16-12-2009, 03:57 PM
Dawn Meredith Wrote:ps. John, I don't disagree with anything you are saying. First person research is certainly the best way to go. Hey, perhaps you'd like to take a little trip to Santa Rosa, California. Have a come to Jesus meeting with Ruth Paine who is residing in an assisted living facility there. Perhaps she'd welcome the chance to finally bare her soul before she meets her maker. If I was not working full time I'd be on a plane out there tomorrow. You just never know when someone might want to have a little confessional when close to the end. She certainly has more than much to tell.
Wish I was not working full time, too. But to harass someone on or near their deathbed is just something I would never do. And my best interviews are done with my "newspaper newsroom soundtracks" running in the background from All the King's Men as if I was ready to go to press with some breaking news. You know kinda like Woodward and Bernstein with lots of phones ringing, typewriters clacking, paper shuffling and teletypes running. Works every time. Even up until the 1990's when all that stuff had been replaced with more silent machines. I am such a devious little bastidge. But do they ever follow the rules? No? :evil::creep:
:bandit::hahaha: And it is not against the law to say you are a freelance journalist either. Without the input and support from Mary Ferrell, Bill Turner, Dick Russell, James Richards, Bill Kelly, Roy Hargraves, Lt. Gracey Lockhart, Joe Milteer, George Michael Evica, Gordon Whineslow, Nathaniel Weyl, Spas T. Raikin, Chip Berlet, Gordon Hall and Grace Hoag from the Hall-Hoag collection at Brown, James Hosty, Charles Drago, Ken Rahn, Dr. Jerry Rose, Ted Gittinger, Russ Bellant, Mark Diaz, John Simkin, Peter Lemkin, David Guyatt, David Boylan, Jon and Scott Anderson, Wes McCuen, Armen Dernounian, Walter Baldinger, Andy Winiarzyk, Frank Sturgis, Terry Nolan, John McAdams, Ulric Shannon, Vicky Wertz, Barbara LaMonica, Sherry Sullivan, Carl Oglesby, Peter Whimpey and several others I would still be scratching and searching for clues and direction.
Some gave me right on the money leads and some through the use of negative templates actually helped me even more by being deflective, disruptive, debilitating, misleading and obfuscating. Thanks for the memories.
And especially to my father who had more courage and guts than any one of a dozen of those armchair investigative quarterbacks all put together. And to my paternal grandfather who died of injuries received fighting the Russians during the Hungarian Revolution, to my mother who taught me how and why to hate and fight the Nazis and the Communists as well as the McCarthyites, and to my maternal grandfather who withheld key information and key components from the Nazis regarding how to manufacture the German version of the Polish Lugers made in the Polish munitions and bicycle factory he managed before the invasion of Poland, right up until the very end when they eliminated him after he was no longer needed. And thanks to my uncle Charles W. Yost and Ambassador Charles "Chip" Bohlen who spirited my mother and her sisters out of Poland while the German invasion was just starting. This one is for all of you.