Charles Apple

Rob Schneider, presentation director of The Dallas Morning News, was very amused that I sent him e-mail at 11:21 p.m. Monday night:

Go to bed! Are you already on your way to the airport?

No, but damn near. I had set my alarm clock for 3 a.m. so I could make a 5:40 a.m. flight from Norfolk to Charlotte to Dallas for my presentations to the Morning News Tuesday and as part of the Southern Newspapers Publishers Association Traveling Campus on Wednesday.

Rob had offered to pick me up at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport at 11:20 a.m. But I was still up late, making last-minute tweaks to my big, six-hour SNPA class. I have a bad habit about building a presentation and then, as I run through a timing check, having sudden brainstorms as to how to improve the show.

And it almost always involves time-intensive rebuilding of jpegs in Photoshop and Powerpoint files. The first segment of my Wednesday talk — which consists of the existing Art of Being Brilliant presentation I originally gave in Atlanta last fall and have presented a number of times since — is made of 425 jpeg slides. It take my beefy little iBook more than ten minutes just to open the file.

So sure enough, I got about two hours in bed last night. I think you’ll all agree that a man my age needs much more beauty sleep than that.

It was weird seeing the Norfolk airport so empty. No one in their right mind flies at that time of day. No one except The Virginian-Pilot’s Rich Radford, that is, who was on my flight to Charlotte en route to a golf tournament in Orlando.

I did mange to sleep well on both flights. By the time Rob retrieved me, I felt pretty good. He wanted to buy me a nice lunch but I insisted on fast food. Rob read my mind and took me to Whataburger.

Every time I visit Whataburger, I’m reminded: I really have to get to Texas more often.

The fine folks of SNPA have put me up in the Hotel Lawrence, smack in the middle of everything. I’m two blocks from The Dallas Morning News, from the Belo building and from Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963.

I’m lovin’ it.

I threw my bags into my room and immediately hauled ass for the old Texas Book Depository Building. I’ve been wanting to see this place since I was a very young boy.

The School Book Depository building, today.
—

The building is very nicely restored. In fact, it looks a lot beter than it did in November 1963.

Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy from the sixth-floor corner window. That’s the second one down from the top, at the right front side in my photo, above.

Admission to The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza was $13.50. With that, I received a loaner pair of headphones that gave me an audio guided tour of the museum, complete with sound bytes from the events surrounding that weekend. The corner from which Oswald fired has been restored with crated boxes that show how he formed a “sniper’s nest.”

I only had a couple of hours to poke around, but it was plenty of time. A highlight for me was seeing the model of the building and its environment used by the FBI and the Warren commission in its investigating of the shooting.

Another highlight was coming across some media-related relics. For example, they had the page dummy laid out by editors of The Dallas Times Herald’s afternoon edition for Nov. 22, 1963. Naturally, when Kennedy was shot, the page was remade:

An even more fascinating exhibit was this map on page one of the morning Times Herald that showed the planned route of Kennedy’s motorcade that morning.

Can you imagine running something like that now? Geez.

And not to give any credence to this sort of thing, but I had heard for years that Richard Nixon was “mysteriously” in Dallas shortly before Kennedy was shot. I never believed it. After all, if it were true, there would be some sort of record of it, right?

Well, there is. Just to the left of the aforementioned map:

I found this creepy.

But not as creepy as a jackass who shoots pictures in a museum where photography is prohibited. It wasn’t until I fired off a few shots that I saw the signs.

Luckily, no one noticed or seemed to mind. I quickly packed up my camera and tried to look innocent. I sure would loved to have taken a picture of that “snipers nest,” though.

When you finish the tour of the museum on the sixth floor, you’re guided up to the seventh floor where you can view many of the assorted home movies that were shot of Kennedy’s motorcade and of his death that day. Including the famous Zapruder film, the one that they almost never show unedited, because it’s supposedly so gory. I’ve seen many, many stills from that film, but I’ve never watched it in its entirety.

Until today. And frankly, I kind of wish I hadn’t seen it. Yes, it’s every bit as shocking as they say. There’s absolutely no chance at all, watching that bullet rip through the president’s head, that he could have survived. One can only imagine how Abraham Zapruder felt as he saw the splatter through his viewfinder.

The motorcade, traveling left to right, emerged just in front of the red, castle-looking building — the old City Hall — and turned toward us in this photo.

We’re standing on the sidewalk, by the corner of the Depository building. That’s Dealey plaza on the right. Incidentally, my hotel is the tall yellow building just behind the old City Hall.

The motorcade came directly toward us for one block and then turned in front of us to our right and then traveling toward the big underpass at the bottom of the hill.

From this vantage point, I turned around and looked up. That’s Oswald’s perch, directly above, just beneath that frieze:

I found something really, really cool in the gift shop; something I never thought I’d see:

It’s a CD version of a comedy record album recorded by comedian Vaughn Meader in October 1962, poking tremendous fun of the Kennedy family. It was basically the Saturday Night Live of its day and won the grammy for Album of the Year in 1963.

I don’t advocate using the Wikipedia as a news source, but it’s good enough for this amusing story:

According to several sources, avant-garde comedian Lenny Bruce appeared at a New York nightclub the day of Kennedy’s assassination. As if testing his audience’s readiness to find something funny so soon after tragedy, Bruce was silent for several moments before announcing, “Vaughn Meader is screwed!”

Read more about Vaughn Meader and his First Family albums at Wikipedia.

Naturally, the record-buying public suddenly lost its taste for biting Kennedy satire. The album was pulled from shelves, making it a collector’s item. I have a vinyl copy that I bought more than 20 years ago in a flea marked for something like two bucks. At this very moment, it’s hanging in a frame on the wall of my home office.

I’ve always wanted to convert it to CD or MP3 or something, but I’ve never had the technical savvy to do it.

And now I don’t have to. This disc contains the original album plus “Volume 2,” recorded in March 1963, that I’ve never heard.

So by now, I was running short on time. I hope to get back over there again before I leave to inspect the actual site Kennedy was hit and the infamous “grassy knoll” from which some witnesses swore another gunman fired.

I then rushed over to The Dallas Morning News building. A number of Morning News staffers are planning to attend my big Wednesday session at the Belo building, but Wednesday is a tough deadline day for most of Rob’s staff. Therefore, he invited me to give the original, 90-minute Art of Being Brilliant session to a collection of his staffers this afternoon.

About 20 staffers showed up for the session, which we held in a reception hall of a building behind the main DMN facility. At one point, I heard what sounded like a helicopter taking off. Naturally, I figured it was the sound of finely-tuned, state-of-the art printing presses churning out copies of the award-winning Dallas Morning News.

Nope. It was a helicopter. The building is home to a cable news operation. The TV station next door uses the property as a heliopad.

As I’ve reported before, this was the sixth time I had presented my Art of Being Brilliant address. It was interesting getting Rob’s take on it.

Rob said he was delighted to see Omaha get so much love. Sure ’nuff, I show several pages from Josh Crutchmer and the folks of the World Herald. They do some really, really clever stuff there.

In this shot, however, I’m showing the famous “Mattafication” page by Todd Bayha of The Columbus Dispatch:

Interestingly, Annie Schnick came to my session but I didn’t get to see her husband, Jeff Schnick. In all the years since I first met Jeff via e-mail and the old VizEds chatroom, I’ve never actually met him face-to-face.

My new theory: Jeff doesn’t actually exist. Kind of like the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. Talk about your conspiracies.

Anyway, once we wrapped up, I rested for a couple of hours before Rob and a number of his staffers took me to Fogo de Chao Brazilian Steakhouse. Apparently, it’s a chain.

I’ve never even heard of a Brazilian Steakhouse, but this place was freakin’ incredible. Here’s how it works…

You basically sit there and get waited on, hand and foot. Waiters roam about the place, carrying huge slabs of wonderfully tasty meat, on giant spikes.

They come to each person at each table. Bottom sirloin, sir? The next waiter will ask: Filet mignon, sir?

Say yes, and the waiter uses a huge blade to shave off a chunk for you. They even supply little tongs so you can help the waiter move the chunk onto your plate.

They must have had ten or twelve different kinds of meat being toted around the place. Most was beef; they also had lamb chops, pork sausages and chicken. My favorite was some kind of sirloin cut called a picantia that’s seasoned with garlic.

They give you a little round plastic disc that I thought was a coaster for my beer glass. It’s green on one side and red on the other. If you want more chunks of meat, turn the green side up. If you want to kick back with some salad or veggies or just want to rest a bit, turn the red side up.

The guys with the meat keep coming around. There’s no limit. It’s all you can eat.

I must have eaten two whole cows.

It was definitely one of the most memorable dining experiences I’ve ever had.

Tomorrow, we start bright and early in the Belo building at 9:30 with the original Art of Being Brilliant presentation and then we’ll expand on the issues we raise there for a full-day session.

Should be fun.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 1:02 am and is filed under Workshops, News design, Charles Apple, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.