Letter from the Editor

“What’s your check number?,” the clerk at a local landscape store said to me Saturday afternoon.

“Seventeen thousand, eight hundred eighty,” was my reply.

“If you’ve written that many checks, I probably don’t need to worry about it being good,” she said. “Nobody writes that many checks anymore.”

She’s right. We checkwriters and cash payers are an endangered species. Debit and credit cards are the norm. In some stores, a transaction under $50 doesn’t require a signature. Swipe and go.

My theory is old school, but simple: If you use cash or pay with a check, you know immediately the impact on your budget. If you wait until the end of the month to see how you’re doing, it’s often too late.

 At gas stations, pay at the pump is convenient but it costs the stores in lost sales of other products. Churches, charities and utilities are hoping their donors and customers go check free. We’ve yet to install a credit only pew at church but that may be coming soon.

Newspaper subscriptions can be billed to credit cards and auto-payments from bank accounts. Ditto for my football tickets and satellite radio. At a charity auction in 2010, organizers asked for credit cards up front to speed up processing.  When we returned in 2011, they had my credit card number from last year ready to use with a purchase.

One popular local drive-in accepts cash and checks but no debit or credit cards. They may be one of the last holdouts.

The lack of checkwriters has caused a slowdown in the District Attorney’s business of collecting on checks written with insufficient funds. That used to be a significant revenue stream, funding several positions in the DA’s office. Not any more.

Banks have fewer employees working to process checks. There are fewer clearinghouses.

For me, my goal is to make it to 20,000 and then start over with number one.

We lost another one of America’s “Greatest Generation.” Walt Knoepfli died at age 86. He was a fixture in Norman, having lived in Norman longer than me. He came in 1955, worked at Central State Hospital, now Griffin Hospital, and had forgotten more people than I’ll ever know.

Saw him earlier this month. He brought in some news for the state hospital retirees group, scribbled on a paper sack. That’s the kind of hometown news release that gets my attention.

Walt was a World War II and Korean War veteran and an active American Legion member. He volunteered for lots of causes and didn’t mind others getting the credit.

 He always had a war story and was quick with a clean joke. He was one of the local veterans that got to go on the Oklahoma Honor Flight to visit Washington, D.C. monuments this fall.

“Pretty neat,” he told me later.

He identified himself as “Knoepfli,” when he called, knowing I was one of the few who could spell his name. He said he learned to spell my name when he worked at Central State and my grandfather was a psychiatrist there.

He once called when he learned I was active with the Boy Scouts. He wanted to know a Cub Scout leader who would take a dozen or more live chickens off his hands. In Walt’s mind, the leader would show the youngsters how to kill, clean and cook live chickens as part of a campout.

“I’m thinking that might not be appropriate for 8-year-olds,” I told him. “They have to learn how to do it some time,” Walt said.

Walt once called on me to speak to a retirees group. Afterwards, he said he had a gift for me in his old truck. It was a dozen, green eggs. It ranks right up there with a jug of moonshine from a reader.  “These came from those chickens you wouldn’t take off my hands last year,” Walt said. That’s how I’m going to remember him. Always with a twinkle in his eye.

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The last time I saw brothers Butch and Ben McCain we were judging the Miss Nursing Home Oklahoma contest in south Oklahoma City. They were the local TV personalities and I was the designated print scribe. They knew how to make those senior women swoon. I’m not sure the women knew I was there.

They grew up in Muleshoe, Texas and are proud graduates of Bovina High School. Butch forecast the weather and Ben read the news. Somehow, when they talked about the need for rain or the price of pork bellies, viewers knew they talked from experience.

After stints at KTVY and KOCO in Oklahoma City, they moved to Los Angeles, seeking some of that gold in those Beverly Hills banks the country musicians sing about. They are on television, appear at state and county fairs and have taken their country rock and roll sound on the road.

They have four albums to their credit on Rise and Shine Records. A new album, “The McCain Brothers…Best So Far” was just released. It’s a collection of favorites from 25 years of making music.

It includes their hit single, “If Love Was A Crime I coudn’t Get Arrested,” songs from their “Hee Haw” and “Nashville Now” appearances. There’s one dedicated to Buddy Holly and the Crickets called “Holly Would” and a parody of Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine,” song called “Propane.”

The CD is available at killertumbleweeds.com. For inquiring minds, more on the McCains is available at www.mccainbros@aol.com

“God Bless Oklahoma,” they wrote on a note to me this week.

Imagine if the new Rock Creek Road overpass over I-35 that opened this year had paid banners promoting Subway sandwiches on it instead of the concrete art designs.

Or what if a bank’s banner advertising free checking hung from the new Robinson Street railroad crossing or the water towers were leased to a car dealership in exchange for a paint job?

That’s the dilemma faced in Chicago where I visited this week. Newspaper columnists are taking shots at the city’s new policy which allows the sale of advertising space on public facilities. The famed Wabash Avenue Bridge house on the Chicago River is now adorned with a Bank of America logo.

 It’s a temporary thing, designed to help cash-strapped Chicago raise $25 million. City council members, lead by former Mayor Richard M. Daley, gave the city and the Chicago Department of Transportation permission to sell space for banners, posters and other promotional items on the bridge houses.

 The city that prides itself on its architectural legacy may take a beating on this. The Wabash bridge is among the most well known and revered structures. In 1930, the American Institute of Steel named it the most beautiful steel bridge.

Columnist Blair Kamin suggests the ads cheapen the city. The famed Bean structure might soon sport a pork-and-beans ad. The iconic Water Tower building could have flashing neon signs.

For now, the bank’s logo stands out like graffiti on an old building wall. The good thing about it. It’s only temporary. The signs come down Dec. 12.

Father forgive me for I have sinned. This weekend, I was a lonely Sooner in Cowboy country even when my team wasn’t there.

Longtime friends invited us to the OSU Homecoming festivities in Stillwater. It’s an amazing festival of yard displays with moving parts, tailgate parties and thousands of students, parents and fans decked out in orange. (It’s not that wimpy Texas orange, either).

Although my family is pretty evenly divided, it was my first real trip to the campus since college days when roadtrips were part of fraternity tradition. My mother, her mother and dad, three sisters, a sister-in-law and countless cousins attended OSU.

 Grandmother Lela Stafford, before she died at age 100 in 2001, was believed to have been the oldest living female graduate.

 Here are some observations: Students for the most part seemed pretty tired. Some didn’t even make it up for the 2:30 p.m. game after weeks of “pomping.” That’s the intricate process of placing the colored plastic in the chicken-wire displays on fraternity and sorority lawns and on residence hall floats.

Some groups start working on their displays the first week of school. Pledges have minimum work hours and the outside decoration master is an exalted office in any chapter house. Freshmen often learn to weld before they learn where the library is located. 

Homecoming began in 1913, but the outside decoration tradition began in the 1920s when sororities started decorating their doors. Those doors became walls and now are often as tall and long as the houses themselves.

The festivities were honored in 2001 as “America’s Greatest Homecoming Celebration.” 

The game itself was a blow-out with Baylor’s offense sputtering each time it got within scoring range. But there are as many activities outside the stadium as there are going on inside.

Unlike OU’s Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, OSU ticketholders can leave the stadium during the game and return. The concessions stands were not crowded as many fans returned to their tailgates for their own plates of food.

The traffic doesn’t seem as stifling since many fans come early and stay throughout the day. And another thing, these Cowboy fans are proud of their orange vehicles. A classic Toyota Land Cruiser was painted bright orange. Nearby, an orange Smart Car was the center of tailgate attention. 

 My mother gave me the fashion rules, just like they did when she attended in 1949: Cowboys wear pressed blue jeans, white shirts and boots. Hats and sunglasses are optional but I wore them anyway just to keep recognition at a minimum.

Growing up in Norman, Bob Barry Sr. was always bigger than life in our home. He was the broadcast voice of the Sooners, the same age to the month as my late father, and he was my Norman High School classmate’s father.

Bob Barry Jr. was in my graduating class, although he went to West and was an athlete and good student while I went to Central and stayed far away from sports and books, had long hair and rode loud motorcycles.

I always imagined Bob, Joan, Frank and Bob Jr. and their dinner-hour conversations revolving around football, basketball and baseball and the celebrities they knew. But then again, he likely didn’t have a normal dinner hour. Journalists work odd hours, weekends and holidays. Their families either shift to accommodate or they break apart as so many do.

It wasn’t until we visited at length during a post-game party more than a dozen years ago in my neighbors Merv and Cindy Johnson’s kitchen that I came to realize that Bob Barry didn’t even consider himself a celebrity. He even introduced himself to me, thinking I wouldn’t know who he was. He didn’t ask me about the future of newspapers, my background or our sports editor’s demeanor.

 He was a great believer in newspapers and had a simple request. He asked me to look into carrying the syndicated “Jumbles” puzzle in our newspaper’s comic section. In his travels with the OU sports teams, he always bought the local newspaper and many carried “Jumbles.” He became hooked on the “Jumbles” puzzle. “I can’t start my day without it,” he told me at the time.

Jumbles found its way onto our pages that year and Bob never quit thanking me. Sometimes, he would e-mail me looking for a clue to that day’s puzzle.

He was an upbeat, optimistic guy who loved his family, close friends, his church, sports and golf, but not always in that order. He went out of his way to greet strangers as if they were estranged cousins showing up for the reunion. In his world, Bud, Barry and Bob deserved the same firm handshake and greeting that Calvin, Andy and Clay got.

An out-of-town friend with a handicapped son who worshipped the Sooners and Bob Barry asked me if I could get an autographed photo for the young man. Bob signed it to him and called him out, by name, as “OU’s biggest fan.”  A simple gesture that lit up a stranger’s life. That was Bob.

Like my father, Bob loved good, clean jokes and old-fashioned humor. He e-mailed jokes that were always a great way to start the day. He had a hardy laugh at his own jokes, even when you know he had told the same one a dozen times around the state.

At half time of a men’s basketball game a few years back, the newspaper was the game’s presenting sponsor and we visited on the air at halftime. He asked me if I’d ever been on the floor of the Lloyd Noble Center. “Not since the Lawrence Welk band opened the place on Labor Day weekend in 1975,” I said.

 “That was a good one,” he recalled, rolling his eyes, knowing full well that we were on the radio, not television.

In 2010, we were both honored by the University of Oklahoma as distinguished alumni. The journalism school had a special luncheon for our families. Frank Barry joined his father at the luncheon. As usual, Bob introduced him as Bob’s older brother, otherwise known as the “elder berry.” He laughed like that was the first time he’d ever told that joke when you knew he’d used it hundreds of times.

 Recently he rejoined the Norman Rotary Club. He was the club’s president from 1967 to 1969 and had to resign when meetings conflicted with his schedule. He agreed to tell a joke for me each week when my club presidency begins in 2013. I reminded him of that just this past week and he said he was saving them up for me.

This past week, he told friends at the OU press luncheon what a great time it was in his life. He had breakfast with author Bob Burke and told him the same thing. He enjoyed watching football and baseball games on television and OU gave him a press-box seat next to his son. It doesn’t get much better than that.

He’ll be buried Thursday afternoon from St. John’s Episcopal Church, a place where he anchored the early service for many years.

For you Bob, we’ll keep publishing the Jumbles puzzles on the comics page and my collection of good, clean jokes starts today. They’ll be told, in your honor, and we know you’ll be laughing and smiling down on us because yours was a life that never had a bad day.

Andy Rieger

editor@normantranscript.com

366-3543

The weekly newspaper we started in Noble in 1985 came at a time of revolution in the newspaper business. Our biggest purchase to date had been a used Veritype typesetting machine that weighed in at about 250 pounds.

It consisted of a small screen and a coffin-like box that consumed rolls of phototypesetting paper that had to be run through a chemical processor. We typed in the news, ads, headlines and cutlines, waxed the paper, cut out the columns and pasted it on a template page.

A few months into our venture, we determined that we could do the majority of our work and more with a single Macintosh 512 computer. We already had an Apple IIe model — with twin disc drives no less — to run our bills and subscription lists.

We borrowed enough money from the local bank (thanks to a second mortgage on my home) to buy an Apple and an IBM to process our accounting. An ad to sell the Veritype machine brought a few inquiries.

One magazine in Wichita, Kan., offered to buy it, sight unseen, for $500 less than our asking price if we would deliver it. Like pall bearers at a family funeral, we gently loaded it into my Jeep Cherokee, drove all night, and delivered the machine the next morning.

“I couldn’t decide whether to stay with Veritype or get one of those new Macintosh things,” the publisher told us as he badly mispronounced Macintosh. “It’s just a fad,” I told him. “That’ll never last.”

 That “fad” has lasted about 30 years and has revolutionized the world we live in. From Apple’s first home computers to today’s smart phones, iPads and iPods, Apple founder Steve Jobs has had as much impact on society as Henry Ford or Thomas Edison.

His death at age 56 robs us of a major force in the innovation and technology sector. Even though his pancreatic cancer was known about for years, the announcement Wednesday night caught many of us by surprise.

Much of the technology change in the small daily and weekly newspaper business has taken place because of Jobs’ vision. It became much cheaper for entrepreneurs like me to start a publication. Personal computers were labor saving.

Our small weekly, the Cleveland County Record, was one of the first newspapers in Oklahoma to go to full computerized typesetting in 1986. University journalism classes scheduled field trips to watch the paper being put together on Monday nights.

Today, my children live in an Apple world and have never lived without personal computers and smart phones. They live in three time zones but talk, text, exchange photos, computer files and videos like they still live at home. Their expectations are sky high for the kind of speed at which information must travel to impress them. It’s hard to believe it all started with an adopted child who dropped out of college to build a computer in his garage.

WICHITA FALLS, Tx., — The trickle of brown water moving under the bridge didn’t do justice to the name Red River on the elevated highway sign above it. Rivers are deep and wide. This was shallow and slow. It was too thick to drink and too thin to plow.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. This area has lacked rain for months, receiving only three inches in a year that should have brought more than 20.  A local rancher said the last good rain was in September.

 Like most of southwestern Oklahoma, farm ponds here have dried up and cattle are being sold before winter’s feeding. Grass is brown and only the mesquite trees seem to have found moisture to grow. At public golf courses, the watered greens and teeboxes stand out like green ink blots among the wheat-colored fairways.

That was the view from my bicycle handlebars Saturday morning in the 30th annual Hotter than Hell ride. An estimated 16,000 riders took part in what is billed as one of the largest and hottest organized rides in the country.

There may be rides with more cyclists but it’s doubtful any take place on hotter days. Saturday’s high in Wichita Falls was 109, making it the hottest in the 30 year history of the ride. (One year, we were greeted with 88 degrees and a north wind).

The route circles Wichita Falls and takes cyclists through Iowa Park, Electra, Burkburnett, Charlie and Dean before sending them back downtown. Racers took a different route. For those who choose to ride less than 100 miles — and there were many of them Saturday — courses take them through Sheppard Air Force Base where airmen cheer them on.

In the small towns, residents turn out to cheer riders on. Schoolgirls gave us a cheer in Burkburnett. Kids skipped sleeping in and cartoons to high-five riders in Iowa Park. In Dean, water hoses sprayed on the road gave riders a brief respite from the punishing sun.

The heat pushed many of us into more rest stops for fluids, pickles and oranges. Temperatures brought more cramping of riders. At the 90-mile rest stop, one tired cyclist sat down in the stock tank full of ice. Shoes and all. Medical personnel seemed busiest at the last four stops.

Norman riders were well represented at the event, considered the end of the summer cycling season. Most fared well after having trained in the heat. Some of the riders from cooler states had trouble.

The ride is a big boost to the local economy. Hotels are booked a year in advance with two-night minimums. Riders sleep on church floors and in tents. Restaurants and bars are standing-room only as the cyclists celebrate conquering yet another century ride in the wicked Texas sun.