Notes from the Newsroom NewsOK.com Blogging Community

If you’re like most people, when you hear the words, Civil Air Patrol, you think of search and rescue guys looking for crash victims or helping after tornadoes or fires. And, you would be right.

But, did you know children as young as 12 years old can become a cadet?

From its beginning, the Civil Air Patrol has served America valiantly. During World War II, they were called “Minutemen” and logged more than half-a-million flying hours, sinking two enemy submarines, and saving hundreds of crash victims.

Officially, the Civil Air Patrol is a “volunteer, non-profit auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force. Its three missions are to develop its cadets, educate Americans on the importance of aviation and space, and perform life-saving humanitarian missions.”

Did you catch that word, “volunteer?” That’s what impressed me most when I conducted a media workshop recently at the Oklahoma Civil Air Patrol Wing Conference at the Reed Center in Midwest City.

I thought I knew what the Civil Air Patrol was all about. After all, I’m the wife of a retired Air Force master sergeant and I know a thing or two about the military — especially the Air Force. While I knew the mechanics of the organization, I didn’t fully understand the true dedication shown by cadets, members and maybe most importantly, by those tireless volunteers. Many are parents of cadets that want to be involved in their child’s interests, and many are businessmen, civic leaders, factory workers and others who want to devote their time and energy to a noble cause.

I salute these men and women who take time out of their busy schedules to help shape the mind of future everyday heroes.

Looking for something to keep your children occupied this summer? Something productive? Something life-changing, character-building, pride-inducing, and self-esteem-boosting? Face it, the latest video game won’t accomplish anything. Encourage your children to aspire to something bigger than themselves. Check out the Oklahoma Civil Air Patrol at www.cap.gov, or by calling 736-6044.

Judy Hooper
Copy/Design Editor

Is retirement going to be a luxury for thirty- and forty- something workers? I increasingly think it will be, and a new estimate from investment giant Fidelity does nothing to dispel that.

A 65-year-old-couple retiring this year will need approximately $225K to cover medical costs in retirement, Fidelity estimates. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is in addition to the coverage available under Medicare, which may itself not be available when I and others retire.

The hypothetical retirees will still have to have enough money to live, either independently or in long-term care.

Perhaps what’s even more sobering than the estimate is its growth since 2002 — 41 percent.

The roughly 6 percent annual growth in the Fidelity projection about matches the growth of my 401K fund during a slow year. I know that doesn’t take into account contribution matching and interest compounding, but I think it raises a worthwhile point nonetheless.

And health care costs show no signs of flattening or decreasing.

Does paying for retirement terrify you as much as it terrifies me? Leave me a comment at http://blog.newsok.com/health.

Fidelity recommends:

- Creating an individual retirement plan

- Starting early and maximizing opportunities to save

- Assessing health status and becoming a smarter consumer of health care

- Determining details of any employer-sponsored coverage

- Understanding the financial impact of health care costs on Social Security income

Jeff Raymond, Medical Writer

I’ve met many “cradle-Baptists” in my time as religion editor.

Yep, I’ve also met plenty of people who were raised as Roman Catholics and who still adhere to the faith traditions of their youth.

However, a survey released this week said those folks still dedicated to the faith traditions of their childhood are decreasing in number.

In fact, the survey released this week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, says that nearly half of American adults have left the faith tradition of their upbringing.

According to the survey, they are either switching to another denomination or faith or deciding to reject religious affiliation.

A story about the survey is featured in Saturday’s Religion section. I’d like to know what readers think about the survey findings.

E-mail your comments and opinions to chinton@oklahoman.com.

Carla Hinton

Religion Editor

The New York Times has opened up some of its most historic archives to the public. TimesMachine offers a look at any New York Times edition from 1851 through 1922. I decided to see if I could find how the paper of record covered Oklahoma’s statehood. It wasn’t as easy as I had thought it would be.

First, I went back to read the front page of the Nov. 17, 1907 edition. There was nothing there about statehood, although there was a complete report on the accidental incineration of the beard of a 70-year-old man who had never shaved.

Perhaps, I thought, the Times opted to run a story on the actual day Oklahoma became a state. But I could find nothing in the Nov. 16, 1907 paper.

So I returned to the Nov. 17 edition and began to flip through the pages. Eventually, on page 8 I found a fairly brief mention of President Theodore Roosevelt’s signing of a proclamation declaring Oklahoma’s statehood. You can see it yourself by clicking here.

As the Times noted: “There was absolutely no ceremony connected with the signing of the proclamation.”

Of course, we played it bit larger in The Oklahoman. Our banner headline read:

OKLAHOMA BECOMES STATE

Scratch of Quill Pen Lets The New State Into Union;

Indian Territory and Oklahoma Are Symbolically Wed.

The Oklahoman also managed to find room on the front page for a fatal saloon shooting. Here’s the flavor of that feature:

“In a pistol duel in Ed Conley’s saloon, 116 West First Street, at 8:15 o’clock last night — a little more than three hours before the prohibition law was applied by Sheriff Garrison and the police departement — Robert Johnson, bartender, was shot three times and is now believed to be in a dying condition at St. Anthony’s hospital.” (A later bulletin noted that Johnson had died.)

Perusing century-old newspapers is endlessly fascinating, with the advertisements often as revealing of the past as the news of the day and the manner in which it was reported.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

Like many newspaper reporters, I served an apprenticeship covering meetings of municipal boards and panels. In the mid-1980s, I was a regular at city council meetings in Norman, Del City and Midwest City. One of the first things you learn is that there tends to be a cast of regulars who attend the meetings. Some of those regulars are fervent, even emotional, about the issues they hold dear.

The fear that those emotions can erupt in violence was acknowledged by the Oklahoma City Council in 1996, when the city spent $2,000 to conceal steel plates in the horseshoe desk the city council sits behind. The plates were designed to protect council members in case of an attack, noted a story by my colleague Jack Money.

The most extreme example will forever be Charles Lee “Cookie” Thornton, who burst into Thursday’s meeting of the Kirkwood, Mo., city council and fatally gunned down five people. An Associated Press account notes that Thornton often was “a contentious presence” at council meetings.

More from the AP:

“He had twice been convicted of disorderly conduct for disrupting meetings in May 2006.

The weekly Webster-Kirkwood Times quoted (Mayor Mike) Swoboda as saying in June 2006 that Thornton’s contentious remarks over the years created ‘one of the most embarrassing situations that I have experienced in my many years of public service.’

The mayor’s comments came during a meeting attended by Thornton two weeks after he was forcibly removed from the chambers. Swoboda had said the council considered banning Thornton from future meetings but decided against it.

In a federal lawsuit stemming from his arrests during two meetings just weeks apart, Thornton insisted that Kirkwood officials violated his constitutional rights to free speech by barring him from speaking at the meetings.

But a judge in St. Louis tossed out the lawsuit Jan. 28, writing that ‘any restrictions on Thornton’s speech were reasonable, viewpoint neutral, and served important governmental interests.’

You can read Thornton’s complaint here  (via USA Today’s On Deadline blog).

Balancing the public’s right to weigh in with a city panel’s duty to get its business done in a timely manner has long been a touchy point for those who hold the gavel at city council meetings. I don’t recall ever fearing for my safety during a council meeting, but there were some nights when I feared for my sanity as a “usual suspect” launched a lengthy diatribe into a public microphone.

I’ve seen city officials gavel down long-winded speeches or even ask police officers to escort uncooperative members of the public from council meetings. And some of those situations were tense. But I’m glad I never had to witness what reporter Janet McNichols saw and heard Thursday night.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

I wrote yesterday about the difficulty of finding things one can buy with a single quarter. The story was related to Monday’s issuance of the Oklahoma quarter, part of the U.S. Mint’s long-running program to highlight each of the 50 states through coinage.

Part of my research for the story involved using a couple of inflation calculators to compare the value of a quarter today and in the past. These things are actually kind of fun. Here’s a graphic that didn’t make the paper showing how much it would cost today to buy 25 cents worth of goods in the past. The timeline at the bottom of the graph runs from 1913 to 2005. 

I bought two rolls of shiny new Oklahoma quarters during lunch on Monday, and those were the quarters that appeared in a photo on the front page of The Oklahoman today. But at the end of the day, I had a couple of pounds of quarters rattling around in my pocket. My kids only needed a few, so I started handing out the rest (and I sold a few to folks who wanted more than one).

So far, I’ve handed out about $5 worth of quarters and it’s fun to observe people’s initial reaction to the coin. In general, even people who didn’t vote for the scissortail flycatcher and Indian Blanket artwork find the coin to be attractive. The most critical comments I’ve heard are that the coin isn’t “Okie” enough.

In the past two days, I’ve handed quarters to colleagues in the newsroom and my wife and four kids. I even slipped one to Boone Pickens after completing an interview.

So, to amend my earlier story, handing out quarters is the best value I’ve found for the new coins.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer

Yes, commuter boats really will soon be cruising the Oklahoma River. A delegation led by Devon Energy CEO Larry Nichols and former Mayor Ron Norick will be traveling Tuesday to Albany, New York as Scarano Boats begins trial runs of the 49-passenger Oklahoma River Cruiser dubbed the Devon Discovery. The boat is 65 feet long and will be among three to be delivered to Oklahoma City over the next 18 months. The Discovery will arrive later this month.

A decade ago, the Oklahoma River was hardly a river at all, and was widely derided as having to be mowed three times a year. That all changed with a $54 million waterway restoration funded through the city’s Metropolitan Area Projects program.

I’ll be accompanying the delegation to Albany, and will report back on the trial run, the boats’ construction, and how the boats are expected to promote development along the Oklahoma River.

- Steve Lackmeyer, Business Writer

Norman the zebra was a delight for the few people in the Ranger Creek area that caught a glimpse of him as he made the rounds through wooded neighborhoods last week, checking out neighbor’s garages and eating dog food.But for owner Amy Saxon it was quite a scare. Saxon sent me an e-mail Monday night after I had contacted her for a story I was writing about the zebra sightings.Norman is a Grevy’s Zebra that Saxon, an Arabian horse breeder, purchased from a ranch in Texas. She got him at 4 weeks old and handfed the animal every four hours until he was old enough. All that tender loving care created quite a bond, Saxon says. “He thinks I am his mama, but he also thinks he’s a human,” Saxon wrote. “As he becomes a teenager I (no) longer needed to be in his sight I guess. I let him roam freely on my 40 acres in Muskogee and also at Hilltop Arena in Muskogee. But this time he left.”

At 1 a.m., Saxon was nearly at her wit’s end and was ready to call the sheriff in the neighboring county since her ranch is near the Muskogee and Cherokee county line.

“I drove home slightly hysterical…when I heard Norman trotting down the drive,” Saxon wrote.

  Zebras deserve a little credit. They’re smart critters and have good memories. Saxon said when Norman was young, she took him to a horse trainer to get him halter broke. After about a week the trainer called to say Norman was ready.

“Now he is halter broke, but whenever Norman comes close to that trainer, he kicks a head high kick at him, only him,” Saxon wrote in her e-mail.

Julie Bisbee

State Reporter

jbisbee@oklahoman.com 

NewsOK.com, The Oklahoman and local PBS channel OETA have joined forces to create a new Web site.

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’ new series on World War II, ‘The War’, airs starting Sept. 23 on OETA and, in an effort to join a national movement, a new Web site has been launched to gather and share Oklahomans’ WWII stories.

The site – http://oklahomawwii.org – offers archived stories and photos from The Oklahoman, as well as videos from OETA, a blog from OETA’S Dick Pryor, WWII resources and much more. We are proud to offer Oklahomans’ stories about WWII and videos submitted by Web site users telling personal stories about the war.

Oklahoma sent more than 268,000 of its own to fight in WWII, and with an estimated 1,500 people from this ‘greatest generation’ dying nationally every single day, it has never been more important to gather their stories.

Visit the Web site today to find out more about the project and to share your story. Families are encouraged to tell the stories of their loved ones, also. You can find the site through NewsOK.com by searching ‘world war two’. The related blog can be found at blog.newsok.com/worldwartwo.

And make sure to watch OETA this Sunday to see the first installment of Burns’ documentary.

Lindsay Hodges - NewsOK.com Web Editor - lhodges@newsok.com

By Scott Schuldt, Staff Writer

Reports out of Las Vegas are saying that O.J. Simpson is being questioned in connection to a casino robbery. From the latest AP account:

LAS VEGAS — Investigators questioned O.J. Simpson and named him a suspect Friday in a break-in at a casino hotel room involving sports memorabilia.

The break-in was reported at the Palace Station casino late Thursday night, police spokesman Jose Montoya said. He said investigators determined the break-in involved sports collectibles.

“When they talked to him, Simpson made the comment that he believed the memorabilia was his,” Montoya said. “We’re getting conflicting stories from the two sides.”