DUer niyad asked me to make this an OP. Why my background makes me despise trump.

[calimary]

51. Many thanks, brer cat!

Last edited Tue May 26, 2020, 02:49 AM - Edit history (1)

Always tried to live up to the people I worked with. And MAN there were some real human monoliths.

Bob Thomas, when I was there, was the "dean of Hollywood reporters," with an address book others in the business would have paid uber-megabucks for. He was also the reporter who broke the story that Bobby Kennedy had just been shot. He was covering RFK's post-California-primary rally at the then-legendary Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. That was where the Cocoanut Grove was - in its star-studded heyday. Bob Thomas was first to phone that one in. And shit - there he'd be, at his work station, sometimes on the phone, typing away on some story he'd be fleshing out. Just like everybody else in the room. Yet another mild-mannered Clark Kent.

And Nick Ut. I think I've mentioned him before, here. EVERYONE knows what he did. Because EVERYONE, at one time or other, has no doubt seen "THAT" photo. Remember the wartime shot of the little screaming Vietnamese girl, running naked up a desolate country road toward the camera? She had just been napalmed. Nick Ut worked at the AP Saigon bureau as a photojournalist, and took that picture. He'd later describe the debate that the bureau executives had, over whether to run the photo because the little girl was naked. Poor little thing had probably torn her clothes off in a panic, trying to escape the horrible burning. They decided to run the photo because of the singular agony of the Vietnam War that it depicted. It won a Pulitzer Prize. And he was the same Nick Ut who I later spotted, crouched down on hands and knees - under the red velvet rope and right in front of me - to catch shots of Cybill Shepherd getting her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was just another day in the life.

Mind-bending sometimes, really.