Lighting

Sooner or later, this kind of thing happens to all of us in the newspaper business.
This time it happened to Rod Rose. I'll go easy on Rod because he's a longtime friend, a good solid journalist and the guy who introduced me to my wife.
Writers at bigger papers used to have the luxury of being able to blame bad headlines on the copy desk. Now, with the advent of computer pagination, the blame falls upon whoever built the page. Unless things have changed at The Reporter, that probably means Rod built the page and dropped the crucial "n."
So it goes. Chances are, most of the readers glanced at the headline and - given the context of the word in a weather story - their brains turned "Lighting" into "Lightning."

May without "500" festivities

How odd to not be in Indiana during the month of May and the run-up to the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race.
Here's a photo I shot of race driver Dan Gurney conferring with his pit crew during practice for the 1969 race. He finished second in that year's Indy 500.
Gurney, now 77, is still active in racing and is almost certainly in Indianapolis right now, awaiting Sunday's race.
My earliest recollections of the race are from the late 1940s or early '50s when we would listen to the start of the race on the car radio while taking coffee cans of peonies to the graves of my parents' families.
I attended my first Indianapolis 500 in 1964. I listened to the 1967 race on a telephone headset, taking dictation from Indianapolis News Sports Editor Wayne Fuson for the paper's running story of the race. We prided ourselves with having the final race edition of the paper, with a complete story of the race and the winner's photo on the front page, at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway before most of the crowd had left the grounds.
That was when the race was held on May 30, regardless of what day of the week it was. Since The News was a Monday-Saturday paper, the decision to hold the race on Sundays took us out of the game. We hated it because it was the highlight of our year.

Low-tech printing in the era of space exploration

This is one of those rare occasions when I can pinpoint when an old photo was taken.
This was shot the afternoon of Dec. 21, 1968. I was a makeup editor at The Indianapolis News and I'm standing next to the front page of the paper's Blue Streak (final) edition for the day with the headline: Apollo Roars Toward 1st Moon Rendezvous" It was the day of the Apollo 8 launch - the first manned space flight outside earth's orbit and the first to orbit the moon. The first moon landing came seven months later on July 20, 1969.
And, yes, this was in the days of typewriters, Linotype machines and hot type printing. I really am that old.
Skip Hess shot the pictures. He's even older than me.

Testing, testing

The box containing my Nikon transparency scanner and my Epson flatbed scanner continues to elude me. I remember packing them together last October and I'm reasonably sure they made the move from Indiana to Arkansas, but I'm damned if I can find the box in the pile of stuff jammed up against the north wall of our garage.
But I had a pressing need for a flatbed scanner and finally gave up and bought an HP Scanjet G4010 the other day at Office Depot.
That's after I looked for scanners at Circuit City and Office Max. It seems that most people who want a scanner are now buying the all-in-one models that combine scanner, fax and printer. Well, we already have two perfectly good printers and I have no need for a fax.
The HP Scanjet G4010 also scans negatives and slides, so I dug into my negative archive for a test scan. I came up with this photo I shot back in October, 1985 at a party store in Carmel, Ind. of a couple of employees and a wall covered with masks. I was the North Bureau chief for The Indianapolis News at the time.