TWANG TIME AT 104.1


Anybody with any sense knows it wasn't God who made honky tonk angels. Shuhhhh!!

Now, however, I can be reminded of that every once in a while.

I have discovered WVSB, 104.1 FM, the radio station at the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and Blind in Romney, W.Va. Because of that discovery, my drive time is a little brighter nowadays.

WVSB plays what I call real country music. It has piano, mucho steel guitar and more twang than you can shake a harmonica at, or, I should say, at which you can shake a harmonica.

What the heck. Merle Haggard never worried ending a sentence with a preposition, so neither will I. Though when I was young and would say "Where is it at?" my mother, Angela, was quick to chime in "Going down preposition street, looking for a comma."

WVSB has a lot of neat things, at least from a spectator's standpoint. There is adultery, heavy drinking, smoking, heartbreak and lying, the kinds of things that real country music was built upon... errr, I mean upon which real country music was built. Sorry Merle. And, if things just get too tough to take, there is always the bottle, though don't count on it because on the way to work today I heard "The Bottle Let Me Down."

I've never been much for the old country talkie songs. You know, there ain't no sangin', just talkin', though I can put with "Giddy-Up Go" every now and then. Give me anything by Merle, especially "Silver Wings," or "It Ain't Love, But It Ain't Bad." Toss in something by Tammy Wynette such as "Apartment Number Nine," or have Buck Owens singing about being put in the movies and drive time passes quickly.

Like I said, WVSB has a lot of neat things. What it doesn't have is self-righteousness, the kind where the disc jockey gives you his views on the world - be it local, regional, national or interplanetary - and tells you that you are a jerk for not agreeing with him. That's why they make speed buttons on the radio.

You won't hear that kind of junk on WVSB, but you will hear important things such as the time and location of the Memorial Day observance or which church or fire hall is having a ramp dinner.

I know that God didn't make honky tonk angels, but maybe, just maybe, he had a hand in constructing WVSB.


THE NO SPIN ZONE


I've been reporting area news for almost 29 years now. During those three decades I've been assigned to just about every beat the Times-News has to offer, with the exception, thank goodness, of the board of education.

I covered Cumberland city hall for years, including the Frank Nethken administration. I spent two years going up and down W.Va. Route 28 covering Hampshire County and another two working out of our Keyser Bureau covering Mineral County. The Mineral County establishment, by the way, was in fact very approachable and very friendly and accommodating, though I can't say for sure that they were the friendliest in the U.S.A. I've never covered anything in Vermont or New Mexico, for example.

As you might imagine, I have dealt with any number of personalities and levels of competence in government officials, so I have some experience upon which to base my following observations.

In recent years, I have been assigned to report about Frostburg city government. There are those who think I have done a good job, those who think I have done a reasonably good job, and those who think I have done a poor job. I know this because they have told me so. That's not for me to decide. I just do it.

Anyway, any job I have done in that regard has been mightily assisted by the professional competence and individual integrity of John Kirby who has been the city's administrator for the past few years.

I'm not trying to smooth things with Kirby by writing this. He already is available to me 24/7, gives me everything I ask for and answers question without the spin that others, over the years, have felt necessary to apply.

Reporters are not supposed to have opinions about the beats they cover, but because I've been doing this for a good little time now, I'm going to take that liberty and tell you that Frostburg's citizens are more than well served by their city administrator.

There are times that we are accused here at the Times-News of not following up on stories that we break.

I've always tried to be aware of what I have come to call story-closure. Obvious stories that need closed are those involving criminal charges. We report that a person gets charged with something, so we should eventually report the outcome. Was the person found innocent or guilty or did some other legal conclusion take place.

Back in September I attended and then reported on the auction of the Rawlings Athletic Complex. Vincent Groh, a Hagerstown area real estate sort of guy, played back and forth with one other bidder before agreeing to buy the complex for $690,000. A buyer's fee paid to the auctioneers, Auction Brokers of Baltimore, brought the total to $748,000.

After the bidding and the appropriate paperwork, Groh told me that he intended to maintain the building as an athletic complex, that he would look for a manager and that he would probably negotiate with the sellers, Rawlings Athletic Complex LLC, to retain the name of the business.

There are probably some of you out there who wonder what has happened since then. Actually, I am one of those who wonders what has happened since then.

Not that I haven't tried to find out. Most of the time when I call Groh's office in Hagerstown I get a recording on which I leave a message telling him I want to let the readers know how things are progressing with the complex. I always ask him to return my call. One time I spoke with a woman and left a similar message.

So far, I have gotten zero calls from the new owner of the large structure in Rawlings. I'll keep trying.

I'm also keeping my eye on the Lonaconing Trap Club appeal, but the Maryland Court of Special Appeals has not yet ruled.

Michael A. Sawyers
Reporter

My swirl of hunting season vacation days has come to an end for this year and I'm doing my best to settle back into day-to-day newspapering, dealing with and writing about things such as buildings being sold in Frostburg, the existence of a house in Cumberland that a local church has bought so that family members of federal inmates will have a nice place to stay for free when they travel here for a visit.

These stories were of interest to me. Some, of course, are not, even though I am given the task of writing about them. I almost wrote "even though I am tasked with writing about them," but caught myself. I hate writers who may verbs out of nouns. Actually, I don't hate the writers, but I hate what they do to perfectly good nouns. Some other nouns that have been illegally changed into verbs are partner and impact.

Every time I am faced with a boring story, I remember what Bucky Walbert, now long retired from the newsroom, said. "Every story is important to someone," Bucky said, and of course he was correct. Bucky was usually correct. In addition, he paid great attention to detail during his daily work with words.

On nights when I have the police beat, I get to write about your wrecks, your fires and your crimes. Keep it clean out there on those nights, will you. You want my work schedule?

The outdoors beat - read that as hunting and fishing - is my favorite, of course. Sometimes that beat involves soft news, sometimes hard news. Sometimes, it is hard-to-swallow news.

The Maryland Inland Fisheries Division has determined that it will force feed us a regulation that keeps us from fishing with bait and keeping brook trout in about 110 miles of the Savage River drainage. See the Outdoors page of Dec. 17 for some opinion and suggestions about that topic.

Although there is some deer hunting remaining in these mountains, the closing of firearms seasons always signals the cessation of the bulk of the hunting. West Virginia has already reported a 16-percent upswing in the buck harvest. Maryland should be coming in with numbers real soon.

It has been a very interesting year from the hard news standpoint. The newspaper has had six articles (I've written four of them) about the conflict between hunters who want to hunt on the Mount Aetna parcel of the Savage River State Forest, but can't do so in the portion now called a safety zone within 150 yards of a hiking trail. That zone was requested by and granted to the owners of the private Savage River Lodge who said they were concerned their guests using public land would be hurt by hunters.

The Department of Natural Resources said it will continue to study the situation and may either keep the zone in place or remove it. No one is going to do anything, of course, until our new governor appoints new administrators in the DNR. Recently, the Maryland Sportsmen's Association and the Maryland Bowhunters Society have asked the DNR to dissolve the zone.

"We told the DNR 'we don't agree. Change it back. Don't do it again. It's a bad precedent,'" said Bob Lynch of the bowhunters group. "For antihunters this would be a jewel. Just say you are worried about being hurt by hunters and ask the state to forbid hunting on public land."

I'm trying right now to find out if the Maryland Wildlife Advisory Commission has taken a stance on the issue. That group is the one made up of citizens and appointed by the governor to advise the Wildlife and Heritage Service. I have contacted the chairman, V.Wilson Freeland of Prince Frederick, and the vice chairman, Lowell Adams of Columbia, and am awaiting their replies.

Mike Sawyers, Outdoor Editor

I haven't blogged for a while. With "Rod & Gun" publication to get out (inserted into Oct. 21 Times-News) and some other newsy things to deal with, just haven't had the chance for this informal, but informative, venue.

Something else I haven't done for a while is take vacation. Other than a couple days in July to visit with our one and only grandchild, Mr. Brady James Sawyers of Garden City, Kansas, I haven't had a block of time off since early May.

That is about to change.

It will be hit and miss catching up with me for the next several weeks. That means, of course, that it is hunting season. I take that back. It is hunting seasons. Two states with numerous seasons in swing simply do not work during the 24-hour-a-day package with which we contend.

Right now, there is just about exactly 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of what is not daylight. That will change rapidly, of course, as we distance ourselves from the Autumnal Equinox. If you check the sunsets and sunrises nowadays, you'll see that we are losing a few minutes on each end every day.

That's OK with those of us who live to hunt. A shortening amount of daylight means less of it is getting through a buck's eyes and to his pituitary gland, thus bringing on that hormonal urge that results in the making of more little deer to eat your azaleas.

Those are the kinds of things I'll be doing... no, not making little deer, but trying to find and reduce to possession those that do.
Some of you understand what I mean. Some of you never will. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

One of my uncles, the late Julius Caesar Tucci of Weston, W.Va., recognized my youthful exuberance for hunting and put it simply. "It's in the blood. Some people do it and some people don't."

Hunters, gatherers and all that.

I agree with Wham! that "If you're going to do it, do it right."

Hey, I didn't choose to have an obsessive-compulsive personality. It just happened that way.

Anyway, during the times that I'm going to be in a tree stand or a ground blind or in my truck on the way to one or the other, I'll record a message on my phone here at work letting you know that I am somewhere else.

I love my job. It is the kind of work with rapid deadlines. Get something done and move on to the next project. This job has allowed me to meet people and learn about things that I never would have thought about otherwise. Most of those meetings and experiences are either good to routine. Some fall into the tragic realm. For example, I wrote stories involving the deaths of two of the area soldiers who died in Iraq, Sgt. George Mitchell and Private Brandon Davis.

The hunting and fishing column and the outdoor page have formed the icing on this work-cake and it is often on my own time, such as that now coming up, that I accrue word fodder for future columns.

It is research that I eagerly await each year.

Mike Sawyers, Outdoor Editor

Writing the hunting and fishing column for almost 28 years now has been a most excellent adventure. Fun too.

As some of the old-time outdoor columnists such as Lefty Kreh drift away (Bill Burton is still plugging along by the way), I and a few others like me around the country become the last of the dinosaurs.

I grew up reading Joe Brooks trout fishing articles in Outdoor Life and the standard me-and-Joe went hunting or fishing pieces in all of the hook-and-bullet magazines of that day.

You know what I mean. They started something like this...

The morning came on white and windy, horizontal too if you take the direction of the snow into consideration. The geese didn't seem to mind. They were banking hard into the gale, exposing their underbellies to me and Joe and giving us numerous chances to earn some roast goose dinners.

Joe's and plumber in Gary, Indiana and one day when he was fixing my clogged drains we learned that we both like to hunt geese.

The me-and-Joe was the staple outdoor article of that time. I still use occasional first-person pieces in the newspaper and the outdoor arena is one place you can get away with it.

Nobody expects Mike Burke to be able to hit a home run out of Camden Yard when he writes about the Orioles.

It isn't demanded of Steve Luse that he can dunk a basketball the way the Allegany College Trojans do when he covers one of their games.

Mike Mathews can't be required to turn the double play the way a middle infielder at one of the local high schools does when he writes about the diamond sport. Ooops. Bad example. The last time I saw Mathews play second base in a Pen Mar League game in the 1990s, I could see the quick release in the middle of a 6 to 4 to 3 double dip that made him a star at James Madison University. Mazeroski like almost.

But when it comes to writing about hunting and fishing, I believe readers want to know that the author practices what he scribbles about or that at least he has some specialized knowledge in the area of fly rods or tree stands and knows the difference between an automatic and semi-automatic firearm. At least it used to be that way. There is a trend away from the participatory journalist in the outdoor arena. Any number of papers view that role as one of straight reporting, rather than advocacy journalism. The George Plimpton approach is fading in the profession. Plimpton, of course, is the author who did things such as playing in a National Football League game so he could write more accurately about it, once he recovered, of course.

I've always believed the column and the news on the outdoor page needed to offer a variety of approaches. The first-person articles are good on occasion. If done appropriately, they can take readers along for a decent mind ride into the woods or stream.

Some columns need to be informational or educational and I have attempted to provide that sort of reading as well. An example would be a column about hunting and fishing legislation being considered by politicians in Annapolis or Charleston or even Washington, D.C.

Opinion columns are important. You've seen those a number of times already this year, especially about the Maryland Fisheries Service proposal to make it illegal to use bait to catch and keep brook trout in the upper Savage RIver drainage.

Bad idea! No, I take that back. It's a VERY bad idea!

I have to admit, I much more enjoy writing an outdoor column than I do covering a local government meeting about infrastructure. If you don't know what infrastructure is, don't worry about it. You're not missing a thing.

I am always thrilled when a get a missive such as the recent one from a Washington County reader who said my squirrel hunting column took him back to when he was a kid and helped rekindle an interest in the activity. Journalists like to know that they have touched a reader in a positive way. We don't do this because it allows us to buy a second home in Florida. Usually, we mostly hear from you all out there only when you disagree with something we've written. That's OK, too. The Outdoors page has often served as a place for the healthy exchange of ideas.

I'll keep writing. You keep reading. Always good to hear from you. Well, most of the time it is.

Mike Sawyers, Outdoor Editor

Competition isn't just creeping into the world of hunting and fishing. It's giving it the bum's rush.

I'm not talking about a couple friends out bass fishing or buck hunting. That's the kind of thing where you return to the cabin or the tent and rub it in just a little that your rainbow trout was four inches longer than your partner's or your buck had eight points whereas his had just four.

No. I'm talking about national, organized, incorporated hunting and fishing endeavors in which modern Web sites keep tabs on your favorite angler or hunter and show how much money he or she has won in a particular year as well as throughout the career.

I remember more than three decades ago thinking that the one-shot antelope hunt hosted by Wyoming's governor just didn't seem right to me. Sure, hunting is about making a clean, one-shot kill, but you shouldn't be limited to one round and you shouldn't have to do it faster than someone else in the contest. Dropping a nice pronghorn should be between you and the animal and any spiritual power source to which you adhere.

Of course, because I was working for the Wyoming Game and Fish at the time and because Governor Stan Hathaway signed my paycheck, I kept my thoughts to myself.

Then along came bass tournaments. Then bass tournaments for women anglers. Then ditto for walleyes. Then this. Then that.

Now moving somewhat laboriously onto the scene is the World Hunting Association (yawn) which wants people (I won't call them hunters) to compete within high fence settings shooting big game with tranquilizer darts. The person who does it the best wins money.

Field and Stream is now beginning a contest in which the winner will be the person who is the best across the board of angling and hunting techniques, the person who can supposedly roll cast the best, shoot traditional archery equipment the most accurately and catch a crayfish with his or her toes.

I admire J.T. Kenney, formerly of Frostburg, who has done very well casting for fish and cash in recent years. In fact, I am the one who nominated him for the Dapper Dan award he received for bringing national attention to Allegany County through sports. As time goes on, I'll continue to share pieces of J.T.'s career with readers. I know that competitive angling has its supporters and my bias will never interfere with a good news story.

The concept of what J.T. and other competitive anglers do, however, does nothing for me on the personal level. Neither does any other form of competitive angling or hunting.

Thank goodness that the idea quickly failed a decade or so ago that would have combined tournament angling with speedboat racing, sort of a NASCAR of the aquatic world. Maybe it would be NAFSBAR (National Association of Fishermen and Sports Boat Acrobatic Racing). Maybe the angler who could catch the most bass while successfully navigating a liquid slalom course would be the winner.

When money, especially big money, is involved, there are always going to be some transgressions in order to obtain it, whether it is catching big fish before a tournament and stashing them in an underwater cage or even BYOF (bring your own fish) from some other location.

The majority of competitive anglers, of course, are ethical. I accept what they do. I just don't get it. But then I don't like applesauce, either.

Mike Sawyers, Outdoor Editor

It is heartwarming to note the commitment of the Cumberland Outdoor Club that has for many years sponsored teams of young people in the state and national Youth Hunter Education Challenge.

This is education of, and then competition by, school-age people in the outdoor techniques of not only shooting, but wildlife observation, orienteering and the like.

The effort on the part of the club fits well with our mountainous region in which many of the residents hunt, fish and otherwise enjoy the natural world that surrounds us. Many is the city slicker, the flatland tourister, as Snuffy Smith would say, who heads west from Baltimore or the Washington, D.C. area who feels a twinge of apprehension when traveling through the Interstate 68 cut on Sideling Hill. What's out there? Cross-eyed banjo players? Lions and tigers and bears? Oh, my.

Those of us who live here, of course, are comfortably at home in a world of bears, oak trees, trout streams, firearms and venison steaks. In fact, I probably speak for others when I tell you that I feel that same twinge of apprehension, but it is when I travel in the other direction, eastward toward beltways, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and suburban cities separated only by traffic signals and convenience stores.

"Thank you for visiting Arbutus, welcome to Catonsville."

The Cumberland Outdoor Club's instructors must be doing something right. Frequently, there are individuals and teams sponsored by this local club of long standing that take top spots in the state-level and then national contests.

The young folks lucky enough to get into these youth programs are being well-grounded in responsible competition, a knowledge that will serve them well in future years. Because of that, it will serve us all well as the young hunter challenge individuals become our police officers, doctors, school teachers, mechanics and service industry workers who choose to live and work in and around the Queen City of the Alleghenies because it is a doggone good place to be.

Others are discovering our values and our valued surroundings. This past fall, around a campfire on Dan's Mountain, a woman from suburban Maryland told me that she and her husband are nearing retirement and are considering a move to Allegany County.

They will, of course, sell their house there for an amount of money that I can't comprehend, then buy a similar house here for one-third that amount. I don't blame them a bit.

"I'm just concerned, though, that if we got sick and needed help that there wouldn't be anyway to get to the hospital. Do you have ambulances?" she asked. Then, before I could answer, I saw a deeper, even more pressing question forming somewhere behind her eyes. "Do you have a hospital?" she queried.

My first reaction was to tell her that we had neither ambulances nor hospitals, but that there was a medicine man living somewhere on the mountain who knew how to make salve, and many of the mom and pop stores have Band-Aids for sale.

I resisted and ended up telling her about the accreditation of the Western Maryland Health System, our great diagnostic capabilities and the fact that there aren't very many miles between ambulance companies, all of which are manned by trained and dedicated individuals.

She seemed both surprised and a bit disbelieving and we left it at that. Maybe they will stay in Woodlawn or Gaithersburg or Rockville or wherever they are from. Maybe not.

As our county changes during the next so-many years, and it is changing, my hope is that we can hang onto things such as the Cumberland Outdoor Club's youth hunter education teams. These are the entities that define us in a positive way and nourish us as we grow and evolve and are discovered by the outside world.

Mike Sawyers, Outdoor Editor

It has been interesting to watch the evolution during the past 20 or so years involving news pertaining to wildlife. Such articles were once reserved for Outdoors pages, but now frequently are seen on various page ones across the country.

A great way to keep up on these stories is to log on to www.outdoorpressroom.com where J.R. Absher does a superb job of collecting breaking stories on a daily basis and making them available worldwide.

Bears make the site on a regular if not diurnal basis. Cougars don’t seem to be far behind in recent times. You’ll read about deer crashing into houses or cars. You’ll see stories dealing with whitetail does that have taken a liking to a college campus and are making students scurry as if they are late for happy hour.

Absher says that “if it’s wild, it’s compiled” and he is good to his word, covering the waterfront of that particular beat without ever leaving the farm, but then that is the cyber world in which we all find ourselves these days. There appear to be no rest stops on the information superhighway. Cross your legs and keep driving.

Bear attacks pop up often on The Outdoor Pressroom, including fatal ones such as the incident that took place in Tennessee this spring.

I am of the opinion that a bear attack on a person is something that will eventually take place in this readership area. Of course, not everyone shares that belief. Some will call me an alarmist or a provocateur for printing my anticipation of such an episode.

Look at it this way. The number of bears is increasing in Allegany County and the number of people is expected to swell as well if all of those 7,000 new homes that are to be built will actually be occupied.

Bears and people. Bears and people. Interesting combination. Many of the new housing developments will carve niches in the wooded mountains of the counties. These niches are already being used by our bruin population.

The more interaction between Ursus americanus and Homo sapiens, the more chance there is for a tussle of some sort. One of these critters has long teeth and claws. One does not.

Film at 11.

Michael Sawyers, July 10, 2006

When I was earning a degree in journalism at Utah State University 35 years ago my professor Marlan Nelson, a peach of a guy, told us that no matter what we write and how we write it, there is always somebody who will take their favorite meaning out of it.

The prof, of course, was right on.

In the 27 years I've been reporting and writing for the Times-News, I've seen Nelson's prediction come true many times. It doesn't matter whether I'm writing about brook trout as the paper's outdoor editor or about the renovation of a burned out building in Frostburg as one of the Times-News reporters.

The readers who take their predetermined meaning from an article often believe that the writer is trying to portray the issue in a certain light. That light, of course, is always the one opposite of their stance.

My favorite example of this reality dates back 15 or so years ago and involved the outdoor column.

Sen. Ida Mae Reuben of Montgomery County proposed legislation in which it would become legal for her constituents to run around in the woods screaming things on the opening day of Maryland's deer season.

Sen. IMR - whose sandwich I love by the way - called it a bill devoted to free speech. She said her constituents should be allowed to run through the McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area vocalizing this and that if they so desired.

IMR's bill, of course, was an attempt to disrupt deer hunting in the hope that deer would be scared to places where hunters could not shoot at them. Montgomery County, you see, has some people who don't like hunting. My thoughts are that such erratic deer movement generated by people exercising free speech could actually cause the deer to run in front of an orange-clad toting a 30-30, thus increasing the state's deer harvest numbers.

IMR was hoping, you see, to circumvent the recently passed law that made it illegal to harass legal hunters.

Anyhoo, I gave IMR and her bill and her constituents the works in my column, standing up for hunting and hunters and saying unkind things about those who would keep us from participating in our favorite activity.

You know what I'm talking about. I've done it more than once here.

At the end of the column, in what we refer to as the tagline, I wrote "Mike Sawyers is outdoor editor of the Cumberland Times-News. He believes in free speech, quiet woods and the knockdown power of the .30-06."

Monday morning I'm at work early and the phone rings.

"Mike Sawyers, Times-News."

"Hey. You the guy that wrote that article?"

"Which article would that be, sir?"

"That one."

"Which one."

"The one yesterday."

"We had quite a number of articles yesterday. Which one do you mean."

"The one about deer."

"Yes. I wrote that column."

"Why, by God, you're an anti-hunter."

I'm flabbergasted.

"Sir, did you read the article?"

"The whole thing."

"How could you have read that article and come away with the idea that I am an anti-hunter."

"It says right here at the end that you want to knock down the .30-06."

I explained what I thought to be very obvious, that I hold hunting in high esteem, that I hunt about 120 days a year and that the tagline was a dig.

"Oh. OK," he said.

Mike Sawyers is outdoor editor of the Cumberland Times-News. He believes... oh, never mind.

Be sure to get a copy of the June 14 Cumberland Times-News, which will include the summer issue of Rod & Gun, our quarterly publication devoted to hunting and fishing.

In it we will inform you about the total number of birds killed during the 2006 Maryland spring gobbler hunt. We'll also let you know the names of the young anglers who won the various awards at the 58th Annual Battie Mixon Fishing Rodeo that was conducted recently in Oldtown.

You'll also read about bass lures, brook trout and the third installment of the Maryland black bear hunt, which is scheduled for October and December. We'll supply the information you need to apply for a permit.

Rod & Gun has become a popular addition to our coverage of hunting and fishing. It supplements the Outdoors page that appears in the Sunday newspaper and gives us some space to provide articles by other hook-and-bullet journalists, sometimes from other parts of the country, who can offer advice and information that will help you in your favorite outdoor activity.

For example, we'll run an article by one of my favorite outdoor newspapermen, John McCoy of the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette about a young West Virginia hunter who killed a 24-pound spring gobbler.

June 14. Be there or be square.

Mike Sawyers, Outdoor Editor