Discovering a park ranger's passion

Hardly anything is more inspirational than coming across someone who is clearly passionate about something and excited about sharing that passion with others. This is what I found on the way to somewhere else a couple of weekends ago.

I was on a road trip with a friend from Gordo and a friend of hers who had flown in from Buffalo, N.Y., with a specific mission. Our first item of business after we picked up the Buffalo visitor at the Birmingham airport was to go through Macon, GA. She wanted to spend some time with an ill brother-in-law who had just recently been hospitalized. From Macon, we planned to spend a day at Ida Cason Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountain, GA.

But since we were in the area, we decided to take a teeny detour through Warm Springs, GA., and check out the Little White House. I had been there before in my teen years (a very long time ago) because it wasn't that far from where I went to high school in Phenix City, AL. But I didn't remember much about it other than this is where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited often in his search for curing or at least helping his polio. And the warmth of the springs was what attracted him and others afflicted with the crippling disease.

Before actually walking through the Little White House, visitors are routed through a museum. We happened into the lobby area just as a park ranger was explaining to a rather large group FDR’s time in history in the context of the expansion of the country. It didn’t take more than two seconds to realize that she absolutely knew and understood what she was talking about. We were mesmerized, listening intently to this woman about our age until time for the short film on FDR and his impact on the small Georgia town to start.

I have to confess I watched the film differently than I would have 20 minutes earlier just from listening to this park ranger. I asked her about her presentation. She said it’s always different but she has read and studied everything ever written about FDR and the people in his life as well as everything ever written about the U.S. expansion and events of that time. She was a student and loved recreating the story that she had discovered from her own interest.

Instead of going into all the fresh perspectives I came away from about FDR, suffice it to say, I have a whole new appreciation for who he was, what he did and the legacy he left behind. I can see why President Obama looked up to him. I went home with a hunger to get to know FDR even better than I did already, which obviously wasn’t nearly as well as I had thought. That’s the results of someone’s passion -- and I’m excited about it!

March 19 a date to remember

Five years ago on this date, the U.S. invasion of Iraq started. My only child was a part of that force and I have to say that date will forever be imbedded in my memory -- the start of holy terror for me as I watched the next few days and weeks unfold. Fortunately, he came home safely after that initial invasion and is no longer in the service.

But also on that date 63 years ago, during the height of World War II, my daddy was on the USS Franklin aircraft carrier when it was attacked and almost sent to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean by one lone Japanese bomber. That was before I was born, but my sister was 3 months old. She and my mother were at my grandparents' home in Alabama and had no idea that Daddy was in such immiment danger until several weeks later.

Daddy was a bomber pilot with the Navy and was sitting in his plane on the flight deck with the engine running ready for takeoff with 31 other planes when the Japanese bomber dropped two bombs on the ship. The seas had been calm that morning where the 27,000-ton ship sat 53 miles off the Japanese coast.

At 7:05 a.m. on March 19, as the pilots waited for their signal to take off, an urgent message came across the TBS (talk between ships) radio from the Hancock, a nearby carrier: “Enemy plane closing on you … one coming toward you!” The first bomb ripped through 3-inch armor to the hangar deck just below the flight deck, tossing the planes waiting to be lifted to the flight deck like toys a foot or more above the deck. The second bomb detonated two decks below that, near the chief petty officers’ quarters. The bombs set off a chain reaction of multiple explosions and fires, knocking out the combat information center.

Airplanes disintegrated as bombs, rockets and bullets exploded all around the ship and rivers of burning gasoline streaked across the decks setting off more explosions. Hot bombs from the burning planes rolled about the flight deck and every few seconds, the leaping flames would find another bomb or rocket. Many of the still whirling propellers of the waiting planes on the flight deck cut into other aircraft and people scurrying around looking for cover. The 36,000 gallons of gas and 30 tons of bombs and rockets on those 31 planes between them became a raging inferno. The entire ship was consumed by smoke, making it almost impossible to breathe or see.

Many of the pilots and crew on deck who weren’t killed instantly were either blown overboard or jumped into the churning, icy water seeing no other escape as their planes exploded around them. Daddy and his two-man crew jumped. Their backpack parachutes kept them buoyant once they slammed into the water. Daddy lost sight of his crewmen and feared they had drowned or were killed on impact. But he was determined he was not going to die that day.

After at least two hours in the ocean, nearby destroyers coming to help fight the raging fires on the Franklin picked up most of the men out of the water. Daddy was relieved to find his two crewmen were among those rescued. The official Navy count for casualties that day totaled 724 killed and 265 wounded, calling it the most tragic casualty list ever sustained by a U.S. Navy ship.

Although Daddy died long before the war in Iraq started, I'm sure if he had been here, he would have been reliving his own horror of March 19, 1945, all over while watching our troops heading into combat on the other side of the world.

The Ides of March

As I was about to crawl into bed last night, it occurred to me that it was the Ides of March, a date I should have been paying more attention to. Just a few days earlier, I had been writing about that date. And unlike what the Ides conjures of for some people, a day of foreboding, it was a day of new beginnings for my parents. They were married the night of March 15, 1944, in Springville, AL, at the home of my grandparents.

They had met on the previous Halloween at a dance at Pensacola Naval Base's Whiting Field. Mama was a link trainer in the WAVES and Daddy was a naval combat pilot. They were smitten with each other right off the bat and thrilled to have so much in common. Both were from large families with strong Methodist roots and both were educators by profession. By Christmas, they had decided they were meant for each other and started planning a very simple wedding ceremony that would be performed by my grandfather, the Rev. J.T. Self.

They thought Daddy would be done with his training phase in Pensacola by the 14th and they would drive up to Alabama that evening. Daddy's brother Harris who worked in the shipyard in nearby Mobile, Al, had offered to drive them up. As it turned out, processing out of the base for the next duty station took a lot longer than expected. It was actually late on the afternoon of the 15th before they were able to get away. Harris was driving so fast that a traffic cop stopped them just south of Greenville, AL. Daddy in all his infinite charm (and it didn't hurt that he was still in uniform as was Mama) explained the situation to the officer who let them go with a warning.

It was after 10 p.m. before they pulled up in Granddaddy's yard. Some of the guests, Daddy's grandmother and aunt, had given up and already driven back home to Bessemer. Of course, the courthouse where they needed to obtain a marriage license was closed up tight. Not to be deterred, Daddy hopped in Harris' car and drove to the home of a judge, waking him from his sleep. Surprised, the judge fortunately was a good-humored man. He produced the necessary document with a laugh.

Just before midnight, Mama and Daddy said "I do!" in the shortest wedding ceremony Mama said she had ever seen. They then rushed to the bus station and caught the last bus out for the night to Birmingham where they would spend their 4-day honeymoon before having to report back to duty.

About the time I was noticing the date last night, I thought about what they were doing 64 years ago. At that exact time, they would have been sleeping during the hour-long bus ride, worn out from the busy day behind them, but holding hands as newlyweds with a lifetime ahead of them.

I slept well.

Response to concern about Werner Erhard

I recently received an e-mail from a guy in California who had just completed the Landmark Forum and Advanced Course. He had read a book published in 1992 lambasting Werner Erhard, the founder of the technology that is the basis of the current Forum and other work. However, Werner has been out of the country since 1991 and has no connection to the company formed after he left, Landmark Education Corp. The guy sending the e-mail was concerned about corruption at the head of the company that sponsored the programs that he participated in and by his own words had received great value from. He was asking if I still stood by the work I had done in the book I wrote in 1992, "60 Minutes and the Assassination of Werner Erhard," which negated the allegations made against Erhard. I'm posting here part of the response I sent him.

"Thanks for writing and expressing your concerns. I can totally understand where you get them. And congratulations on completing the Forum and Advanced Course and getting value from them. I strongly recommend that's where you focus -- on the value you got from participating in the work rather than on who originally founded and developed the technology decades ago.

"Yes, I absolutely still am confident in what I wrote in that book. I made it very clear to the people who I spoke with and the people who helped open doors for me to get to others that I was not going to step over anything. If I found a shred of truth in the serious allegations, I would print that and not tiptoe around it.

"Secondly, all of the daughters who were on the '60 Minutes' program or reported about on the program have since recanted their stories. As pointed out in the book, there were issues Werner had with his children because he wasn't the daddy they thought he should be. But the allegations were false and just their way of lashing out at him. Werner has been focused on healing his relationship with his children and last I heard making great progress. One of the reasons he never brought suit against Pressman (author of the first book) was that he wasn't going to publicly drag his children through the mire. And he wasn't interested in a drawn-out expensive court battle since he had left the country and had no intention of ever returning. And Landmark has no ground to sue. It wasn't part of the picture at the time.

"Werner sold his company, Werner Erhard and Assoc., to the employees when he left in 1991 and it was afterward that it became Landmark Education Corp., still using and expanding the technology but completely reorganizing its structure. Werner has no connection with the company and hasn't since its formation. Yes, his brother, Harry Rosenberg, is the CEO and I'm sure they are in communication on a regular basis as brothers. But Werner has no financial or managing interest or control in Landmark.

"I still participate in various Landmark programs, mostly in Atlanta and mostly in the Wisdom curriculum. I completed the Wisdom course in 2001, Partnership Exploration in 2002 and Power and Contribution in 2003. Since taking the first course, I have been an active member of the assisting team and been an accomplishment coach for Wisdom each year. I continue to find great value for myself and my communities by assisting and participating and I know for a fact that thousands of others around the world do as well. I find that the conversations generated are quite powerful and continue to call me forth to not be stopped by my petty circumstances.

"Right after the Werner stuff broke in late 1990 and before the '60 Minutes' piece aired in early 1991, I wrote a column for the newspaper I worked for at the time as I was trying to sort out my feelings about the situation. I was stunned and thinking I had been duped, etc., probably similar to some of your reactions. But what I got was regardless of the veracity of the allegations against the man -- which I again am confident are all untrue -- I had to weigh the value I received from the work. I certainly wouldn't stop using light bulbs if I found out Thomas Edison was a slimy con man ripping off people right and left."

If anyone else has questions about any of this, I'll be glad to talk about it. Just contact me at jane@janeself.com.

10th anniversary of my mother's death

It's hard to believe that it's been 10 years today since my mother died. In some ways, it seems like just the other day; in other ways, it seems like it was a lot more than 10 years. This photo of my sisters and brother with Mama in her nursing home room was made on Dec. 25, 1997, just a few weeks before she died. Since my sister mentioned to me on Thursday that this anniversary day was coming up, I've been thinking about that day on Jan. 20, 1998.

Not long after crossing the state line from Georgia into Alabama, a handsome young man appeared before me, right outside my front windshield. I knew he wasn’t really there; he was just a figment of my imagination. Had I been driving that long? It had only been a couple of hours since I left my home in Macon, and I still had a couple of hours of driving left. I blinked a couple of times to focus, trying not to get too distracted from the highway I was negotiating at 80 mph. But sure enough, there was my daddy, David Self, his arms outstretched, grinning from ear to ear, eyes twinkling. He was thin like I remembered him when I was just a tyke. Gone were the bags under his eyes and the slightly protruding abdomen. No longer was there any gray to be found on his full head of hair.

Out of the clouds on the left side of my view, a beautiful young woman came running toward him, her long wavy dark hair flowing all around her. He wrapped his arms around her.

“Oh, Huck, you are so beautiful,” he whispered softly in her ear as they embraced. “Oh, David, you too,” she whispered back, snuggling comfortably into his strong arms. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“Come on, I have a lot to show you,” he said, excitement building in his voice. He was twirling her around as if in a dance. She hesitated. “But what about the children,” she asked.” In a reassuring yet insistent voice, he said. “Don’t worry, they’ll be fine. Janie will be there soon; they have each other. They’ll be fine.”

Then they disappeared, dancing off into the puffy clouds. I thought to myself that I needed to remember all the details of this incredible image so I could describe it to Mama and my sisters and brother when I reached Tuscaloosa. They’d get a big kick out of it.

Although I couldn’t literally take notes as I continued driving, I began mulling over all the details in my mind, trying to remember the exact words and what they looked like. Just moments before they appeared before my eyes, I had gotten disgusted with trying to find something interesting to listen to on the radio. Forget the radio; I’ll just think about something else to occupy myself on the long drive. As I was sorting through my brain, figuring out what I wanted to think about, Daddy appeared. Remembering as much about that as I could, going over and over the image, the ringing car phone jarred me.

“Janie, pull over a minute. I want to talk to you about your mama.” Why was John, a friend of my sister’s, calling me? How did he get my number and how did he know I was in the car? That was the only time I ever used this old-fashioned bag phone. I had yet to join the modern world of the smaller, hand-held cell phones. Waiting for me to stop the car, he asked where I was and how the trip was going. I wondered why he cared. By the time I pulled off Interstate 20 onto the shoulder a few miles west of the Oxford/Anniston exit, it hit me. Oh my god, my mama was gone.

Shortly before I left Macon a couple of hours earlier, I told my sister Frances, who was in the hospital room with Mama, to call me if anything changed. I was on my way to help her hold a bedside vigil until Mama returned to consciousness. She had been unresponsive for nearly 30 hours. But she wasn’t supposed to die. Since her heart attack exactly six months earlier and stroke a few days later, we had almost lost her several times. Despite the scares, her strong will to live always kicked in (with a lot of help from activated prayer chains) and she would come back from those near-death experiences stronger and more determined than ever to get her life back.

Not this time. Her stubbornness was depleted.

I listened to John describe the last few minutes that he and Frances held Mama’s hands from each side of the bed, reciting the 23rd Psalm – “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil..." - and whispered comforting words to her. I thought my own heart would stop. He told how her brother Hubert watched the heart monitor over her bed show the ever-increasing space between her heartbeats, until there was nothing but silence. I could hardly breathe. “She quietly slipped away at 3:48,” John said. I glanced at the clock on the dash. That was the exact time I was watching my parents embrace. I smiled through my tears, and said a quiet “thank you” to my parents for that gift.

With no idea how I was going to do it, I quickly got back on the road as soon as John hung up. I still had more than 100 miles to go and wanted to see Mama before the hospital staff removed her body. Frances promised to do what she could to keep Mama there, but was concerned about me driving. She didn’t have to worry.

As if Mama were painting a brilliant canvas for all the world to see, I drove into the most magnificent sunset I’ve ever seen. And it stayed with me the entire trip, getting more dazzling every time I crested a hill. There were even a few times I thought I saw Mama freely dancing through the clouds, splashing ever more gorgeous colors onto the canvas.

I later discovered that a few days earlier, just hours before Mama was transported for her last time from the nursing home where she was recovering to the same hospital where I was born nearly 52 years earlier, she told my sister Carol that she wanted to dance. At that time, we still had hopes that she was getting better. She getting a little bit of movement in her left hand, which had been paralyzed since her stroke, and it was just a matter of time before she was going to come home. That Saturday morning, Hubert and Carol were in her room teasing her, joking and playing music. She had a lot of different kind of music in her room, and Carol had put on some soft soothing music. Mama said she didn’t want to hear that. She wanted to hear Rosemary Clooney’s “You Make Me Feel So Young.” As the song played, Carol danced around the room being silly. Our brother Jim, who really is a dancer by profession, had spent many hours entertaining Mama in that room with his dances. And she often said she wanted to do that – dance. She surprised Carol that morning suddenly bursting out “I want to do that!”

Carol picked up her limp arm and Mama started moving her good hand to the music. Of course, she was too weak to actually get of the bed and make any movements. But she was dancing with her hand. Her spirits were high – she seemed so free and carefree and wanting to just dance and play. When Carol came back a few hours later, Mama had taken a turn for the worse and announced that she was dying – first time she had said that in the months she had been bed-bound and despite the many crises and close calls she had survived.

She slipped into a deep coma from the morphine that was given to her to relieve the pains she was having in her chest and never woke up. Jim had called me that Tuesday morning and said she had not come out from under the morphine, yet, although it was well past time for her to come around. I was driving over from Macon to help keep her bedside vigil until she woke up, which we were sure she would be doing any minute.

But instead of waking up, she slipped away from us that afternoon and went off dancing with Daddy in the clouds, leaving her broken body behind for good. She finally got her wish to dance one more time. It was just like the first time she ever laid eyes on the man who would become her husband of 42 years and the father of their four children. I could just imagine her delight to once again be free to do as she pleased.

Still to this day, I often imagine them running through the clouds, dancing and laughing together. Just being free. It's a great image and helps me get past the sad times when I miss both my parents.

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Daddy's birthday

OK, keeping up with this blog site has not been a top priority for me obviously. But I couldn't let today go by without acknowledging my father, David Self. If he were still alive, he would be turning 88 today. Wow, that's hard to believe. The hardest part is that it's been more than 21 years since he suddenly dropped dead of a massive heart attack at the young age of 66. It just doesn't seem that long ago.

I often wonder what he would be like if he were still alive today. Would he still be as sharp as he was? Would he still be in good shape and handsome? Even as he aged and his hair thinned and grayed, he always looked distinguished to me. My mother, too.

Helen Self lived another 12 years after Daddy died. It's hard to believe she's been gone now for nearly 10 years.

For the past month, I've been spending a lot of intensive time revisiting my parents' lives as I work on the book I'm writing about them. So I'm tenderly present to who they were, what their lives were like as children, as young adults meeting for the first time, then raising a family in Alabama while also devoting themselves to the things they were most passionate about -- education and the Methodist Church. They also both earned doctorates in the process. I don't know how they did all that with four rambunctious children underfoot.

They were amazing people and continue to be an inspiration to me. I'm proud to be their daughter.

Happy birthday, Daddy. I miss you both.

Starting anew

After eight and a half years as features editor at The Tuscaloosa News, I am leaving that position effective the day after Labor Day. There is certainly some sadness - I'll miss the awesome people at The News and being in the middle of the hoopla when events happen. Fortunately, I will be able to continue to write the fallen warrior profiles that I have been doing since the fall of 2005 paying tribute to Alabama troops who have made the ultimate sacrifice since the war on terror started. And I'll keep up the fallen warrior blogs on The News' web site.

My other plans include finishing at long last a book I started about my parents a year ago, but been talking about for more than 20 years. I've got to get that out of my system once and for all. And I have a lot of reading and traveling I've been wanting to do, a myriad of projects I've kept putting on the back burner for years and some sleep to catch up on.

I'll be using this space to capture this phase of my journey and explore what life looks like when you start a fresh page. Wish me well!