Eight Feet Deep

Having worked as a newspaper reporter for almost two decades of my life, I realize there has always been some natural friction between print people and electronic news gathering folks. But sometimes the local TV people — in smaller markets especially — can just make you want to throw the teevee out in the yard or use it for sighting in your rifle

My case in chief: Today, local station KBMT Channel 12 in Beaumont, Texas, reported that the police are looking for suspects in a home invasion robbery.

They have some pertinent information in the story such as the suspects tied up the homeowner, stole something then fled. They even gave a description of the vehicle the perps were driving.

What is glaringly missing is that the story does not mention where this home invasion robbery happened? Why? Did the cops not want to give it to the media? Did the media even ask? Did the media not want to embarrass anyone? Were the media just having a synaptic misfire thus not remembering “where” is one of those elements important in a news story?

At the place where I reside a home invasion robbery wouldn’t be too difficult to imagine. But if I was regular Joe Beaumont Citizen, I would want to know where a home invasion robbery took place.

Channel 12 says they will have more on story on their broadcasts at 5, 6 and 10. I hope so, maybe they will finally tell the public where in the hell this robbery occurred.

People — including myself — often question the death penalty used so liberally in Texas. Pardon the pun. But when you read stories about Texas residents who are charged with sickening crimes such as this …

On the local news last night — from KFDM Channel 6 in Beaumont, Texas, — came one of the strangest stories I have heard in awhile. As a matter of fact it is strange on a couple of different levels once you think about it.

It seems as if this guy named Joe Richardson who lives up in the East Texas Pineywoods town of Buna lost his technical school ring in 1987 while fishing in Lake Sam Rayburn. A guy called Richardson up on Thanksgiving and told him he had found his ring in — of all places — the mouth of an eight-pound bass the caller had caught.

Apparently Richardson lost the ring in the very same area in which the Good Sam had caught the ring-eating fish on Rayburn. Whether the bass was actually eight pounds, well, I guess we’ll just have to take that nugget on faith.

Now what is equally strange, to me at least, the guy who called Richardson saw the latter man’s name etched on the ring and used his cell phone from there in the boat to search the Internet for Richardson. The Richardson from Buna was the fourth Richardson he called. That was certainly lucky because, being one who has a pretty common name, I would imagine there are a lot of Joe Richardsons out there. As a matter of fact, “Joe Richardson” returns 39,100 hits on Google. The kind-hearted fisherman, who wanted to remain anonymous, would have had one hell of a cell phone bill if it turned out his guy was number 39,099.

Going east? Going west? Going north? If driving through Beaumont, Texas, not so fast.

‘Tis the season: To curse loudly, beat your fists on the steering wheel, exercise that middle finger and to generally just exhibit some of your best Christmas road rage. Unless you take plenty of mood-enhancing drugs you might just fall into such behavior if you encounter traffic where I live.

Christmas traffic in Beaumont, Texas, for lack of a better word, sucks. The problem lies with all of the popular shopping places in town being located in one compact area which one must travel to on roads not meant for the 21st century.

Beaumont is a city of about 113,000 and is a central shopping area for an exurban and metropolitan population of somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000. I could be wrong. This is just ballpark figuring using official U.S. Census numbers and my knowledge of the area, which is just as good as anyone else who spent a good portion of his or her life living in that area.

City fathers and mothers as well as developers did what I consider to be a momentous deed for shoppers when they allowed and built Parkdale Mall, which opened sometime around 1974. The mall continues to have a robust shopping scene and the area surrounding it now holds every big box, national food chain and store one might find in any other city in the United States of this size. Actually, it’s kind of disorienting sometimes. Drive south on Interstate 35 from Dallas to San Antonio and you begin to wonder what city you are in because all towns have the same Best Buys, Wal Marts, Applebys, ad nauseum.

Back here in Beaumont, the environs around Parkdale Mall continue to grow including now, of course, business parks and apartment complexes. But while all of this growth has boomed the roadways supporting the shoppiexplosion of northern Jefferson County, Texas, has unfortunately not kept in pace.

The traffic bottleneck caused by the Parkdale Mall “district” is not limited to Black Friday and afterwards. From noon Friday until Sunday evening, and to a lesser extent during our limited “rush hours,” traffic can be snarled from the following:

–Eastbound I-10 sometimes as far out as Walden Road, just entering Beaumont from Houston and beyond.

–Northbound US 69/96/287 toward I-10 occasionally 7-8 miles near the Lamar University/Martin Luther King exit.

–Westbound I-10, at least from the downtown Beaumont exit coming from points east.

Our new city fathers and mothers (our mayor is named Becky Ames) have a grand vision for building downtown Beaumont into scaled down version of Venice, or at the very least, San Antonio, with a big lake or pond or some kind of water hole as a focus. I’m not sure exactly what they plan to do to be honest. The obvious goal is making Beaumont a tourist destination. (Dead air) Okay, I like Beaumont and would invite friends here, but it’s definitely an acquired taste.

No way can I see how city officials and boosters can imagine they will draw admiring crowds of touristas if their first impression of the city is being stuck in traffic upon entering the town.

And these are by no means our only traffic problems. Hey, the hurricanes we went through — complete with little stop signs at every intersection where a traffic light was out and doing a slalom around downed trees and power poles — were an improvement over some of our strut bangers and pot holes. At least fewer people were on the road when half the town was evacuated.

No, I don’t want to steer visitors away from Beaumont but unless something is done to get traffic moving again, I’d avoid driving through the city on Interstate 10 during the Christmas shopping season and on weekend afternoons unless you are armed with an abundance of patience and have plenty of gas. As for the city mothers and fathers, you all really need to do something about the roads.

The panel that makes official economic pronouncements for the U.S. said something today that has been fairly obvious to even the most brain dead of Americans, that we are in a recession. Hell, we’ve been in one since December 2007.

It doesn’t take the blue-ribbon economists of the National Bureau of Economic Research to tell our fellow Americans that the nation’s economy has stunk like possum roadkill in July for some time.

Of course, the current White House with its out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality cannot bear to let the “R-word” flow from their lips.

“What’s important is what is being done about it,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, without using the ‘R-word.’ “The most important things we can do for the economy right now are to return the financial and credit markets to normal, and to continue to make progress in housing, and that’s where we’ll continue to focus.”

The most important things being done about the recession and any other major world or domestic problem by the White House has already been set in motion. That is ending the Bush administration next month.

Ah, next month. The words kind of have a nice ring to them.