphones

Technical analysis pioneer Acampora on Buffett’s turf STEVE JORDON

WARREN WATCH It’s unusual for Ralph Acam pora and Warren Buffett to be in the same town, let alone the same sentence. But that’s what happens when

See Grocery: Page 2

Acampora, sometimes called the godfather of technical analysis, visits Omaha, as he did last week to talk with students and investment advisers about the economy and how he figures out what stocks to buy or sell. Buffett, as chairman and chief executive of the conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway Inc. of Omaha, is wellknown for pick ing investments based on fac tors such as the type of business, See Warren Watch: Page 2

MINING AND HOPE Tough times for coal country bring new approaches to dealing with poverty. PAGE 4D

NEW YORK (AP) — Between splashy launches, lavish new phone offers (get a free HDTV on activation!) and frequent software updates that slow down your old handset, it sometimes feels like the entire technology industry is pushing you to buy the latest smartphone. Yet some holdouts resist. Take Zak Sommerfield, 35, a software analyst in New York who has hung onto his LG De light flip phone for five years,

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80 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

even though his friends and coworkers make fun of it. “I hate smartphones. I hate how they take over people’s lives and they spend all their time looking at them,” he said. “I’d love to stay on this phone forever.” People such as Sommerfield are a rarity. More than 90 per cent of smartphone users trade up for newer models within two years, said Ramon Llamas, See Old phones: Page 2

News Page Design Finalists Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Katie Myrick SATURDAY, JULY 4, 2015

Publication: St. Louis Post-Dispatch By: Josh Renaud, Evan Hill, Laura Black, Santiago C. Ayulo

SUNRISE EDITION

‘Pocketdials’ to 911 waste dispatchers’ time, money

RAIN SWAMPS ROADS

Brentwood firefighters ferry people from a flooded area near the intersection of Ruth Avenue and Manchester Road on Saturday. Eight people were trapped in cars and businesses. STORY • A3

Rise in accidental calls steals precious minutes from true emergencies BY MAGGIE O’BRIEN WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

The call lasts a minute and six seconds. Most of it is one-sided, with a lot of dead air. “911, do you need police, ﬁre or medics?” a Douglas County 911 operator asks the person who called the dispatch center. Silence. The operator waits a few seconds, then sends out a teletype message in case the caller is hearing impaired. Nothing. She calls the person back. “This is the 911 operator. We had a call from your cellphone. Is everything OK there?” Another try. “Hello, sir? This is 911, do you have an emergency? Hello?” Finally, the caller picks up his cellphone and responds. “My phone pocket-dialed you on accident,” the man says. The dispatcher ends the call. “Oh, OK. ... Thank you very much, sir. Bye-bye.” Accidental 911 calls, once an occasional slip or prank by a kid using his parents’ land line, have become more common

ERIN GRACE

COLUMNIST

FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA

CHRIS LEE • clee@post-dispatch.com

Two young men from France stood in the driveway of a Memorial Park home and strapped the last of their things onto their white road bikes.

•

They carried granola bars and Gatorade, sleeping bags and plastic tarps. They had Kerouac (in French)

and Twain (in English) and journals into which they have faithfully logged each day of their American adventure. They had smartphones.

•

“We say goodbye to the kids, and then we go?” Ben asked his compatriot, Alex, in his polite and lyrically

accented English.

•

Alex nodded. Then, with a wave to a pair of Omaha boys wearing French soccer jerseys, the two 20-some-

things hollered farewell, pedaling west on Webster Street and into the next leg of their summer-long Tour d’America.

See 911: Page 2

•

SUNDAY • 12.27.2015 • $2.50 • FINAL EDITION

Ben-

jamin “Ben” Rieu and Alexandre “Alex” Aubertin are a third of the way through a journey that began the ﬁrst of June in New York City and ends on the 25th of August in Los Angeles. They’ll cover 5,000 miles of ﬁeld and mountain, countryside and city, the postcard scenes and the less-remarkable terrain and all the strangers along the way.

America has unique love for its flag

Missouri is the only state with

YEAR IN REVIEW

See Grace: Page 2

HIGH NOTES, LOW POINTS

Two young Frenchmen have set out to do something many Americans won’t or can’t — see it all. And they’re doing it all from the seat of a bicycle. Alexandre Aubertin and Benjamin Rieu seem equally impressed by famed sights and the mundane scenery of middle America. Watch and listen to the journey of Benjamin Rieu and Alexandre Aubertin as they travel across America on bicycles. Video on Omaha.com/grace.

No limits on lobbyist gifts No campaign contribution limits No laws governing when a legislator can become a lobbyist

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

REVISITING ETHICS REFORM

Raised by firefighters from the smoking wreckage of the World Trade Center, a flag telegraphed both anguish and resolve. Planted atop a mountain on Iwo Jima, another piece of national cloth came to symbolize collective perseverance and conquest. Around the globe, flags — some of nations, others of affiliation — have wrapped spectators at soccer matches and participants in protest marches, flown over revolutions and holy wars, adorned advertisements and marked lunar landings. But even to people gazing up at the same flag, it can mean very different things. And, experts say, there may be nowhere else in the world where flags stir See Flags: Page 2

House, Senate leaders say ‘cleaning up the culture’ is priority for 2016 Republican, resigned because of sexually charged messages he exchanged with a 19-year-old intern from Missouri Southern State University. A few months later, Sen. Paul LeVota, a Democrat, resigned amid sexual harassment allegations from multiple former interns. While the intern situation is not directly related to traditional ethics reform, McCreery said it “shined a light on the goings-on in Jefferson City.” Missouri’s ethics laws fall short in three specific areas: limits on lobbyist gifts, laws governing when a legislator can become a lobbyist and campaign

BY ALEX STUCKEY St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Huskers set sights on 15-year-old football player Beatrice’s Cameron Jurgens says NU’s scholarship offer is “mind-boggling.” Sports

Omaha weather Today’s forecast High: 85 Low: 66 Full weather report: Page 6B Omaha.com: the latest updates

JEFFERSON CITY • Republicans and

LO C A L N E WS

N ATI O N / WO RLD

St. Louis celebrated 50 years as the Wicket City and scrambled to keep its NFL team. STL Sunday • B1

Attacks rocked the globe; gay marriage was upheld; and refugees flooded Europe. Inside • A12-13

S P O RTS

THE A RTS

Rams drafted Todd Gurley; Cards lost postseason and Heyward — to the Cubs! Sports • C1

“Fargo,” “Carol” and “The Winslow Boy” are among our critics’ top picks for 2015. A&E • D1

THO S E WE LO ST

B US I N E S S

Deaths included Leonard Nimoy, Joaquin Andujar, Yogi Berra and Martin Duggan. Obituaries • A8, A20

A-B merged with rival; Ikea arrived; and Boeing lost out on big bomber contract. Business • E1

Democrats agree the scandals that led to two legislative resignations this year cast a shadow over state lawmakers and their work in Jefferson City. They also agree ethics reform would help lift that stigma in 2016. “I think the voters … are supportive of ethics reform,” said Rep. Tracy McCreery, D-St. Louis. “I just think there are regular occurrences of things that look improper, and it’s up to us in the Legislature to listen to what voters want us to do.” In May, House Speaker John Diehl, a

See ETHICS • Page A10

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Our biggest hurdles

Waiting for justice

Fixing schools is top job, David Nicklaus writes

Tony Messenger writes of whistleblower’s firing

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Heyward, Carpenter, others benefit as winning tradition is passed on

All around you, in towns big and small, people are quietly performing selfless deeds to make our communities stronger. The good life? You bet. Today we’d like you to meet just a few of these everyday heroes.

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ST. LOUIS COUNTY MUNICIPAL COURTS

A WEB OF INFLUENCE in the county’s 81 municipal courts hold roles in multiple courts while also working as private defense attorneys.

a rl

D a n B o y le

al d

B rock m

Many of the judges and prosecutors

ill i

a m B u chh o

e s B i ll i n g s

The Post-Dispatch obtained full or partial dockets from 21 cities. it h Ch e u n g Ke Ste

B A la n a ke r

v e n Clar

M E G A N FA R M E R / T H E W O R L D - H E R A L D

BY JENNIFER S. MANN, JEREMY KOHLER AND STEPHEN DEERE St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Nathaniel Slate was in the crosswalk when the car hit him from behind, sending him tumbling over the hood and onto the pavement. “Where did you come from?” asked the driver, Thomas R. Battreal Sr., who according to a police

and broken in a ditch beside Interstate 80, Rachael made up her

as a garbled whisper. • The truth seemed inescapable: She would never get out of this car that she had lost control of and ﬂipped twice while driving to visit a friend in Illinois.

// Mentor: Page 6

THE TEACHER JJ Ventura turns helping kids into an art form. 1B

THE COACH Gannie Clark roots for north Omaha kids. 1C

THE BUILDER Steve Skidmore trains future craftsmen. 1D

report, slowed just long enough to ask the question after ignoring the pedestrian crossing sign. Battreal then took off down Emma Avenue in Jennings. It was Feb. 20, 2014, a sunny, dry day. Battreal, 86, later told police that he made a right turn and “all of a sudden there was a black guy on my hood.” They charged him in municipal with•failure to yield for a Seecourt COURTS Page A1

BY DAVID HUNN St. Louis Post-Dispatch

PHOENIX • The face of St. Louis foot-

“I started to realize that I’m not an inspiration because I broke my neck. I’m an inspiration because I’m me.”

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A RED LINE connecting lawyers means that they each took a turn as defense attorney in the court where the other lawyer served as prosecutor or judge or they serve together as prosecutor and judge in one court and in another court one was defense attorney and the other was judge or prosecutor. Jenn

i fer Fis

INSIDE

Clayton firm specializing in municipal law is now coming under increased scrutiny. Page A10

pedestrian in a crosswalk and leaving the scene of an accident. Battreal hired an attorney and just over a month later, the prosecutor recommended one charge be dismissed and the other be amended to “illegal parking.” Battreal paid $250 plus court costs and was done with it, never having to worry about the accident going on his driving record. His defense attorney was Ronald

Brockmeyer — then one of the more prolific players in St. Louis County’s municipal court system and the judge in Ferguson. Brockmeyer resigned from all five municipalities where he was either prosecutor or judge after a Department of Justice report March 4 accused him and other court officials See COURTS • Page A8

She couldn’t move, because her neck was broken. She

couldn’t yell — when she tried, the word, “Help!” exited her throat

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ball walked the gilded halls of the Arizona Biltmore hotel last week, in double-buckled loafers, a blue plaid suit, aviator sunglasses and a grin. At the close of last week’s annual meeting of National Football League owners, there was no longer any doubt: Stan Kroenke wants to move the Rams to Los Angeles. On Monday, a league executive

Opinion.............8&9B Movies..............23Go TV...........................8E

briefed teams on Kroenke’s plans for a glamorous, 80,000-seat, $1.86 billion stadium in Inglewood, Calif. Afterward, a group of key owners and league executives made another thing clear: Moving the Rams will be difficult if St. Louis planners nail down a proposal to build a new football stadium downtown. And that shifts the fate of St. Louis football out of the enigmatic owner’s hands and — temporarily — into those See STADIUM • Page A11

Tweens left without their own devices Parkway sixth-graders ‘rough it’ at camp, leave the phones at home HOME & AWAY • H1

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Feature Page Design Winner Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Tammy Yttri Judgesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Comments: I love the amount of thought and effort that went into these pages, from the crazy guitar strings to the veggie garden to the trees. But this designer makes it look easy â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the ideas behind the designs are communicated clearly, simply and quickly. I also enjoy the element of wit, which is a quality in short supply these days.

LIVING

ITâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S TOUGH TO BE A TREE IN NEBRASKA

LIVING

THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2015 SECTION E

Drought, ice storms and tree diseases can take their toll on our green infrastructure. Although replacing those dead trees is important, not all trees are created equal, said Justin Evertson, interim director for the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum. Here are some types to plant this Earth Day and Arbor Day.

THURSDAY, APRIL 23, 2015 SECTION E

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s never gonna be our big break. For me, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s another vehicle for the music. It just gets our music to people who arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t in our circle.â&#x20AC;? Derek Presnall of Omahaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Icky Blossoms has seen its songs used in several TV shows

PECAN

OUT THERE

MUSIC LICENSING

Suitable to eastern Nebraska; fast growing. This multitasking tree provides shade in addition to its nut production, Evertson said.

IF A TUNE SETS THE RIGHT TONE, IT PAYS

TULIP Suitable to eastern Nebraska; more prone to ice storm damage. In addition to its namederiving ďŹ&#x201A;owers, this treeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s distinctive leaves ďŹ&#x201A;utter in the wind like a cottonwoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s.

In this new year, you may be hitting the gym a lot more. But all those things you remember about exercise may be wrong. Cardio doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t burn more calories than weightlifting, sit-ups wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t give you a six-pack, and static stretching may not prevent injuries. Mental Flossâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; latest episode of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Misconceptionsâ&#x20AC;? runs down the top 10 exercising misconceptions. Check it out: bit.ly/1w17mzZ â&#x20AC;&#x153;Stuntmanâ&#x20AC;? seems like a really fun job, but it also looks incredibly dangerous. Damien Walters, whom youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve seen in movies such as â&#x20AC;&#x153;Hellboy II,â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadowsâ&#x20AC;? and â&#x20AC;&#x153;KickAss,â&#x20AC;? makes it look simple. He compiled an entire year of ďŹ&#x201A;ips, including the time he backďŹ&#x201A;ipped into bed and under the covers, into one amazing 5-minute video. Watch it: bit.ly/1tKaf8p

BY KEVIN COFFEY WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

BUR OAK

PERSIMMON

Drought-tolerant; very tough and reliable. Evertson said these treesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; slow growth but long lifespans mean they will â&#x20AC;&#x153;span the generations in a community.â&#x20AC;?

Suitable for eastern Nebraska; prefers moist, fertile soil. This medium-size tree, reaching 30 feet at maturity, is native to the eastern Great Plains and has tasty fruit.

The acoustic guitar swells over that moving â&#x20AC;&#x153;Greyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Anatomyâ&#x20AC;? scene. A running back jumps the defense accompanied by bouncy punk rock chords. Beats bump during the trailer for a new action movie. â&#x2DC;&#x2026; Music helps us feel a connection to what weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re watching. â&#x2DC;&#x2026; More and more TV shows, movies and even commercials are using pop music, and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not only big artists like the Rolling Stones or Fall Out Boy that are being featured. Local artists and local record labels benefit from getting exposure and some cash by having their music played. â&#x2DC;&#x2026; But how does a song by a local band like Icky Blossoms make it into a movie trailer? We spoke to musicians and others in the music business about choosing the right song, getting approval and â&#x20AC;&#x201D; maybe most important â&#x20AC;&#x201D; getting paid.

If thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s one man you shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t challenge to a pushup contest, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gaston from â&#x20AC;&#x153;Beauty and the Beast.â&#x20AC;? And not just the ďŹ ctional muscle-bound cartoon character. If you challenge Gaston while at Disney World, which a young man recently did, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll show you up pretty fast. Check it out: bit.ly/14vIx9q

ELIZABETH NELSON

WE NEED A SONG

MOMAHA.COM BLOGGER

Choosing a song for a ďŹ lm or TV show begins with a director or screenwriter. Sometimes, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll mention a speciďŹ c song in the script. Often thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s simply a vibe or feeling that they want to convey in a scene. It works similarly

Unless the devil is your childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pretend pal, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fret

See Music: Page 2

LICENSING PAYS OFF FOR LOCAL BANDS

Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imaginary friends are often portrayed negatively, making parents feel their child may be anti-social, shy or have low self-esteem. What would other parents think if your little Cindy started talking about her new pretend friend? Would they think you are not spending enough time with your child, or that sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not developing properly? Relax! The other parents will probably tell you their child also has an imaginary friend â&#x20AC;&#x201D; maybe two. The truth is about two out of three children have played with or spoken to an imaginary friend by the time they are 7 years old. An imaginary friend is how your child expresses her creativity. Maybe itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a dragon, a teddy bear, another person who makes her feel more comfortable in social situations, or just a partner for play. Imaginary

Artists have the potential to earn by placing their music in advertisements, TV shows and ďŹ lms. The following local artists have done just that. â&#x2DC;&#x2026; Bright Eyes, â&#x20AC;&#x153;We Are Nowhere and Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Nowâ&#x20AC;? in movie â&#x20AC;&#x153;Knocked Upâ&#x20AC;? â&#x2DC;&#x2026; Mynabirds, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Wolf Motherâ&#x20AC;? in â&#x20AC;&#x153;Pretty Little Liarsâ&#x20AC;? episode â&#x20AC;&#x153;Grave New Worldâ&#x20AC;? â&#x2DC;&#x2026; Sail by the Stars, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Icebergs Are for Penguinsâ&#x20AC;? on MTVâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Real Worldâ&#x20AC;? â&#x2DC;&#x2026; 311, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Love Songâ&#x20AC;? in movie â&#x20AC;&#x153;50 First Datesâ&#x20AC;? â&#x2DC;&#x2026; Azure Ray, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Have Lovedâ&#x20AC;? in â&#x20AC;&#x153;Greyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Anatomyâ&#x20AC;? episode â&#x20AC;&#x153;Somethingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gotta Giveâ&#x20AC;? â&#x2DC;&#x2026; Oxygen, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Do You Want to Play a Gameâ&#x20AC;? in movie â&#x20AC;&#x153;Saw IVâ&#x20AC;? â&#x2DC;&#x2026; Bright Eyes, â&#x20AC;&#x153;First Day of My Lifeâ&#x20AC;? in a Zillow commercial â&#x2DC;&#x2026; Icky Blossoms, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Babesâ&#x20AC;? in â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sin City: A Dame to Kill Forâ&#x20AC;? trailer â&#x2DC;&#x2026; The Faint, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Worked Up So Sexualâ&#x20AC;? in â&#x20AC;&#x153;The OfďŹ ceâ&#x20AC;? episode â&#x20AC;&#x153;Night Outâ&#x20AC;?

ELM Tolerant of wet and drought. There are many new disease-resistant types of elms, and elms will provide shade more quickly than oaks.

CONCOLOR FIR Drought-tolerant. Evertson described this evergreen tree as a good survivor that performs well in the Nebraska climate.

See Momaha: Page 2

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y M AT T H A N E Y / T H E W O R L D - H E R A L D

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SXSW

Female-fronted bands get crowds going Intense Dead Sara, mellow Alvvays and harmonic Girlpool didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t disappoint

BY KEVIN COFFEY WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

AUSTIN â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Women rock. So far, female-fronted bands have made up about half of the artists Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve seen at South by Southwest music festival. And the ladies have been the highlights of the festival for me. Best Coast was the ďŹ rst band that I saw at SXSW, and theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve always been a favorite of mine and of other music critics from all over. On Wednesday, I caught sets from L.A. rock outďŹ t Dead Sara, Canadian rock band Alvvays and Philadelphia duo Girlpool.

The focal point of Dead Sara is singer/ guitarist Emily Armstrong and guitarist Siouxsie Medley. Armstrong has a voice thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s one in a generation in terms of intensity and ability. She sang so intensely that her voice sounded raw and strained. I met Medley before the show and she was very kind. When she got on stage and strapped on her Gibson guitar, she turned into a ferocious slayer conjuring explosions of sound from her instrument. Dead Sara blew me away. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not the only one who says so. See SXSW: Page 2

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EARTH DAY

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Tending to the communityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s roots Neighborhood groups see trees as vital landmarks that deserve extra protection

BY LEXIE HEINLE WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

The old Kentucky coffeetree in Elmwood Park was a constant presence in Diana Faillaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s childhood, the scene of family picnics and afternoons spent reading. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We grew up under the tree,â&#x20AC;? said the president of the Midtown Neighborhood Alliance. It was â&#x20AC;&#x153;shelter, refuge and a place for calm.â&#x20AC;? That tree came down last year, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s at the top of her list to replace. As a soon-to-be certiďŹ ed arborist, Failla

pays close attention to her neighborhoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trees. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I see trees as landmarks,â&#x20AC;? she said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The trees mark generations of people who move around them.â&#x20AC;? She points to Bemis Parkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s druid oak, which was planted in 1787, and Elmwood Parkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s white oak, a champion tree planted 150 years ago. Those trees have stood the test of time, but many others in Nebraska are in jeopardy. Approximately 50 percent of the stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s public trees have been lost since the late

BY BOB FISCHBACH WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

No, owner Denny Moran does not yet have a reopening date on the calendar for the Dundee Theater. Yes, work on remodeling is continuing, and Moran said itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s possible the theater, at 4952 Dodge St., could open in late fall. The Dundee, Omahaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only remaining single-screen movie outlet, closed in May 2013 for installation of a digital projector, new sound equipment, renova-

tion of the lobby and concessions area, seat refurbishing and more. The theater was last renovated in 1987. Moran said work on the exterior continues. Tuck-pointing of brickwork is complete. New electrical panels are installed. New heating and air conditioning units are now fully functional. Moran said he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to begin plaster repairs, painting and upgrading seats until new rooďŹ ng is in place. The weather See Theater: Page 2

2015

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Not all trees are suitable for the Nebraska climate. Turn to Page 2E to see a list of trees to avoid.

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OUT THERE â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am your father!â&#x20AC;? Darth Vaderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s declaration to Luke Skywalker in â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Empire Strikes Backâ&#x20AC;? is one of the most memorable lines in cinema. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve all done our own impression of James Earl Jones delivering the iconic line, but how does it sound in other languages? A YouTube video collects 20 different versions of the line. Some are as fearsome as the original. Others are delivered ďŹ&#x201A;atly. Watch it: bit.ly/1aKN0ry Want a fun way to grow some spring plants? Try an upside down planter shaped like an octopus head. Your plants growing from the bottom

will look like tentacles growing out of the octopusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head. California artists Cindy and James Searles sell the planters in their Etsy shop. Check it out: bit.ly/1DiHAf6 Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve probably sipped hundreds or thousands of beverages out of aluminum cans. But have you ever stopped to wonder why every can is shaped the same way? A lot of thought went into making the can the way it is, and YouTuber engineerguy, University of Illinois professor Bill Hammack, explains it all in a video that has nearly 1 million views. Watch it: bit.ly/1IILvWb

Tony Curtis as a dad? Complicated BY BOB FISCHBACH WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

Kelly Curtis â&#x20AC;&#x153;We had our ups and downs, but I always knew he loved me. He called me his number one.â&#x20AC;?

Kelly Curtis was 3 when her dadâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s movie, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Some Like It Hot,â&#x20AC;? was released. She visited the set and was even photographed on the beach where part of it was ďŹ lmed, but she has no memories of it. She was 5 when her late parents, iconic movie stars Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, divorced. â&#x20AC;&#x153;It wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t a particularly good time,â&#x20AC;? she recalled. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I was not pleased with that. But I never had any other father.â&#x20AC;?

So, Friday night, Curtis will appear at the Joslyn Art Museum for Omaha ďŹ lm historian Bruce Crawfordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s special screening of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Some Like It Hot,â&#x20AC;? speaking to fans and signing autographs. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s doing it to honor her dad, just as she honored her mother by appearing with her at a 1994 Crawford screening of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Psycho.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never spoken about my dad before to the press or public,â&#x20AC;? Curtis said by phone from Bellevue, Idaho. Her 1885 Victorian home overlooks the Sawtooth See Curtis: Page 2

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;SOME LIKE IT HOTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; What: Commemorative screening by Omaha ďŹ lm historian Bruce Crawford Where: Joslyn Art Museum, 2200 Dodge St. When: 7 p.m. Friday Who: Special guest Kelly Curtis, a daughter of actor Tony Curtis BeneďŹ t for: Omaha Parks Foundation Tickets: $23, available at all Omaha Hy-Vee Supermarkets Info: 402-926-8299 or omahaďŹ lmevent.com

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R E B E C C A S . G R AT Z / T H E W O R L D - H E R A L D

82â&#x20AC;&#x192; /â&#x20AC;&#x192; Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org

Feature Page Design Finalists Publication: Tulsa World By: James Royal

Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Brady Jones

Friday, May 1, 2015 n n D 3

OSCARS SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2015

SECTION E

Do studios still stack up? Academy voters increasingly embrace indie movies for their top award By Bob Fischbach

•

World-Herald Staff Writer

MORE INSIDE THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

Get ready for a little song and dance with Tony winner Neil Patrick Harris hosting. Page 2E

MILLION DOLLAR BABY

Bob Fischbach plays prognosticator on who will take home the statues. Pages 4&5E

GOING MY WAY Do you know your cinematographers from your composers? Try our Oscar quiz. Page 4E

It’s official this year. Oscar loves independent movies. • Hollywood’s major studios may have created the AcademyAwards, hoping to drum up publicity for their product. But those same studios are increasingly getting the cold shoulder when the gold statuettes are handed out. • Or is it the studios that are turning their backs on award-worthy movies? • Of the eight best-picture contenders at tonight’s 87th annual Academy Awards, only one, “American Sniper,” is the product of a major Hollywood studio, Warner Bros. Another, “Selma,” had independent financing sources and a developed script before making a distribution deal with Paramount. • The two best-picture front-runners? “Birdman” had five production companies led by New Regency, a company founded by Israeli independent producer Arnon Milchan. “Boyhood” is a product of IFC, a leader in independent film founded in 2000, and director Richard Linklater’s Detour Films. • The trend has been building for a while, said Omaha filmmaker Mark Hoeger of Oberon Entertainment. • “The major studios, for the most part, don’t want to invest in smaller, under-$30 million pictures that are less high-concept events,” Hoeger said. “They need to create big shows with big audiences, for a whole variety of reasons.” • Big-budget movies appeal to the increasingly profitable international market, he said. That means lowest-common -denominator stories — comic-book characters, epic heroes — driven by action that will translate to any culture. That’s generally not the kind of film the academy wants to celebrate. • The big studios see smaller movies as too risky, Hoeger said. A moviegoer in Kyrgyzstan won’t

87TH ANNUAL ACADEMY AWARDS 7:30 tonight • ABC

P H O T O I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y R YA N S O D E R L I N A N D B R A D Y J O N E S / T H E W O R L D - H E R A L D

See Films: Page 2

AROUND AND ABOUT: It was a night of fun and games and giving for Heartland Family Service’s “Carnival of Love” on Valentine’s Day. Page 3E

Register Today! Free Screening for Varicose Vein Treatment Totally Vein is holding free screenings during the month of March that include an exam by a Registered Vascular Technician and an ultrasound screening. Weekday, evening and Saturday hours available. Space is limited. Call Totally Vein at 934-VEIN (8346) today! Stephen D. Torpy, MD FACS Lakeside Hills Medical Plaza • 17001 Lakeside Hills Plaza, Suite 102 • (402) 934-6996 • www.torpytotallyvein.com

D1 Thursday | April 30, 2015 | tulsaworld.com

• WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2015

OMAHA WORLD-HERALD

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2015

• 5E

loaded Sequel ‘Age of Ultron’ tries to pack too much in but still offers fun, loud action review

By MICHAEL SMITH

World Scene Writer

t is inevitable that any film sequel be judged against the success of its origins.

It is impossible to not compare the new all-star superhero team-up “Avengers: Age of Ultron” to the spectrum of Marvel’s films, because they are all so intricately connected to one another, whether through storyline or shared characters. “The Avengers” set the bar so high in 2012. It was a nearperfect entertainment, creating an origins story for how Marvel’s iconic characters came to join one another in fighting a threat to the Earth. It was one of the best-made movies of that year — no matter the genre. Iron Man, Captain America and Thor were witty, smart and brave. The Hulk smashed, and it was fantastic. The supporting players were all given moments to shine, and we embraced these characters full of heart and humor.

ALPACAS, GENTLE BY NATURE, ARE ‘JUST SO SWEET’ Sheri and Mike Jacoby’s alpacas are social creatures. They rove the couple’s 13-acre farm near Fort Calhoun in packs. Look like you’re going to feed them and they’ll dash toward you, eagerly waiting to nibble a carrot from your outstretched palm. The care and keeping of 29 alpacas could be a full-time job. But Sheri Jacoby maintains her animals in addition to her work as a pharmacist. Jacoby goes out in the morning around 5:15 and spends an hour making sure the animals have water and giving each of them a bowl of grain and pellet supplements. She also gives the alpacas some fresh hay and water and scoops their waste. When she returns home in the evening, she feeds them their grain right away, lets them out to the pasture to graze and then repeats much of the morning’s maintenance duties. Each spring, the alpacas are shaved so the soft ﬁber can be used to make socks and other items. — Andrea Kszystyniak

‘AvEngErS: AgE of ULTron’ Cast: Robert Downey

Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, James Spader, Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Paul Bettany, Cobie Smulders Theaters: Cinemark Tulsa, Warren Theatre Broken Arrow, AMC Southroads 20, Starworld 20, Admiral Twin Drive-in, Cinemark Broken Arrow, Owasso, Eton Square, Sand Springs run time: 2 hours, 21 minutes rated: PG-13 (intense sequences of sci-fi action, violence and destruction, and for some suggestive comments) Quality: ••• (on a scale of zero to four stars)

SEE filM D2

P H O T O S B Y B R E N D A N S U L L I VA N

Chris Evans (top), Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo return as the Avengers to battle Ultron (right, voiced by James Spader) in “Avengers: Age of Ultron. MARvEl/Courtesy photos

BAPAC brings powerhouse women in new season • The Broken Arrow venue has announced the lineup for its seventh Spotlight Season. By JAMES D. WATTS Jr. World Scene Writer

A quintet of legendary women of stage and screen — Liza Minnelli, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, Lily Tomlin and Broken Arrow’s own Kristin Chenoweth — will be featured as part of the Broken Arrow PAC’s

seventh annual Spotlight Season. The season will also include touring productions of three musicals, as well as concerts by Christian artist Steven Curtis Chapman and the Ten Tenors. “We have packed this season with nothing but legendary artists and shows,” said Mark Frie, BAPAC Foundation president/CEO. “To see all these names side by side, it makes me proud to know the BAPAC is becoming an entertainment destination.” The main season will include seven SEE SEASon D3

liza Minnelli (left), Bernadette Peters, Patti luPone, lily Tomlin and Broken Arrow’s own Kristin Chenoweth will be featured as part of the Broken Arrow PAC’s seventh annual Spotlight Season. Associated Press file photos

Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org / 83

Sports Page Design Winner Publication: Lincoln Journal Star By: Clark Grell Judges’ Comments: “Window of Opportunity” is just that, and I love that you seized it. Game coverage, complex infographics, photo illustration and creative concepts ... you do all well. Bravo!

SPORTS, B3-B5: HUSKER SAFETY NATE GERRY EAGER FOR ANOTHER SHOT AT BRUINS

Thursday, December 17, 2015 | Lincoln Journal Star | Section B

HUSKER EXTRA

SUNDAY, OCtOBER 4, 2015

LINCOLN JOURNAL StAR

SECtION C

NCAA VOLLEYBALL FINAL FOUR IN OMAHA

ILL-FATED

CHAMPAIGN PAIN: Illinois stuns Nebraska with late touchdown. TIME MANAGEMENT: Huskers unable to make key plays to run out clock.

KADIE ROLFZEN

FRANCIS GARDLER/Lincoln Journal Star

Illinois receiver Geronimo Allison celebrates his game-tying touchdown late in the fourth quarter Saturday in Champaign, Illinois. The Illini kicked the PAT to pull out the win.

KELLY HUNTER

Late-game struggles add up to another loss for the Huskers.

NU’s 2-3 start reflects poorly on new staff

By BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON Lincoln Journal Star

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The final minute confused everyone more than the game’s officials, and that’s some accomplishment, since they spent several minutes of Saturday’s game trying to figure out if it was a third down or fourth down. Yeah, that happened. And so did a Husker late-game giveaway that was almost impossible to understand, with Illinois topping Nebraska 14-13 on a 1-yard touchdown catch by Geronimo Allison with 10 seconds left. Five games. Three losses. By a total of nine points. “I hope we don’t have to weather any more,” said Husker head coach Mike Riley. “That’s a rough one for them.” He repeated it, because See HUSKERS, Page C5

AMBER ROLFZEN

The Final Four is back in Nebraska, and for three Husker standouts, it’s practically in their backyard. The Rolfzen twins and Kelly Hunter are ready for the moment, and the people who watched them grow up couldn’t be more proud. BY BRENT C. WAGNER | LINCOLN JOURNAL STAR

The introduction of the starting lineup for the Nebraska volleyball team doesn’t offer much variety. || From Papillion, Nebraska, Kelly Hunter. || From Papillion, Nebraska, Amber Rolfzen. || From Papillion, Nebraska, Kadie Rolfzen. || How did we get to where three players from the same city, and the same graduating class at Papillion-La Vista South High School, are now starters for a team that has a chance to win the NCAA championship this weekend? And even better, the Final Four is being played about 20 miles from where they grew up. See OMAHA, Page B14

Cook’s evolution helps put NU on brink of crown Nebraska volleyball coach John Cook is guided in part by a saying: “The longer I coach, the less I know.” During the past few seasons, the 16th-year NU head coach has emphasized learning more about himself in his profession. He wanted to address his shortcomings. Don’t underestimate Cook’s desire to improve, and the lengths he’s gone to do it, as a leading reason the fifth-ranked Huskers reached this week’s

NCAA Final Four. Excellent leadership involves both art and science. Cook long has STEVEN M. had the science SIPPLE Lincoln Journal Star part down. You know, the technical side of the sport, the physical training, the tactical

John Cook watches his team during practice Wednesday at CenturyLink Center Omaha. Cook has led Nebraska to six Final Fours. MATT RYERSON Lincoln Journal Star

See SIPPLE, Page B14

Watch highlights and view photos from Saturday’s game. Monday: Watch Mike Riley’s weekly news conference beginning at 11 a.m.

14 13

OHIO ST. INDIANA

34 27

PENN STATE ARMY

IOWA WISCONSIN

10 6

MICHIGAN ST. PURDUE

24 21

Big Ten coverage, Page C6

NORTHWESTERN MINNESOTA

27 0

MICHIGAN MARYLAND

28 0

THURSDAY’S MATCHES At CenturyLink Center Omaha Minnesota (30-4) vs. Texas (29-2), 6 p.m. TV: ESPN2 (35) Nebraska (30-4) vs. Kansas (30-2), approx. 8:30 p.m. TV: ESPN2 (35). Radio: 107.3

MORE ONLINE Photos: Check out a gallery from Wednesday’s practice sessions. Video: Husker players have a request for fans. @HuskerExtra.com

See SIPPLE, Page C3

AROUND THE NATION

ILLINOIS NEBRASKA

84 / Read the full stories and view winning photos at greatplainsawards.org MORE FINAL FOUR COVERAGE/B2, B13-14: NEBRASKA’S JOHN COOK IMPRESSED WITH KANSAS’ ATHLETICISM.

@HuskerExtra.com

SATURDAY’S BIG TEN SCORES

Amber Rolfzen and Kelly Hunter file photos: MATT RYERSON; Kadie Rolfzen file photo: FRANCIS GARDLER; Illustration by CLARK GRELL/Lincoln Journal Star

WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

ERIC GREGORY/Lincoln Journal Star

Nebraska coach Mike Riley (left) and defensive coordinator Mark Banker watch the replay of an Illinois catch ruled out of bounds late in the fourth quarter Saturday. The Huskers are off to a 2-3 start in Riley’s first season.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Nebraska offensive coordinator Danny Langsdorf stood in a darkened tunnel under Memorial Stadium. He wore short sleeves. He was cold, he said. He faces hard and cold reality, as does Husker head football coach Mike Riley and the rest of the STEVEN M. staff. SIPPLE Five games into Lincoln Journal Star their tenures at Nebraska, the Huskers are 2-3 (0-1 Big Ten). The first two defeats, to BYU and Miami, were jarring enough for everyone involved, including an intensely loyal fan base. Saturday’s collapse — a 14-13 loss to deeply flawed Illinois — feels even worse. Even more jarring.

20 14

NO. 1 BUCKEYES SURVIVE INDIANA Ezekiel Elliott (left) rushes for a career-best 274 yards and three touchdowns, and No. 1 Ohio State needed every bit of it to hold off Indiana 34-27 in Bloomington. A late goal-line stand helped the Buckeyes, who may fall in the polls. PAGE C6

Pelini in South Dakota: Coyote fans try to rattle ex-Husker coach in his return to the Great Plains. Page C6

1_1C-4-01-5102-RATS_SJL

KYMC

•••

Sports Page Design Finalists Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Ian Lawson

Publication: Omaha World-Herald By: Tim Parks

PREGAME

SPORTS

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2015 SECTION C

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2015 SECTION C

Any thing the guy in charge say I have to now future thing thoughdsts of behind the scenes of whatever I Nebraska can

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ZZZ

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WILL NEBRASKA RISE FROM ITS SLUMBER?

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CHANGING THE NARRATIVE Beating Michigan State would help NU move past a season of bad breaks By Jon nyatawa WORLD-HERALD BUREAU

LINCOLN — Nebraska coach Mike Riley would prefer not to discuss the potential narrative-altering impact that an upset win over an undefeated top-10 team could have on a disappointing debut season. To Riley, any assertion that a single game has added value over another jeopardizes the workmanlike approach he’d like his program to adopt. So he’s reluctant to acknowl-

edge what seems fairly evident about the opportunity in front of the Huskers this weekend: If they beat Michigan State, they could change the perception and tone of 2015. It’s clear that, regardless of the outcome, NU’s staff has plenty of work to do. Schematic weaknesses, personnel deficiencies and lingering internal issues from the coaching change will still need to be addressed during the winter and spring. A See NU football: Page 14

6 p.m. Saturday Memorial Stadium ESPN • 590 AM, 92.3 FM

MORE INSIDE STEVENSON MOVES ON Freshman running back Jordan Stevenson quits the Husker football team. Page 14C

MORE ONLINE Live analysis, photos, video and more. Want to chime in? Use the #NUvsMSU Twitter hashtag. Omaha.com/gameday

Byy Sam am mc cKewon ewon

In a year defined by the unexpected, a Husker upset would fit right in

MICHIGAN STATE AT NEBRASKA

Good morning, Vegas. What do you know that we don’t? It’s Saturday. Finally. Mercifully. If Nebraskans ever needed a game, it’s this Saturday. Maybe not this game. The road to the College Football Playoff goes through Lincoln (as Husker fans stand on the side of the road, watching the parade go by). Michigan State is on that road. Sixthranked Sparty is on a mission to compile victories and style points, in that order. Playoff committee member

FOSTER FARMS BOWL: NU VS. UCLA

•• WORLD-HERALD WORLD-HERALD BUREAU BUREAU

INCOLN — Rewind, for a second, to kickoff on

Stadium. Nebraska, which had roused its moribund, frustrating season with an upset win over Michigan

a bye week of preparation, that Iowa would have to play its best game to escape with a win. •• As it turned out, the Hawkeyes won

ty, but the Huskers handed them the game with four turnovers

Previews for Saturday’s other bowl games. Page 8C

and a few defensive busts that will haunt the team into the offseason, regardless of what happens in Saturday’s Foster Farms Bowl

MORE ONLINE

against UCLA. •• That Iowa loss was a microcosm of Nebraska’s

See Shatel: Page 14

Live analysis, photos, video and more. Want to chime in? Use the #NEBvsUCLA Twitter hashtag. Omaha.com/gameday

football program in recent years. NU rises, peers out the window at opportunity, rubs the crust out of its eyes, and turns right

BARFKNECHT: CONFIDENCE OF ‘SUNSHINE’ QB C.J. BEATHARD IS CHANGING THE MINDSET OF IOWA FROM THE TOP DOWN. PAGE 16C

back into its slumber. In this way, the

Mike Riley power-hooked his drive off the first tee way left, so far into the junk that his caddie, Shawn Eichorst, refuses to go look for it. Fortunately, he gets a mulligan. That’s what this Foster Farms Bowl is tonight for Riley and his Husker football program. After a season in the blender, this one’s a freebie. Second chance. A Mully. Whether anyone thinks the Huskers deserve to be here at 5-7 is beside the point, really. They’re here. So is UCLA. This is a made-for-TV show, See Shatel: Page 10

comfortable. Notes, Page 10C

28-20 and really didn’t have to escape at all. They wobbled plen-

COLUMNIST

Tommy, defense can make most of mulligan

Nebraska coach Mike Riley said he had to get “creative” with bowl preparations to keep his team from getting too

NU program, coaches and players were confident, especially after

Tom Osborne will likely be in the house, watching coach Mark Dantonio’s machine in person. And you wonder if Osborne

COLUMNIST

MORE INSIDE

State, had a fine shot at upending undefeated Iowa. •• Within the

TOM SHATEL

8:15 p.m. Saturday Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara, California ESPN •• 590, 92.3

Black Friday and an electric crowd inside Memorial

/ See Huskers: Page 4 ?

GETTING DEFENSIVE Creighton seeks more consistency from its efforts on defense. PAGE 5C Member FDIC

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THE SERIES

An analysis of college football coaching hires continues through Sunday. Friday Big 12 and coaches 60-88 14.8% 25.9%

25.9% 33.3%

{ 1 0 0

2014

2 1 1

2013

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2012

4 1 0

2011

0 0 0

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{ Hires Improved Got worse