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Ever since I went to New York City where I lived for ten years I have enjoyed the tabloids and newspapers. The New York Times, the New York Post and the New York Observer interested me regularly. The Standard Examiner in Ogden and the Las Vegas Journal Review in Nevada have been wonderful too with news, advertisements, sport scores and more. The columns are good as forms of entertainment or political insight and persuasion. These newspapers like columns are meant to be read for enjoyment and information.

Ever since I went to New York City where I lived for ten years I have enjoyed the tabloids and newspapers. The New York Times, the New York Post and the New York Observer interested me regularly. The Standard Examiner in Ogden and the Las Vegas Journal Review in Nevada have been wonderful too with news, advertisements, sport scores and more. The columns are good as forms of entertainment or political insight and persuasion. These newspapers like columns are meant to be read for enjoyment and information.

Cub reporter Kris Dillman is excited about the prospect of covering Rush Ramond, Jefferson High’s superstar basketball player who is due to be the first junior selected in the NBA draft. But the broad racial lines that cut through the heart of Kris´s beat provide numerous obstacles. One of which is The Blockade: a stone-covered hill with a cyclone fence topped with V-braced barbed wire. It bisects what was originally a through street, conspicuously at the threshold where the neighborhood goes from predominately white to predominately black. While negotiating this treacherous terrain, Kris learns about media hypocrisy, bigotry and accountability; public relations hype, manipulation and intimidation; and how a simple news tip can lead to murder…

Cub reporter Kris Dillman is excited about the prospect of covering Rush Ramond, Jefferson High’s superstar basketball player who is due to be the first junior selected in the NBA draft. But the broad racial lines that cut through the heart of Kris´s beat provide numerous obstacles. One of which is The Blockade: a stone-covered hill with a cyclone fence topped with V-braced barbed wire. It bisects what was originally a through street, conspicuously at the threshold where the neighborhood goes from predominately white to predominately black. While negotiating this treacherous terrain, Kris learns about media hypocrisy, bigotry and accountability; public relations hype, manipulation and intimidation; and how a simple news tip can lead to murder…

Cub reporter Kris Dillman is excited about the prospect of covering Rush Ramond, Jefferson High’s superstar basketball player who is due to be the first junior selected in the NBA draft. But the broad racial lines that cut through the heart of Kris´s beat provide numerous obstacles. One of which is The Blockade: a stone-covered hill with a cyclone fence topped with V-braced barbed wire. It bisects what was originally a through street, conspicuously at the threshold where the neighborhood goes from predominately white to predominately black. While negotiating this treacherous terrain, Kris learns about media hypocrisy, bigotry and accountability; public relations hype, manipulation and intimidation; and how a simple news tip can lead to murder…

Imagine this book as an improbable cocktail party. All the people who populate this collection of journalistic works by Jerry Miller, living and dead, are there, holding martinis or grape Nehis (a lot of them are from Middle America after all), telling their stories, showing their human sides, keeping their lives in motion for the writer of descriptive narrative journalism to depict in his work and, thereby, evoke deeper and more unexpected responses than the more expository, facts-only approach of traditional reportage.
Quite the party, this one. People you know because they are celebrities or because they live just down the street, because they made headlines or because they tried and didn’t get their allotted fifteen minutes of fame. So, walk into the party, mingle, see the characters up close and personal, again thanks to a brand of literary journalism that believes its subjects are far more human and complex than just the bare facts that appear on their driver’s licenses, which probably aren’t accurate, anyway.
Look, over there in one corner is the country music contingent. Loretta Lynn holding court with Skeeter Davis and Tom T. Hall, who is quite a storyteller in his own right. And all three came through Indiana to perform at one time or another. So did many others, like Crystal Gayle, Carl Perkins, Ray Price, and Ernest Tubb, but they couldn’t make the party (or the book).
Tiny Tim is trying to break into that claque, or any other for that matter, but they won’t let him in.
Over by the window are the songwriters, living and dead. The Indiana boy who made “Stardust” a word in all our vocabularies, and the sickly humorous author of such classics as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “The Old Dope Peddler.”
Nearby, too, are the Hollywood types. Quite a range of them, from Spanky McFarland to Wolfman Jack, the Lone Ranger to Martin Sheen. They won’t let Tiny Tim into their conversations, either.
The biggest group of all probably is the one over by the beer cooler. The auto racing crowd – Jeff Gordon, A. J. Foyt, Jan Opperman, Andy Granatelli, and a young stock car driver hoping to make the same kind of headlines the others have. There are the Indy 500’s most legendary losers, too, from Ralph DePalma to Andy Granatelli (before he finally won the big race). The author has spent a lot of time at race tracks in his lifetime, so these are the people he invited first. After all, he did once write a whole book about those guys (and a girl or two) with grease on their uniforms and blinding speed in their blood. Other sparkles of fame are scattered around the room. Jesse Jackson is here. So is Dick the Bruiser. And Dave Barry and The Great Imposter. All of them, except maybe the Imposter, will talk your leg off. The Bruiser will also rip it off if you give him reason (like suggesting that pro wrestling is fake).
Oh, hey, there’s the pope, John Paul II, sipping a small class of communion wine, imagine that. Tiny Tim keeps asking him to forgive him for calling Satan a beautiful angel. The Holy Father just keeps sipping. And there’s ex-senator Birch Bayh, proudly talking up his son, the senator and perennial Mr. Congeniality of the vice presidential nominating contest. Vernon Jordan is here, as well, fully recovered from his assassination attempt in Indiana (not the state’s proudest moment). And Bobby Garwood, whoever he was once upon a time. The entire population of Economy, Indiana, is here, too, all bemoaning how the American economy for which it was named continues to pass it by over on a highway in eastern Indiana. Another small town has squeezed in, too, the one that beat some of the biggest schools in the state to get to the state high school basketball tournament’s finals down in the big city (Indianapolis).
It just gets more and more diverse, this odd menagerie of imaginary cocktail partiers. Hobart Freeman, the faith-healing pastor of the old Faith Assembly, hanging around waiting for someone to get sick. Iranian hostage Rick Kupke, another Indiana boy who made his 444 days of fame, then moved to California.
The lesser lights are mingling around, too. The Peace Pilgrim, who won’t tell you her name or age, a platoon of superb roller skaters, Emmett Kelley’s son, an old science teacher who put a lot of his faith and elbow grease into creating soap bubbles for the ages, two extraordinary Scrabble-playing brothers from over in Muncie, and the odd curator of the School of Magic and Witchcraft. Play it safe, don’t shake his hand if he offers it. Representatives of some of the more interesting places the author probed and lived to tell his readers about have showed up for the shindig. An all-night diner, a local mansion where the Spoon River poet once courted a banker’s widow, the site of Marion, Indiana’s greatest shame, the lynchings of August 7, 1930. A hotel on the way out the door, a pool hall just holding on, and the town that made the teaching of evolution and Clarence Darrow famous (or was it infamous?).
The author’s family sits around a small table toward the front. Two parents, one grandparent, a son, and an ex-wife make room for some of the author’s most memorable students from his days in a college classroom and, when he stops by, the author’s recollections of dealing with deaths and diseases and bluegill fishing and playing the clown, literally, get retold.
The invitation list keeps on going and going, without the Energizer bunny. A truck driver from the open road, a county fair with its intriguing cast of farm kids and carnies, the army of the devoted and curious followers who won’t let Indiana’s original Rebel Without a Cause rest peacefully in his nearby grave. A man who would be Henry David Thoreau but isn’t, and a man who would be Ray Bradbury and actually is.
They just keep coming in through the door (and a few through the windows). As a whole, they represent the most noteworthy and praiseworthy subjects of the author’s forty-year career in newspaper and magazine journalism. Though he was based in Indiana most of the time, the spectrum of his subjects spreads out from California to Massachusetts (and that’s just one guy!) and several points in-between. Bob Smith from Brooklyn crossed the author’s path before he became the most famous consumer of Popsicles in American film. So did a stream of young women who were eager to bare all (or maybe just some) between the covers of Playboy.
They constitute the faces, voices, places, and events that made the author’s career a genuine adventure. Into celebrity, into news events, from murders to politics, into ordinary people doing extraordinary things, into places with their own stories to retell, into translating his own experiences and relationships into something resembling insightfulness for the benefit of his readers, and even into some stories that aspired to be literary, even poetic, and occasionally may have succeeded.
The collection is the testament to the author’s idea that journalism and literature are not mutually exclusive (and never really have been), and that, ultimately, the subjective truths in life are the most honest and the most compelling. He, of course, will let the book’s readers be the final judges, as he always has.
He may even ask Tiny Tim’s opinion, if he only will come back to life and wipe the elephant crap off his tennis shoes.

Imagine this book as an improbable cocktail party. All the people who populate this collection of journalistic works by Jerry Miller, living and dead, are there, holding martinis or grape Nehis (a lot of them are from Middle America after all), telling their stories, showing their human sides, keeping their lives in motion for the writer of descriptive narrative journalism to depict in his work and, thereby, evoke deeper and more unexpected responses than the more expository, facts-only approach of traditional reportage.
Quite the party, this one. People you know because they are celebrities or because they live just down the street, because they made headlines or because they tried and didn’t get their allotted fifteen minutes of fame. So, walk into the party, mingle, see the characters up close and personal, again thanks to a brand of literary journalism that believes its subjects are far more human and complex than just the bare facts that appear on their driver’s licenses, which probably aren’t accurate, anyway.
Look, over there in one corner is the country music contingent. Loretta Lynn holding court with Skeeter Davis and Tom T. Hall, who is quite a storyteller in his own right. And all three came through Indiana to perform at one time or another. So did many others, like Crystal Gayle, Carl Perkins, Ray Price, and Ernest Tubb, but they couldn’t make the party (or the book).
Tiny Tim is trying to break into that claque, or any other for that matter, but they won’t let him in.
Over by the window are the songwriters, living and dead. The Indiana boy who made “Stardust” a word in all our vocabularies, and the sickly humorous author of such classics as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “The Old Dope Peddler.”
Nearby, too, are the Hollywood types. Quite a range of them, from Spanky McFarland to Wolfman Jack, the Lone Ranger to Martin Sheen. They won’t let Tiny Tim into their conversations, either.
The biggest group of all probably is the one over by the beer cooler. The auto racing crowd – Jeff Gordon, A. J. Foyt, Jan Opperman, Andy Granatelli, and a young stock car driver hoping to make the same kind of headlines the others have. There are the Indy 500’s most legendary losers, too, from Ralph DePalma to Andy Granatelli (before he finally won the big race). The author has spent a lot of time at race tracks in his lifetime, so these are the people he invited first. After all, he did once write a whole book about those guys (and a girl or two) with grease on their uniforms and blinding speed in their blood. Other sparkles of fame are scattered around the room. Jesse Jackson is here. So is Dick the Bruiser. And Dave Barry and The Great Imposter. All of them, except maybe the Imposter, will talk your leg off. The Bruiser will also rip it off if you give him reason (like suggesting that pro wrestling is fake).
Oh, hey, there’s the pope, John Paul II, sipping a small class of communion wine, imagine that. Tiny Tim keeps asking him to forgive him for calling Satan a beautiful angel. The Holy Father just keeps sipping. And there’s ex-senator Birch Bayh, proudly talking up his son, the senator and perennial Mr. Congeniality of the vice presidential nominating contest. Vernon Jordan is here, as well, fully recovered from his assassination attempt in Indiana (not the state’s proudest moment). And Bobby Garwood, whoever he was once upon a time. The entire population of Economy, Indiana, is here, too, all bemoaning how the American economy for which it was named continues to pass it by over on a highway in eastern Indiana. Another small town has squeezed in, too, the one that beat some of the biggest schools in the state to get to the state high school basketball tournament’s finals down in the big city (Indianapolis).
It just gets more and more diverse, this odd menagerie of imaginary cocktail partiers. Hobart Freeman, the faith-healing pastor of the old Faith Assembly, hanging around waiting for someone to get sick. Iranian hostage Rick Kupke, another Indiana boy who made his 444 days of fame, then moved to California.
The lesser lights are mingling around, too. The Peace Pilgrim, who won’t tell you her name or age, a platoon of superb roller skaters, Emmett Kelley’s son, an old science teacher who put a lot of his faith and elbow grease into creating soap bubbles for the ages, two extraordinary Scrabble-playing brothers from over in Muncie, and the odd curator of the School of Magic and Witchcraft. Play it safe, don’t shake his hand if he offers it. Representatives of some of the more interesting places the author probed and lived to tell his readers about have showed up for the shindig. An all-night diner, a local mansion where the Spoon River poet once courted a banker’s widow, the site of Marion, Indiana’s greatest shame, the lynchings of August 7, 1930. A hotel on the way out the door, a pool hall just holding on, and the town that made the teaching of evolution and Clarence Darrow famous (or was it infamous?).
The author’s family sits around a small table toward the front. Two parents, one grandparent, a son, and an ex-wife make room for some of the author’s most memorable students from his days in a college classroom and, when he stops by, the author’s recollections of dealing with deaths and diseases and bluegill fishing and playing the clown, literally, get retold.
The invitation list keeps on going and going, without the Energizer bunny. A truck driver from the open road, a county fair with its intriguing cast of farm kids and carnies, the army of the devoted and curious followers who won’t let Indiana’s original Rebel Without a Cause rest peacefully in his nearby grave. A man who would be Henry David Thoreau but isn’t, and a man who would be Ray Bradbury and actually is.
They just keep coming in through the door (and a few through the windows). As a whole, they represent the most noteworthy and praiseworthy subjects of the author’s forty-year career in newspaper and magazine journalism. Though he was based in Indiana most of the time, the spectrum of his subjects spreads out from California to Massachusetts (and that’s just one guy!) and several points in-between. Bob Smith from Brooklyn crossed the author’s path before he became the most famous consumer of Popsicles in American film. So did a stream of young women who were eager to bare all (or maybe just some) between the covers of Playboy.
They constitute the faces, voices, places, and events that made the author’s career a genuine adventure. Into celebrity, into news events, from murders to politics, into ordinary people doing extraordinary things, into places with their own stories to retell, into translating his own experiences and relationships into something resembling insightfulness for the benefit of his readers, and even into some stories that aspired to be literary, even poetic, and occasionally may have succeeded.
The collection is the testament to the author’s idea that journalism and literature are not mutually exclusive (and never really have been), and that, ultimately, the subjective truths in life are the most honest and the most compelling. He, of course, will let the book’s readers be the final judges, as he always has.
He may even ask Tiny Tim’s opinion, if he only will come back to life and wipe the elephant crap off his tennis shoes.

Group citizen journalism is emerging in local communities as mainstream media reduces its reporting ranks. This book describes how community group journalism operates at adult and youth levels.

An intimate, inside look at the internal workings of three pioneering publications—that started in 1996, 1998 and 2003—reflects the satisfaction and energizing effect of being able to publish widely without the benefit of a printing press.

Group citizen journalism is emerging in local communities as mainstream media reduces its reporting ranks. This book describes how community group journalism operates at adult and youth levels.

An intimate, inside look at the internal workings of three pioneering publications—that started in 1996, 1998 and 2003—reflects the satisfaction and energizing effect of being able to publish widely without the benefit of a printing press.

Group citizen journalism is emerging in local communities as mainstream media reduces its reporting ranks. This book describes how community group journalism operates at adult and youth levels.

An intimate, inside look at the internal workings of three pioneering publications—that started in 1996, 1998 and 2003—reflects the satisfaction and energizing effect of being able to publish widely without the benefit of a printing press.

This is a collection of Letters to the Editor, and other essays, written passionately and with conviction, over a period of forty years.

Meyer Rangell takes the freedom of the press seriously and personally , and uses our precious press freedom to express opinions on the important issues of the day, including nuclear war, international relations, the United Nations, our health care system, racism, ,religion, poverty and disease in the modern world, drug abuse, violence, crime, and anything else that comes to his inquiring mind. A free press, he maintains, properly utilized by involved citizens, should contribute to that elusive "public opinion" which shapes the nature of our democratic society.

This is a collection of Letters to the Editor, and other essays, written passionately and with conviction, over a period of forty years.

Meyer Rangell takes the freedom of the press seriously and personally , and uses our precious press freedom to express opinions on the important issues of the day, including nuclear war, international relations, the United Nations, our health care system, racism, ,religion, poverty and disease in the modern world, drug abuse, violence, crime, and anything else that comes to his inquiring mind. A free press, he maintains, properly utilized by involved citizens, should contribute to that elusive "public opinion" which shapes the nature of our democratic society.