Monthly Archives: April 2014

Magazine writing: The last Studebaker dealership

Back in the early 70s I bumped into an editor for Boston Magazine at a party.  We chatted, and by the time we parted company he had asked me to do a story for him.  I had been telling him about an idea I had for a story about one of the nation’s last Studebaker dealerships, which was still operating in Revere Beach, near Boston, years after Studebaker had stopped producing automobiles. I wrote this story and they sent me a check. As far as I know, they never published it.

By ARTHUR FREDERICK

The Revere Beach Parkway is a windy road, and Feldman Motors squats on the apex of one of the curves, so small that the line of rusty cars nosed up to the sidewalk is only a dull blur in the corner of your eye as you drive past.

If you turn your head and slow down a little, you can pick them out; a Studebaker Lark and a couple of Hawks. There’s a Packard, one of the last models built, and it looks like it might have been red.

It is dark inside Feldman Motors, but there is some noise in the back of the shop and in a few minutes Irving Feldman shuffles out to the front, peering through think glasses. He is 65, and he’s been here for 20 years.

Feldman had chuckled on the phone and hedged suspiciously about being interviewed. “Oh, well, I can’t afford it right now,” he said. No charge, he was told, but he’s still not sure.

“Who do you work for? No bullshit?” He examines the press cards, turning them over to read the back.

He moves to the back of the shop to talk to a customer. The shop is full of yesterday’s cars. Packard Clippers, Studebaker Hawks and Cruisers. A white Hawk stands near the door, and the street noise disappears when you shut the door and squirm into the red leather seat. The clock is ticking, and automobile clocks never work.  The odometer says 9,000 miles, but Feldman says it’s probably 109,000.

“In 1955, the best days of my life I had here, we were selling, servicing, we had a group of 12 men. Then, 10 years later, the bottom dropped out of it.”

The bottom began to crumble when the Studebaker Packard Corp. decided to drop the Packard line in the late 1950s.  Feldman Motors and Studebaker-Packard dealers across the country found themselves dealing in nothing but Studebakers. It was a worrisome time for the dealers, but Studebaker was showing signs of resuscitation; they redesigned the Lark and came out with the Avanti, a beautiful four-seater with a fiberglass body and an optional supercharger.

It wasn’t enough. Studebaker moved its car-making operations to Canada for two years before the Studebaker joined that Big Hudson Hornet in the Sky in 1966.

“I had four Studebakers on order when we got the news from the company,” Feldman said. “I called the customers and told them they didn’t have to take the cars if they didn’t want to. But I told them I would stay here and carry parts, and service the cars if they bought them. They all bought the cars.”

1959_Studebaker04_AdIt’s hard to forget the good days, the mid-1950s, when Feldman Motors was selling cars, when 12 men in the back were repairing the Packard Clippers amd Patricians and Studebaker Hawks. And the fall – the decline of Studebaker-Packard – is hard to forget, too.

“They (Packard) went out of business and for a few years we were doing wonderful. We just took all Studebakers, then, even they lasted less than 10 years on their own and then they’re out.

“We work, we make a living, but it is a hard living now.”

It’s not hard to take yourself back to 1955 and imagine Irving Feldman tooling a big Packard Patrician with dealer plates into his dealership, walking into his showroom in a blue suit to talk to a customer. Today, he wears baggy pants and a faded blue sport shirt open at the neck. Today, his showroom is empty.

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Cowsnatching and other Maine tales

I’ve been looking through the Google News Archive and I’ve found a number of my old stories from my days with United Press International. This is a valuable find for me because these stories illustrate the wire service style of writing — tight, short and bright. I spent a lot of my days with UPI in Maine covering government and politics, but when I wasn’t doing that I was looking for features stories, like this one about cowsnatching.

By ARTHUR FREDERICK

AUGUSTA, Maine – There’s a lady in Levant who won’t let her cows out of the barn. Rustlers got one of her heifers and she  doesn’t want it to happen again.

In Mount Vernon, Milton Hall noticed three heifers missing. After checking his pastures, he called the sheriff. The cows had been rustled.

Rustling isn’t limited to the Western bad guy type.  It’s been reported in the Maine counties of Kennebec, Aroostook, Sagadahoc, York and Penobscot.  The incidents range from the theft of a single grazing cow to daring cowsnatching right from the farmer’s barn.

In Belgrade, someone made off with a single Hereford after cutting a tether rope. But in Albion, one ambitious fellow made off with six milking cows.

“The guy drove a truck right into the barn and drove out with six of them,” said Kennebec County Sheriff Stanley Jordan.

Sheriff Darrell Crandall of Aroostook County said there have been three incidents in recent weeks, but he said he wasn’t sure if two of them were the real thing or not. The third incident was rustling, all right, he said, but the farmer didn’t know whether he lost two cows or four.

“The guy drove right in with a vehicle and took off with the cows,” Crandall said. “But the owner didn’t know whether he got two or maybe four.  Now, just how he came up with those figures I don’t know.”

Most of the cases are one-shot, or one-cow, deals. But a couple of years ago some enterprising rustlers used a bit of local technology in bagging their bovines.

The thieves used a “pulp truck,” a big stake truck with a huge hydraulic claw which is used to pick up logs and place them on the truck bed.

“These guys used to get a cow near the pasture fence, bop it over the head with a hammer, then move the claw over the fence and pick the carcass right over,” said Sheriff Jordan. “We never got ‘em.”

Jordan thinks the increase in rustling is a result of the increase in beef prices. And he thinks it’s going to get worse.

“See, a friend of mine said they’re selling beef cattle for 80 cents a pound on the hoof,” Jordan said. “Now if a guy can go out and knock one off that’s 200 or 300 pounds or so dressed out, he’s got it made.”

Bringing a conference back home

In 2010 I attended the annual convention of the National Council for Marketing & Public Relations in Albuquerque on behalf of my then-employer, St. Petersburg College. Rather than simply soak up four days of seminars and conferences, I put together a WordPress blog (a bit like the one you are reading) and reported on each of the conference sessions so my colleagues back in St. Pete could benefit from them. (That blog is still up and you can see it if you want to). The following is one of the stories I produced at that conference. This isn’t an example of great writing, but rather an illustration of how journalism can contribute to institutional knowledge and expand the value of things like conferences and seminars.

Four culprits contribute to stalled growth

This session was presented by Steve McKee, a partner in an Albuquerque-based ad agency, McKee Wallwork Cleveland, and author of “When Growth Stalls,”a book that examines the hows and whys of a business phenomenon that many businesses, even successful ones, run into.

That sudden slowdown is just what happened to McKee’s own business just a few years after launch. The new company went through rapid growth and was even cited by a national magazine as being one of the fastest-growing new companies in America. But just a few years later, much of the air seemed to escape from the balloon, and McKee Wallwork entered a period of the blahs. McKee Wallwork remained busy, but the previously steep growth curve went flat.

As a marketer, McKee was not only worried about the sudden negative turn; he also was curious about the reasons for the sudden change, and he wondered whether other companies experienced the same slowdown after steep initial growth. He decided to do some research.

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Writing in the first person

I think most journalists will tell you that writing in the first person is difficult and even a bit unpleasant. It’s hard to lift the curtain on your own life and let people see you — it’s much easier to write about others. This is the only story I can recall that I ever wrote about myself, except perhaps for things like travel pieces. I wrote it to acknowledge National Birth Defects Prevention Month, and to commemorate the 40th birthday (and day of death) of my first child. Three newspapers — in Salt Lake City, Norfolk, Va. and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. — ran this on their op-ed pages.

By Arthur Frederick

Dear Baby Boy:

On a day in the not-to-distant future, I’ll pause to quietly take note of your 40th birthday. It is unimaginable that you, my first-born child, was born so long ago.

Things were different back then, in the early 1970s. For one thing, sonograms were not a regular part of a doctor’s tool kit, as they are today. If they were, your birth defect would have been noted very early in your mom’s pregnancy. As it was, your undeveloped skull and brain were not discovered until a number of hours after your mother went into labor.

“When I examined your wife, I felt soft tissue rather than a hard skull,” the doctor told me as we huddled outside your mother’s hospital room.

Today, because of that ability to diagnose anencephaly at somewhere between the 11th and 14th week, around 95 percent of families elect to terminate such pregnancies. That means that only about 1,000 anencephalic babies are now born in the U.S. each year; back around the time of your birth, that number was more like 20,000.

We didn’t have that option. But, to be honest with you, it’s a decision we probably would have made. Not because we didn’t already love you, but because I believe we would have accepted the inevitability of what was about to happen to you, and to us.

Those who end their pregnancies early avoid the indescribable pain of their child’s certain death. About half of anencephalic babies are stillborn; others, like you, are born alive, but are destined to die in as little as a few minutes or as much as a few days.

No babies born with anencephaly survive.

You died in an incubator in the hospital nursery, surrounded by a half-dozen healthy babies. I stood and watched through the big viewing window during the 20 minutes or so that it took you to go.

I’ll tell you a few things that have happened since then:

Your mom and I didn’t stay together very long after you were born. We were both devastated by what happened to you, and to us. But our parting wasn’t your fault.

You have three half-siblings, all girls. One is a doctor; another is a drug addict. Their lives, as well as your very short one, have taught me that having children, while joyful, is a risky business with unpredictable outcomes.

Both your mom and I are grandparents. Since you would be 40, you might well have had children of your own by now who would be approaching college age. I feel sad at having missed that, and even sadder when I think about all the things you missed.

You may have noticed that I opened this letter by referring to you as Baby Boy. You were going to be Matthew, but under the circumstances, we decided not to name you, and Baby Boy is how you are listed on your birth and death certificates. It was a decision, among many others, that we had to make in a hurry and under great stress. I hope it was the right one, but I don’t know.

Not naming you may leave the impression that we simply hoped to avoid the pain of your death by not acknowledging your life. That was not the case. Not at all.

Forty years after your brief time here, your dad still loves you very much.

Arthur Frederick is a journalist and a public relations consultant. He lives in Palm Harbor, Fla.

An obituary that touched me

This is the only obit I ever wrote that made me cry. There was something about this young woman’s early death, and the things that she accomplished in such a short time, that got to me. People always say nice things about the dead, but the comments I heard about this person were different, very sincere and meaningful. Also, the flight suit hanging in her closet, awaiting her death, was a powerful metaphor for me.

Illness had kept Elizabeth “Beth” Rogers from her job as a Bayfront Medical Center flight nurse since last fall, but the helicopter crews would fly over her home whenever they got the chance to let her know they were thinking of her.

Mrs. Rogers lost her long battle with cancer Wednesday at Mease Hospital Dunedin. She was 25.

“She could always hear the helicopter before the rest of us,” her husband, Ted Rogers, said Thursday. “She would say, `Here they come.’ It always brought her pleasure to hear them going over.”

Although illness forced an end to her career before her 25th birthday, Mrs. Rogers had accomplished a great deal, according to her co-workers. She was a trained paramedic, a registered nurse and a certified flight nurse, and worked on the BayFlight crews for more than a year.

“Beth had geared her whole life toward becoming a flight nurse,” said Maurice Brazil, BayFlight’s chief flight nurse. “She was the only nurse I know who had every certification known, and at her age that was extremely unusual. She was very energetic and very focused on patient care.”

Brazil said the Florida Flight Nurses Association, meeting recently at a national emergency care conference in Orlando, voted to name its new annual award the Beth Rogers Award and to make her its first recipient. In addition, he said, the Florida Emergency Nurses Association has established a scholarship in her name.

“Some of us old dogs have been in this business for 20 years, and Beth had been flying for only two or three years,” Brazil said. “That’s the kind of impact she had. Our whole industry is just devastated.”

Mrs. Rogers knew she wanted to be involved in emergency medicine when she was in her teens, her husband said. Her interest in flight nursing happened later.

“Beth was always interested in emergency medicine,” he said. “In 1985, she became involved with the Young Explorers, which allowed young people to participate in various fields. She worked as a volunteer in the emergency room in a hospital in Panama City.”

Mrs. Rogers earned her EMT license in a program in Panama City, Fla., taught by her future husband, and then began working in Walton County. Later, he said, she returned to school and earned registered nurse and paramedic licenses.

“In 1991, we went on vacation and rode in a sightseeing helicopter, and then she did an internship with Life Flight Helicopters in Tallahassee,” Rogers said. “She thought it was the best of both worlds, doing the work of both a paramedic and a nurse. She always wanted to do both.”

Mrs. Rogers went through several surgeries and underwent long radiation and chemotherapy sessions in her battle with cancer, her husband said. Through it all, she expected to recover and to return to work.

“She always treated it as another challenge; she never gave in to it,” her husband said. “She wanted very much to be able to go back to work. She had a brand-new flight suit hanging in her closet that she had never worn, and she had every intention of wearing it some day.”

Rogers said his wife will be buried in the new flight suit.

Mrs. Rogers was born in Nashville, Tenn., and came here in 1991 from Panama City, Fla.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by her parents, Roger and Laura Draffin, Palm Harbor, and a brother, Wally A. Draffin, Auburndale.

Sylvan Abbey Memorial Park is in charge of arrangements. Visitation is planned from 6 to 8 p.m. today at Moss-Feaster Sylvan Abbey Chapel, Sunset Point Road, Clearwater. The funeral service will be 10 a.m. Saturday at Curlew Baptist Church, 2276 Curlew Road, Palm Harbor. Burial will be in Sylvan Abbey Memorial Park, Clearwater. The family suggested donations to the American Cancer Society.