Boot camp is not for sissies.
This I know, so I am cautioning myself to not get cocky or lulled into a false sense of confidence based on the slow starting pace of this week’s computer-assisted reporting boot camp.
This is the second “boot camp” of sorts I have signed up for in my life, the first being a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation back in 1999. At the time, I not-so-fondly called it Boot Camp for Buddhists.
Obituary describing the life of a local doctor / 851 words / The Columbia Missourian
When you talk to people who knew Dr. George William Nordholtz Eggers Jr., you can tell how they knew him by the different names they call him.
He is “Dr. Eggers” or “Bill” in the medical community. “Billy” to the crowd he grew up with in Galveston, Texas. “Doc” to his poker-playing buddies. “Dad” and “Grandpa” to his family.
Dr. Eggers died Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011, at University Hospital in Columbia. He was 82.
“This was his home,” said Scott McCord, who worked for Dr. Eggers as a medical student in 1962. “He’s one of the reasons I stayed around.”
“Not just radio. Community radio,” they say at KOPN, where volunteers have been keeping the frequency live since March 3, 1973. Part music and part talk, the station’s programming is diverse and sometimes controversial. There’s a waiting list for new DJs, whose first chance to get on the air is often in the middle of the night.
Woody Adkins, 48, started “Midnight Country” in 2000. He’ll play some current country music — but only if it sounds traditional.
radiostation(audio)
Breaking news report on two local fires / 220 words / The Columbia Missourian
COLUMBIA, MO. — A stove fire resulted in damage to kitchen cabinets but no injuries Tuesday at 3310 Jamesdale Road.
A second fire at 4515 Rice Road was also reported. There were no injuries, but more details were not available.
Columbia Fire Department responded to the Jamesdale Road fire with three engines, one ladder, a heavy rescue squad and two incident command vehicles at 4:47 p.m. Public Information Officer Steven Sapp said that is the normal turnout for a residential fire of this nature.
“It was a quick knockdown,” Sapp said of the crew’s work to extinguish the fire.
Description of a local, grassroots community action meeting / 807 words / The Columbia Missourian
COLUMBIA, MO. — Defining “the hood” was nowhere near as important as identifying ways to make it better at Saturday’s “Occupy the Hood” event near Douglass Park.
Inspired by the national Occupy the Hood movement*, this was a casual gathering of six people plus its organizer, Tyree Byndom, a human resources manager, community activist and KOPN radio host. His goal was to generate specific action items that each attendee would walk away with.
Byndom had neatly laid throw pillows around the perimeter of his living room for people to make themselves comfortable, but conversation didn’t move far from the dining room table, surrounded by shelves of spiritual books and Byndom’s children’s art supplies.
Over bowls of spaghetti, the group’s conversation looped easily from each others’ personal lives to memories of the city from earlier years and their own observations about what created some of the city’s “hoods” today.
Preview of local, grassroots community action meeting / 414 words / The Columbia Missourian
COLUMBIA, MO. — Tyree Byndom wants everyone to know that while the “Occupy the Hood” gathering that will take place Saturday at his downtown home is about solidarity, it is even more so about action.
“It’s a little different from Occupy Wall Street,” said Byndom, a longtime Columbia resident and, increasingly, community activist. He said his three central questions for those who come to the open meeting will be: “What do you want to do? What do you need? And how do you want to get it done?”
Nationally, Occupy the Hood is an off-shoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement that has gone global in the two-plus months since it took root in New York. Generally speaking, Occupy the Hood’s aim is to integrate the burgeoning social movement with the faces and concerns of people of color, co-organizer Malik Rahsaan, a New York-based substance abuse counselor, told the Huffington Post.
To Byndom, “it means the empowerment of po’ folk.” He said he wants to help people escape their lethargy, entropy and disenfranchisement to become active participants in the community. He learned of the movement from Philip Jackson, executive director of the Black Star Project out of Chicago.
“Black people are used to suffering. So now that (other) people are stepping up to say, ‘We’re suffering,’ it’s a little different,” Byndom said.
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As Inside Columbia magazine moves to its new headquarters on West Broadway, the local glossy is changing a lot more than its address.
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