Abortion center violence

Clinic relieved that no violence followed execution

Published September 7, 2003

It was a normal Friday at the Presidential Women's Center in West Palm Beach. A day for follow-up appointments, consultations, HIV tests -- but, as customary, no surgeries.

Two days after the execution of Paul Hill, whose intense opposition to abortion led to double murder, there were no signs of heightened threat, said Mona Reis, director of the county's oldest clinic openly providing abortions.

This was a relief because Hill had given a calm and chilling last statement Wednesday. Strapped to a gurney, he advocated more acts like his own when, in 1994, he killed a Pensacola doctor and his security escort with a shotgun.

Yet a normal day at the Presidential Women's Center is not like a normal day everywhere else. It is a day under siege.

Baseball dreams

A local kids' team made it to the finals of the Little League World Series. It made me think about the value and emphasis we place on kids' sports, and inspired this column.





IT ALL BEGINS WITH A SIMPLE GAME OF CATCH
Date: Sunday, August 24, 2003
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

A game of catch.

That's how it starts.

A father throws a ball back and forth with a son. Or, increasingly, a daughter.

And he starts building a mostly wordless bond that links his memories of being young to his dreams for his child's future.

In our culture it's a primal bond, even as it's challenged by the kicking of soccer balls, or the swinging of tennis racket and golf club. For a few minutes -- before dinner, maybe, or in the quickly fading light before nightfall -- father and child step outside and reconnect by means of ball and glove.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

As if you didn't know, East Boynton Beach's Little Leaguers won the U.S. championship over Saugus, Mass., Saturday night. Today this appealing crop of 11- and 12-year-olds will be playing Japan for Williamsport's whole enchilada: the world championship. But long before they reached the televised pinnacle of the Little League World Series in those little jewels of baseball diamonds in the Pennsylvania hills, each Boynton kid started with a game of catch.

Silent battle

I wrote this as an exercise at the Poynter Institute, in a workshop on persuasive writing. The assignment was to write about something personal, and this was a subject I'd never committed to paper before. The piece was a big hit with the editorial writers and columnists at the workshop, so I offered it to the Features department when I got back to Fort Lauderdale. Our paper ran it, and so did the Chicago Tribune. I heard from many readers for months afterward, thanking me for describing their own situation or giving me suggestions for cures. By the way, my hearing is better than it was - another attempt at surgery, in September 2008, had happy results.






WHAT'S IT LIKE TO SPEND MOST OF YOUR ADULT LIFE FIGHTING TO HEAR EVERYDAY SOUNDS, THE SHOUTS AND WHISPERS THAT MOST OF US TAKE FOR GRANTED? LISTEN . . . AND LEARN.
Date: Sunday, March 16, 2003
Edition: Broward Metro Section: HEALTH & FAMILY Page: 1E
Byline: By Howard Goodman Staff Writer

Listen. If we're going to talk about this, you'd better speak up.

If you don't, I'm afraid I'm not going to hear you.

I wear a hearing aid in each ear. They're pretty well-hidden in the thickness of my hair, so maybe you didn't realize it.

But no day goes by without my hearing problem being a problem.

My man Koufax

In learning to be a columnist, I had to get used to the idea of using my own feelings and memories as material. That's very different from the journalism that I was taught to practice. This column won the Sun-Sentinel's readers' poll for their favorite commentary of the year:






LEFTY'S LEGACY: FIGHTING FOR WHAT'S RIGHT
Date: Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

I was about 10 years old, sitting in the box seats with my dad at Wrigley Field, cheering for the visitors.

The Dodgers were my favorite team, though I was a Chicagoan who had never been to Brooklyn or Los Angeles. I loved their lore, their soul, their exquisite heartbreaks against the Yankees.

Out of the bullpen in the late innings, the Dodgers called on this kid Koufax.

"Oh, I've heard of him," I told my father. "He's really fast."

I'd heard right. Tall, gangly, strong, the young Sandy Koufax threw the fastest balls I ever saw.

And they were balls, not strikes. Koufax kicked his big right leg high, stretched it impossibly far, uncoiled his long left arm and sent the ball sailing into the backstop.

A couple of years went by. Koufax learned control. And dominated baseball as perhaps no pitcher ever has.

In four incomparable years, 1963 to 1966, he pitched four no-hitters, including a perfect game.

He led the Dodgers into the World Series three times. And in 1965, he refused to pitch the Series' opening game because it was Yom Kippur.

Out of respect for his forebears and the sacrifices they made for their beliefs, he wouldn't play that day. He taught a couple of generations of Jewish kids that some things were more important even than the World Series.

Long into adulthood, many of us -- even the doubters and disaffiliated -- would consider it sacrilege to work on the High Holy Days because of Koufax's unforgettable example.

And then he was gone. Quit at age 31, after winning 27 games in 1966, rather than risk permanent damage to an elbow rent by arthritis.

Sandy Koufax became a willing ghost, a legend who resisted the limelight.

"Sandy is somebody," his biographer, Jane Leavy, has said, "who craves his anonymity."

Marching to Iraq

This column seems tame now. But I wrote it at a time when anything less than 100 percent gung-ho agreement with the White House brought you heaps of invective. I heard from a lot of angry readers over this one. Many of my misgivings look prescient, but I too was fooled into thinking that Iraq was hiding WMDs.






IRAQ CONFLICT ALREADY RAGES -- IN MY MIND
Date: Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

Like many Americans, I am divided on Iraq. My lack of resolve shows in the internal polls I've been taking.

According to my mind's pollster, I am 85 percent certain that Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator whose greatest contribution to the world would be to leave it.

I am 95 percent sure that Hussein is hiding weapons of mass destruction, including terrible gases, chemicals and germs. And I am 75 percent sure that the United Nations will lose even more of its credibility if it lets Hussein off the hook.

But I am 90 percent sure a U.S. invasion of Iraq will bring death to many innocent people, encourage Hussein to unleash the very weapons we fear he has, and radicalize new generations of Arab and Muslim suicide bombers to haunt us.

Those aren't the only conflicting opinions I'm holding.

My parents as I never knew them

Every now and then, I wrote a column that was just about my life or my family. This one was especially sweet. My sister had discovered a cache of love letters of my parents' that none of us had ever seen, and they told a story all by themselves. After it ran, I was contacted by several people who recognized my parents from the old pictures we ran of their young selves. Amazing.






LOVE LETTERS AS PERFECTLY DATED AS A FEDORA
Date: Thursday, November 28, 2002
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

My sister Susan found the letters when cleaning out my parents' house last summer. They were tucked back in a little-used cabinet in the basement, a neat bundle of carefully folded stationery that no one had seen or touched for decades.

They were from 1947, the summer before Carol Goodman and Miriam Gutman, both of Chicago, were married.

Finding them was a revelation: a window flung open to that time you cannot know, the time before you were born, when your parents were young and had the dreams and desires each generation thinks are theirs alone -- and which certainly never can exist in the orderly, responsible people who are your parents.

Carol -- the male name was common in his parents' Hungary -- was 24, just out of uniform from World War II. Miriam was 21, working as a legal secretary in the Loop. They met at her family's apartment on the North Side where her older brother was hosting a veterans' meeting.

Carol fell for the pretty dark-haired girl immediately. She took a little longer, inconveniently being engaged to someone else.

But soon she was making other plans. "I realized that your dad would always make me laugh," she'd say.

They became inseparable -- except for nine days when he traveled to Denver to visit his beloved older sister Gene, who'd moved there 14 years earlier. You did that, back when Denver's air was clear, if you had tuberculosis.

It was his first trip West, the first time either of them would fly on an airplane.

In those days, a long-distance phone call was a major event. A stamp was 3 cents, air mail 5 cents.

Miriam and Carol wrote nearly every day, long letters on heavy-bond paper and monogrammed onionskin, filled with chat and jokes and -- most surprising to us kids -- open expressions of love.

I look at these letters, and I can see by the handwriting that it's the same two people I've always known.

But I don't recognize this giddy version of them, this young pair so dreamily in love, intent on putting every thought to paper.

In contemporary slang as perfectly dated as fedoras and padded shoulders, they enthuse about the whole wide world opening before them.

Noisemaker

When I found out that the head of special events for the city of Philadelphia was a fairly serious scholar of fireworks, I knew I had a good subject for a magazine article - and the chance to learn a lot about a subject I always wanted to know better.

(Click on image to enlarge it. Then hit "previous page" to reduce it.)

Replaying a shooting

A news story about an extraordinary effort by state troopers to understand the circumstances of a racially charged police shooting.






ON TURNPIKE, OFFICIALS TRY TO REPLAY SHOOTING
A 13-MILE STRETCH WAS CLOSED FOR HOURS. INVESTIGATORS WENT OVER VERSIONS OF EVENTS IN WHICH TROOPERS WOUNDED THREE MEN.
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: SOUTH JERSEY; Pg. B01


In silver shadows on the strangely stilled roadway, the minivan backed toward the squad car. A man jumped away, fell to the pavement with a gun drawn, scrambled to his feet, stumbled again, darted out of the way.

His partner readied to fire at the van as it nudged the police car, pushing it backward to a grassy strip left of the shoulder while curving slowly backward across three lanes toward the concrete median barrier.

Forensics expert Henry Lee ordered it done again. And again.

Policing gets smarter

Philadelphia had one of the nation's most brutal and backward police forces in America in the 1970s. In the late '90s the city decided, finally, to change. Here's one of many stories I wrote on how the new police commissioner went about it.





COMPSTAT: NEW WEAPON FOR POLICE
The intense weekly meetings zero in on Phila. crime statistics - and how to thwart criminals
Howard Goodman, Inquirer staff writer
LOCAL: Pg. A01

So there's this cop up in the 14th District, see, and he goes to investigate the theft of a cell phone.

What's he do? He calls the number.

And - can you believe this? - the knucklehead answers.

The cop pretends he's the owner. Tells the thief: "Hey, this phone really likes me. Will you take $50 for it?"

Sure enough, the guy agrees, they meet. Bingo! An arrest.

Captain Joseph Marker told that story yesterday, and the assembled brass roared.

"But here's why I wanted to tell you this," Marker said. "In the 14th now, we have standing orders. Every time we investigate a stolen cell phone, we dial the number."

Celebrating ingenuity, sharing information. That's the essence of a new ritual in Philadelphia policing - the weekly meeting called Compstat.

Compstat is the organizational centerpiece of the Police Department's new crime-fighting initiatives, the chief apparatus for turning the long-slumbering department into a unified, focused force.

Conducted in the half-light of one meeting room or another, with more than 50 police officials from all over the city seated at a U-shaped table with computer-generated crime maps splashed on a screen, Compstat is where district captains and the heads of special units are confronted with up-to-date statistics about crime in their areas, and questioned about them in exquisite detail.

With Police Commissioner John F. Timoney and top aides leading the grilling, it's where captains must defend the steps they have taken to fight crime.

For the commanders on the hot seat, it's a chance to show they are getting ahead of the criminals in their districts.

But if they don't know their facts, if they haven't aggressively and creatively attacked the problems on their streets, Compstat can be an occasion of intense embarrassment.

Yesterday, for the first time since the sessions began in March, Timoney opened a Compstat session to reporters.

Alaska in an RV

A travel piece. The whole family went on the road, and it made for a funny trip.





ALASKA BY RV: A PRACTICAL WAY TO TRAVEL A CHALLENGING STATE
IT'S A LESS COSTLY, LESS DAREDEVIL MODE - WITH PLENTY OF HOOKUPS.
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: FEATURES TRAVEL; Pg. T01


ON THE ROAD IN ALASKA - Wind lashed my face, cold rain cutting icy rivulets on cheeks chapped raw, as my weary team lunged onward and our sled - plied with foodstuffs, camp gear, precious serums - forged toward the white-blurred, unknown beyond . . .

Well, no, that's not actually how I traversed Alaska.

Picture, instead, a cushioned vinyl seat, a steering wheel, a bed with sheets and pillowcases, a cupboard full of Lays Baked Potato Chips, an Aqua-Marine IV toilet - all of it moving at nine miles to the gallon.

Ellen, my wife, is in the passenger seat, checking our progress against The Milepost, a 754-page guide to just about every roadside attraction in the Great White North. My stepdaughter,
Rachel, is on the couch, writing in her journal. My stepson, Mike, is curled up in the rear bed with a book on the wilderness and Soundgarden on his headphones. Rachel's boyfriend, Tal, and my son, Ben, are playing cribbage at the dining table.

We're doing Alaska family-style, in a rented recreational vehicle - a 1993 Ford Jamboree Rallye - carrying most of the comforts (and a lot of the chores) of home with us as we go from mountaintop to salmon stream to shoreline. In the biggest state in the union - Texas times two, plus change - the six of us are spending two weeks in a 27-foot-long, 18-foot-high, 7 3/4-foot-wide RV.

We have hearkened to the call of the mild.