John Ashcroft Thrown Out at Home

All this talk in the news lately about whether former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft condoned torture of suspected terrorists or urged President Bush to raise threat levels for political purposes evokes vivid memories of a night in the heartland twenty summers ago when I struck a blow for press freedom against Ashcroft.

Freedom, that is, from the commotion he and his entourage created one steamy Saturday night during a Giants-Cardinals game in St. Louis. That’s when I ejected then-Missouri Governor Ashcroft from the press box at Busch Stadium – for cheering.

It was July 8, 1989. The temperature was a sticky 93 degrees as 47,000 Cardinals fans packed the ballpark to watch Whitey Herzog’s Redbirds take on Roger Craig’s first-place Giants.

I was there in my role as the Giants’ PR executive and liaison to the team’s traveling beat writers and broadcasters. I sat with a half-dozen Bay Area sportswriters at the third base end of the expansive press box, some forty yards away from the St. Louis media contingent.

The Giants were leading 4-3 when left fielder Kevin Mitchell, enjoying an MVP season, led off the top of the sixth with a bomb to deep left field off reliever Frank DiPino, Mitch’s second homer of the game. One out later, Giants third baseman Ernie Riles singled up the middle. With a 1-1 count on the next hitter, Pat Sheridan, Riles attempted to steal second. Cardinals catcher Tony Pena nailed him with a perfect throw.

A shrill voice erupted directly behind us. “YEAH, TONY! ATTA BABY! GO CARDS! OH, YEAHHHH!”

We all turned in the direction of this jarring and unexpected outburst. Cheering in the press box is one of baseball’s cardinal sins – and not just in St. Louis.  In fact, “No Cheering in the Press Box” was the title of a book by the late, legendary Chicago baseball writer Jerome Holtzman. (Aside: Later that year, when the Giants were an out away from clinching the NL pennant, I left my seat in the Candlestick Park press box so I could join the screaming fans in the upper deck.)

A  half dozen people decked out in full Cards fan regalia had apparently emerged from a luxury suite adjacent to the press box and were gathered behind us. Several clutched beers, waving caps and pennants, whooping it up. Obviously, they were not sportswriters. One man who appeared to be the leader of the group continued shouting encouragement to the Cards at the top of his voice.

Nick Peters of the Sacramento Bee, who then was considered the dean of the Giants’ traveling writers, was seeing red. He scowled at me with his arms outstretched and his palms up, as if to say who are these people and what are you going to do about it?

I got up and approached the ringleader, whom I did not know or recognize. I glanced far down the press box to see if any Cardinals staff had noticed the disturbance, but they were all preoccupied with the game still in progress.

I felt awkward about enforcing decorum in another team’s park, but I had no choice. Peters, a veteran scribe who was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this summer, could be demanding and impatient on deadline. He had already elevated my personal media terror alert. This called for some enhanced but tactful interrogation techniques. The conversation with the rowdy fan went like this:

Me: Excuse me, sir. This is a working press area.

Him: You could have fooled me.

Me: Well, it is, and there is no cheering allowed in the press box.

Him: But that’s wrong. When I see my team do something good, I cheer. Do you know who I am?

Me: I’m sorry, I don’t. Do you work here?

Him: Any time I am in Missouri, I’m working! I am the governor of this great state! John Ashcroft (extends hand). How do you do?

Me: Forgive me for not recognizing you, Governor. I’m Duffy Jennings, the Giants’ PR director, from San Francisco. I’m simply pointing out that these writers are working. It’s the same as if a bunch of people charged into your office while you were trying to work and started hollering.

Him: My door is always open! Everyone is welcome in the governor’s office! And if they saw something good happen, they could cheer.

Me: I understand, Governor, but with all due respect, I still need to ask you and your group to leave this area.

By then, Cardinals officials, alerted to the disruption, had converged on us. They quickly took command of the situation, apologized to Ashcroft for any misunderstanding and escorted the governor and his group back to their seats. To his credit, he returned a short time later and apologized to me for the inconvenience he had caused. The Giants finished off the Cards, 8-5.

Sunday papers all over the country carried the story of the dustup between a chagrined Giants PR director and Missouri’s popular governor – the only Republican ever elected to two consecutive terms in Missouri history. He was subsequently elected to the U.S. Senate before Bush appointed him U.S. Attorney General in 2001, a post he held four years.

It’s not for me to say whether Ashcroft is guilty of any wrongdoing in office, but there are plenty of people around who would like to have seen him tossed out for misconduct.

In retrospect, I look back on that summer night in St. Louis with an extra measure of personal pride.

A Night to Remember in Montreal

It was nice to see that the Giants honored Dave Dravecky this week in a pre-game ceremony to commemorate his great cancer comeback performance twenty years ago. In all my years handling the team’s PR and media relations, August 10, 1989, will always be among the most memorable days.

But what happened five days later in Montreal – twenty years ago today – holds a deeper personal connection for me.

The comeback game in San Francisco was powerfully emotional and unforgettable for everyone – for Dravecky, his teammates, his family, our front office family and Giants fans everywhere. Thirty-four thousand packed Candlestick Park for the heralded return of the likeable left-hander. It had been nearly a year since surgeons removed a tumor from his pitching arm.

Dravecky threw eight solid innings on that sunny Thursday afternoon to beat the Pete Rose-managed Cincinnati Reds. It was a triumphant homecoming for a talented player who had been told by his doctors he would never pitch again.

Even the media were uncharacteristically moved by Dravecky’s courageous performance. The press box at the ‘Stick overflowed with reporters from all over the country. Some actually applauded when Dave came out of the dugout in the bottom of the eighth to acknowledge the cheering crowd.

“I feel great,” he told them at a post-game press conference. “After what happened today, anything else is icing on the cake.” That weekend we dropped two out of three to the Dodgers and on Monday we flew to Montreal for the start of a nine-game road trip.

Olympic Stadium in Montreal is a cavernous structure enclosed by a huge dome that amplifies the interior noise to a level rivaling a 747 taking off from your back yard.

Built originally for the 1976 summer Olympics to accommodate 56,000 people, the acoustics were always ill suited for the smaller crowds typical of a major league baseball game. When the fans were quiet, as Dravecky noted in his book, “Comeback,” you could hear somebody eating peanuts in the upper deck.

That’s how it was when the series opened on Tuesday night, August 15. Fewer than 20,000 fans were there to see the hometown Expos host the Giants and the celebrated Dravecky.

With Dravecky and the Giants leading, 3-0, in the bottom of the sixth inning, the Montreal crowd was especially hushed. Damaso Garcia led off with a home run and then Dravecky’s first pitch to Andres Galarraga came too far inside and nicked him. With Galarraga on first and nobody out, Tim Raines dug into the batter’s box. Dravecky looked into catcher Terry Kennedy for the sign, came to a set position, then wheeled back and whipped his arm forward with the pitch.

“THWACK!” The stadium exploded with a piercing noise that sounded like a heavy tree branch snapping in two. But it wasn’t from Raines’ bat striking the ball. It was Dravecky’s arm snapping in two. He let out a shriek that sent chills through the crowd as he instantly dropped his glove, grabbed his upper arm in agony, whirled in place and crumpled to the edge of the mound in agony.

Kennedy and first baseman Will Clark bolted in from their positions and knelt at Dravecky’s side to comfort him as other Giants converged on the mound from the field and the dugout.

Giants trainer Mark Letendre and others wheeled Dravecky off the field on a stretcher and into the clubhouse, where doctors and team officials examined him. Stunned and shaken teammates stood by, some weeping quietly.

The humerus bone in Dravecky’s upper left arm, weakened by the tumor-removal surgery and brittle from subsequent freezing to stem future growth of the cancer, had fractured under the powerful torque of the pitching motion.

Normally only one PR person travels with the ball club, but I had taken my assistant, Robin Carr, along because we were headed to Philadelphia and New York after Montreal and we knew the media interest in Dravecky’s comeback would be tremendous in those media capitals. In the press box high above the field, the writers and broadcasters with us, as well as the Montreal press, were numbed by Dravecky’s collapse.

Robin remained in the press box while I rushed down to the clubhouse to learn what I could about Dave’s condition and relay it back to her. By the time I got downstairs, an ambulance was already pulling up to the clubhouse entrance. Soon the attendants loaded Dravecky aboard and assistant trainer Greg Lynn followed. I clambered in behind them in order to keep tabs on developments that I could phone back to the stadium.

Dravecky winced in pain and groaned audibly as the ambulance sped bumpily across the city to the hospital.

“How you doing, Dave?” I stupidly asked him as we pulled up to the hospital’s emergency entrance. I immediately regretted the question. I guess I was lost for words. But he wasn’t.

“I feel like somebody hit my arm with a meat axe,” Dravecky answered with a look that said he knew his career was truly over this time. “But that’s not important right now. I left a man on base. Could you let me know how the game comes out as soon as you find out? I’d hate to lose this one. I’d like to go out undefeated.”

The Giants held on to win, 3-2. And Dravecky’s comeback inspired them to win the National League pennant, too. Oakland, however, swept the World Series after the Loma Prieta earthquake, minutes before Game 3, caused a ten-day postponement.

While Dave was being treated in the hospital in Montreal, I met a CNN crew outside to update them. There were no other media there – in 1989 the Internet and cell phones weren’t around to transmit news instantaneously, and CNN was pioneering the cable TV revolution. Doctors took X-rays, placed a cast on Dave’s arm and discharged him. He took a taxi back to the Giants’ hotel, where he met briefly with the traveling beat writers and our broadcasters.

Robin and I, meanwhile, were up most of the night answering phone calls from reporters and radio stations around the country as the news spread. She continued on the road trip and I flew back to San Francisco, as did Dravecky.

A few months later, Dravecky’s cancer returned, and his left arm and shoulder were amputated to save his life.

But he had his wish – he finished his final season undefeated.

First Responders

Driving down the Peninsula recently on the way home from a business meeting in San Francisco, I was surfing the radio dial when I dropped in on Gil Gross’ afternoon show on KGO. He was talking with Ravi Peruman. Longtime KGO listeners – and those in Bay Area news media – know Ravi better as veteran reporter R.J. Peruman.

I was a bit confused at first because Peruman clearly wasn’t doing a news segment. It turned out he had been off work for two months while undergoing hospitalization and treatment for severe depression. At his low point, Peruman contemplated suicide. Now he was talking openly on his own station for the first time about his pain, his ordeal and his recovery.

The underlying cause of his despondency? A career of covering violent, gruesome news. The tipping point, Peruman said, was the suicide of a teenager who jumped to his death inside the atrium of the Hyatt Embarcadero earlier this year. Arriving at the scene, Ravi caught a glimpse of the kid’s face before it could be covered. It jolted Ravi and conjured the image of his own son. In Ravi’s mind at that moment, all the years of human tragedy he had reported on so dispassionately, so “objectively,” came hurtling down into a crumpled heap on the lobby floor of his psyche.

There is more, of course, to Ravi’s story and his struggles with traumatic stress. But the cumulative effect of the day-to-day exposure to the ugliest sides of life and death is powerful.

I get this. Even though I left reporting years ago, I understand the lasting power of the images, voices, sounds and smells of violent crime and accidental carnage. Thankfully, I never covered a war, a plane crash or an execution (although my father covered fifteen of them).

I did report on many of San Francisco’s most notorious crimes and tragic events. During my years with the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s, assignments took me to dark places. I worked the graveyard shift on the police beat, spent a week on round-the-clock call with homicide detectives, lived in the firehouse and fought fires with the men of Engine Co. 21, ducked behind cars at shootouts, sidestepped blood and bones at assassinations, assaults, accidents and autopsies.

During the interview on KGO, Peruman and Gross noted something about my former profession that caught me completely by surprise. They talked about journalists as “first responders” to crime scenes, fires, explosions, earthquakes, crashes and other emergencies much like cops, fire fighters, EMTs and other officials.

It had never occurred to me that reporters and photographers fall into the same category. They hear the police radio or fire dispatcher announce the call and they go. Even though they are at the scene with emergency workers, they are not actively doing anything to tend to the dead, assist the injured, douse the flames, protect bystanders. With microphones, cameras and notebooks, news people merely observe, ask questions and report. But they don’t feel.

In spite of finding ourselves in dangerous environments, reporters in my day simply didn’t get killed on the job. With rare exceptions, I don’t recall fearing for my safety. Well, sure, there were a few reckless photographers behind the wheel, tearing through the streets to a scene. Still, we wore an invisible aura of invulnerability, walking into crime scenes holding our flimsy press credentials aloft as if they were bulletproof vests.

Even when the Zodiac killer threatened my colleague Paul Avery in a Halloween card, Paul laughed it off and we repaired to Hanno’s in the alley behind the paper for drinks. That all changed for me in November of 1978.

A contingent of Bay Area media – including Chronicle reporter Ron Javers, San Francisco Examiner reporter Tim Reiterman and Examiner photographer Greg Robinson – accompanied Congressman Leo Ryan’s delegation on a fact-finding mission to the Rev. Jim Jones’ jungle compound in Guyana.

Everyone knows the outcome. Jones’ gunmen opened fire on Ryan’s group as they left Jonestown, killing Ryan, Robinson, NBC reporter Don Harris, his cameraman, Bob Brown, and a temple defector. Reiterman and Javers were among ten others wounded.

The shootings jarred the Chronicle and Examiner newsrooms. After hiding in the jungle overnight, Javers, who sat next to me at the paper, called in and dictated his first-person account of the attack. As he talked and I typed, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

The Journalists Memorial at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., pays tribute to 1,913 individuals around the world who have died reporting the news dating back to 1837. They include, oddly enough, the founder of the Chronicle, Charles de Young, who was shot to death in his office in April, 1880 at age 35 by the son of the mayor in a personal and political act of revenge. The only other Chronicle staffer to die on duty was editorial writer Vince Mahoney, who perished in a plane crash in Bombay, India, returning from a tour of Indonesia in 1949.

We had scarcely recovered from the Jonestown killings when another tragedy rocked the city just ten days later. On a bright Monday morning, Supervisor Dan White shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in their City Hall offices within earshot of scores of city workers, including then-Board of Supervisors president Dianne Feinstein. Reporters at the scene were in shock once more. Over the next five months, as I tracked the aftermath of the killings and sat in the front row at White’s trial, I became more aware of the extent to which a decade of this coverage was taking its toll on me emotionally.

Two years after that awful November, I left the business. But even now, nearly thirty years later, I perk up when I hear someone like Ravi Peruman confiding publicly what reporters rarely talk about outside our own homes, if at all.

In a recent LA Times column last week, James Rainey describes a new documentary on this subject, “Breaking News, Breaking Down.” The film explores how journalists today “dive headlong toward disaster, seldom imagining that they can be snared in the psychological trauma” of such events as 9/11, Katrina and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ravi Peruman has changed his first name from R.J. to help shed the personality that carried him into the depths of depression. He recently invited his peers to join a journalists’ trauma group he formed on Facebook to stimulate support and discussion while furthering his own recovery.

The group has 19 members already, including some prominent Bay Area reporters and anchors, and undoubtedly will grow.

I was proud to be among the first responders.

It’s News to Me

I’ve been thinking lately about my late friend and former colleague, Harry Jupiter. Harry was the quintessential old-school reporter, sportswriter, publicist and storyteller. I rarely saw him without his two ever-present trademarks – the fedora tilted back on his head, with his card stuck in the hatband, and a cigarette stuck between his lips.

We worked together at the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s and saw one another frequently during the 1980s after I left the paper for a job with the San Francisco Giants. Harry retired in 1993, and every time I saw him we had this running joke.

“Hey, Harry, how’s it going’?” I would ask.

“Couldn’t be better,” Harry would say. “In fact, I’m writing a book.”

“Really? What’s it about?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t actually written anything yet. But I have a great title.”

“Yeah? What is it?”

“Everyone Says I Should Write a Book.’”

Having shared parallel careers in journalism, baseball and PR, I’ve been thinking of Harry lately for two reasons.

First, everyone says I should write a book. They tell me I have stories people might like to hear about my experiences in news, sports, public relations and life. Many of my friends and family know I covered the Zodiac, Zebra, Patty Hearst and Moscone-Milk cases for the Chronicle. And there was the 1989 World Series earthquake and the inspiring saga of Dave Dravecky during my years as the Giants’ publicist. Not to mention the fun of heading up corporate communications aboard the Fogdog.com rocket ride to e-commerce stardom back in the day.

But not many people know about my mother’s incredibly popular yet discreet neighborhood gay bar in San Francisco’s upscale Presidio Heights in the closeted ‘60s, the Club Dori. An odd mid-career switch for a woman who graduated with an English degree from Stanford at 19 alongside William Hewlett and David Packard.

Also, there are few around today who know much about my father’s career as a newsman and author, writing about Hollywood stars, moguls and mobsters (“Bugsy,” for one.) Trivia note: I was named after the warden of San Quentin Prison, Clinton T. Duffy, who collaborated with my father on his autobiography at the time I was born.

So I can’t disagree that the stories are in me, and I am working on that memoir. But that will take some time. (And no, Harry, I don’t have a title, but I have written a few chapters.)

In the meantime, everyone says I should write a blog – the modern day substitute for writing a book a little at a time every day or every week, only everyone gets to read along. Which brings me to the second reason I am thinking about Harry Jupiter.

This month’s fortieth anniversary of the moon landing reminded me of the story about the day back in 1962 that Jupiter was standing behind the batting cage at Candlestick Park, watching San Francisco Giants rookie pitcher Gaylord Perry hitting wicked line drives in batting practice.

While the details of the encounter have varied over the years, the common lore has it that Jupiter turned to Giants manager Alvin Dark and told him: “That Perry kid’s going to hit some home runs for you.”

“There’ll be a man on the moon before Gaylord Perry hits a home run,” scoffed Dark.

Seven years later, on July 20, 1969, less than an hour after Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface, Perry launched his first major league home run off the Dodgers’ Claude Osteen at the ‘Stick. (He hit only five more in his career.)

It seems the older I get the more things happen that remind me of a good story, and I have somehow found myself at the center of more than my share of them.

Since my passions are writing and news, the title of this blog seemed appropriate. It was the name of my father’s Chronicle gossip column in the early ‘50s. When Herb Caen defected to the Examiner for a few years, Dean Jennings was among Caen’s replacements, if such a phrase ever adequately applied to anyone.

Over the past four decades, I have written literally thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, press releases, news advisories, speeches, op-eds, proposals, communications plans, newsletters, brochures, white papers, captions, you name it.

But they were all about or for others.

Professional journalists learn to stay out of the story, on the sidelines, observing and reporting. Alas, all that has changed. Now ‘citizen’ journalists abound on the Internet with their own perspectives. The transition is difficult for me, but it will probably be a lot more interesting and fun. I hope you think so, too.

Book, blog, blank paper – it’s not important where to begin.

Everyone says I should write. Period. So here goes. And hats off to you, Harry.