Goodbye, Baltimore

Mike and Sarah Batley hosted a wonderful sendoff for us at their home. It was a delightful evening. Mike cooked burgers and regaled us with tales of Packers fans, in an authentic Wisconsin accent.
Sarah is from the Lakewood, Ohio, Blakeslee family. Her brother Mark and I used to run around together in elementary school. Naturally we would end up on the same block in Baltimore.



Cindy's co-workers -- Patti, Val and Linda -- were sad to see her go.


Dave Kuntz and I used to lunch together and talk books and the future of the human race.



Andi Broom was a ski instructor in Chile and Argentina and helped me practice my Spanish.


Constellation Energy brought Maureen Brown to Baltimore and the Candler Building recently. Coincidentally she and I started work at the Columbus Dispatch on the same day in 1977.


Patti and Cindy.

Carol Vellucci, left, went on to great things after serving as marketing director at the Baltimore Business Journal.


Our daughter Christine and our son Patrick's girlfriend, Emily.


Scott Broom, cultural observer, news commentator and Renaissance man.


Scott Rykiel and David Jackson.


Larry Fultz and Bob Baummer.


Cindy and Becky Baummer.


It's going to be OK, Mom.



A Columbus reunion of a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and John McNeely, Yankees fan and former sports columnist for the Columbus Dispatch.


John and his wife, Terri Leist.


At Graceland, Elvis's home.

The Tequila Express

Guadalajara is famous in Mexico as the birthplace of mariachi music and tequila. The heart of tequila production lies to the northwest of the city and is reachable by a special tourist train called the Tequila Express. It is the only passenger train that runs from the city's station, and it only runs on Saturday.
The pokey train takes you through vast expanses of cultivated agave cactus, a kind of spiky plant that thrives in the volcanic soil and provides the juice that is distilled into tequila. After about two hours, and a couple of shots of a special reserve tequila, you arrive at Atitlan, hometown of the famous Herradura distillery. Although it is obviously an industrial plant, it has the look and feel at the same time of a public garden and a museum. The architecture is Spanish colonial and the grounds are meticulously and beautifully kept.
Lalo, an employee of the University of Guadalajara and one of my hosts on this trip, introduced me to the burro and his handler.


Authentic tequila is a denomination of controlled origin referring to the beverage produced in a half-dozen towns near Guadalajara, much as the name burgundy can only be applied to the wine of that region.















After a tour of the plant you pass into a vast hall where you are served an enormous lunch with every variety of local delicacy and are entertained by a mariachi band (violins, guitars, trumpets), dancers, singers and a demonstration of charreria, Mexican cowboy rope tricks. Then it's back onto the train and more music from musicians and singers strolling through the cars. A nine-hour day.

We're headed for Guadalajara

Since returning from England in January, I have been awarded a second Knight International Press Fellowship to launch a digital journalism training center connected with the University of Guadalajara in Mexico.
This goal is to create a center that serves journalists from Spanish language media all over Latin America and within the U.S.

Sold the house

In preparation for the move in mid-June, we sold the house and we're unloading everything except for a few personal things. It's a big step, but the truth is that our children are scattered to the four winds and work is where the need and opportunity lie. So home is wherever we are.

People we know who have gone overseas for a few years and put things in storage all told us the same thing. When they returned they wondered why they had saved and stored all that stuff. That played into our decision.

We've been to the Yucatan and the lower Baja peninsula but never Guadalajara. It's the second largest city in Mexico and the university is the second largest in the country. The city is at about 5,000 feet above sea level and is about five hours drive directly east of Puerto Vallarta. Information for gringo tourists says the climate is so mild that homes don't need heat or air conditioning. Well.....we'll see.

Bronte Country

The house where the extraordinary Bronte sisters grew up is a little over an hour by bus and train from Manchester. The village of Haworth is in Yorkshire, just east over the Pennine Hills from the big city.

Hundreds of volumes have been written about this remarkable family. Charlotte and Emily wrote two of the finest novels of the 19th century ("Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" respectively), and these books still enjoy tremendous popularity. Younger sister Anne was also a fine novelist, though less read today. The name Bronte is an attempt to mask the family's Irish roots and ancestral name, Brunty.

Above: the moor the day I visited.

Briefly, the family moved into the parsonage in 1820. There were six children. The oldest two daughters became ill at a boarding school and died (providing fodder for "Jane Eyre"), and their mother died of cancer. The four remaining children, Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell, were home-schooled by their aunt and created their own mythic stories and books.

You can really get a feel for how the place may have inspired the young women. Haworth is on the edge of the moor. The day I visited, it was blustery, wet and cold, a perfect day for Heathcliffe to go brooding about with his cloak pulled tight about him.

If the deaths in their family weren't enough, the front yard of their home was the church cemetery.





This is the school where Charlotte taught, adjacent to the parsonage. The town is arranged along a road that winds up to the top of the hill. There are a number of public walking trails that lead out from the village.




















In the village you can visit the pub where the Brontes' brother Branwell destroyed himself with drink and laudanum, a medical form of opium that was popular and easily obtainable.

JK Rowling's cafe in Edinburgh

Sunday I went to brunch in Edinburgh with Matt and Susan Reed, a British couple we met in the Galapagos. We went to a little place called the Elephant House and had a nice chat. Turns out this was the coffee house where J.K. Rowling penned her first Harry Potter book, and maybe several thereafter.



It is obvious why. It has an airy main room, high ceiling, big windows, big tables, lots of room, lots of space for a writer to get lost in thought.

Saturday night I went to see the Scottish ballet perform Tschaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, which was very good, mostly. Some of the performers are of very high quality and some are pretty dodgy.



The city is dominated by a castle that dates back about 1,000 years and has been overrun and heavily damaged several times. It's built on a pile of rock that is an extinct volcano.



Sunday I hiked to the top of Arthur's Peak, about 800 feet above the city and extremely craggy and blustery. It's also an extinct volcano.
Edinburgh is a bustling city of about 450,000 on a wide water highway to the ocean called the Firth of Forth. Interesting architecture.
The accents are very strong and hard to render in written form. Robert Burns was not exaggerating. Nor was the Fat Bastard's accent overplayed by Mike Meyers in the Austin Powers movie.

WORKING CLASS

The Conservatives have made a big stink lately about the number of British workers on disability and have made a proposal to get them back to work. The total of 2.6 million people collecting disability payments is huge considering that the workforce numbers only 30 million.
British employers fret about that cost as well as the cost of workers calling off sick, which is a massive problem here.

Oscar Wilde said it best: Work is the bane of the drinking classes.

A newspaper launch

I'm back in the States with the family now for 10 days. I've been in England for the better part of five months now to help with the launch of Crain's Manchester Business, a weekly business newspaper, based in England's second-most important economic center.

My job has been to interview, hire and train the editorial staff as well as produce a prototype and then help launch the first edition. In that last role, I've been the deputy editor to the editor we hired. My work will be done at the end of January.

The first edition came out Dec. 17 with 15,000 mailed to a select list of business people and 5,000 sent to newsstands. The sample list will be converted to paid, 74 pounds, over a long period. Many of the newsstands had sold out by Dec. 21.

The effort has attracted a lot of attention, since news media are consolidating in Great Britain, just as in the US, and few are launching new print vehicles. The Financial Times weighed in with a piece on regional business media. It has been quite well received so far by local communications professionals.

The UK version of Editor and Publisher published an extensive piece as well.

The Crain's Manchester Business website also went live on December 17, and for the moment, all of the first edition's print content is available, save the lists and record copy, on the site. We've been posting 15-20 web stories a day to keep the pressure on the Manchester Evening News, the principal daily in the region.




After Crain's Manchester Business's editorial crew sent the paper to the printer Friday December 14, there was a small celebration at a pub called the Seven Oaks. This was followed by a visit to an Italian restaurant and then a rock concert. The latter, I decided, was not my cup of tea. When my rib cage and internal organs began vibrating in time with the bass of the legendary band, Happy Mondays, I decided it was time to leave. I prefer to listen to music in a different way.

What's next

I don't have much lined up, and honestly I haven't spent any time doing business development. What I do have is interesting. The US Embassy in Chile has invited me to do a week of seminars in Santiago and other cities in the spring. And I have another newsroom leadership training session for Latin American journalists later in the year. There are two other possibilities for newsroom coaching that could develop into something bigger.
Bolivia appears to be on the brink of civil war (it's closer to the brink than usual), so I don't see going back there any time soon.

Wordsworth's lakes

This is Dove Cottage, in Grasmere in the Lakes region of England, where Wordsworth wrote some of his most important poetry. Wordsworth and his wife, sister and children lived here on the edge of Lake Grasmere for eight years. It's a small place, 400 years old, originally a pub. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other literary lights visited Wordsworth here.

If you read any of Wordsworth's work in school, it was likely to have been some of his nature poetry. But he was far more than simply a nature poet. He wrote a kind of epic work in which the poet is the hero on a quest through nature. Not a lot of people read "The Prelude" today, but it is a great work and I did want to see the landscape that inspired it, just as one day I would like to go to the site of Troy in Turkey (the Iliad) and Ithaca in Greece (the Odyssey).

The Lakes region does have a dramatic beauty. Surely Wordsworth would be appalled to visit there today, 200 years after he wrote about the region, and see that his songs of praise of natural beauty have attracted mobs of tourists and vacation-home builders. Relatively speaking, the tourism is controlled and restricted, but there is still a lot of traffic, even in December, and you can never escape the traffic noise, even high up in the hills. Below is an example of some of the commercial construction, tastefully done, that serves the tourism industry.






This is Mount Rydal, a half-hour climb up behind Wordsworth's other home in the area. The two homes are about a half-hour apart on foot.
He designed the four-acre garden behind the house, which is a substantial two-story structure and his home for 37 years.



This is the so-called summer house located in the garden where he would spend time.


I was completely immersed in Wordsworth's poetry years ago, especially The Prelude. Attempting to write about the beauty of the landscape described by one of England's great poets is a bit intimidating.



Several slate quarries in the area for centuries supplied building materials for the homes and shops.