I learned a few days ago that one of the true influencers in my early career had passed. I first met Chip Neal at Ch. 11 (NH Public TV) in the early 1980’s, when I was volunteer at the station. Chip was a producer and director there. He was one of the original producers of NH Crossroads, a weekly program that I would later work on from time to time, but I first got to know him as the guy behind the scenes in fundraising and Auction events.

As a volunteer, I was struck by Chip’s openness and generosity. My first “work” at the station was answering phones during fundraising breaks, and the curious kid I was would wander from the studio to learn more about what happens in a TV station. Chip took the time to answer questions, and, to top it off, he seemed to have a great sense of humor.

I would learn later that a sense of humor was necessary to 1.) work in in television, and b.) have any success at it.

When I first started working for a paycheck at Ch. 11, I learned more about who Chip was and what he did. He was, as I mentioned, a producer/director for NH Crossroads, creating interesting segments that often came about because he saw something interesting in the world and he just plain wanted to share it with others. I had the great pleasure of being his photographer a number of times; we visited a frozen lake and watched cars race around in ice races, went to a county fair on a sweltering summer day to watch oxen pull, explored Houghton’s Hardware in town as adults would explore a toy store, and looked at a few historical markers along the way. Met some interesting people because of Chip.

Chip was highly visible as a Crossroads producer, but most folks didn’t know how much scut work he did for the station. The marquee programs were all well and good, but how many people think of telethons and fundraising TV auctions as TV shows? Well, they are. Especially the annual Auction – let’s face it, if you want to raise money on TV selling stuff, you need folks to be watching, and it’s got to be somewhat entertaining. Chip was one of the behind-the-scenes producers of a lot of material for the Auction, especially “Superboard” items, which were high-ticket items that were presented over the course of the week using produced packages – almost product infomercials. Each year we’d have a car donated to auction off, and one year he made a memorable promotional video for this Superboard item that featured a juggler friend of mine.

What I learned from Chip that was far more valuable to me than basic TV production stuff was mindset. When I went out with Chip to work on a story, it wasn’t work – it was play. It was discovery. And he quite often pushed me to explore with my camera, so it wasn’t just a guy talking to a camera telling us a story. He taught me how to bring the viewer along to play, too. This could be from an icy pond to an Auction set.

In the summer of ’87, Chip was tasked with producing and directing a pilot program with Fritz Wetherbee, titled something along the lines of “Fritz Wetherbee’s Yankee Hour.” It was to be a variety show, with Fritz being Fritz, and Fritz would Fritz with a few guests and a musical group, and include some field segments. And it was for this pilot that Chip packed me along to New Boston to record what is one of my favorite stories of my career, the summer evening when the Rotarians played a round of meadow muffin bingo. What you see below was originally three segments that were dispersed throughout the hour-long pilot; Chip took the three segments and stitched them together for a Crossroads feature. Why not? The Fritz pilot didn’t go anywhere, and there was all this great material…

Thank you, Chip, for helping me learn to tell stories, and to look askance at the world around me. The work you did off-screen meant a lot to folks, and to this day, I think of you often. Godspeed.

Senate rules allow the senators to vote without any regard to facts. Now, one could argue the overarching notion that the oath of office, in requiring senators to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic and to bear true faith and allegiance to the the Constitution, and that they will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office, would bind them to voting along lines of fact, rather than along lines of whatever political machinations they choose when casting their vote.

But that question, too, is moot, since there is no way to put a senator on trial for a vote one might find faithless and failing to uphold the Constitution, unless that vote can be tied to a violation of a particular statute, but the bar to show a vote violating a law, when a vote is the act of creating law, is extraordinarily high.Since senators cannot be impeached – they can be expelled, but not impeached and tried in the same way – the only remedy for a faithless senator is at the ballot box. Unless and until they are booted by the voters, congresscritters sit pretty much alone in a rarified catbird seat.

I, too, agree that the evidence presented by the House managers is damning. Many today are complaining, saying it meets the threshold required in criminal court – but I’m not sure. For the guy who lost the presidency: on what charge would that evidence produce a conviction? On which charge -and be specific – would the House managers’ evidence prove beyond reasonable doubt that the former president was guilty? I’m not defending the man – hell no! But I can’t think of a federal statute, or even D.C. ordinance, that you can charge him with. Yes, the words and videos are damning, but are they the literal smoking gun to prove beyond a doubt that he was guilty of violating [insert US code citation here…]?

The evidence does prove to me and to most rational folks that he shirked his duty, but shirking is not a crime in the criminal code. They do prove beyond a doubt that he violated his oath by acting faithlessly – but his oath is not a federal statute. Violating his oath is a high crime and misdemeanor, for which the remedy is clearly spelled out: impeachment.

The guy who could not get elected with 74 million votes famously said he could go out on 5th Ave., shoot someone, and get away with it. We may not spend our time marveling at his intellect, but the truth is, he was smart enough to *not* do that. Because then he would be breaking a law – not an oath. And laws when broken are addressed by the judicial system and courts. His oath? That’s a high Constitutional crime, for which the redress is impeachment.

Are the 43 cowards who voted to acquit accomplices?

Absolutely.

Did they break a law?

No.

They broke faith, just as he did, with the people of the United States. They broke faith with the notion of our nation, a nation that exists only because of words on a parchment that bind us, We the people, together. Breaking the faith: that’s their crime, and you can’t find “breaking the faith” in any federal or D.C. statute.It the Minority Leader hiding behind a loophole? You betcher ass he is, along with 42 others in the minority.

But, look at his title in the Senate – it’s proof they are the *minority.* If the impeachment vote today was an election, it would be worth noting that “our side” *won* by 14% – we just didn’t win the jackpot prize. And those 43 cowards are now trying to figure their end game. Some, like the Minority Leader, were just re-elected, and their long game is that six years from now this will all be water under the bridge…or they plan to ride off into the sunset.

The Senator from Maine who sits in Margaret Chase Smith’s seat used her re-election and six-year security pass as an opportunity to find a conscience. Maybe she’s going to be a different Senator before she retires – or maybe she read the tea leaves and will be a Senator for the people. The cynic in me thinks her guilty vote was a one-time one-off, only safe to do because she was just re-elected.

All of this, as rambling as I tend to be, leads back to this as the bottom line: the impeachment process is a political process, and was intended to be from the very beginning. No amount of hand wringing about right and wrong, facts and lies, or what would be allowed in a criminal trial or a real jury room really matters. What mattered, when the time came to vote, was each senator’s self-interest, and deciding what devil they want to dance with.

And now we know.

It’s on the record.

And in that record, the House managers have done an excellent job of providing a fact-based context against which those 43 choices can and MUST be weighed in public until those 43 cowards get the justice they deserve, which is the justice we were denied.

That we were denied justice in this case was no surprise – the impeachment process is, again, what? That’s right, Johnny and Janey, a political process.

Show me a political process that puts justice first.

My mornings have a routine: get up, make food for breakfasts and lunches, and when everyone else is set, sit down with my bowl of oatmeal and press through the crosswords in the morning cage liner while listening to Morning Edition.

So there I was, getting a recap on the first impeachment hearing from yesterday, making my way through the clues, enjoying the fact that some of these references will stymie the young ones (for example,
34 across: Author/Aviator _____ Morrow Lindbergh,⁽¹⁾ or perhaps
17 Across: “Robinson Crusoe” penner⁽²⁾), as many of the clues lately have been ripped from the headlines…of 1945 editions of Variety or The Hollywood Reporter.

I mean, 32 Down: Chaplin named for her grandmother.⁽³⁾ Really?

And then, there it was. Something a très actuel, yet fully classical.

56 Across. Three letters.

(1) Anne
(2) Defoe
(3) Oona

Going through some old tapes and video files, it occurred to me that a round-number anniversary is looming, as we are coming up on thirty years since the Notre Dame bridge in Manchester was taken from that New Hampshire city’s skyline.

It’s not often a person gets to be a part of history, in my case, as a documentarian of a moment in time. The Notre Dame bridge was an iconic part of Manchester’s identity, standing, for fifty yeas, astride the Merrimack River, an arch of solid steel connecting Manchester’s west side, with its Notre Dame cathedral, to the east side, with the Amoskeag mills, the city’s cathedral to industry. Built as a WPA project, the half-century-old bridge was deemed to be past its useful service as a means of getting cars across the river.

It had to go.

Here’s a story I produced for NH Journal at New Hampshire Public Television. Word leaked out late on a Friday that the bridge would come down “sometime” the following week. Public outcry made the exact date and time leak out, too, and I convinced my news director that this needed to be a story in our program. He agreed, but I had no time in the schedule to do a full feature. I literally drove to Manchester after photographing a story in Concord in the morning, en route to Portsmouth for a another recording for a future story. I had about a two hour window, and all I could arrange for that time was to have Dean Kamen (yes, that Dean Kamen…) arrange parking for me, and access to a rooftop. (Kamen was one of many in Manchester who tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the bridge from coming down.)

After the green lady was in the water, I ran over to Kamen’s office and we went to his roof and I lifted off in his Enstrom helicopter (he liked the helicopters so much he bought the company!) to get a quick aerial view – the only one on TV – and then off to the Seacoast to work on another producer’s story.

At the end of a long-ish day, Sam Fleming (my news director) asked me to write a narration. Since there were no interviews, my Demo Day footage and whatever words I came up with were all we had to tell the story for the week’s “kicker.”

I typed. Sam approved.

Initially I voiced the story, and when it was reviewed late Thursday (we taped our weekly show on Friday mornings) the fact that I was not an on-air voice or personality became a hitch. So Sam voiced it for me, keeping every word intact.

I’ve received a number of comments over the years, even before I posted the story to YouTube. It wasn’t just a story – it was also a commentary. “Some call it progress, most call it sad…” was the final line, one that I felt strongly should stay in the story; to his credit, Sam agreed, or at least assented, and there it remains to this day.

This story has special meaning to me, as it is a recording of a moment that meant so much to so many. But it is also a moment when I, finally, was able to put my words and my pictures, alone together, on the air as a story. Up until that date, I had produced a number of “kickers,” short stories that go at the end of the program, usually to end the show on a lighter note. Sometimes they were montages of images set to music; other times, they were full-fledged stories, but self-contained in narration by the participants, produced in a cinéma vérité style, where the narration is completely from the scene, rather than a reporter. Here’s perhaps my favorite example of this style, not from NH Journal though; a combination of the on-camera talent of Fritz Wetherbee and the incisive producing and editing talent of Chip Neal: (this has nothing to do with the bridge, by the way…)

If I had a nostalgic bone in my body, I might be tempted to look up the Notre Dame bridge, to see how she manages as a mere memory. Indeed, were I to do so, I might stumble upon a site that brings me other memories, those of the times I found myself rubbing elbows with the Union Leader’s marvelous photographer George Naum; a site that reveals how he captured a sequence of 35mm frames in exquisite black and white elegance of the same moment in time I recorded for posterity.

The bridge is gone. George is gone, too.

History, however, remains.

Longtime listeners of NPR’s On The Media already know this, but for them what missed it, they’ve begun a series called The Scarlet E in which they take a deep dive into our nation’s eviction epidemic. Like so many other stories they cover, much is revealed that is contrary to the popular myth about evictions. Take some time and give it a listen.

And while we’re at it, take a moment and support your public media of choice. You’ll be glad you did.