There are good things and bad things about working at a small, non-union daily newspaper such as the Lake County Record-Bee.
One of the good things is the ability to take on assignments that would not be allowed at a union shop, where visiting another department requires the equivalent of a hall pass. A smaller paper allows more flexibility not to mention mobility, and it”s that type of flexibility that allowed me to spend the last few months — since late March to be exact — working on something that has absolutely nothing to do with sports. In my case, that would be the Moving Wall, which visits the Lake County Fairgrounds beginning Friday morning.
The Moving Wall is just what the name implies, a smaller version of the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. that moves from town to town. Lakeport is the only Northern California stop for the Moving Wall this year, which is quite an honor and quite a coup for the local branch of the Vietnam Veterans.
For my part, I am not a veteran even though a co-worker asked me if I had served in Vietnam, which gave me a chuckle. Not quite. I was born in 1961, the draft ended when I was still in elementary school, and Saigon fell when I was an eighth-grader. But I remember the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s, and I remember reading about the Vietnam War in the newspapers, fascinated by all the strange names and places, and even more fascinated that others around me didn”t care about the war or the soldiers who served there.
Come to think of it, times haven”t changed so much. We”re fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as you read this and too many Americans couldn”t locate either country on a map, let alone the former South Vietnam, if their lives depended on it.
When I learned about the Moving Wall”s impending visit, I volunteered to put together a small section for the newspaper. I figured about four pages would do it. I figured wrong. I ended up constructing 12 pages that cover the history of the war, Lake County men who died there, and others who served In-Country.
I talked to relatives — dads, moms, sisters, brothers and cousins — as well as friends and acquaintances of the Lake County men or men with Lake County ties.
While doing a check of old Record-Bee issues stored on microfilm at the Lake County Library in Lakeport way back in April, we (news editor Mandy Feder and myself) discovered two men with Lake County ties not originally honored by the local Vietnam Veterans chapter … Morris Allan Noble and Glenn Edward Kollmann … bringing the number to 10 of local men who died in the Vietnam War and whose names you”ll find on the Moving Wall this weekend at the fairgrounds.
Internet searches kept me up into the wee hours of the a.m. as I tried to discover who these guys were and what they did. Many of those searches took me nowhere, but some did. Along the way I met some wonderful people, including members of the Forward Air Controllers Association, who e-mailed me back answers to my many questions almost instantly.
During the last three months I”ve talked to some fascinating individuals, including Colonel Richard Boland, a veteran of three wars who penned the nickname “Herd” for the 173rd Airborne Brigade. He”s the closest thing to Patton I”ll ever meet on God”s green earth and there is absolutely nothing dull or subtle about this true warrior.
My interest in history and the military has been there since I can remember. I graduated from San Francisco State with a bachelor”s degree in history, I”ve been fascinated by the military since I first learned about my dad”s World War II experiences, and so I knew way back in March that this would be my project, one that I couldn”t resist.
There is no way this would have happened at a larger union newspaper. As my co-workers can attest, I literally went from taking baseball and softball linescores on one phone line to talking to family members of local Vietnam men on the other throughout the months of April and May. I had notes scattered everywhere. While it approached something on the order of mind-numbing on some of the busier nights, I wouldn”t have traded it for anything.
Now, months later, my work on the special section is done and another high school sports season has come and gone. I”ve gone from a frenzy of activity to wrapping up things for the 2008-09 school year, which means working on the Athlete of the Year section. And no, I still haven”t decided who had the better year between Kelsey Welton and Kaila Sterbank, so quit asking me. I”ll figure out that one next. Hopefully.
One thing I do know is that a young woman from Cloverdale was just honored as U.C. Davis” freshman of the year in track. My daughter, Sarah, 19, had a great season.
