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  • Flapping Skulls and Severed Limbs
  • Meet Him in St. Louis
  • Beat Writer Blues
  • Akoy Agau: Lost and Found
  • Eric Raskin’s Struggle

Flapping Skulls and Severed Limbs

Not long ago I woke up in the middle of the night, television on, sound muted.  A film was on HBO,  ”House of 1000 Corpses”, from 2003.   The plot, as laid out on IMDb: “Two teenage couples traveling across the backwoods of Texas searching for urban legends of serial killers end up as prisoners of a bizarre and sadistic backwater family of serial killers.”

What ensued was an uninterrupted barrage of violence, sadism, torture, agony, blood and twisted limbs.  It was so off the chart there could be no chart.  Did I turn the channel?  No.  I waited to see how each scene would outdo the last in psychosis.  Which is what director Rob Zombie intended, no doubt.  Zombie was an awful musician who transitioned seamlessly to tasteless film director.

Meet Him in St. Louis

This photo of Augie Favazza says everything about the St. Louis Cardinals and their epic World Series championship.

Augie Favazza

He grew up in the same neighborhood as Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola – The Hill.  He was a graduate of Southwest High, and the University of Missouri (B.J., 1973), and went on to become sports editor of the Portland Press Herald.

Now he splits the year between Old Orchard Beach and St. Petersburg – and works as an accreditation consultant to cosmetology schools.  But he still has family in St. Louis, and his heart still pumps Cardinal red.

 

 

Beat Writer Blues

Sure, it sounds glamorous.  Covering the Celtics for the Boston Herald, hobnobbing with the likes of Mike Gorman and Gary Washburn, is the stuff of journalism school fantasy.

Steve Bulpett

But Steve Bulpett, who has had the beat since 1985, is here to tell you that it exacts a physical and emotional toll.  Physical, from long hours, irregular sleep and exercise, and poor diet.  Emotional, from the adrenaline high of the season and the inevitable and spooky decompression after it ends.

The toll on a writer’s personal life is another subject altogether.  Bulpett, 54,  says he has been “close to the alter a few times – three arrests, no convictions” in this candid interview. And though he does not disclose his favorite haunts on Boston’s North Shore, sources say he can be found at Red Rock Bistro in Swampscott on weekends.

An Interview with Steve Bulpett

Steve Bulpett: Interviewed on December 5, 2011

Position: NBA writer/columnist, Boston Herald

Steve Bulpett

Born: 1957, Lynn, MA

Education: University of  Dayton, 1979, B.A.

Career: Beavercreek (Ohio) Daily News 1979-81; Burlington (MA) News 1981-82; Salem (MA) Evening News 1982-85; United Press International 1985; Boston Herald 1985-present.

Personal: Single. “Close to the altar a few times  – three arrests, no convictions – but surely maturity will kick in soon and I’ll complete the trip.”

Favorite restaurant (home):  “Too hard to narrow it to one.  And I’d piss off too many friends in the business if I did.”

Favorite restaurant (away): Presently in the NBA: Billy Coerper’s Five-O’Clock Club, Milwaukee. “The name has changed and it’s gone a bit upscale, but it retains much of the charm of an old-time corner bar restaurant.” Honorable mention: Rendezvous Barbecue in Memphis; Gibson’s in Chicago; In-n-Out Burger out west “the one on Lincoln Blvd. and Sepulveda is so close to an LAX runway that I once lost a french fry in the vortex of a Korean Air Lines 747.”

Akoy Agau: Lost and Found

Sports journalism at the high school and community level often is about more than the sport.  I was reminded of this in reporting a story about Akoy Agau, star center for Omaha Central High School, who fled his native Sudan as a little boy.

Akoy Agau

The story was supposed to be about how students of Agau’s era understood the 1960s, as depicted in my book, “The Rhythm Boys of Omaha Central: High School Basketball at the ’68 Racial Divide”.

But my reporting took me in a different direction, toward Central’s “persistently lowest-achieving” status under state and federal No Child Left Behind standards, and the tangle of politics behind it.

Here’s the story for the Oxford African-American Studies Center.

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