New Voices - stories spring 2011

After 45 minutes of on-camera questioning, the Daily Show was running out of patience with Texas State Rep. Elliott Naishtat. It was Take Five and correspondent-comedian John Oliver was still trying to get Naishtat to act flustered or surprised when Oliver brought up the make-believe Jewish holiday of Yomchechecheche. But Naishtat, even though he happens to be Jewish and a Democrat and a liberal and from New York, and even though he desperately wanted to be on the show, was refusing to play along.

“What’s the question?” Naishtat asked after Oliver brought up Yomchechecheh for the fifth time. It’s Naishtat’s go-to response to most reporters’ questions but it didn’t fit the Daily Show’s shtick.

“You know the question — just answer it!” the show’s frustrated producer Stuart Miller shouted from behind the line of cameras filling up the rest of Naishtat’s inner office.

The interview was part of a segment seeking to capitalize on a comment made by a right-wing activist saying the state needed to elect a Christian speaker. Because the House’s current speaker, Joe Straus, was Jewish, the remarks set off a brief flurry in the media about anti-Semitism in the race. With the state still simmering in ultraconservative Tea Party fervor, and with the House enjoying a new Republican supermajority, it was just the sort of outrageous political controversy the Daily Show thrives on. Naishtat had been thrilled to receive a call from Miller a couple of weeks earlier, asking if he’d be willing to do an interview for the show. After all, it can get lonely being a Democrat in the Texas legislature these days and lonelier still as a liberal Jewish Democrat — a minority of a minority of a minority.

And so a few weeks later Naishtat was showing Miller and Oliver around his inner office, a small space with ablack leather couch, small table, a couple of chairs and a desk. Naishtat showed off framed newspaper clippings from his glory days. “Ardmore? You went to Ardmore?” Miller asked, looking at a front page of the Austin American-Statesman with mug shots of every Democrat who fled to a small town across the state line in Oklahoma in 2003 in order to stall a Republican-drawn redistricting map that would have cost the party five seats. It was an early Texas version of this year’s Flight of the Democrats in Wisconsin. Before framing the paper, Naishtat had all of his cohorts sign next to their picture.

“Damn right I went to Ardmore,” Naishtat said proudly.

When the interview finally wrapped up, Miller and Oliver turned down Naishtat’s offer to give them a “New York City-oriented tour of the Capitol.” They had to catch a flight, Miller said. But first he had a favor to ask. He wanted Naishtat to help Oliver deliver $250 worth of Jewish delicatessen food from the Second Avenue Deli in Manhattan. “What we want is for John Oliver to deliver it to the Speaker’s office, to say, ‘I’m John Oliver, this is the Daily Show’.”

“Well that’s a little problematic,” Naishtat replied. “First of all there’s all this security now. Second of all, it’s a restricted area. Third, if I do this, I’ll end up on the Cultural Resources and Rodeos Committee.” Naishtat glanced at his secretary, Judy Dale, who was waving her arms in front of her, mouthing, “No! No! No!” He smiled and said, “Well come on, let’s do it right now.” Naishtat led the group upstairs to the Speaker’s reception room, where two interns beaming at the sight of John Oliver let the crew in. They tried three takes, attracting the attention of the Speaker’s communication crew and Capitol security, who let the shenanigans continue because of Naishtat’s presence.

“Okay, wait, it’s not working,” Miller said. “The two kids can’t stop laughing and there’s nothing here that says Speaker Joe Straus. This could be anywhere.” Oliver agreed. Then Naishtat had an idea. I’m going to be in trouble anyway, what the hell. “Okay, this can’t take more than two minutes, follow me,” Naishtat said. He led them down the hall and into the House chamber. Because the House was not in session,the large, ornate room was completely silent. Naishtat pointed to a sign hanging at the head of the room, right of the Speaker’s dais, that reads, “Speaker Joe Straus, welcome House of Representatives.” Right below that it says, “In God We Trust.”

“Perfect,” Miller said.

***

The next morning the House was in session and Naishtat began making the rounds. He apologized to the interns in the Speaker’s office. They could have cared less — a brush with the Daily Show was the best thing that had happened to them in their time at the Capitol. Then he went to House security. “Please don’t do that again,” they said. Finally, he walked up to the dais and beckoned to Straus.

“I guess you heard about what happened yesterday,” he said.

“Oh yeah, I heard,” Straus said.

“Joe, if you’re mad at anyone, don’t be mad at Jon Stewart,” Naishtat said.

“No, no don’t be silly, everyone had a great time. It’s no problem,” Straus said. “But where’s my sandwich?”

A few weeks later, Naishtat was in New Orleans for a friend’s birthday celebration. The segment had been set to run multiple times, but kept getting pushed back. That day, however, the Daily Show tweeted a confirmation that it would run. “How Jewish is TOO Jewish?”

Naishtat gathered a group of his friends at a nearby restaurant for a watch party. The five-and-a-half-minute segment aired, but Naishtat was nowhere in it. The segment featured Republican activists, Christian leaders and one very confused rabbi. There was no room for the liberal Jewish Democrat from New York. Just three weeks into the 82nd Legislative Session, Naishtat had been left on the cutting room floor.

***

Elliott Naishtat has always been in the minority in Texas. It’s something he’s tired of talking about.

During every appearance he makes — whether it’s a two-minute speech or an hour-long address — he tells the story about the boy from Queens who signed up to be a Vista volunteer to avoid being sent to Vietnam. He was promised a spot in San Francisco, which would have been a haven for a liberal kid trying to escape the draft.

“You know the government,” Naishtat says. “They lied."

Instead, Naishtat was sent to Eagle Pass, a tiny town on the Texas-Mexico border. In the barrios of Eagle Pass, people lived in houses without plumbing. Naishtat had seen poverty in New York, but he never imagined U.S. citizens had to rely on outhouses.

Afterward, Naishtat attended the University of Texas at Austin to pursue an education in social work. He got his masters in the subject and helped the School of Social Work develop an intern program at the state legislature. He eventually went back to UT and got a law degree, then started working for legislators.

Twenty years ago, he took his West Austin seat from an incumbent Republican who ran a television ad during the campaign with a take-off of a popular picante sauce ad. “Do you want a liberal social worker from New York City? Get a rope!” the ad said.

Even when Democrats dominated the legislature in the early ‘90s, things tended toward the right. But Naishtat found ways to be successful. For a time he chaired the Public Health Committee. During more than one session Naishtat got more bills passed than any other House member. He always filed dozens of bills, often close to 100, generally focusing on very specific measures intended to protect the poor, elderly and sick. And he usually got about half of them passed.

In 2003, the last time the state faced a serious budget shortfall, the Austin Chronicle named Naishtat the “Best State Legislator,” an award voted on by Chronicle readers. According to the paper, “…Over the years Rep. Naishtat has quietly and steadily become one of the most effective legislators in the state.” He was the Health and Human Services’s David to the conservative political culture’s Goliath.

But this session, David’s slingshot wasn’t enough. Republicans had cleaned up in the elections, propelled into House seats by an anti-taxing, anti-government-spending Tea Party momentum that left even moderate conservatives little breathing room. The state was $27 billion short of current operating costs and lawmakers were looking to cut. The House’s proposed budget gutted $11.4 billion of Health and Human Service funding — stripping programs that Naishtat had spent two decades fighting for. Naishtat was demoted to vice chair of Public Health.

This session he only filed 35 bills. He was given a 1 out of 10 on a power index put together by the Dallas Morning News. Republicans who had served one-quarter the time Naishtat had scored 9s and 10s. Even David couldn’t fight the Tea Party Goliath.

Just a month into the session, Naishtat was searching for ways to minimize the damage. He didn’t want the session to play out like the Daily Show debacle. After 11 sessions, he wasn’t going to let the tea party tide wash him away. It would require stepping out of his comfort zone to raise money for the services dear to his heart — but he was determined not to let the legislation he spent 20 years passing be left on the cutting room floor.

***

Three weeks into the session, Elliott Naishtat filed a bill he swore would get major attention. The E-Fairness bill was a reaction to controversy stirred up by the online retailer Amazon, Inc., after it announced it would close its Texas distribution center instead of paying $269 million in sales taxes the state comptroller decided to collect. Amazon’s announcement drew in the attention of Gov. Rick Perry, who was in Washington, D.C., at the time for the Conservative Political Action Conference and gave his two cents to the Washington Examiner.

“The comptroller made that decision independently. I would tell you from my perspective that’s not the decision I would have made,” Perry told the Examiner. As usual, Naishtat disagreed with the governor. So he filed the bill, which was modeled after New York law and would close legal loopholes that allowed online retailers to get away with not collecting and paying state sales taxes — money he figured could cushion the budget blow to state health and human services.

In a session when at least half of the state’s representatives had campaigned on not raising taxes, Naishtat was toying with a sacred cow — but that was more realistic than convincing the legislature to okay any more spending on social services. After all, he wasn’t trying to raise taxes, but extend them. Since the Amazon story involved the national press, Naishtat was soon getting calls from papers like the Wall Street Journal. He was most proud of the editorial the Dallas Morning News ran supporting the bill.

Naishtat saw the bill as one of the biggest of the session. It was not the sort of legislation he was used to filing. For someone who spent their career in social work, learning the inner workings of the state’s sales tax required a steep learning curve. He became obsessed with it. It wasn’t entirely out of line for an Austin politician to listen to the interests of small businesses. The city’s motto is “Keep Austin Weird,” and some of its strongest businesses, like Bookpeople and Waterloo Records, are locally owned and compete directly with online retailers like Amazon.

A week after filing the bill, some of Naishtat’s other constituents paid a visit to his office. Three members of the University of Texas at Austin’s student government met with him to talk about the issues affecting them — from massive higher education funding cuts to a bill that would allow concealed handguns on college campuses. What Naishtat wanted to talk about was his Amazon bill.

“I’m sure you’ve been following what’s going on with the comptroller over Amazon and sales taxes,” he said as the students settled in. They all looked at each other shaking their heads.

“No?” he asked.

“No.”

One of the students explained that they were at the Capitol to ask lawmakers not to cut higher education, to support domestic partner benefits and to stress their opposition to guns on campus — all very unpopular positions, but if any representative at the Capitol was going to support them, it was Naishtat. He listened for 15 minutes, nodding his head and occasionally offering a “sure,” but little else. Naishtat, was used to fighting losing battles. The Republican supermajority meant higher-ed funding cuts were unavoidable. Financial aid would be affected no matter how the budget was divided. Naishtat humored the students, but he had a different battle on his mind.

“The other thing I asked, if you’ve been following this huge fight between the governor and comptroller over Amazon.com not paying sales tax,” he said. He explained the issue, paying special attention to the amount of ink it was receiving in the national press.

“You guys need to weigh in,” he said.

“Right,” one of the students said, settling back into the couch. The E-Fairness bill would likely have little effect on college students. But Naishtat stressed that the money it could bring in could soften the blow to higher-ed.

“Amazon can pay for our financial aid,” the student said, struggling to trace the connection between the tax bill and higher education that Naishtat was attempting to draw. “We’re down for that.”

***

One afternoon, Dorothy Browne, Elliott Naishtat’s chief of staff, brought Naishtat a letter from the Democratic Caucus to Rick Perry, trying to sway the governor’s hard stance against tapping into the Rainy Day Fund — a $9 billion fund made up of tax revenue from oil and gas production — to give the Legislature a little more budgetary breathing room.

“They want your electronic signature on this,” Browne said, holding the letter.

“All right,” Naishtat said.

“Do you want me to send it? Do you want to read it before you sign it?”

Naishtat took the letter and read over it carefully. Browne sat down next to him and waited patiently.

“Great recession…that’s a bit melodramatic,” Naishtat said under his breath, still reading.

“Do you want to make changes to it?”

“No. In the old days I would have rewritten the damn thing. Not anymore. I’m too old and fat.”

“Will you sign a pledge not to rewrite anything?”

“I haven’t rewritten anything,” Naishtat said, and then paused. “But I would never end a letter to anyone with a preposition.”

Naishtat okayed the letter, preposition and all.

Browne is one of three politically experienced women, including legislative director Nancy Walker and secretary Judy Dale, who have made up the core of Naishtat’sstaff for more than a decade — an unusually long time, considering some state legislators’ staffs change with each session. All three began working for Naishtat in 1999, but Browne and Dale both had long careers in the state government before then. Naishtat hired Browne at a Final Friday party celebrating the end of the 1999 session at legendary journalist Molly Ivins’s house.

For years, Browne had worked for the former Texas Governor Ann Richards, a hero of the state’s Democratic Party. But the Republicans took over in 1995, when George W. Bush became governor and named now-Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst head of the Land Office, the agency Browne was working for.She was fired just before heading to Ivins’s party. Ivins was good friends with Naishtat — he keeps a stuffed armadillo that used to belong to Ivins on a ledge above his desk. (“Molly Ivins’ armadillo is always keeping an eye on me.”)

“Elliott!” Ivins shouted to Naishtat. “Isn’t there something Dorothy can do in your office?”

“You know how to write a newsletter?” Naishtat asked.

“I’ve written a million of them,” Browne said. So he hired her on the spot to write the post-session newsletter. Soon enough she was head of his close-knit staff.

Judy Dale sits at Naishtat’s front desk. She is a generally welcoming figure to Naishtat’s visitors, but her bluntness also serves as the office’s first line of defense against less friendly visitors. A week before Dan Neal ended his campaign to unseat Texas State Rep. Donna Howard, one of Naishtat’s fellow Austin Democrats, Neal stopped by Naishtat’s office. It was months into the session and Republican contender and Howard were locked in what seemed to be an endless legal battle, with Neal claiming the count was off. Neal was making the rounds, the final push, asking for support from other Representatives.

“Maybe you’ve heard about the race in District 48,” Neal said to Dale as he walked into the office Dale stopped him before he could go any farther.

“Donna Howard is my Representative. I voted for her the first time and I’ll vote for her again if I have to.”
Neal didn’t return.

Dale worked in the Land Office for 16 years. Dewhurst fired heron his first day. These days, she runs Naishtat’s hectic schedule — still entirely on paper.

“He doesn’t even know how to text,” Dale said.

Ten years ago Naishtat’s staff bought him a Palm Pilot; it sat in the box, never opened. “We’ve never tried again,” Dale said.

Nancy Walker, Naishtat’s legislative director, entered his office through the social work internship program he helped to create at UT. After the internship, Naishtat offered her the job — which she refers to as the “ultimate setting to inform policy. Walker is a big contributor to Naishtat’s high batting average on passing legislation,most of which starts with her. She’s learned to work politicians on both sides of the aisle to promote his bills. She follows other legislators’ campaigns to learn what makes them tick — from the issues they stand on to details that might have trickled out in the media about their families. She looks for any little thing she can connect with them on.

“You learn things. That’s how I can be effective personally is to know something about them or their staff…that’s when I can pull them in and get their help.”

In 2003, the last time the Texas Legislature faced massive budget shortfalls, Walker learned to use the news media. She discovered it was the most efficient way of getting her message to the public, who would then put pressure on other representatives. But this session was the most difficult she had faced. Naishtat filed fewer bills than ever before, because Walker limited her recommendations to him. She knew the reality of the session.

And because of that, she says she sometimes thinks she might have been in it too long. But for now, she, like Naishtat, would continue to fight.

***

A couple weeks after Elliott Naishtat filed his tax bill, Grover Norquist, a national hero for the anti-tax movement, sent an email to state legislators telling them to stay away from it — especially since most of them had signed a pledge to reject any tax hikes. Dorothy Browne saw the letter first. She printed it out and showed it to Naishtat, who took a look and lit up.

“Excellent, excellent!” he said.

To Naishtat, Norquist has always been the enemy. In the social policy course that Naishtat taught for 14 years at St. Edward’s University, the section on Norquist was always his favorite. Norquist was one of the first to aggressively criticize programs Naishtat believed so strongly in — including Lyndon Baines Johnson’s War on Poverty, which had sent Naishtat to Eagle Pass as a Vista volunteer.

“Grover Norquist was always on my mind,” Naishtat said. “He was one of the first to say we should be shrinking government, drowning it in a bathtub. I was so pleased he weighed in on my bill.”

Around that time, Governor Perry met with Norquist in Dallas for what Naishtat termed a “come to Jesus” meeting. While most of the news reports about the meeting focused on Norquist’s reiteration to Perry that the state should not tap into its Rainy Day Fund to lessen the budget’s deep cuts, Naishtat was sure they must have discussed his bill.

A few days after the meeting, State Rep. John Otto, the Republican vice-chair for the Ways and Means Committee that would consider Naishtat’s bill, approached Naishtat with an offer. Otto told Naishtat he was putting together a less aggressive version of the Amazon bill and he wanted Naishtat to sign on as a joint author. Then in his next breath, Otto added, “My other joint author is Harvey Hilderbran,” the committee’s Republican chairman.

Okay, you’re not a rocket scientist, but I think we know which bill is going to come out of the Ways and Means Committee, Naishtat thought to himself. He knew his bill had been hijacked, but he signed on anyway. Otto’s version was watered down. The difference in the bills rested on their definitions of what constituted a taxable nexus. Naishtat’s bill included any company that brings in at least $10,000 a year in Texas or enters an agreement with a Texas resident “for directly or indirectly referring potential customers to the retailer.” Otto’s would require the business have a distribution center or other physical presence in the state.

The Legislative Budget Board, the organization that estimated the fiscal impact of proposed legislation, said Otto’s bill would bring in less than $20 million a year. That was quite a bit less than the more than the $200 million the comptroller’s office said taxing Amazon would make. Naishtat was convinced that Otto’s bill wouldn’t capture the massive e-retailer. But he knew it would be a more viable vehicle, a more realistic way to generate money to potentially minimize the damage to social services.

Within a few weeks, Naishtat’s and Otto’s bills both hit committee. Naishtat, who knew his bill was doomed, went first. A handful of local Austin retailers followed him, praising the legislation. Then a slew of e-retailer and Amazon affiliates testified for hours against the bill. The committee passed Otto’s bill, while Naishtat’s was left to die.

“There was so much potential to generate substantial money for Texas and it’s not going to happen,” Naishtat said, looking back on the outcome.

But politics is a game and Naishtat was willing to play. On the other hand, my bill might not have passed.

***

Elliott Naishtat takes copious notes, documenting everything that happens to him in the Legislature. The Daily Show debacle, John Otto’s hijacking of his tax bill, the meeting with the UT students. They’re all little scenes for the book he plans to write.

“I don’t know what to leave out, so I just write everything down,” he says. The working title: Get a Rope: The Adventures of a New Yorker in the Texas House of Representatives. He hasn’t started writing it yet.

Years ago he novelized his time as a Vista volunteer. He said the book was his version of Catch 22. He showed it to some editors, publishers and others writers he knew. Their reviews were all negative. We can see how you were struggling to be a writer, they said. You tried to capture the essence of how boring your Vista training was. Well you captured it all too well. Molly Ivins got him going again. “Elliott, forget about your Vista novel,” she told him. “Write a non-fiction book about being a New Yorker in the Texas lege.”

So Naishtat started taking notes.

But the legislative session, which on occasion has lawmakers working around the clock, leaves Naishtat little time to write. On one of the session’s marathon days, Naishtat was at the Capitol for an 8 a.m. Public Health Committee hearing, which broke for a House session that lasted hours, then Public Health reconvened and heard testimony until 5 a.m. Four hours later, Naishtat was back at work.

“That’s hard. I’m older now. It took a couple of days to get over that,” he said.

Naishtat’s family and friends have begged him to make this session his last — just like they begged the session before and the one before that. Naishtat is 66 and he says he hopes he doesn’t end up 90, saying, “I’ve got to write that damn book.”

He needs blocks of time to sit down and write. But for now, he says, he loves his job in the legislature, even though this session has definitely been one of the hardest, and certainly the most frustrating. Still that’s all material for his book.

“It’s like these things seem to have happened this session that are great stories with not the best endings,” he says.

***

On the first Friday in April, the Texas House of Representatives began its battle over the proposed bare-bones budget that cut billions of dollars from health and human services and public education. The fight was at the center of the entire session. The bill had hundreds of proposed amendments — little attempts to shift or salvage funding by nearly every member of the House.

Elliott Naishtat was one of the first to bring his amendment to the House floor. It would have used unexpended funds from the attorney general’s office, the governor’s office, the comptroller’s office, the state Board of Preservation and the legislature to cushion the blow to the Department of Aging and Disability Services — which was facing a 30 percent cut to funding over the next two years. Nursing homes from across the state pleaded with their representatives, saying if this budget passed they would have no choice but to close their doors.

“Our seniors cannot live in fear of losing their homes — taking care of the frail and elderly must be a priority for the state of Texas,” Naishtat told the House, as he moved for them to adopt the amendment.

John Otto, the Republican who just weeks before had sought Naishtat’s signature on his own revamped Amazon tax bill, was the first and only representative to speak against the amendment. Even though a few Republicans, including Burt Solomons, a powerful veteran legislator, supported the amendment, it was shot down by a vote of 91 to 54.

Two days later, the budget passed the House with funding for Naishtat’s social services severely hacked. Naishtat decided sometime midway through the session what his mantra would be: maintain a sense of humor and minimize the damage. He repeated it to himself over and over.

“I think I’ve been more successful at maintaining my sense of humor than minimizing the damage,” he said at the end of April, as the session was entering its final month.

But there was the sales tax legislation.While Naishtat’s bill was left on the committee room floor, Otto’s passed the House with ease. And Naishtat was convinced Otto would not have written his version of the bill if Naishtat’s hadn’t generated so much attention. Even if the bill was watered down, it still raised money for the state — millions of dollars, maybe enough to keep a few nursing homes open.

“It’s called incremental change,” Elliott Naishtat said. “And I wholeheartedly believe in it.

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THE LAST DEADLINE

In the capitol of capital punishment, an execution is just another news story

by Jessica Hamilton

Tori Brock has spent the afternoon making calls, trying to find answers to a story that’s supposed to run in tomorrow’s Huntsville Item about the city’s Census information. Tori is not a fan of numbers and the story is proving more complicated than she had anticipated. Her glance switches from her Word document, to the Census website, then quickly back to the digital clock in the corner of her laptop screen. She has 20 minutes to make it to her last story assignment for the night: the Wallis Unit at Huntsville Prison where the fifth execution in Texas this year is scheduled to take place at 6 pm.

The condemned man’s family didn’t think to bring Kleenex. They use their hands and forearms to wipe away tears as the heavy metal door closes behind them and locks with a noise that fills the compact room. Tori settles herself against the back wall of the crowded room, lifting her 5’ 5” frame on her tiptoes to see around Columbus Adams. She contorts her neck to see over his shoulder but despite her efforts, she has to keep shifting her weight to see. She would never think to ask him to move so she could have a better view. She wants to be respectful. After all, Columbus was about to watch his son Timothy die.

Timothy was there because in 2002, after threatening his wife with a gun, he wound up in a standoff with police. He shot his 19-month-old son twice in the chest at close range and said he had planned to kill himself as well. He pleaded guilty and begged for mercy, but the jury condemned him to death.

Columbus’s wife Wilma huddles next to the glass at the front of the room, her heavily lined hand gripping her daughter’s forearm for support. With her hair in a bun, she looks as if she were headed to Sunday church service. At first, she keeps her gaze forward, but then allows her eyes to take in the whole chamber.

On the other side of the window is her son, wrapped in a tight white sheet, strapped to a gurney. His dark brown skin is a sharp contrast to the fresh beige Ace bandages holding tubes inserted into the veins of his hands. A chaplain stands off to the right next to Timothy Adams’s feet.

A small microphone hovers over Timothy’s head and the sounds from the execution chamber are piped into the undersized witness room. The administrator asks in a flat monotone if Timothy has any final words, as if asking if he’d seen the Rockets game the night before.

From his position in the center of the gallery, Timothy can see two windows on either side of him. Behind one window is what’s called the “victim’s viewing gallery.” The baby’s mother is in that room with a few of her relatives and friends. The faces behind the opposite window are more empathetic. Those are Timothy’s family and friends.

Timothy turns his head slightly to the right, locking eyes with his mother. He mouths something to the window.

“We love you,” Wilma whispers.

The first quote of the night. Tori’s purple pen scribbles furiously across the lines of her reporter’s notebook. Cell phones and recorders aren’t allowed in the viewing gallery, so in order to record the last minutes of Timothy’s life she has to rely on diligent note taking.

Mom and sister quiet sobs. Declined final statement. Looked at mom. We love you.

About 12 people stand in the crammed viewing gallery. A chemical smell pushes at the walls of the room. The plant chemical scent in the Home Depot garden center always causes Tori’s stomach to sink because it is almost identical to the gallery odor.

At 6:21 p.m., drugs enter the I.V. and begin spreading through Timothy’s veins.

Wilma’s sobs, and those of her daughter Stacey’s are growing in power and emotion. The family’s spiritual advisor reaches in his jacket pocket and hands up a white handkerchief to the two women. Stacey takes it and wipes her face.

“You’re going to a better place,” Wilma says. “No more worries. God’s got you now.”

Timothy’s mouth opens and his chest jumps quickly as breathing becomes strenuous. His organs are shutting down. Stacey’s knees bend and she sinks toward the floor. Her father holds her up as officials bring in wheelchairs for her and Wilma. The wheelchairs barely fit side-by-side in the tiny room.

But Wilma doesn’t sit. Through her gasps and cries, she recites the phrase “Lord, I thank you” over and over in a steady cadence.

Timothy’s brother, Chadrick, addresses his family in an authoritative voice.

“If we let it beat us down, then they already won,” he says. “We coming to heaven. Just going to take a little while, but we'll be there.”

A few seconds later, a voice comes on the intercom.

“6:31 p.m.”

Timothy Adams is dead. The family continues to watch his lifeless body, as if expecting him to wake.

Three raps on the metal door signal that the witnesses from the other viewing gallery have cleared the hallway. The Adamses look at the carpet of the room as their feet shuffle out the door, silently wiping tears and passing Tori.

Tori is busy jotting notes and doesn’t watch the family leave. As she steps into the hallway, the prison’s public information officer hands her an official timeline detailing when the drugs were administered and when Timothy was pronounced dead. Tori nods at the PR woman and takes the sheet without glancing at it.

***

No state has executed more people than Texas over the past 30 years and every one of those 466 executions has taken place in a small chamber at the Huntsville maximum-security prison. Which makes all of them local news for the Huntsville Item, a small-town daily with a 5,500 circulation.

From Day One in 1982 when the state adopted lethal injection as a form of capital punishment, a reporter for the Item has taken the long walk to the witness gallery to attend every execution. In the past, they’ve alternated this duty or drawn straws, but these days, one young reporter has become the go-to person for the last 30 legal killings.

Tori Brock walks through the glass double doors of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice building and sees Timothy Adams’s parents and siblings loading into a car parked at the curb. Tori wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t been for the sniffling and muffled cries coming from Adams’s mother.

She quickly redirects her gaze to the sidewalk, as if focusing on each click and clack her black shoes make against the cement.

“I always feel blessed when I leave this place,” Tori says after double-checking she is out of earshot from the Adams family. “The minute I feel that breeze on my face I just thank God and I say a little prayer. I say a prayer for everyone – me and my family, the prisoner’s family, the victim’s family – everyone.”

The ride back to the newsroom in her red Ford Explorer is quiet except for the shifting of a white plastic Wal-Mart bag she uses as a trash bag hanging from her shift handle. A few Crayons slide off the car seat in the back and roll up to the floorboard under her feet. She kicks them to the side as she opens the door. Tori Brock has a story to write and dinner waiting at home.

Tori and her husband Joe have been married for nine years and she’s been married to her profession for just as long. Joe understands the demands and long hours of her job – he makes dinner and puts to bed their two children, Shelby and Jackson, whenever she’s on deadline. Tonight, he’s made spaghetti.

Scooping her short blonde hair behind her ears, Tori gets to work recapturing the execution scene. But after a few keystrokes on her laptop, she stops. “What was his name?” she mumbles to herself. Sifting through the papers in her media kit, she finds a sheet with his name. Oh, right. Timothy Adams.

By the time she pulls into the driveway of her yellow paneled home, the kids are already asleep. It’s only 8, but they have school in the morning. She sits at the round kitchen table with Joe, and as they swirl strings of spaghetti onto their forks they exchange their days. Joe tells her about a customer he had in the store today. Tori tells him about the 30-something assignments she had to unload on the paper’s only photographer and how she felt bad that the work would take up much of his weekend.

A lamp by Tori’s bedside illuminates the bedroom while Joe gets ready for bed. With no immediate intention of sleeping, Tori slips under the green comforter and pulls a journal from the top drawer of her nightstand. She turns to a fresh page and writes about her experience in the execution gallery. She records how sad she felt for everyone involved. It’s a short entry but it serves its purpose.

“It helps to get everything out on paper,” Tori says. “I’ve been keeping a journal for years but it’s after stories like these that I realize what a release it is.”

A few pages toward the front of the worn journal is an entry that takes up a lot more space. It’s dated November 20, 2003. That was the first day Tori saw a person die.

***

After graduating from Sam Houston State University, located two blocks away from the execution chamber, Tori went to work for a newspaper outside of town. But when Joe took a job at a marketing shop back in Huntsville, she signed on as the city reporter at the Item.

It wasn’t a particularly great job offer. The county daily paper has two local bylines and just as many computers in the newsroom– one for reporters and one for copydesk. There are holes in the ceiling from water damage and an osculating fan hums in the corner.

The night before her first execution, Joe was reluctant to let Tori go through with the assignment. Every so often, he would ask if she was sure this was something she wanted to do.

“That’s not something you see every day, you know?” Joe said. “You can’t sit through something like that and not have it affect you in some way.”

But Tori wasn’t going to turn down the story. Journalists hope for assignments like this – a story so interesting they can tell their friends and colleagues they were there to witness it.

“I’m not going to lie, I was a little excited at first, but the night before the execution it really started sinking in,” she said. “I had a hard time sleeping that night and especially the night after. I just kept thinking about the look in his eyes.”

When she first took the job, she thought the execution stories she read came from a public relations person with the prison. She didn’t know it was the Item reporters who got the story out to the public. Her own beat was very different. On her own personal laptop, she would type out a weekly profile of someone in the community along with daily news stories mostly about city council. Back then, the paper’s news editor covered the executions.

Then, two weeks after she started work, her editor asked her to fill in on an execution assignment.

Now her desk is situated in the middle of the newsroom facing Matthew Jackson, the Item’s only other news reporter. After the editor took a position with the city, Tori and Matthew were left to cover Montgomery County. Matthew files stories on Sam Houston State University attendance rates and resident profiles while Tori takes on the executions. Matthew decided a long time ago it wasn’t something he wanted to do.

He said he didn’t want to be like Mike.

***

It takes about seven minutes for a death row inmate to die by lethal injection.

If you sit down and do the math, that means Mike Graczyk has spent nearly three days of his life watching inmates be executed at the Wallis Unit.

As a reporter for the Houston branch of the Associated Press, Mike has made the hour-long trip to Huntsville over 340 times to witness and report on the state’s executions.

“I know other people look at my job as a horrible thing, but executions are just one of the many, many stories I do,” Mike says. “I’m a reporter. I just report what happens around me.”

Mike is a tall, mild-mannered man with salt and pepper hair. He has witnessed more inmates put to death than any other reporter, prison employee or chaplain in the state. Since Texas leads the nation in executions, that means he’s seen more executions than anyone in the nation. When he started at the AP, Mike would keep count of his executions assignments, holding a mental tally in his head. Then one day he quit doing it. He didn’t lose count. He just didn’t want to know. But that didn’t stop some people from tracking how many times Mike’s name came up on the media witness list.

Mike has become such a regular part of the death penalty process that other journalists interview him[c5] . Mostly they’re respectful, if slightly awed by his track record for longevity in the death beat. But then there was the time a couple of French reporters decided they could best seize the moral high ground by treating Mike as an accomplice to official murder.

“They thought he was a monster. They told him that,” recalled Lisa Trow, the Item’s managing editor. “They asked how he could live with himself and said he was just doing these stories to keep adding them to his resume. They thought Mike saw it as something he ‘got’ to do.”

At first, he did.

Mike entered the chamber for the first time on March 13, 1984. James Autry was strapped to the gurney for killing a female store clerk over a six-pack of beer. He shot her between the eyes and killed a customer as well.

Mike says he will always remember that first one. It’s the other 339 that can get a bit cloudy.

Of course, there’s Robert Black. Mike saw him put to death in 1992. Black was convicted of killing his wife to collect the insurance money. What makes him so memorable? It was the first time Mike walked into the witness chamber and an inmate called him by name and asked how he was doing.

He remembers the reporters’ reactions after Karla Faye Tucker’s death – some were crying while others prepped their hair and makeup to go on-air. And who could forget Ponchai Wilkerson, the guy who coughed up a handcuff key as he was dying from the injection?

But for Mike, it’s the final statements that stick with you. The prayers, poems, or pleas are the moment when the condemned make an impression, like a middle-schooler who cleans his room before asking for a sleepover. Sometimes they choose to cuss at the chaplain, the family members, the system. And sometimes they opt out of the ritual altogether.

Jonathan Nobles pops into Mike’s head at least once a year. Mike heard him sing “Silent Night” as his last statement.

"Now, whenever I go to church on Christmas Eve or Christmas, I remember Jonathan Nobles’s voice," he said. "It just kind of resides up there and comes back to haunt me sometimes.”

As chilling as it is for him sometimes, the job hasn’t landed Mike on a therapist’s couch yet. Despite his boss’s best efforts to send Mike to counseling, he doesn’t see a need to go. He once told CNN in an interview, "To see someone go to sleep, not to sound insensitive, but the carnage at the murder scene is harder than what you see in the death house in Huntsville."

It used to be that each county in Texas would handle the executions itself. Then the legislature decided the state should be in charge of capital punishment and moved the executions in 1923 to Huntsville where inmates would take a turn in Ol’ Sparky. That was the nickname for the state’s electric chair, which dispatched 361 inmates during its run. It’s now on display in the Texas Prison Museum.

At the time, death penalties were handed out freely. But in 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court raised questions about the fairness of the system that led to a nationwide moratorium on executions. The justices later ruled that the way the death penalty law was imposed at the state level was “arbitrary and capricious” and therefore unconstitutional. Texas’s governor at the time changed the sentences of all 52 death row inmates to life and cleared out death row in 1973. It didn’t take long for the state to fill it back up.

The following year, Texas standardized the process and juries began handing down death sentences again. It wasn’t until 1982 that the state changed to lethal injection. Executions were infrequent at first---often just one or two per year. For the first 10 years, there were 43 altogether. That was when reporting an execution story was quite the assignment.

“Reporters used to fight for those stories,” Lisa Trow recalled. “They wanted in that gallery. It was something new and different for them. Those were the good ol’ reporting days when these things were still a big deal.”

Then things changed. The executions came more frequently and became more routine. The Item’s readers seemed to tire of reading about them, especially when the condemned prisoners were from distant parts of Texas. The editors responded for a time by exiling execution stories to an inside page. But when Lisa Trow took over, she restored the stories to the front page. The Item resumed its death watch.

“I put them on the front because I think they’re important,” Lisa said. “It’s a part of the town and people should know what’s happening down the street from them.”

***

Another Tuesday rolls around and Tori Brock is standing with her back against the witness gallery wall. She’s standing behind a different family and looking through the glass at a different man. The story for this execution is already half written, minus a few quotes and reactions from the night. Tori flips to a clean page in her notebook and gets ready to write down what she needs to plug into the story back at the office.

Three hundred and seventy-two words later, the story is at the copy desk and Tori is finally sitting down to dinner with Joe. She reaches into the take-out bags and sets the burgers on the table. The kids are already in bed, and the crinkling of wrappers is loud throughout the quiet house.

This was the first execution in Texas using a new cocktail of lethal drugs. Joe asks Tori how it went. “It was just like all the others,” she says. “I still got out of there in time.”

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THE FOOD WRITER

Pat Sharpe learns to cope with the new age of social media and a young rival

By Layne Lynch

When I was 14, I announced to my family that I intended to become a food writer. For years, my mother had stood over me at the stove and schooled me in the art of “southern cooking,” hoping I would one day carry on the family tradition into my own kitchen.

Yes, I had always loved cuisine, but my grandma, a school teacher, also encouraged me to embrace my knack for writing. She, too, hoped I would inherit her love and respect for cuisine, and also her beautiful writing voice; so upon hearing my announcement, she gave me a book to inspire me: Best Food Writing 2002.

Sitting in my bedroom and flipping through the anthology’s pages of some the greatest food writers in the United States, I remember, one article in particular stood out to me.

“War Fare,” a humorous chronicling of a 48-hour diet of meals-ready-to-eat, was both catchy and packed full of beautiful dialogue and diction. The author of the piece was Pat Sharpe, and although I had never heard of her before, I planned to go forth and try to mimic her craft.

Nine years later, to my surprise, I would get the chance, after being chosen as an intern at Texas Monthly magazine where Pat Sharpe has worked for over 30 years. I knew there was much I could learn from her, but the one thing I didn’t expect was that after three decades worth of writing about food, she herself was still watching and learning.

***

Stepping off the elevator to the eighth floor of the Texas Monthly office on my first day, I journeyed through the heavy glass doors, past the small, manila wood receptionist desk, through the long, empty conference room, and into the communal kitchen, where a white wall with a collage of company photos caught my eye.

I studied the time-capsules of years past: the hair styles ranged from the big and frizzy to the short and straight, and the clothes evolved from bulky, neon shoulder pads to flared, dark denim jeans.

Most of the people in the photos were unfamiliar to me; for many, their time at Texas Monthly had come and gone. But mixed with all these anonymous faces, there were the few who had been in the magazine since its beginning.

There was Paul Burka, the political writer, with a wide stance and disarming smile. For 25 years, he has been the leading authority and critic of the Texas Legislature. And in the back corner, a bit shy and stoic, there was Mimi Swartz, a longstanding editor and writer. Then I spotted the one person I was looking for: Pat Sharpe.

She was always front and center, wearing a button-up shirt, long pants and a wide, notorious grin. Her short, dirty blond hair picked up shades over gray over the years. She was also surprisingly thin for someone who had spent 30 years eating for a living.

After my internship at the Austin American-Statesman, I had come to Texas Monthly to work for Pat, hoping to learn how to report and write just like her. But the first two weeks were endless rituals of photocopying, transcribing and running errands.

Then, finally, I got my chance: it was time to begin work on the “Cook like a Texan” issue.

“Cook Like a Texan” is Pat’s baby. From the spark of the its conception to the moment it is sent off to the printer, she puts this issue together. Pat begins by narrowing down a list of the top 10 classic dishes, interviews the chefs famous for creating them, envisions the photo shoots, writes the majority of the copy and hypes the issue even before it comes out.

The food issues at Texas Monthly are usually its biggest sellers, so the pressure never stops. But I never saw someone who could juggle so much and still maintain absolute poise and calm. But “Cook Like a Texan” isn’t just a one-woman show. Although Pat naturally commands the charge, she needs some helpers. Many people are enlisted to contribute to her blog “Eat My Words.” Others are assigned to update Texas Monthly’s food Twitter account. And Pat even had an assignment for me.

“I have an idea I want to run by you,” Pat said, when I stopped by her office one morning. “I want to find a group of unique Barbecue pits, like this one,” pointing to a black and white print-out of a gun-shaped barbecue pit. A middle-aged man with a bulky cowboy hat and hunched stance posed next to it.

“Just see whatever you can find on the blogs and the Internet and show me what you find,” she said.

“I’ll get right on it,” I replied, heading for the door.

But Pat stopped me before I could grip the handle.

“I have a question,” she said hesitantly. “Is it possible to tweet this kind of thing?”

I looked at her quizzically.

“I mean, I know you can tweet to give information, but can you tweet to get it?”

Tweeting is a social media that I understand quite well. In fact, it’s one of the unspoken requirements for surviving in the journalism field these days. It is a world within itself, full of interview subjects, breaking news and interesting newsworthy trends. In fact, it is an essential highway to most anything a journalist needs.

Was Pat Sharpe, my idol, asking me how to tweet?

***

Pat Sharpe’s office overlooking the Westside of Interstate 35 is a shrine dedicated to her food writing career. In the right corner, there’s a 2008 Saveur magazine entitled “The Texas Issue” on top of a high stack of magazines she has contributed to. There’s an old, pale watercolor hanging on her wall that looks like a Georgia O’Keefe replica. An old, worn Navajo blanket is draped haphazardly over the black office chair she hardly ever has time to sit in. On the shelves and in the drawers of her filing cabinets are a seemingly endless assortment of vintage, earmarked cookbooks, mostly pertaining to barbecue and Tex-Mex, her favorite cuisines.

She uses the cookbooks for research and inspiration. Her personal favorites--- Texas Home Cooking, Texas Cowboy Cooking, and A Cowboy in the Kitchen ---come in handy for “Cook like a Texan.” She wants to write about the classic Texas dishes of her childhood, Pat says. She misses the fried catfish her Grandma used to make, and the pan-fried steak her mom would serve weekly when she was a child.

Pat grew up in Austin and always planned on going to the University of Texas. She got a master’s in English and taught English and Spanish for a few years, but always knew she wanted to be a writer. After an even shorter spell at the Texas Historical Commission, she wound up editing the culture and restaurant listings at a new start-up magazine, Texas Monthly. Bill Broyles was her boss.

For Pat, food turned out to be the answer. She loved meeting restaurant owners and chefs, savored their work and their creations, and managed to capture their enthusiasms and their follies in print. With her passion, her connections, her spunky personality and her spirited prose, she quickly became Austin’s top food writer---someone who was, according to Kate Thornberry of the Austin Chronicle, “super-knowledgeable, sweet, charming and has a lot of clout.”

Every year, the Chronicle publishes a list of Austin’s top 10 food celebrities among the region’s farmers, restaurateurs, chefs and food writers. And since the list’s beginning, Pat’s name has always been at the top.

Tradition is important with Pat. It’s one of the things she emphasizes in her food writing and one of the values she lives by. For years she made a good living, and the Texas Monthly itself thrived, with the traditional magazine print model---lots of colorful expensive ads that paid for fat issues that catered to affluent, savvy readers.

But for many magazines, the digital revolution has shattered the old model, forcing them to experiment with websites, Facebook, Twitter feeds, mobile apps and a host of other innovative tools, bells and whistles. Texas Monthly’s paid circulation has fallen and its ad pages decline year to year. The old verities---and venerable icons like Pat Sharpe---have been thrust into a brave new world. It’s adapt or go home.

Like the magazine itself, Pat confesses, she’s been a little slow in embracing all of the innovations and gimmicks of the digital age. She started “Eat My Words” a few years ago, and she struggles to update it the way other other prominent food bloggers do. The best bloggers update several times a day. Pat, in a good week makes one new entry a day. During busy months and tight deadlines, it slips to perhaps three a week.

Recently, the magazine hired three online writers. They were enlisted to update blogs and the Twitter accounts of Texas Monthly and writers, like Pat, who aren’t quite keeping up with what’s happening in this new era of journalism.

Pat concedes she is not terribly fond of the Texas Monthly Twitter feed. She leaves most of Twitter updates for her account “TMFood,” to the Monthly’s online writers. And with “Cook Like a Texan” demanding so much of her attention and energy, Pat doesn’t have much time for tweeting or blogging. “A lot of [blogging and tweeting] is rooted in self-promotion,” she says. And that’s not how Pat likes to operate.

Perhaps as a result of this attitude, Pat’s ranking fell a bit in the Austin Chronicle’s annual listing. Pat says she didn’t get upset about the change. “Those things don’t really matter,” she says.

This year, according to the Chronicle’s Top 10 list, there’s a new queen of food writers, someone who Kate Thornberry calls “a leader in the Central Texas blogging community and one of the top food writers on Twitter.” It also happens to be someone who used to be Pat’s intern and whom Pat mentored and guided. Not a rival just yet, but more of a challenger. Someone that isn’t quite on par with Pat just yet, but someone that is quickly moving up the ladder.

***

I had already heard of Addie Broyles before I arrived as a food intern at the Austin American-Statesman. I knew she was young, innovative and adept at social media with a growing following and name recognition. But I had no idea what she was like in person.

Preparing for my first day of work, I ironed my pale blue, floral dress, pulled back my wavy, red hair, and stumbled in my high heels straight into the Statesman’s office. Stepping off the elevator, I automatically felt out of place--- the newsroom was full of faded blue jeans and Converse sneakers.

“Hey are you the girl replacing Addie?” Pat Beach, a features reporter, asked.

“Yeah, that’s the new Addie!” someone confirmed.

I was confused, but before I could respond someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey, Layne. It’s nice to finally meet you,” Addie Broyles said.

I recognized her Shirley Temple curls from her headshot. I instantly got why people liked her. She had a certain spunk and charm, and she was dressed in blue jeans tightly tucked into a pair of brown cowboy boots with a vintage lace tank-top, revealing a very pregnant belly.

Addie and I had been exchanging emails for nearly six months. I had sent her some of my early Daily Texanwriting clips, asking if she could give me some advice on how to get the food intern position. She spoke to her boss, put in a good word for me and congratulated me when I was chosen. I couldn’t wait to work with her, but judging from the size of her belly, I was guessing she wouldn’t be in the office much longer.

Addie’s cubicle was stacked high with newly released celebrity chef cookbooks, the oddest of kitchen gadgets and a seemingly endless assortment of thank you notes from those whom Addie had written about. Family pictures circled the outlines of her desk, and the only screens open on her computer were Twitter and her blog, “Relish Austin.” It was official. Addie was ready to train me.

I didn’t know all that was in my job description, but on my first day at work, Addie was determined to teach me how to handle her blog and her Twitter account.

“Okay, so I’ve already set-up a blog post that introduces you, and tells people you are going to be handling everything while I’m gone. You just have to finish it “

In five minutes, Addie had written the introduction to the blog post, and for the next 45 minutes I sat pondering what to write. After I finally finished, I clicked and the post went live.

She told her blog followers she was about to give birth to a baby boy, her second child, and wouldn’t return for eight weeks. It was a very intimate message, yet it also somehow managed to encompass food. “The little boy, whom we’ll probably call Avery (not in any way after the flora- and fauna-filled island in Louisiana where Tabasco hot sauce is made), is coming this week, which means that I officially start maternity leave today!” she wrote.

Then she introduced me: “Layne just got back from a summer internship with Food Network Magazine and is incredibly passionate about food. Now, I’ll turn things over to her and let her introduce herself and explain why she’s pursuing a career in food writing and what it means to Relish Austin…”

My contribution went on to rant about why I was passionate about food, masking an uncertainty that I was not quite ready to live up to what Addie was: a celebrity. One reader’s comment confirmed my worst fears. “You’ve got some shoes to fill,” it read.

I looked around the office, making sure no one was looking and deleted the comment.

***

“I never wanted to be a food writer,” Addie told me recently. “I never really had my eye on the ‘Pat Sharpe Prize’.”

“What about now?” I asked.

She dodged the question.

“I often wonder what will happen when she leaves. How will the food universe respond to something like that?”

I tried again.

“But, would you say are you now or may one day have your eye on the ‘Pat Sharpe Prize?’”

Addie laughed. “I don’t think you would believe me if I said no.”

Three years ago, blogging, tweeting, and Facebook were the farthest thing from Addie’s mind. She hated reading mindless updates of peers and friends informing her they had just brushed the plaque from their teeth and were now headed to a long work day. “I didn’t get why people cared about it,” she says. “It seemed like nonsense.”

Addie had come to Austin from the University of Missouri a semester before graduation for an internship at Texas Monthly, hoping to learn the workings of the editorial department.

Food hadn’t really been that big of a thing in Addie’s life. Yes, she had dabbled in cooking, but microwaving chicken and making instant rice as a child were the extent of her experimentation, aside from a short vegetarian stint in college.

Then, Addie met Pat, the woman whose life revolved around food.

“Nothing seemed daunting to her,” Addie recalled. “She had this air about her: So calm, so collected about these seemingly impossible features she had to write. I guess she has been doing it so long, it seems natural to her.”

Pat enlisted Addie for research projects, but, even then, Addie still didn’t feel the pull toward food writing. “It was great to work to Pat, and she was a great mentor, but I didn’t really get to know her,” she recalls. “I’m not even sure I still know her.”

“I thought of food writing as a world full of snobby restaurant critics,” she admits.

After returning home and graduating college, Addie came back to Austin six months later, with the intention of working at a magazine, but she couldn’t get a job.

In fact, the only opening was a copy-editing position at the Austin American-Statesman. She took it because she needed the money and nothing else was coming up.

Three months into her job, however, a rumor began circulating that Kitty Crider, the longtime food writer, was retiring, and her job was up for grabs. “I knew I wasn’t qualified,” Addie said. “But I figured, ‘what the heck?’ ”

She stretched and played up her minimal food writing experience to the max. Three interviews later, Addie got the job. “I’m one of those people that wants to become a professional at everything, so I just did my best to embrace what was happening. I learned everything as I went.”

It was a crazy time for Addie. Within three weeks, she was married, working at a new job and featured on the hit television show “What Not To Wear.”

Suddenly, right before her eyes, Addie had become a celebrity.

Months later, on a reporting assignment Addie learned about her potential in social media.

“I was driving a food writer back to Houston and I basically just sat down and picked his brain,” she recalled. “He wrote this amazing wine blog, and I wanted to know how he did it. He just kept stressing to me that in order to survive as a journalist, you had to brand yourself. He said ‘it’s not about the news organizations; it’s about protecting yourself as a writer’.

“And I finally got it. I went back to the office that day and started a Twitter and a blog.”

“So, is this what this is about?” I asked. “Branding yourself?”

“Of course it is. Wherever I go, I want to be able to take my audience with me.”

I was surprised by her candor.

“Where do you want to go?”

Addie paused, carefully forming her answer carefully. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

***

As my time nears an end at Texas Monthly, I want to talk to Pat about what I have observed and learned from watching her.

In the days of disappearing from the office, her blog is rarely updated, and she has opted out of creating a personal Twitter account. Last I checked, she hasn’t logged onto her Facebook page in over two weeks.

She seems to have surrendered to the inevitable, allowing others to pick up the slack. In a way, I am envious of her. She is able to check out of something that I’m forced to deal with in my own career. I don’t have 30 years of seniority under my belt. I don’t have the choice to just be a writer; I have to adapt.

I want Pat to reveal her frustrations and, perhaps, her fears of the social media evolution taking place in culinary journalism right before her eyes, perhaps, as a means to ease my own anxieties.

Then, one day, I get my wish.

“You know,” she says, “I have to admit it; those great days of journalism are gone,”

“What do you mean?”

“Years ago, writers just had columns, and now every writer has a Facebook and Twitter along with it. It’s driving me nuts.”

“Well, what were the great days like?”

“Oh, I could tell you about the great days.”

Pat loves to reminisce about how lucky she was to have Bill Broyles as her boss. Broyles---who is no relation to Addie--- saw potential in her that no one else did. “No publication really had culinary writing, except the [New York] Times,” she said. “I wanted to do what they were doing, and Bill believed that I could do that.”

For years, Bill observed Pat sifting through cookbooks like Le Rouge Gastronomic and Waverly Root, reading culinary memoirs, and recreating the “Craig Claiborne” style---the first of today’s autobiographical style of food writing---all in effort to perfect this modern art called culinary journalism.

Then Bill gave Pat the gift of a lifetime when he granted her a trip to France to study basic French cooking. It was all paid for by Texas Monthly. “You wouldn’t see something like that happening these days,” she assures me, in case I ever plan on receiving such a blessing in my own career.

France was the beginning, Pat tells me. It was a short trip, but something that changed her career forever. For the first time, Pat understood what food writing was all about. “It’s about celebrating something that connects us all,” she says. She didn’t need social media to do that. All she needed was passion.

“Food is a means of survival, and I don’t know why it wasn’t written about that way before. Once I got back, everything had changed. I was the best writer I would ever be.”

But, things have changed again. Food writing isn’t the same art anymore. Writers don’t have to go to France to write about cuisine. Anyone and everyone has a say in the matter because of the advancements of technology and human creativity.

Pat isn’t just expected to keep up with the daily newspaper and press releases she receives by the hundreds every day; now she has to keep up with hundreds upon hundreds of people who permeate the web with their views on Texas cuisine.

“Everyone wants the last word,” Pat says. “With Facebook and Twitter, the information is too numerous, too fragmented.”

Then the most surprising line of all: “I’ve stopped caring,” she tells me.

“You don’t care?”

“I want to maintain my sanity, and I can’t do that if I try to keep up with what’s going on.”

Then, carefully, I bring up the one person who would disagree with Pat most on this matter.

“Well, then what about people like Addie? Do you think they are wasting their time with blogging and tweeting?”

Seconds pass. Pat has to think this one out.

“Well, she is so conversant with social media,” she finally replies.“She has found developed her own voice in all of this. This is a new era, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do with it.”

I find myself wanting to comfort Pat. I think back to myself at 14 and realize this is never how I pictured this experience. In the book my grandma gave me as a child, Pat ruled the pages. She wasn’t subjected to the changes in the journalism and the casualties it leaves behind. To me, she was one of the classics.

Then Pat, as if to read my mind, says, “You seem to have a grasp on what’s happening to this field, and your enthusiasm will keep make you one of the ones that sticks around. One day, you’ll be a step ahead of people like me and Addie. In fact, you’ll probably give us a run for our money.”

The same woman whom three months ago I had come here to learn from and admire was now comforting me. A woman whom I couldn’t and wouldn’t look in the eyes as I passed in the halls. And at the end of the process, I’m still not sure what to think or who to admire anymore.

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DIVIDED PRAYERS

A Korean immigrant church agonizes over a generation gap

By Ann Choi

It’s Sunday morning, just before 11, and the sanctuary at Austin Korean Presbyterian Church is half-filled with around 80. Thomas Park, pastor for the church’s English ministry, is nearing the end of his sermon.

Four services take place at the sanctuary on Sundays – three of them are in Korean, but this one, the fourth, is in English. It is held to serve second-generation Korean Americans, a minority group within the church

Outside the double doors, the older Korean-speaking congregants are getting restless. Their service does not start for another 15 minutes, but they are eager to go inside. Thomas continues his sermon. One of the deacons from the Korean ministry steps inside. He taps his watch. It’s time to end. As Thomas concludes the service with a prayer, the doors swing open and the adults come in to take their seats.

There is no exchange of greetings, only silence, between Korean ministry members and English ministry members.

Austin Korean Presbyterian is the largest Korean immigrant church in the metropolitan area. It has around 1,000 members, both first-generation immigrants, for whom the church serves as a home away from their homeland; and second generation Korean Americans, for whom it is a safe haven for their conflicting sense of identity. Whether they are fluent in English or not, Koreans are an immigrant group in this country. They know all too well that it takes more than fluency in English to be treated as an American.

The church has seen many changes during its 40-year history. Now another is about to take place. Thomas Park is leaving our ministry. For members of the English ministry, his departure means more than a change of a pastor. Thomas was our spiritual leader and our friend. No matter our background or our theological beliefs, he offered understanding and hope. The ministry has been growing in number and in the depth of its relationships. But now he and his family of six are departing without explanation and without a plan for their future.

We wonder if we have done something wrong. I wonder what has happened to my friend, pastor and mentor. And I wonder if our church has failed him somehow---and ourselves.

“I feel like Abraham”

He looks out of place as he walks into a dining area inside student union with his 5’10” posture, his leather one-shoulder computer purse, sky blue polo shirt and khaki slacks. His goatee does not reveal that he is a pastor for a Korean immigrant church --- which is just how he wants it.

“How are you doing, Ann?”

Thomas and I start talking about my school, my future plans, the college ministry and the church we are both part of. An hour flies by. I almost forget that this could be one of the last times I will get to spend time with him. I started coming to this church four years ago when I first moved to Austin for college. I had left my home in South Korea and arrived here determined to make a home of my own. Welcomed by the warmth that Thomas and his family provided, I have become committed to this church. Aside from school, the church takes up most of my energy and time. It has become my home; and the members---especially, Pastor Thomas and his family---are my family.

Thomas and his family---his wife Carol, and Ellie, 8, Isaiah, 6, Joanna, 4, and Jeremiah, 1---are leaving Austin at the end of June. They plan to go on a mission trip to Honduras for three weeks. His plan ends there. He doesn’t know if he and his family will come back to the United States; even if they do, he does not know where they will be going and what they will be doing. Thomas doesn’t have a destination or a plan, only a conviction.

“I feel like Abraham,” he says. The analogy to the ancient patriarch who was taken out of his homeland and dislocated to a nowhere, holding onto God’s voice as his only assurance, is not a stretch. Thomas had planned to go back to school at Princeton Theological Seminary. A few weeks ago, he declined the acceptance.

“In a worldly sense, what I’m doing is pretty insane,” he tells me. “It’s scary. I have four children to feed. I am a father. I have a responsibility to my family.” Still, his voice is calm. “God is doing something fresh in my heart. I don’t know where I am going but I’m going anyways.”

Ten years into his ministry, Thomas wants to take radical steps to fulfill his calling.. He says he is tired of “playing church.” He is ready to take up his cross.

He was born and raised in Korea. His father left the family when he was 2. The first time he remembers seeing his dad was at his sister’s wedding more than a decade later. After Thomas graduated from high school, his father made a petition for him to come to the United States. So Thomas moved to Farmington Hill, Michigan, the winter of 1992. He was 18.

“I was looking for any opportunity that would lead me to a decent job,” he said.

He went to a local community college to become an engineer or a dentist, any job that would make adequate money. Then after an encounter with God his plan changed. Making decent money no longer interested him. He went to William Tyndale College in Michigan and started his first ministry as a Sunday school director at Detroit Full Gospel Church. Afterwards, he went to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston. It was there he met Carol, a Korean-American minister. Thomas served Mid-Hudson Methodist Church in Poughkeepsie, New York, as a youth pastor for four years. The East Coast became a familiar place.

But Thomas wanted to take up new challenges. He had several options but he picked Austin. Texas was a foreign land. The title of the associate pastor for an English ministry within a Korean immigrant church was also new. He stepped into a new place with an old mission.

Although going into a Korean church is not the most popular or conventional route his peers were taking, he wanted to give it a try. He hoped to bridge the gap between first and second generation Korean-Americans.

“Most of my friends and peers are in independent English ministry,” he said. “And I know why they are leaving Korean churches. Once they leave, they never want to come back.”

But Thomas sees the values and benefits that a multigenerational church can offer---children growing together with adults, teaching values to both sides. Despite the inherent cultural differences, he feels it’s an effort worth making.

“I want my kids to grow knowing about Korean identity. I want them to grow up in Korean text,” he says.

When Thomas first started in 2007, the English ministry had barely recovered from a rift between the previous English pastor and the senior pastor of the church. Many young people left the church along with the English pastor. But Thomas managed to rebuild. Now the English ministry consists of college students, single young adults, married couples and their families. His ministry is a rare success story for a second generation within an immigrant church.

But there have been conflicts---over God and theology but also over control of the ministry. The most wrenching was between Thomas and two of his most ardent early supporters---Charlie and Wonho Shin. Charlie’s father is one of the church’s elders, but Charlie and her husband are among the most liberal of church members. The dispute with Thomas turned out to break the bonds of trust and support between them, and between Thomas and the church’s senior pastor, Reverend Joseph Kim.

Everyone hoped for a magical resolution that would heal the pain and give us a happy ending to a conflict that had started as a theological disagreement but grew into a struggle that tore the core people of the church apart.

All sides say they deeply regret the rift. But Thomas is clear that he has no choice but to go. “I cannot fully support senior pastor’s vision for the church,” he tells me. “And not being able to defend the core teachings of Christ does not help.”

“I feel my mission here is done,” he adds. “I would be lying if there is no bitterness whatsoever in leaving. But I’m at peace with where I stand. I have let senior pastor know how I feel. How to take my opinions is up to him.”

Charlie’s Truth

The last time I saw Charlie was when I and two other English ministry leaders sat down with her and Wonho on a Friday night to hear what had happened between them and Thomas. Our conversation lasted for hours. As we said our goodbyes at the end of the meeting, I knew I wouldn’t be seeing them at church the following Sunday. A few months later, we are at last meeting again.

“Hi, Ann. Come on in,” she says. She looks a little foreign to me---perhaps it’s the newly permed hair. “I was just playing with Yejae. Say hi to Emo ( aunty), Yejae, say hi!”

Charlie was born in San Antonio. She came to Austin Korean Presbyterian in 2001. She met Wonho at the University of Texas at Austin and they got married in 2008. After graduating, Charlie worked for Samsung for five years as an engineer. She excelled, but she had lost passion for the work and began to pursue a different yearning: for God.

She enrolled at Austin Presbyterian Seminary last fall. “I love being in seminary. It has been teaching me how to express my thoughts; how to put the thoughts I have into words.”

Charlie, Wonho and Yejae moved into the Seminary’s family dorm. Family portraits, pictures of Yejae taken she was an infant, 100-days-old and a-year-old decorate the walls. Copies of Time, Newsweek, Harper’s, Outside andParentage are stacked. Charlie sits on a beige couch.

“Our whole life has been in AKPC,” she says.

Wonho, her husband, has literally grown up with the church. In 2008, they were anointed as deacons. Charlie led the Young Adult Group of the English ministry. Wonho led praise for the English ministry service. They speak fluent English and Korean. Polite, friendly, responsible, respectful of Korean culture and traditions, they were what first generation Koreans want every second generation Korean to be.

“We are the last people the adults would expect to be rebellious,” Charlie says. “We never did anything wrong. We don’t have a rebellious bone in our body.”

Charlie and Wonho are now labeled as liberals. Their views on the authority of the Bible, the means to salvation, homosexuality and the role of women are far from those of a conservative Korean Presbyterian church or of Pastor Thomas.

Charlie and Wonho’s positions on controversial issues surfaced over several discussions they had with other English ministry members. In her Bible study groups, Charlie rejected taking a literal interpretation of the Bible and condemning homosexuality. The discussion took a sharp turn once it left the room, according to Charlie. Words were added and taken out of context.

“The worst thing that can happen within a church happened to us,” Charlie says. “Everyone was talking about what we said, who we are, without directly talking to us.”

Thomas grew worried over what the members were telling him about Charlie and Wonho’s “theologies.” He tried to find out for himself what their beliefs were. Long discussions on theology took place among the three of them. Neither party expected to convince each other to see things differently. After all, one thing that didn’t need to be explained was how much faith mattered to each of them.

“Pastor Thomas knew where we stood in our theologies,” she says. “I didn’t know just how conservative he was. If I knew how he really felt about certain issues, I would have not said certain things. I didn’t know we stood at different ends of the spectrum.”

After long discussions, Thomas asked Charlie and Wonho to accept his views on certain key theological issues. Thomas saw a non-negotiable need for the leaders of his ministry to agree upon core theologies. He also concerned over the possible confusion the differing theologies could bring about, especially amongst the young congregants. Regretfully, Charlie and Wonho told him they could not.

“I couldn’t go against my conscience,” says Charlie. “I cannot say for the sake of being a deacon, having a title, even though I love my church, I cannot say I believe in things that I don’t.”

They decided to step down as leaders. Seemingly, a personal theological conflict came to an end with relatively little damage.

“I knew PT already was having a hard time ministering,” Charlie recalls. “I did not want to make things harder.”

The day after Charlie and Wonho made their decision, Rev. Kim contacted Charlie early in the morning. He asked them to reconcile with Thomas. He didn’t want Charlie and Wonho to leave. Charlie reassured Kim that they wouldn’t be leaving. But the following night, Charlie’s dad, Elder Kim, told her what he had heard from Kim.

Kim said Thomas had come to him to insisting that the church not hire Charlie as a seminarian. Charlie and Wonho had hurt his ministry a great deal, he said, and he wanted them out. Kim refused.

Charlie wanted to hear from Thomas if this account was indeed true. Thomas replied with repeated apologies, asking for her forgiveness. She felt manipulated. She wanted an explanation for every word he supposedly spoke but Thomas simply apologized over and over.

“I was furious,” she recalls, “Your friends can hurt you the most.”

“It is understandable that a leader wants to protect the foundation of the ministry,” she says. “Theology is worth protecting, but a church should be based upon love and relationship; not on theology alone.”

Charlie and Wonho now attend St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, 10 miles north of their old church. She is still very much connected to the Korean church through her friends, family and Facebook. But she doesn’t go there.

“I told PT that what he has done in our church is great, that he will have a great, successful ministry, and I meant that,” she says. “But I can’t be a part of it.”

Oil and Water

Roy Kim is part of the so-called 1.5 Generation. He came to the United States when he was 18. He is now the father of two sons who are soon to graduate college. He joined Austin Korean Presbyterian in 1993 and became an ordained elder six years later. Ever since then, he has been a figure who can fluently communicate with both ministries, making him an ambassador to a foreign land---the Korean American congregants within the church. He has devoted nearly a decade to the English ministry.

He sees that the gap between first and second generations sets the tone between Korean and English Ministry.

“Second generations complain that they don’t have a relationship with their parents,” Kim said. “They would say, ‘Dad, you don’t get it’.”

Kim thinks the cultural, generational and the language gap between the first and second generations poses a huge stumbling block for both. The first generation started low in America but worked hard. Their primary goal was to provide security, wealth and opportunity. There seemed to be little room for spending time and building relationships with their children in their 10-hour-long work shift. The immense language barrier between them and their children further hindered their efforts. They believed their hard work spoke the loudest of their love and sacrifice they made for their children. They shouldn’t have to earn respect and love from their children; it must be given and rightly so.

On the other hand, “Second generations [Korean-Americans] don’t have the urgency to succeed,” Kim says. Thanks to the better upbringing their parents have provided, Korean Americans have easier access to the American society and its benefits. They value an eye-to-eye relationship and interactions with their family. Respect and relationships must be earned and built. It cannot be summoned on demand, even by your parents.

“What you see and learn from home carries over [to church],” Kim says, “The cultural gap is imbedded in church.”

The church first had an English-speaking pastor for its youth group. As the church grew in size, it saw the need to minister over English-speaking college students and youth group members who were too old to be in a “youth group.” The church hired an English ministry pastor in 1999, and started holding a separate service apart from the main Korean services.

Kim says the English ministry was at its “strongest” state before Thomas arrived. The church put more effort into cultivating the ministry. Under Pastor Matthew Kim, there were five ordained elders in the ministry in 2004; now there is only one. But Matthew Kim inevitably clashed with the church’s senior pastor, who was of similar age. Eventually Pastor Matthew left the church with the majority of the English ministry, leaving it in rubble.

“Even now, I don’t think we have fully recovered from the damage,” Kim says.

Then the former senior pastor specifically requested a non-ordained pastor for the next English ministry associate pastor. Thus came Thomas Park.

“I think it got worse,” says Roy Kim about the English ministry.

“You need an understanding pastor [for the Korean ministry and English ministry] to coexist,” he adds. “It would be ideal if we can coexist under one umbrella. That ideal situation is hard to exist. The reality is that they fight.”

Roy Kim remains a practical man. “KM and EM are like oil and water. If they are not going to mix, why encourage it?” he says. “You just go separate ways.”

God’s Children

It’s 7:15 Thursday morning. Reverend Joseph Kim attended church’s early morning service. I have never been in his office and I have never sat down and talked with him. He sits on one of leather couches. His height of almost six-feet, his light brown eyes and distinct facial features – double-lidded eyes, light skin, prominent cheekbones---together tell of his half-Korean, half-Caucasian heritage.

“It was not my design that I have become a minister,” he said. If Kim had it his way, he would have become a diplomat for South Korea, he says. He started his career as a minister in 1973 and became an ordained Presbyterian pastor in 1981.He is a 1.5 Generation himself, having come to America when he was 27.

It’s been roughly two years since his arrival at Austin Korean Presbyterian Church. Before he served in different Presbyterian churches throughout Seoul, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Boston, Syracuse, Minneapolis and Chicago during his 38-year career. For a quarter of his career, or eight years, he had worked only with English ministry.

“There always exists a degree of difficulties in different churches,” he says about the struggles between the Korean and English ministries. “Cultural, general gaps are issues we need to face and come up with a mutually beneficial solution. Our church is made up of very loving, accepting, peaceful and well-mannered people. Keeping in mind that we are all God’s children and that we are all equal in God’s eyes, we can create a congregation respecting of each other,” he adds.

As the senior pastor, Kim conducts two Korean services on Sundays and is in charge of pastoral care for the majority of the Korean-speaking members, mainly first generation.

“I do not think EM as a second class generation,” he says of English ministry. “There is no distinction in my mind [between Korean ministry and English ministry]. EM is a vital, integral part of our congregation.”

“We coexist within one roof, maintaining Korean tradition along with second generations – children, non-children members – having their own ministry.”

The English ministry is a key part of the church, he tells. Over time it will inevitably grow in size and stature. The ministry will continue to hold its separate session. “They will grow to be an independent congregation---under one roof.”

I ask him about Thomas’s ministry. He doesn’t seem to be caught off-guard.

“That question is not relevant,” he replies.

“I think you can try.”

Carol Park is sitting outside the Bass recital hall, reading a book and keeping an eye on her four children, who are running around. She brought them here to listen to a piano recital by Joseph Choi, a member of the English ministry. But the kids were too loud and restless. She is missing the performance, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

This is Carol---always trying to participate but willing to be flexible when things don’t work out. She is my spiritual guide and life leader---the person I most admire in church and in life. Thomas’s wife and a minister herself, Carol reads a book, The Supernatural Power of the Transformed Mind by Bill Johnson. All of her kids are running around. She has brought all four of them, knowing it will be a challenge to keep them quiet during an hour-and-a-half-long recital; nonetheless, she wanted the kids to try. She wanted to hear Joseph play.

“I had to take the kids out,” she says. “They were just being too loud.”

Carol worked for the church as pastor in the Children ministry for roughly a year. She could teach the kids in English and talk to the parents in Korean. She has a B.A. in elementary education and a Master’s in divinity. She seemed to be a perfect fit until the church decided that she was too outspoken.

She is my spiritual and life leader, for lack of a better term. I ask her a question knowing all too well that she struggled with this question herself for the past five years and that, at last, she decided to leave the church, feeling unresolved if not defeated by the reality.

“Do you think I can bridge EM and KM?”

There is a brief silence. “I think you can try,” she says.

“I mean, if PT can’t do it, I don’t know who else can, honestly,” she says with a small laugh. “There is a difficulty imbedded in the system. First-generation Korean parents demand respect and obedience from their children only because they are their parents. It doesn’t matter if they have a relationship with their children or not. My parents had the crappiest relationship with me. But it didn’t matter to them. They demanded my respect. And I wasn’t going to give any if they didn’t earn it.”

Like Carol, many second-generation Koreans demand trust and mutual respect. They may not be able to get it from their parents, but they can insist upon it from their church. And when they don’t get it, like Carol, they can leave.

“If you aim to make small changes at the bottom and not from up top, I think it will be fulfilling,” she tells me. “To change the system, it would almost take an uprising from 100 people. But why would you do that?”

“You just leave the church,” as she and her husband---and Thomas---have done.

The Next Chapter

Thomas is giving a sermon titled “Heaven and Hell.” Today’s is the 14th part of a sermon series he entitled “Foundation.” After six more Sundays, he will no longer have a title at Austin Korean Presbyterian Church.

The church has commissioned a search committee for the new EM pastor. They expect the search process to last from six months to a year. The governing body of the church is unclear on what will happen in the meantime. English ministry members speculate that the senior pastor and two other associate pastors will take turns holding the English service,

The leaders of the college group, young adult group and married couple group are bracing for the big transition. Thomas has been preparing them as much as he can: multiple print-outs on the core values he set out for the ministry, descriptions on the specific duties he has done outside Sundays, meetings he is having with soon-to-be leaders---and most of all, his ardent prayers.

It has been nearly a year since Thomas announced his coming departure to his congregation. But his commitment to his congregation has not faded . He delivers his sermon with consistent passion.

“Do I believe a loving God could create hell?” he says. “Absolutely.

“A loving, just God would never force us

to love him. He would not torture us by forcing us to spend eternity with him in heaven…

I hear the growing noise outside the sanctuary. I look up at the clock. It is just before 11 a.m.

Thomas finishes his sermon with a prayer. The double doors swing open. The adults of the Korean ministry take their seats silently as the English ministry members walk out.

I wonder when we will start talking to each other.

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SCHOOL UNDER SIEGE

Eastside Memorial faces a bruising new era of large demands and small budgets

By Addie Anderson

Eastside Memorial High sits on a large piece of land in blue-collar East Austin, close enough to the airport to hear a constant roar overhead of planes taking off and landing. The school is surrounded by one-story houses with burglar bars on the windows and small front lawns confined by chest-high, chain-linked fences. The streets are deserted during the afternoon hours, at least until school lets out at 4:30.

Alina Adonyi is still in her classroom after school, as she is every day, helping students finish up work they have missed or gotten behind on. Christmas lights hang around the perimeter of the room above big posters of student work, and quotes from famous writers and historical figures add to the decor. She’s wearing a sun dress and sweater; her long brown hair hangs straight down her back and bangs cover her forehead. She wears thick black eyeliner and looks hip for a teacher. She talks to students as if they are her friends.

“Can you go get that key from my BFF Ms. Law?” she says to one. Another asks to borrow her cell phone charger, and she obliges. When she’s in front of the room teaching, however, she’s all business.

Alina has been teaching language arts all day long to juniors, exploring The Great Gatsby and preparing them for the upcoming Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test. Students must pass the standardized test each year in order to graduate.

Alina’s phone buzzes on her desk; it’s a new text message from a fellow English teacher.

“Dude, thank you so much! Now I can keep my house!”

Susan Diaz was due to get laid off because of a massive budget shortfall, between $46 million and $94 million, in the Austin Independent School District that has forced officials to cut 1,153 of the 12,000 education positions throughout the city. Teachers, administrators, secretaries and custodial staff—nearly 10 percent of the total work force—have to go because the governor and the legislature insist it is the only way to make up the deficit. With numbers so astronomical—the overall state budget deficit is somewhere between $15 and $27 billion—it’s easy to lose track of the fact that the reductions will affect real people, crush promising careers and do major damage to schools like Eastside Memorial that are already struggling with big problems and limited resources.

Because she was the newest hire in the English department, and lay-offs are based on seniority, Susan Diaz’s job was on the line.

Alina’s job was safe; she was hired a year ago at Eastside Memorial after teaching in the district for nearly 10 years. Still, she made the decision over the summer to leave after this school year. She says she wants to focus on finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Texas.

“She’s thanking me for ducking out so she can stay employed, so that she can pay her mortgage,” Alina said. “I would have been one of the ones that kept my job. I would say 1 of about every 4 teachers was cut here.”

Alina said that if she weren’t focusing all of her energy on getting her Ph.D. after the school year ends, she would stay. She loves the students and the community. But with so much on her plate, giving up her position to save a fellow teacher’s job was the right decision.

“I thought to myself, ‘Wow, she made it because I was able to sacrifice, but what about all the hundreds of amazing people out there who weren't as lucky?’” Alina says. “How will they survive? How will they pay their mortgages and feed their kids? It's appalling."

And she’s right, not everyone was as lucky as Susan Diaz.

***

Across the school from Alina’s classroom, social worker Mary Beer is finishing up her lunch of Top Ramen noodles and saltine crackers. She sits at her desk, answering e-mails and making arrangements for students who need help in staying in school and coping at home.

Mary’s office is roomy, with three chairs, a desk, a couple of bookshelves and huge windows that allow the sun to hit the plants all over the room. She’s worked here for the past four years.

There is a dog bowl on the floor. One of Mary’s many projects is to go to the homes of absentee kids to find out why they’re no longer coming to school. In one particular case, a teacher reported to Mary that one of her students hadn’t been in class for a week. Mary went to the student’s home and found out it was because she and her sister had taken in a Chihuahua. The only way to get them back to class was for Mary to keep the dog in her office while the girls were in school.

Now there’s a therapy dog at the office for students to pet while they’re talking to Mary.

And Mary is easy to talk to. She says students are constantly coming in, but that’s what she’s there for.

Most schools in the district share a community liaison social worker — which means that one worker has to serve about seven schools. But Eastside Memorial is considered a high-risk school and was assigned its very own social worker four years ago. That social worker was Mary.

Mary says she was brought in as a last-ditch effort to keep the school open. They hired someone full-time for drop-out and pregnancy prevention. Mary came into the school with a plan.

She has created a program called Jobs Inc. to help students get employment, a pregnancy prevention program that Mary says has been 98 percent effective – meaning only one or two girls of the many who have been in the program have gotten pregnant — and a dropout prevention program.

Teachers send at least one student a week to Mary for different reasons. “Kids are crying in class, kids are going to drop out,” said Kristen Choate, a chemistry teacher.

“You get an e-mail from Mary 15 minutes later that the student will be back in class. She’s so great at her job.”

Mary spends part of her summer break teaming with Eastside Memorial’s drop-out specialist on home visits to students. The two partners try to figure out why a student has stopped showing up and get them the help they need to be able to return.

“My goal is to get them back in class so they can learn, to get them to a point to focus,” Mary says.

But all of this is about to end for Mary.

The week before, both of the school’s principals came into her office and told her that her position had been cut for the next school year.

“I was heartbroken,” Mary says, but it wasn’t a complete shock. “Each year that I have been here, my position has been on the chopping block. I figured it was coming with all the budget talk from the district.”

She found out the same day that many of her friends in similar school-to-community liaison positions were told they were losing their jobs too.

“It was a rough weekend,” Mary says.

She is nervous about finding a new job because she loves Eastside Memorial and says that no matter what job she finds, it won’t be as good. And she worries that students will fall through the cracks if she’s not there. Teachers will have more students in their classes, and even less time and resources to help those who are struggling.

There’s a knock at the door. Two students walk in and one walks straight up to Mary’s desk.

“Hi Mary, can I have a piece of gum?”

It’s clear that they have spoken many times before. Mary gives her the gum and she heads out the door.

Mary presses her lips together and moves her ChapStick around. She looks around her office and out the window for a minute before she continues talking.

The students don’t know that Mary will not be coming back next year. Not yet.

***

Eastside Memorial is functioning as usual. Teachers are teaching their classes, and the usual students are attending. In the wake of nearly 1,100 planned job cuts in the district, you would think something would feel different, but it doesn’t yet. But from the Eastside teachers’ view, the pressure’s on.

This year, one room nestled deep within the school was transformed into what teachers and administration call “the war room.” The white walls are plastered with lists and charts showing where all of the students stand comparatively after last year’s Texas Assessment Test. The students are classified by grade, race and socioeconomic status. The teachers are compared to one another, too, based on subject and performance.

Administrators at Eastside Memorial meet with district officials in the war room to discuss strategy for the upcoming test and plans to make changes if the school does not achieve “academically acceptable” status. Administrators then meet with their teachers to show them where they are and where the students need to be.

The strategies discussed in the room and how they are carried out could be the difference in keeping Eastside Memorial alive or shutting it down after this school year. Consistently poor performance on the Texas Assessment Test has given the school — and its teachers — a bad rap over time.

Eastside Memorial was itself born out of a similar failure. Johnston High School was closed in 2008 after not meeting state academic and dropout standards for five consecutive years. The school was then split into two academies: Eastside Memorial Green Tech and Eastside Memorial Global Tech. They occupy the same campus and have similar student populations, but have separate administrations. Each of the two academies has around 300 students and 20 teachers.

Since their establishment three years ago, the campus has settled in with new administration and teachers, and the Texas Assessment Exam scores have improved, depending on subject area. Science improved by 37 percent last year. But Green Tech was still the only school in the district to be ranked academically unacceptable in the 2009-2010 school year. To earn a recognized rating, at least 80 percent of students must pass the assessment test.

The school is not there yet, despite the progress it has made.

“If we do that much improvement over two years, imagine what we do in five years with the same teachers and administration,” Mary Beer said. “That’s what drives me crazy is the people making the decisions don’t see that these kids in this population need stability more than ever.” After major cutbacks, she warns, Eastside Memorial is going to be a low-performing school again.

Students and teachers alike know that this year, if the school doesn’t perform well enough to move out of the “Academically Unacceptable” range, it could be consolidated, bought by a charter school, or closed altogether by district mandate.

The students and teachers have been focused on the assessment test since January. Those who have not passed in the past will get pulled from elective courses to go, sit and do just math for an extra hour three times a week.

“They’re really doing everything to help these kids,” Mary said.

District Superintendent Meria Carstarphen came to the school at the beginning of the year with a speech to teachers on how she had been fighting for them all summer. She said she knew that the school has improved, that science and math scores had gone up. Green Tech improved on everything, but not enough in one category: math. She told teachers she knew they could do it. But later in the year, the tone from the District changed even though no tests had been taken.

“She sent six people in from downtown to tell us we are being consolidated,” Kristen Choate said. “ ‘Your jobs? We can’t tell you anything about your jobs until June, but here’s the HR person, our transfer hiring fair is May 3 and we highly suggest you attend.’”

If the Texas Assessment Test scores of Kristen’s students are below a certain number, she will not have a job at Eastside Memorial next year. But the district has not come up with the formula it will use to decide how well a teacher performed.

“My job could depend on some formula that you don’t even have yet?” Kristen said.

It’s a comment, not a question.

***

Geneva Govea-Oliva is a local mom from a family of 10 that went through Johnston High School, and she has lived on the Eastside her whole life. Her three daughters also went to Johnston, the youngest graduating in the first year after it became Eastside Memorial.

“We have a family history going through there,” she said. “Johnston High School, the Johnston Rams, that was our pride.”

Geneva was the PTA president when Johnston High School was shut down by the Texas Education Agency in 2008. She said that although the school was a source of pride for her family and the community, they agreed to make the change to Eastside Memorial because they still wanted to have a school in the community.

Johnston was transformed into Eastside Memorial during the summer of 2008, and a new staff and curriculum were brought in the following school year. The redesign included new instructional strategies, structural changes, new technology and a project-based learning and thematic curriculum.

Although the school made the changes, many in the community felt some promises from the district fell through. Until Eastside’s current administration came in two years ago, teachers were in and out of the school, and it lacked stability.

“They said they were going to give laptops to our kids,” Geneva said. “They gave it to them the first year and took them away from them the second. How do they expect them to progress? They’re always promising something to the Eastside and then taking it away.”

It’s been this way for at least 40 years, East Austin residents say. Johnston High School was built in 1960, in the center of a predominantly Hispanic and African American area. The school was named after Confederate General Albert Sydney Johnston.

Larry Amaro, a Johnston alum, said the school once had 1,800 students, major football players, a big band and extracurricular activities; the choir even went to Mexico City to perform before the president.

“It had a lot of quality ‘cause it had quantity as well,” Amaro said.

Then in 1971, East Austin schools began busing students to West Austin schools and vice versa in an attempt at desegregation.

“It was going good, there was busing both ways,” Amaro recalled. “But, when busing ended, it ended for those kids coming from West to East but it didn’t end for kids going from East to West. So we went from a school of 1,800 to a school of 700. And that was a big, big difference. Too big to overcome.”

When the Johnston feeder middle school was closed in the 1970s, one middle school was left to directly feed into Johnston — Martin Middle School. And many of the Martin students ended up going to Austin High and other schools through busing and transfers.

Fast-forward 40 years and that’s what is still happening in East Austin today. Many kids attend schools like Austin High and LBJ instead of the one in their area. Over the years, the local high school had fewer students to play sports, less school spirit, and got a bad rap for fighting and drugs.

Many of Martin Middle School’s students end up going to Austin High or other high schools because of the better reputations and recruitment.

“They have 2,500 students at Austin High already, so they can afford to have extra staff,” Amaro said. “They send the counselor at the beginning of January to Martin Middle School to recruit the kids. The principal [at Eastside Memorial] doesn’t have someone to send over there. The principal has to come to recruit the kids.”

All of which helps explain why Eastside Memorial today has only 609 students---considerably less than Austin High, with 2,221 students, Anderson with 2,030 and LBJ with 926 students. Eastside is the oldest and only high school in the traditional eastern end of town, but it’s hurting for students because it is still seen as a problem school. And with further cuts, further problems are certain to arise.

Like the band. To meet parents’ demands, officials brought in a director two years ago. Suddenly the number of band members rose to 35 from a previous low of eight — and it sounded like 100, Larry Amaro recalled.

Due to the cuts, the director will soon be gone---and so will the progress the band has made. “You get a good band director in there, now they’re taking him away,” Geneva said. “That doesn’t make sense. What is this district really doing? What do they want from the Eastside?”

***

After several weeks of profound silence, Governor Rick Perry told a press conference in mid-March that the responsibility for the lay-offs was in the hands of local school district officials, not the state.

"The lieutenant governor, the speaker, and their colleagues aren't going to hire or fire one teacher, best I can tell,” Perry said. “That is a local decision that will be made at the local districts.”

It was, perhaps, the literal truth. But what the governor neglected to say was that local districts get their funding from the state, and that the legislature was in the process of cutting as much as $10 billion in state funding, with Perry’s blessing. The job toll could be as high as 100,000 laid-off teachers, administrators and staff.

Three days after Perry’s press conference, close to 10,000 teachers, staff members and parents from across Texas gathered at the State Capitol on a warm, sunny day.They wore matching colorful T-shirts with slogans like “Save Our Schools,” held umbrellas to symbolize the Rainy Day Fund that they wanted lawmakers to use to make up the shortfall, and carried signs that read “Invest in Our Children,” “Tax Me Texas Children Are Worth It” and “Keep My Wife Employed.”

“I will never follow the lead of those who exclude the kids who need education the most so that my precious scores will rise,” John Kuhn, Superintendent of Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District, near Fort Worth told the crowd. “I will never line up with those whose idea of reform is the subtle segregation of the poor and desperate. I want no part of the American caste system.”

The rally was sponsored by Save Texas Schools, a volunteer coalition of parents, students, educators, business leaders and community members who want the state’s elected leaders to make education a top priority. Two days later, many returned to the Capitol for the Texas American Federation of Teachers lobby day. They urged Perry to tap into the $9.4 billion Rainy Day Fund in the name of education.

Texas ranks 44^th among the states when it comes to spending per student. In the 2009-2010 school year, the state spent $9,227 per student— $1,539 below the national average. Just 10 years ago, Texas was just $281 below the national average.

The tangible consequences are visible in Kristen Choate’s chemistry class one morning. There are 25 students and despite Kristen’s best efforts most don’t come close to finishing the day’s assignment—too many students, not enough time. If the budget cuts pass as expected, next year’s class sizes are sure to be even larger.

Later in the day, Kristen sits at her desk during her off period and hears students wandering the hallways when they should be in class. She has no control over what happens out there. “That is beyond a teacher’s responsibility and outside of our control,” she says.

***

At a school meeting the day after the April board meeting, a few members of the school board came to Eastside Memorial to describe to teachers and administrators their plans to strengthen the school. Kristen said they continuously brought up how Eastside Memorial is a drain on their finances.

Kristen is frustrated. Of course it’s a drain on their finances when they don’t give the school the things it needs. Two years ago, when she opened up her science classroom for the first time, there was no equipment to be found. The District kept promising to get it from another school, but never did. “So we spent $45,000 on science equipment.”

The board members who came in late April talked about consolidating the school to make it stronger . But no exact plans have been presented yet.

“Quite honestly, people who are able to stay, people who still have their position, they’re getting out because they don’t have the energy,” Kristen said. “We don’t have the energy to get through the chaos that will happen.”

Last year, Kristen spent every day for a month planning out, organizing and running a camp for incoming freshman to become familiar with the school. High school is a huge transition for kids and freshman are at the biggest risk of dropping out. This year, she says, there’s no way she would run the camp again because she will not even know if she has a job until mid-June.

“What would I tell the kids?” Kristen said. “Here’s the cafeteria, here’s the gym, we don’t really know what anything else is. We don’t really know what we’ll be called, we might be the Panthers, we might be Black and Silver. We don’t know who your principal is. We don’t know what your classes will be like. So, hey freshmen, welcome to chaos!”

Connor Grady, the principal at Green Tech, is the only hope for many of Eastside’s teachers in the reconstitution of the school. Although he has been told he does not have a job next year, he can apply for the position of principal of the consolidated Eastside Memorial. The district could decide to keep him or bring in someone new.

It’s said among the teachers that Grady decided in January that instead of escaping the school and saving his own neck, he decided that he doesn’t work for the district, he works for the students.

If Grady is rehired as the principal, it won’t be complete chaos, Kristen says. “He’s a strong leader, he’s intelligent, and most importantly he cares about the kids.”

The past few years at Eastside Memorial have not been perfect, but even students have noticed improvements. Nellie, a senior at Eastside Memorial, says she wants to go to college and become a nurse. She has a child in the Eastside Memorial day care and has high expectations for herself and her daughter. At first she was scared to go to Eastside Memorial because she heard about fights, drugs and gang bangers. She now feels safe here. She doesn’t like how the school gets a bad rap because she’s had so many opportunities through the school.

Omar, another senior who has been at Eastside for four years, says there’s not much school spirit there. He blames the separation between Green and Global. “I thought it was a cool school when everything was one school,” Omar said. “We should be one.”

Although he has his complaints, Omar says he’s going to miss the routine of Eastside Memorial, some of the teachers and Mr. Grady.

It’s early May and the students at Eastside Memorial have just taken their science and math assessment tests. The scores will be back on May 20. The legislature will pass its budget around the same time and the governor will decide whether to sign it. In the end, it all comes down to test scores and money. That’s what the district, the school and the students will be waiting for.

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FIRE PROOF

Seven years after he was executed for killing his three children, the Todd Willingham case lives on

By Aziza Musa

“Do not speak please,” John Bradley barked at a woman sitting in the front row.

Eugenia Willingham, who flew in from Ardmore, Okla. to watch the proceedings that could exonerate her late stepson, was immediately silent. She whispered to her relatives, sitting on either side of her, while Bradley reminded the public they were not allowed to interject.

Bradley rocked his leather chair back and forth, and he placed one hand on his hip, the other holding his black-rimmed glasses to his mouth and resumed his review of the state Forensic Science Commission’s draft report on Cameron Todd Willingham, who was tried, convicted and executed for killing his three daughters nearly 20 years ago.

It’s been more than seven years since Willingham’s execution and nearly three years since the commission first took up his case. But with the drafted report, the commission has come the closest it has ever been to completing its investigation of the questionable science used to convict him.

They edited the report for content and grammar over the course of two days. But they carefully avoided the central issue in the case — whether the purported science was so faulty that Texas executed an innocent man in 2004.

Bradley has never thought so. The Williamson County District Attorney once called Cameron Todd Willingham “a guilty monster” and has said he has had no reason to change his view. Indeed, his certitude is the likely reason Governor Rick Perry named him chairman of the commission. From the beginning, Bradley’s role has been to ensure that Willingham’s guilty remains established and Texas justice untainted, no matter what evidence emerges to the contrary.

But Bradley’s path has not been easy. For one thing, the evidence continues to unravel. For another, Bradley is having trouble mustering support even from a legislature that is dominated by pro-death penalty Republicans. His abrasive nature and delays in the Willingham case have jeopardized his chances for reappointment.

At the end of the two day session, the commission issued a final draft report,. But nearly 20 years after the three girls were killed and seven after their father was executed for their deaths, the case seems no closer to a final resolution and the authorities less certain than ever about who or what was responsible for the fire that took three young lives in Corsicana, Texas, on a cold morning in December 1991.

***

Neighbors were gathering anxiously outside the burning one-story bungalow on 11^th Street on a cold December morning when a barefoot man dressed only in trousers crouched with his blackened arms crossing his chest on the front lawn and implored onlookers to call the fire department. “My babies are burning up!” Todd Willingham yelled hysterically.

Diane Barbee tried to calm him down. Between gulps of air, he told her he had woken up to an angry fog of smoke after hearing screams from his two-year-old, Amber. His wife Stacy had gone out early to buy Christmas presents, so it was just him in the house with the three girls — Amber, and the one-year-old twins, Karmon and Kameron.

The girls shared a room with two cribs, a bed and a space heater. Willingham tried to get to it, he told Diane, but the fire was too intense. He yelled to the kids, but the roar of the blaze stifled every other sound.

But neighbors noticed signs of odd behavior: Willingham screamed only after he ran out of his house, and he took time to move his car away from the blaze while his children were dying.

The Corsicana Fire Department arrived 10 minutes later, and within minutes, the firemen’s hoses sprayed hundreds of gallons of water onto the flames.

Once the fire died down, Assistant Fire Chief Douglas Fogg and his team of fire fighters entered what was left. Stains charred the walls on the home’s southern end, where the flames grazed the kitchen and utility room. At the northern end, the fire decimated one side of the hallway, the living room, the girls’ room and the porch. It stripped the floors to the wood underneath, stained the concrete porch, shattered the glass windows, reduced furniture and clothing to debris — and left behind three little girls’ bodies.

Still distraught, Willingham told investigators there had been an electric space heater in the girls’ room, as well as exposed electrical wiring throughout the house. Something must have happened to accidentally trigger the blaze, he claimed.

The exposed wood, the glass fractures and the burn patterns told a different story to the fire investigators. Fogg and Deputy State Fire Marshal Manuel Vasquez examined every inch of the 975 square-foot home and the grounds surrounding it and reported more than 20 indicators of arson — all pointing to Todd Willingham.

Two weeks later, police arrested him.

***

Todd Willingham, 23, maintained his innocence from the start.

The state assigned him two defense lawyers, David Martin and Robert Dunn, whom the family claimed believed him to be guilty. “All the evidence showed that he was 100 percent guilty. He poured accelerant all over the house and put lighter fluid under the kids’ beds,” Martin told David Grann, a reporter for the New Yorker.

Willingham went to trial a year later. He was almost certain to face the death penalty if the jury found him guilty, but prosecutors offered him a life sentence in exchange for a confession.

He refused.

Prosecutors offered testimony from neighbors, who said he drank and partied with friends and a loud boombox the day after his home burned down. A jailhouse snitch, Johnny Everett Webb, said during the trial that Todd told him he lit his home on fire.

Willingham never testified at the trial on advice of his lawyers. “It’s not that I don’t want to, but I don’t feel I need to,” he said.

Prosecutors called on paramedics, firefighters and officials with the State Fire Marshal’s Office to testify against him.

Ronald Franks, the Corsicana Fire Department’s lieutenant paramedic, said he searched the kitchen once they put out the fire. He “tried to open the back door for ventilation, and there was a refrigerator in front of it,” he testified.

Willingham “made the statement to the effect that if any more samples were taken of the floor, he had poured some cologne on the floor because the children had liked the smell of that cologne,” Franks testified. “He poured it from the bathroom to where the children burned.”

Both Vasquez and Fogg claimed they had eliminated all other possible causes of the fire, electrical shorts and gas explosions. One of the first things firefighters looked at was the space heater in the girls’ bedroom, Fogg said. The heater was in the “off” position, and the bedroom had no evidence of any electrical shorts, he said.

“We even had the gas company come out and do a leak test and a bar test where they punch holes, checking for gas leaks, which they found none,” he testified.

Fogg said as they started removing debris, they found pouring patterns and puddle formations, which led them to suspect arson. He believed those signs meant someone poured an accelerant and intentionally set the fire. To be sure, Corsicana Fire Department officials consulted the State Fire Marshal’s Office. The agency sent Vasquez the day after the girls’ funeral processions.

Vasquez, who had more than two decades of experience in the fire industry, investigated up to 1,500 fires for the state agency. He said in court that almost all of the fires he investigated turned out to be arson.

“And have you ever been wrong in a conclusion that you make?” a defense attorney asked him.

“Not to my knowledge.”

Vasquez backed the fire department in his testimony, further implicating Willingham in arson because of all of the indicators. The wires, which were sprawled on the walls and over the crown molding, were irregular.

“All the coating burned off, which indicates that the wire is a victim of the fire,” he said.

Vasquez identified the deep burning in the multiple layers of the floor. Fire goes up, and liquids go down, he said, indicating someone had used an accelerant to help speed the fire along. He testified that while he saw pour patterns, the burns were inconsistent around the house, implying multiple areas of origin: one in the girls’ room, on in the hallway leading to their room and one on the porch on the same end of the home.

“The fire is telling me this,” Vasquez testified. “The fire tells a story. I am just the interpreter…and the fire does not lie. It tells me the truth.”

Vasquez said the refrigerator that blocked the back door stood out to him. He accused Todd of creating a fire barrier.

But Martin fought back. “Is it unreasonable to expect to find an old house with doors or windows taped or shuttered, or towels stuffed in the cracks to keep the draft out?” he asked Vasquez.

“I guess so, sir,” Vasquez answered.

“Did you know, when you went through the back door of the house, that it had been taped around the edge?”

“No, sir, I did not notice that.”

Willingham’s attorney tried to prove accidental causes — perhaps a kerosene lamp in the living room, or the possibility that one of the girls had played with Todd and Stacy’s cigarette lighter. But Vasquez discredited each attempt and repeated his opinion that he had found multiple arson indicators around the house and under the debris.

“The fact of the matter is, as the training books warn us that falling and burning debris laying on a floor can cause patterns and marks in areas that could be mistaken for accelerant puddles and trails,” Martin said.

But the fire leaves burn patterns that no one can change, Vasquez testified. “You cannot pollute the fire scene,” he said. “You can try, but you can’t.”

In his opinion, Willingham started the fires to kill his three daughters, he said.

The trial only took two days — and on the second day jurors found Willingham guilty. During the sentencing phase, friends and family pleaded for a life sentence, forcing the judge to take more testimony about Todd’s character.

Prosecutors painted Todd as a tattooed sociopath, obsessed with satanic imagery. They pointed to numerous posters of a disembodied, zombielike figure plastered on his bedroom walls as evidence of his depravity. Policemen and sheriffs testified about Todd’s criminal history of home and auto thefts and of aiding the delinquency of minors.

Stacy’s friends and relatives believed her husband was guilty. They labeled him as abusive, claiming he hit her when she was pregnant with the twins.

Stacy, however, denied the incident and stood by her husband. She and Willingham’s relatives acknowledged his vices, but they said he cared for and loved his children. They said even when Todd got high off paint, he was still the same gentle person.

In spite of the pleas to spare his life, the prosecuting evidence prevailed. Jurors were unconvinced Todd could change — and they sentenced him to death.

***

Todd Willingham appealed nine times to no avail.

In December 2003, he exhausted his last appeal. His cousin, Pat Cox, wrote a letter to Governor Perry’s office in hopes of delaying or stopping his execution.

In January, a judge set Todd’s execution for February 17, 2004.

Time was running out. Pat tried to reach several arson experts, including Gerald Hurst, an Austin-based scientist and fire investigator. Hurst agreed to pore over legal notes and eyewitness accounts to review the case for arson.

He wrote a report refuting the prosecution’s case and concluding that the science was flawed and that none of the evidence used to convict Willingham suggested arson. A renowned group of fire experts, nominated by the National Fire Protection Agency, created a “Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations,” that discredited the state fire marshal’s conclusions, he wrote in the report.

Hurst, who was also a chemist, took apart every one of Vasquez’s 20 arson indicators. He compared arson scenes versus post-flashover scenes — those following a fire that spreads rapidly and leaves an entire enclosed area in flames after reaching a certain temperature. Fire investigators could not differentiate between trailers, pour patterns and puddle configurations from an arson case and those simply resulting from an accidental fire, he said. The fire marshal said he found V-patterns that showed where the fire started, but Hurst said those patterns would appear and disappear during the course of any fire.

The fire marshal claimed the charred wooden floors underneath an aluminum base pointed to arson. “This phenomenon is clearly impossible,” Hurst wrote in his report. “Liquid accelerants can no more burn under an aluminum threshold than can grease burn in a skillet even with a loose-fitting lid.”

He pointed to other possible causes of the burned tile and crazed glass and said investigators used “baseless speculation” to determine arson from the brown rings on the cement porch.

Hurst hand-delivered the report to Willingham’s lawyer four days before the execution date, and the attorney then submitted it to the governor’s office. But the report did not reach Governor Perry’s office until the day scheduled for Willingham’s execution.

On February 9, the pardon board denied Willingham clemency.

As his execution drew nearer, his family grew more desperate. Pat talked to Perry’s general counsel, Mike Schofield, nearly every day, while Todd’s stepmother, Eugenia, visited him on death row.

One day before the execution was scheduled, Schofield told Pat that he had received Hurst’s report and that he would brief the governor at 11 a.m. the next day. “It was just a painful, unbearable waiting, which we did, for any indication that the governor agreed to issue a 30-day stay,” Pat said.

The stay never came. Todd died by lethal injection on February 17, 2004 shortly after 6 p.m.

“The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man — convicted of a crime I did not commit,” he said before he was executed. “I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do.”

***

But the Willingham case did not die with Todd.

One year after his execution, lawmakers created a Forensic Science Commission, made up of nine members who established a process for all accredited labs and entities to report professional negligence or misconduct. The commission was meant to investigate the reported allegations.

But the commission was plagued by its own problems.

Governor Perry appointed as chairwoman Debbie Benningfield, a deputy administrator in the Houston Police Department’s latent lab section. When she took charge of the commission, it was not funded because the Legislature failed to direct any money from the state budget to the agency. The commission would not be funded until 2007.

In 2006, the Innocence Project, a New York-based organization that seeks to help wrongfully convicted prisoners to clear their name through DNA evidence, petitioned the commission to take up two similar cases: Ernest Willis, who was sentenced to death after he was accused of setting fire to a house, killing two, and Todd Willingham. But their cases had one big difference: a state judge had freed Willis after hearing new evidence of innocence, whereas Willingham had been executed. In the months following Willis’s freedom and Willingham’s execution, the Chicago Tribune published an article comparing the similarity of the two cases and their incongruous outcomes. Officials with the Innocence Project stumbled upon the article and brought it to the commissioners’ attention.

Benningfield resigned in early 2007 for personal reasons, leaving the group without a leader. That’s when commission member Sam Bassett stepped up and informally became the chairman. Perry officially appointed Bassett to the position in December of that year, and for the first time, the commission had a champion.

***

Sam Bassett practices criminal defense law in Austin. His office only takes up one room of what used to be a two-story brick home, facing the Travis County courthouse. The blue carpet lines the entire office, and the building creaks with each step.

Bassett wears a white button down shirt and a red tie that lies crooked on his chest as he sits down. He looks out of one of the two wall-sized windows when he talks about the commission, discussing his nostalgia but even more, his disappointment.

Bassett had hopes for the commission: in five meetings under his chairmanship, the commission set up processes, an office and a reporting system for complaints. They hired staff and created a website. Bassett wanted to start a liaison between crime labs and their different stakeholders to talk about the National Academy of Sciences report on the latest forensic sciences. He wanted roundtables where people from various fields would meet to discuss the report and how they would handle forensic science as it evolved.

But perhaps the most lasting achievement was to convince the commission to examine the Willingham case. The panel hired arson expert Craig Beyler to analyze the science behind Todd’s conviction. In July 2009, Beyler concluded in a report there was not enough evidence to definitively determine arson. The commission was scheduled to hear testimony from Beyler during its September meeting.

But three days before the session, Governor Perry replaced his four appointees and named John Bradley as the new chairman of the commission. Sam Bassett was one of the political casualties.

“I was disappointed that a commission that I saw that should be a non-partisan, non-political place was interrupted, interfered with by politicians and political agendas,” Bassett told me. “I think maybe the governor’s office had a fear that we were going to write some scathing report that this shows an innocent man was executed.”

“The fact of the matter is I don’t think we’ll ever know if he’s guilty or innocent. I never even thought we would go down that road. I thought it was going to focus on forensic science, and I hope it still does.”

***

Despite the setback, the Willingham case remained the potential holy grail the anti-death penalty movement has been looking for. While several men have been freed from death row because of new evidence or the discrediting of the case against them, no one who has been executed since capital punishment was reinstated more than 30 years ago has been conclusively determined to be innocent. The movement needs an innocent victim to convince lawmakers to suspend executions in a state where the death penalty remains popular.

One day, Eugenia Willingham, Todd’s stepmother, saw a news clip with a picture of a woman with an anti-death penalty group. The woman wore a shirt with Todd’s face and “I am an innocent man” printed on the back of it.

“You know that should be me up there, representing him,” Eugenia thought out loud.

And so began her journey to help Todd, post-mortem. She joined forces with Todd’s cousin, Pat Cox, and the two women began to attend the Forensic Science Commission meetings in January 2008 with two missions: to clear Todd’s name and to ensure the same thing did not happen again to someone else.

For three years, they have attended commission meetings, given interviews and campaigned on Todd’s behalf.

They asked for a special court of inquiry to determine whether Willingham was wrongfully convicted and executed. Gerald Hurst and another arson expert John Lentini testified in support of their cause — Lentini said the case suffered from BS: bad science. But after the court had heard for hours of testimony challenging the Willingham verdict, an appellate court granted the Navarro County District Attorney R. Lowell Thompson a stay that prevented suspending presiding Judge Charlie Baird from ruling. The Willingham family turned next to the Forensic Science Commission.

***

The first thing John Bradley did when the governor named him chairman of the commission was to cancel the meeting where Craig Beyler was supposed to appear.

Bradley’s reasoning: he needed time to review the case.

Then, he suggested that the panel investigating Todd’s case meet in secret so members could not be swayed by outside agencies. The commission skirted the state Open Meetings Act, which mandates that all government entities must conduct meetings in public and give notice of any upcoming session. The act did not apply because the four-member panel did not meet a quorum.

Bradley seemed to be in no hurry. Six months later, he said before the entire commission that Willingham’s case was “very much in its infancy,” and provided no timetable for implementation or completion.

That summer, Bradley first questioned whether the commission had jurisdiction to investigate the Willingham case at all. He drafted a letter to Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office, but neglected to send it immediately.

After several detailed and contentious meetings, the commission unanimously concluded that the science at the time of the Willingham investigation was flawed, but members failed to conclude whether the fire marshal and other investigators were professionally negligent or were merely following 1991 investigation methods as best they could.

Members began to draft a report on their conclusions but were stymied after Bradley asked them to accept the finding that the fire investigators had performed under the standards at the time and could not be held professionally negligent. Several commissioners who had reservations about the conclusions fought back and did not accede to Bradley’s request.

The next month, some members again criticized Bradley after he called Willingham “a guilty monster” in an interview with the Associated Press. Commissioner Sarah Kerrigan said Bradley’s comment “muddies the waters,” on the issue. The commission, she argued, was meant to rule on the forensic science used to convict Willingham, not on his guilt or innocence. Bradley defended his comments and blamed outsiders, like New York lawyers, for seeking to exploit the commission to promote Todd’s innocence.

“I’m not going to sit by and watch the commission’s reputation be used in that manner,” Bradley responded. “The focus of the commission should definitely not be on the agenda of New York lawyers. It should be on forensic science. The rest of it is politics and a circus sideshow.”

***

It wasn’t until January 2011 that the commission finally heard testimony from arson experts and officials from the state fire marshal’s office. The meeting marked the first time in the investigation that the commissioners could question the experts, including Craig Beyler.

Beyler said he had not changed his opinion since he wrote his report in 2009. Most of what investigators knew in 1991 was drawn from their experiences and experiments. “The profession was bootstrapping itself at the time,” he said of the original investigation. “It understood it was behind.”

Techniques were passed from fire investigator to fire investigator, meaning there was no uniform standard, Beyler said. Not everyone might agree on a definitive conclusion to the Willingham case, he said, but they could agree that many of the arson indicators the fire marshal found were in fact unreliable.

Both Beyler and a second arson expert John DeHaan, who wrote the leading fire investigative textbook, agreed that the fire marshal, now deceased, should not have eliminated all other possible causes besides arson and should have therefore concluded the cause of the fire was undetermined.

Bradley challenged the Beyler and DeHaan’s conclusions.

“By undetermined, you’re not excluding arson?” he asked Beyler.

“By undetermined, I mean undetermined,” Beyler replied.

Commissioner Kerrigan asked if Beyler still held the same opinion as he did in 1991.

“It’s even more strongly the case as time moves along,” he said. “The support for determination that these were arson fires gets less and less.”

DeHaan criticized the original fire investigators’ failure to document in detail the evidence they found when they searched Willingham’s home. “In many cases, it was a single line in a report,” he said. “Especially in a capital case where one would expect extensive review down the judicial process, one would expect full documentation. It was certainly my practice then. Everything that was documented could have been accidental as well as an intentional fire.”

Bradley attempted to discredit the two witnesses, citing errors they had made in previous cases. “I’m not quibbling with your opinion,” Bradley told Beyler. “I want to make it clear that it is one that is undetermined at a 20-year hindsight. These investigators did the best they could with the information they had at the time.”

By contrast, Bradley went easy on two witnesses who supported the original verdict.

Assistant State Fire Marshal Ed Salazar argued the fire investigators had followed peer-accepted principles at the time. “Back then, while there was no specific written standard, there was a standard that was acceptable protocol using procedures, policy, and training that they had received,” Salazar said. “They followed it and wrote their report and came to their conclusion.”

Thomas Wood, a 32-year veteran investigator, stood by the state fire marshal’s office original conclusions, saying the finding of arson was justified given the investigators’ training at the time.

“One of the things that is so prominent about fire investigations is that a lot of the evidence is circumstantial,” Wood said. “The totality of the evidence is what the majority of our calls are made on, but we’re never going to know what was in [the investigator’s] mind.”

At the hearing’s end, commissioners seemed to lean toward a ruling that the case against Willingham was inconclusive. It was not strong enough to definitely declare his innocence, but too weak to justify his conviction and execution. One week later, Bradley called a halt to the proceedings by asking the attorney general — another ally of Governor Perry — to decide whether the commission had the jurisdiction to make such a ruling.

Each side remains determined to defend and protect its position and its actions.

Perry’s critics note that he went through with Willingham’s execution even after he received Gerald Hurst’s report questioning the arson verdict. They contend that the governor’s highly publicized replacement of four of the commission’s appointees obviously reveal his desperation to cover up the truth.

They remain wary of Bradley, who was Perry’s known ally, especially after Bradley’s campaign of delays, said Stephen Saloom, the Innocence Project’s policy director, in an interview. And they see his latest appeal to the attorney general’s office as another stalling tactic.

“Our biggest frustration is the fact that this commission is for the second time questioning whether they have jurisdictional authority to investigate this case,” says Pat Willingham-Cox. “It’s already been investigated to the point where they can make a final draft. That’s just not reasonable.”

In spite of Bradley’s actions, the commissioners have urged him to move forward in the Willingham case, and they released a draft report this April. The draft, while critical of the old arson investigation techniques, did not draw any conclusions about Willingham’s guilt or innocence. It gave recommendations to fire investigators, lawyers and judges but explicitly stated the commissioners would not rule on professional negligence as they await Attorney General Greg Abbott’s decision.

Bradley, who faced a pending reappointment as chairman bickered his way through testimony with state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, earlier this year, and did not impress legislators with the commission’s lack of progress. That means the governor will soon choose yet another person to head the commission.

Meanwhile, the attorney general has until the end of July to make his ruling. Having waited nearly 20 years for a definitive finding, Todd Willingham’s mother and cousin are growing impatient. But unlike when Todd faced execution, they now believe that time is on their side.

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THE BUSINESS OF DEATH

A local funeral consumer group wants you to have a choice

By Pooneh Momeni

Death is the last frontier. It’s scary and lonely and, for everyone, it’s looming. The topic of death is not one you bring up in civilized conversation. People don’t talk about advance directives, body disposition affidavits or coffin sizes at home with their spouse, let alone at a dinner party. But every frontier has its pioneers.

Nancy Walker has fiery red hair and piercing blue eyes. She’s 67-years-old and has worked in healthcare, hospice care, funeral homes and, for a brief period in the 1990s, a car dealership. Her specialty back then was selling fully loaded diesel trucks with dual exhaust, mud flaps and a CD player. Although she was the best at selling these trucks, she didn’t care much for selling people things they didn’t need.

“People would come in and demand the extras be taken off,” Nancy remembers. “I would try to sell to them, but in my head I was happy they weren’t buying.”

The dealership experience left Nancy with a bad taste for sales and a hunger for consumer rights. Now she’s crossed over to the opposite side of the consumer wars—only it’s not pickup trucks anymore, it’s death.

Nancy is the vice-president of the Austin Memorial Burial and Information Society, a local Funeral Consumer Alliance group. It provides biannual price surveys for funeral homes and cemeteries in the area, along with a multitude of information to help remove the stigma attached to the topic of death by placing knowledge and authority in the hands of the consumer, not the funeral home.

The society’s office, about the size of a large walk-in closet, sits hidden within an undistinguished early 1970s building labeled “Austin Groups for the Elderly.” It’s crowded with three desks and shelves filled with a variety of handouts and legal documents about death. An entirely volunteer-run non-profit organization, the group has been assisting people make their end-of-life decisions for over 50 years. In February, Nancy was elected vice-president, and as one of the youngest and most energetic of the organization’s members, she has high expectations to meet.

On a Wednesday morning she is the only one in the office. When the phone begins to ring, Nancy holds it close to her face and peers over her glasses for the “on” button. It’s a social worker asking about burials for homeless people. Nancy tells the woman that most funeral homes in the Travis County area offer services for indigent burials, and lists the ones that don’t.

“I can’t officially recommend any one funeral home, but the family owned ones tend to be much more compassionate,” Nancy tells the social worker, adding a wink to me.

The rest of her time at the office, Nancy answers six more calls, types letters to members and responds to emails. Although passionate and knowledgeable about her work, Nancy wishes she could do a lot more. She wants the society’s website to look cleaner and more professional, but she doesn’t know how to do it. The modest budget they receive from membership dues is largely spent on printing pamphlets and letters, so Nancy devotes her free time to trying to learn web design. As vice-president, she could delegate this job to someone else, but she fears the other volunteers cannot not handle the challenge.

Currently she’s hunched over her colleague Maxine, who’s 74, and giving her a step-by-step instruction on how to select the color printer in Microsoft Word.

“We’re getting older but our membership, relative to us, is getting younger,” Nancy says. “And increasingly, the first place people see you is on the Internet.”

Two miles away, at Austin’s largest funeral home, it’s a much different story. And Nancy knows it.

“It’s like we’re a gnat, compared to them.”

Them

The Cook-Walden Funeral Home is Austin’s oldest, biggest and most expensive funeral provider. The pristine, 3,000 square-foot, colonial style building houses nearly 40 employees, an embalming facility, two chapels, multiple viewing rooms and an indoor fountain.

They stress good taste uniformity. When I asked to sit in on their work, one of the conditions they required was that I wear black closed-toe shoes, black slacks, a white blouse and black coat—the same uniform every employee wears.

John Onstott is the general manager—his employees affectionately refer to him as “the boss.” A licensed funeral director and embalmer, John looks like Dan Aykroyd from My Girl; he’s a sizable man, in height and weight, and gives the impression when he walks into a room that you should be on your best behavior.

He approaches a woman in the waiting area and at arms-length offers his condolences. Linda is here to finalize plans for her brother’s prearranged cremation. John introduces himself as if he, the manager of Cook-Walden, would be taking care of the arrangements, but he quickly passes off Linda to Dave Ives, one of five funeral directors, and disappears.

Cook-Walden has been a fixture in Austin’s funeral scene since the late 1800s, but it has expanded and changed ownership multiple times, and now has five funeral home locations, two cemeteries and a crematorium. During the mid-90s Cook and Walden, the original owners, sold the company to Dignity Memorial; but what neither they nor their website mentions is that Dignity Memorial is a subsidiary of Service Corporation International, North America’s largest provider of funeral services and a company with a long history of controversy ranging from improper body handling to political corruption.

In the planning room Linda is served decaf Starbucks coffee in fine china and Dave begins discussing the prearrangement in case she wants to upgrade anything. She doesn’t. After 15 minutes of arrangement information Linda slides her hands underneath her glasses and begins to sob. “I’m sorry. I just lost my husband two weeks ago,” she tells Dave. “I already know about the process, can we just do what we need to so I can go home?”

Dave is stunned; at an institution where they pride themselves so much on customer service he has clearly dropped the ball. He apologizes sincerely, considerably speeds up his spiel and leaves the room to process the paper work. Then Rebecca Baker enters.

The title on Rebecca’s business card reads “Family Service Counselor,” but she has no problem admitting to me later that she is a sales person.

“I just want to let you know, we do have a hotline that you can call 24 hours a day, and there are Ph.D. people on the other end,” Rebecca tells Linda in a soft voice. “If you’re having a weak moment or you need someone to talk to you can always call.”

Sitting tall, Rebecca keeps her hands crossed on her lap and her back straight, making her tall frame slightly imposing, but she is careful to look engaged. She explains to me later that listening is an important part of sales—a good listener can get all the information she needs. Rebecca asks about Linda’s family, her husband, where they grew up and her career. Then she casually asks if Linda has made her own funeral arrangements. She has not, and Rebecca quickly makes a mental note.

Occasionally the conversation gets strange, like when Rebecca brings up the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

“It’s just crazy to think about, if it had been any worst that whole race could have become extinct, like the ancient Egyptians,” Rebecca says.

Linda pauses, scrunches her eyebrows and says, “Yeah… Do you know when he [Dave] will be back? It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, I just want to go home.”

An hour and 20 minutes later, Linda, with the prearranged funeral plan, is finally able to leave. Now it’s just the professionals.

When I ask why the prearranged plan took so long, Dave says the paperwork just takes time to process—he doesn’t mention that it must all be cleared with the Service Corporation International headquarters in Houston. I start to ask questions about why Cook-Walden advertises the Dignity Memorial brand but not Service Corporation International, their parent company. Dave excuses himself at the first opportunity.

There is a momentary lapse of emotion with John, the general manager, when I bring up the Austin Memorial and Burial Information Society, Nancy’s organization.

“Let me tell you something about AMBIS,” says John. “They reduce the loss of a loved one to dollar amount and distribute a price list to people in hospitals and social workers. Since we’re the most expensive, people don’t want to use us, but we offer the most services. We have the Starbucks coffee.”

The Conflict

The friction between Nancy’s organization and Cook-Walden funeral home is a smaller, localized example of an older and larger conflict between the national Funeral Consumer Alliance and Service Corporation International. Lamar Hankins, the former president of the national Funeral Consumer Alliance and a volunteer for the Austin Memorial Society for nearly 20 years, articulates the heart of the matter as he sees it.

“The difference between [the society] and SCI is that we’re run by people who care about people,” he said. “All SCI cares about is their bottom line.”

And there is nothing low about their bottom line. Service Corporation International owns nearly seven percent of all funeral homes in the United States. Their homes consolidate resources such as personnel, preparation services and vehicles, making their business highly efficient. Last year the corporation reported $450 million in profits according to the Business & Company Resource Center. To put it in perspective, their closest competitor, Stewart Enterprises, Inc., has less than one percent of all funeral businesses and reported $96 million in profits last year—less than a quarter of SCI’s. As the corporation grows so do the number of whistle blowers. But to understand the conflict you have to understand the modern funeral Industry.

The practice of embalming began during the Civil War as a means of preserving the bodies of deceased soldiers to return them to their families. Eventually, the practice became so widespread that it created the modern funeral industry.

Before embalming, the burial of the dead was the responsibility of the family of the deceased. The process requires a means of pumping embalming fluid into the arterial system of the body to preserve it. Then, depending on the situation, the deceased usually requires cosmetic reconstruction—to make the body look like it is sleeping, not dead. It became impossible for families to prepare the bodies themselves, so the task inevitably was passed from the home to the funeral parlor.

Once the preparation of the body was removed from the family a process, which Nancy describes as a ripple effect, began to take place. Undertakers became funeral directors and funeral parlors became funeral homes. The homes offered grieving families the convenience of purchasing caskets and services in-house rather than making their own caskets and going to church for a service. Soon the homes teamed up with cemeteries to sell plots and with florists for arrangements; now the entire funeral from the casket to the guestbook to the lump of dirt on the grave is the responsibility of the funeral home.

With this new business came new sources of profit. The cost of the average funeral rose steadily every year from the early 1900s until 1984, when the Federal Trade Commission stepped in and created regulations governing the way funeral homes dealt with the general public—requiring price lists and allowing services to be purchased a la carte. Although funeral homes are now required to disclose information concerning local laws and regulations, large death care providers still find themselves involved multiple lawsuits every year. In 2008 the Funeral Consumer Alliance sued Service Corporation International over price fixing on their caskets, a case that is still unresolved.

While the conflict plays out nationally in courtrooms, locally, the Austin Memorial and Burial Society feels like David against Goliath Incorporated.

The Casket Room

“Are you okay with this?” Rebecca, the saleswoman, asks me.

We are about to enter the casket room. Beyond the door resides the place where people are confronted with their mortality and the most expensive decision they have to make concerning it. I am okay with it. We proceed.

The spacious room is divided into quadrants bearing labels like “HERITAGE,” “HONOR,” “TRIBUTE” and “LEGACY” with small casket samples like you’d expect to see when purchasing carpet. The fluorescent lights hit the light blue carpet and cast an eerie blue tone on the walls. There are also a handful of full-sized caskets.

Rebecca stops at the first casket--a heavy, black steel. “Anybody can weld a square,” she says in admiration. “But if you look at the edges of this one they’re rounded, which demonstrates the skill in the craftsmanship.”

The people at Cook-Walden constantly defend themselves, whether it’s the prices of their caskets or the quality of their service. Nothing goes without saying. Here in the casket room Rebecca boasts about the products they offer to “protect your loved one,” although she readily admits that no casket or vault will keep the body from decomposing.

The caskets vary in material and style; they offer as well an array of vaults, liners, packages, urns and even keepsake urns, such as necklaces for the cremated remains. But despite all the options there is an overlying uniformity to the whole Cook-Walden experience. Just as all the employees look the same, so too is the treatment of the customers. Every person is greeted the same, asked to sign the same forms, given the same spiel and pays the same price. As far as remembrance goes it’s nowhere to be found in the home, but perhaps the burial is a different story.

A Cook-Walden Funeral

Lamar Hankins has been on the governing council for the Austin Memorial and Burial Information society for 18 years and served on the board for the national Funeral Consumer Alliance for eight, four of them as president. He is an attorney by trade; currently, he creates the price lists and newsletters for the society.He served as an expert witness for the trial between the national Funeral Consumer Alliance and SCI, and he still serves as legal consultant for the national board.

“He’s a big guy,” Nancy says gesturing her arms out vertically and horizontally. “He’s got a big beard and he’s tall, but don’t let him intimidate you, he’s a great person.”

In 1960, Hankins’ parents purchased four plots in Greenlawn Memorial Park, a family-owned cemetery in East Texas located near the town where Hankins grew up. In 1998, Service Corporation International purchased the cemetery from the original owners.

In 2000, following the death of his brother, Hankins and his family arranged to have the cremated remains buried in one of the aforementioned plots. After weeks of negotiation with SCI, the manager of the cemetery, who was a member of the family from whom Hankins’ parents originally purchased the plots, agreed to allow the Hankins family to conduct their own gravesite service and burial themselves, under the condition that they purchase the foundation for the grave marker from SCI, for $432.

“My brother did macramé crafts over the years, so I fashioned a macramé case to cover the container, which I made out of heavy PVC pipe” Hankins recalled. On the day of the funeral, the Hankins family and some close friends gathered at the cemetery. Hankins remembers taking turns digging the hole with his father, uncle and cousin.

“The process was meaningful to all of us,” Hankins said. “And especially helped my mother and father deal with their grief.”

Now, 11 years later, both of Hankins’ parents have passed away.

“I want to do the same thing we did for my brother and bury their cremated remains together,” Hankins said. “And hold another private service.”

This time has proved much different, however. The former cemetery manager has retired, and Hankins has had to deal with an entirely corporation-run facility. The initial reaction of the cemetery manager was that Hankins could not have the same arrangement as before, but agreed to check with his supervisor. After a week of silence, Hankins called and spoke with the supervisor himself, who said that the Texas Department of Banking required that Hankins pay a second interment fee to bury the cremated remains together—a claim Hankins knew to be false.

After contacting the Department of Banking and confirming his suspicions, Hankins got in touch with the manager of pre-arranged funerals for SCI, Jim Kriegshauser, in the form of a well-articulated letter, which has now gained a cult following among pro-consumer blogs. Among its numerous emotionally charged paragraphs he states:

“I would like to resolve the needs and preferences of my family amicably with SCI, but the inexcusable deceit and hostility that I have encountered to simple requests that create no liability or demands on your cemetery or your corporation lead me to believe that SCI’s greed is the only force that drives your corporate policies and the behavior of your employees.”

One month has passed but Hankins still hasn’t heard back from Kriegshauser. “I don’t expect to hear a response,” he says flatly.

Hankins’s mother passed away in 2008 and his father in February, so Nancy asked him the obvious question: “Do you still have your parent’s cremated remains, unburied?”

“Oh yeah,” he let out a soft, exhausted laugh. “But I’ll probably just go out there one day on a Saturday afternoon with my family and bury it; there won’t be anyone out there to bother us.”

“I’m just tired of hassling with them.”

A Different Funeral

About an hour north of central Austin, in Georgetown, Texas, Our Lady of the Rosary Cemetery sits atop 22 acres of mostly untouched Hill Country land, offering patrons an alternative to the impersonal cookie-cutter image of most cemeteries.

It is one of the cemeteries that Nancy claims is a model for what cemeteries and funerals could be.

“We’re not a place of death,” said Sinclair Ender, the assistant director. “This is a place of resurrection and beauty.”

The refreshing absence of plastic flowers, generic tombstones and the unnatural green grass you’d expect to find on a putting green allows nature to showcase its radiance. And it’s quiet---not an eerie Dawn of the Dead type of silence, but the kind you most closely relate to peace. The philosophy at Our Lady of the Rosary is to accept creation as it comes, and as the country’s first xeriscaped cemetery, they actually put their words into action. Xeriscaping is an environmental design in which the landscape is designed with plants that grow naturally in the region and require minimal water.

The result isn’t always flowery or manicured; however, on the day I arrive in April, the Texas wildflowers are in bloom beneath a cloudless blue sky.

The first to arrive are three Navy officers. They practice intricately folding the American flag three times and walk around the intimate gravesite to plan where they will stand during the ceremony. At 10:45, Sinclair arrives and conducts some last minute adjustments—turn on the fountain, place a cross behind where the priest will stand---and says a prayer. At 11:35, the hearse arrives, but with no procession following it. At 11:37, the priest arrives, but the family of the deceased---a 73-year-old Navy veteran---is still nowhere in sight. At 11:45 the family and friends begin to trickle in, in a somewhat unorganized manner. A woman, presumably the deceased’s sister, visits the adjoining gravesite of the man’s parents and with puffy eyes and pink cheeks begins to sob.

“It’s hard being the only one left behind,” she says.

At noon, the scheduled time for the service to begin, everyone is standing under the tent waiting for a final guest to arrive. Then, speeding around the corner, a small silver sedan packed with four members of the Knights of Columbus pulls up and the men quickly shuffle out of the car.

Tthe priest says an opening prayers and asks everyone to have a seat. The parallels to a wedding are difficult to ignore.

After 10 minutes, the sailors begin their ritual with the military funeral song preformed by one of the men on the trumpet. The other two stand at either end of the coffin in salute until the song ends, at which point they remove the flag to uncover a plain wooden casket. They fold the flag in accordance to military tradition and hand it with a salute to the deceased man’s son.

The ceremony was quick, slightly disorganized, tasteful. It lacked the police-led procession and clockwork uniformity of an SCI burial, but the family did not seem to need it. In the final analysis, watching the son of the man weep as they lowered the casket, it’s clear that no amount of preparation or customer service can make the loss of a loved one easier.

Afterwards Sinclair and I walk around the nature paths that surround the cemetery and talk about the funeral.

“We bury our dead to memorialize them,” he says. “If everything looks the same and everyone is treated the same, then what kind of memory is that?”

As we stand at the edge of the cemetery’s lake discussing the struggles of remaining pious in a multi-million dollar industry, he finds himself groping for words. “We just want to help people transition into the greatest journey.” He pauses and gives me a sympathetic look as if to ask, does this make sense? And it does.

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REQUIEM FOR A GADFLY

Thomas Palaima tried to take on the University of Texas's powerful sports program. Guess who won?

By Evelyn Ngugi

It is a balmy Sunday afternoon in April. Young mothers in burnt orange sundresses carry their infants (protected from the sun by tiny burnt orange baseball caps) down the hill of 21^st Street to Darryl K. Royal Stadium. Young children run ahead of their parents. Not far behind, elderly couples carefully shuffle down the hill hand in hand. One man wipes his brow with a burnt orange handkerchief. They all have a chance to inspect the new players for the fall, take pictures with Bevo and Big Bertha, and this year: stick around for a free showing of Toy Story 3 on the 55 by 134 feet “Godzillatron.”

Even in April, the annual Spring Jamboree attracts Longhorns to the Mecca of Texas football for the Orange-White Scrimmage. Forty-five thousand Longhorns, to be exact.

This is the power of University of Texas football. We’re four months away from a serious game, but despite last season’s disappointing 5 and 7 record – the worst in Coach Mack Brown’s 13 years as head coach – the sport has a firm grip on the loyalties and imagination of the community and the culture. It’s not just the games – it’s the TV broadcasts, the $10 million in annual trademark licensing revenue, the tailgate traditions, the families that bleed burnt orange.

This is Texas. Football is a sport, a culture, and a religion. It has its faithful and its heretics.

***

Taped to Thomas Palaima’s office door in Waggener Hall are rectangular clippings of op-eds he’s written.

“Work long and hard for what is right for society.”

“No more excuses for UT’s excesses.”

Added to that will be his most recent piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education– “The NCAA and the Athletes it Fails.”

Palaima is 5’8”. White hair, white beard. Wears a black belt with a brass “P” on the buckle. He looks like the Ancient Greek professor he is. His office looks more like a cave. Ancient Greek texts line the shelves. On the white concrete wall are framed 4x6 photographs of his archeological digs. Corinth, 1977. Prague 1982. Hohhot, Mongolia, 1990.

Palaima got his Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of Wisconsin and came to Austin in 1986. He created the Prehistory and Aegean Scripts program in the Classics department. He is a connoisseur of all things Ancient Greek, specializing in war and violence. “You wouldn’t believe the similarities between Homer’s society and the U.S. during the wars in the Iraq,” he says. He can recite lines of the Iliad in its original Ancient Greek.

But most recently Palaima has earned another title. He’s become “that guy” – one of the most vocal critics of the university’s NCAA program.

It all started in 1999 when then-UT President Bill Cunningham published his new millennium vision for the campus in the Austin-American Statesman. Cunningham saw the university as a “magnet for business" meant to attract and foster new industries.

“Nothing in it about fine art and humanities or the culture of higher education,” Palaima recalls.

Is college supposed to churn out a bottom line-minded workforce, Palaima asked himself, or help students figure out what kind of adults they want to be? “It seemed so one-sided,” he says.

Palaima submitted his response---“Is Corporate Model Right for Higher Education?”---to Maria Henson, op-ed editor at the time. “It was a rather long response and required a lot of editing,” he says.

The finished product got people talking. Big people. Department chairs, deans, executive vice president types, Palaima says. They contacted him in confidence, because they agreed with him. Palaima won’t name any of them even now, but he says the response shocked him. “I just can’t understand how they would write to me saying ‘thanks for this’ but never be vocal about it,” he says.

With encouragement from Henson, Palaima became a regular contributor to the Statesman. “The windows have been opened,” he says. In the following years, Palaima says he witnessed “scandalous behavior and wrong values.”

The commentaries he wrote as a result reflected his belief that on UT’s campus sports entertainment reigned supreme, to the detriment of the students who play on the teams. For his pieces, he spoke with athletic academic advisors, the men and women’s athletics council, UT athletes past and present. “Because of that, I became an accidental expert,” he says.

He quickly came to realize that to afford multi-million dollar coaches and achieve a status of success worthy of an $8 million “Godzillatron,” you have to win games and earn fans who will spend money on whatever the burnt orange logo touches. Coca-Cola, Nike, Budweiser, AT&T and other brands attach themselves and their money to the Longhorn brand through sponsorships.

In 2008 Palaima became the university’s representative on the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, an organization of faculty members from 57 of the nation’s 155 Division 1-A NCAA universities. It meets annually and publishes reports advocating reforms. His predecessor, Michael Granof, an accounting professor had thrown in the towel after five years. “He thought COIA would be ineffective because of the money and power and UT presidential gaga-ism over sports,” Palaima says. “I thought after nine years of writing and looking locally, doing something nationally was worth a try.”

As a faculty member at the third most expensive NCAA program in the country, Palaima had a lot of numbers to get acquainted with. He decided to go straight to the source. He set up an appointment with Kevin Hegarty, the university’s chief financial officer. Joining them in Hegarty’s office was Men’s Athletics Director Deloss Dodds, Women’s Athletics Director Chris Plonsky, and Ed Goble, the program’s chief financial officer. They did their best to answer all of his questions. “We had all the spread sheets strewn on the table, and they gave me a complete run-through of the program’s finances,” Palaima recalls.

They told him that Longhorn athletics generated $138,770,031 in income that year. Football alone earned $87,583,985. But they also told him that the program was committed to a huge outlay of building and remodeling projects, a debt totaling $396 million, incurring annual payments of $15 million. Instead of cutting expenses, the program was increasing revenue. “That’s not a business plan my financial advisor would recommend,” Palaima says.

In 2007, University President Bill Powers and the Board of Regents agreed to turn over management of trademark licensing to the athletics department. The royalty revenues are split 90 percent and 10 percent---for every dollar the Longhorn name and its associated brands brings in, the sports program gets 90 cents and the academic institution gets a dime.

***

"Multi-year contracts are much more prevalent than before, and that's something you have to deal with the universities - with buyout," Mack Brown is saying. That was something that we haven't really dealt with before. And the salaries are much higher. I didn't even realize how high they were until I started looking outside. In a lot of cases some of our staff members were not paid near as much as some guys on the outside."

It’s late January--two days before National Signing Day 2011---and Coach Brown is meeting with the press for a play-by-play look at the state of Longhorn football.

Right now he’s explaining about the huge sums the program has allocated for hiring assistant coaches for a team that went 5 and 7 last year.

Brown hired nine assistant coaches. Eight of them received pay raises. Six of them are brand new to Longhorn football. The program dished out $3.7 million in total for the new coaches. “In the end, we thought we hired a great staff for Texas,” says Brown.

Two years earlier, Brown himself signed a revised contract that made him the highest paid college football coach in history at $5.1 million per year. Alabama’s Nick Saban has since stolen the top spot with $5.9 million.

By contrast, university president William Powers makes $511,491. Soncia Lily, the dean of students, makes $198,177.

While the football program is offering six-figure salaries to new assistant coaches, the rest of the university is cutting as fast as it can. The university’s total 2010-2011 budget is $2.23 billion. The academic core, which pays teaching salaries, student scholarships and keeps the lights on, is $1.2 billion. With the state legislature reducing its contribution by about $29 million over two years, the university has to slash five percent for the 2011-2012 fiscal year. UT enacted a hiring freeze in February 2009. That saved $7 million. A UT system-wide salary freeze followed suit.

At the time of Brown’s pay raise, Palaima was on the Executive Faculty Council. “They sent the email before the Christmas break, you know how they time things,” he recalls. “Just like sending bad news on a Friday. By the time they notified us, we weren’t able to muster a quorum. It was absolutely insane.”

The available council members met days later and although it was unofficial, passed a resolution calling the pay raise "unseemly and inappropriate." They voted 23 to15 in favor. Four members abstained. Powers was one of them.

***

To find Tom Palaima’s counterpart in the sports world, go to Ernest Cockrell Jr. Hall, the engineering building. David Fowler, head of the Men’s Athletic Council, is an architectural engineering professor. The salary freeze applies to him as well. Still, he’s an ardent defender of the sports program and its expenditures.

As chair of the council, Fowler serves as an advisor to the president, evaluates the athletic budget, and takes part in student athlete initiatives like Major Exploration Night, a dinner conference for freshman and sophomore athletes to fine-tune their degree plan and career goals.

Fowler says his interactions with Palaima are cordial, although the two professors wildly disagree. He says Palaima simply doesn’t understand how truly valuable the sports program is. “When you get a degree from UT, it’s huge and everybody takes notice,” Fowler says. “And sports is a great reason for the desirability of that brand.”

Fowler explains that sports often serve as the launching pad and introduction to the greater Longhorn culture. Take Billy Joe “Red” McCombs, a UT alumnus who co-founded Clear Channel Communications, the largest owner of full-power radio stations in the country. He made Forbes magazine's 400 Richest Americans list in 2005. McCombs’s first big donation to the school was $3 million to Women’s Longhorn Softball in 1997. Three years later, he donated $50 million to the business school – the largest single gift in the university’s history. “It started with sports, but that opened him up and he saw a need in the academic world,” says Fowler.

President Powers echoed the same point in his blog Tower Talk. “Athletics is a key way we connect donors to the University and our academic programs,” he wrote.

“I travel around the world quite a bit, and if I’m wearing UT gear, people will come up to me and say ‘Hook ‘Em!’” Fowler says. “We’re so well-known and the sports program is a big reason for that. It’s a great brand, UT Longhorns.”

Of course, the people who truly power the brand aren’t the coaches or the alumni, but rather the student athletes.

***

Shon Mitchell graduated from LBJ High School in Austin in 1993 as an All-American, one of the top high school running backs in Texas. He remembers scouts visiting his school. “They come watch you practice, see if you fit the criteria as far as your grades,” Mitchell says. “Make sure you’re the type of player they want on the team.”

Mitchell says he didn’t take his grades seriously in high school and had to go to Blinn Junior College. John Mackovic, then UT’s head coach, promised Mitchell that if he continued the football process and did well in junior college, a scholarship would still be on the table. And it was. In 1995, Mitchell became a Longhorn. He and future Heisman Trophy winner Ricky Williams led the team to two consecutive conference titles.

And what about grades? The truth of the matter is that the academic services available to UT athletes rival those of most of the country. Longhorn Pride is the name of the academic initiative. It enlists a team of 88 mentor-tutors exclusively for athletes. Each freshman athlete is assigned to one. There’s mandatory study hall. The pressures of academic and athletic performance is a juggling game, much like pursuing a journalism degree while freelancing. It just comes with the territory.

“That's what I try to tell kids – it's hard,” Mitchell says. “Watch film. Go on flights to away games yet focus for a test you just studied for. Sure we had tutors and you got your study hall to sit in there for an hour and concentrate on your grades, but still.”

The pressures, Mitchell says, have only increased since his time at UT. “At the time it wasn't a big ‘go pro’ talk,” he recalls. “Our coaches didn't like you talking about going pro at the time. Just stick to the program. They didn't really push us. Nowadays it's a different process. They put the NFL into their heads and it's a different focus on keeping that 2.0.”

After two seasons, Mitchell did leave for the pros. In 1997 he became a 49er and moved between different indoor and outdoor leagues. “I was a journeyman,” he says. “I saw Europe. I got a chance to see a lot of places that I wouldn’t have, coming from East Austin.”

Mitchell didn't feel exploited as a student athlete, he says. Football is his passion, and Longhorn football allowed him to move on to bigger and better things. Academic tutors and football coaches were available to help him achieve any goal he wanted. "They were really there to hellp me," he says.

After a knee injury cut short his pro football career, Mitchell decided to return to Austin for his degree. “I called up academic advisors and Brian Davis got me back enrolled,” he says.

Yes, it’s much easier being only a student, Mitchell says. “I can focus on getting that 3.0,” he says. “I ain’t got to lift weights, watch film of practice, watch film of opponents. I ain’t got to do none of that.”

In May 2009, he earned his degree in Youth and Community Studies. He was 35. “I always wanted to be the first one in my family to graduate and I did that,” he said. “I got my degree, and I’m happy.”

Now, Mitchell lives in East Austin and is a manager at Hit Center Austin, an athletic training facility. “I'm trying to get these young athletes to be good student athletes, focus on both,” he said. He even has a top recruit headed for UT Austin soon.

In 2005, NCAA created the Academic Progress Rate, to track student movement toward graduation. A passing grade is 925, the equivalent of a 50 percent graduation rate. The latest available data from NCAA is for 2008-2009, and football earned a 947.

The Graduation Success Rate groups athletes in six-year cohorts for graduation. The 2009-2010 graduating class enrolled in 2003. Their GSR is 79 percent, compared to the general student body’s rate of 80.7 percent. The NCAA created its own rubric because the federal government’s graduation rate for student-athletes didn’t take into account students who left for the pros, mid-year enrollees or those who transferred and graduated at another institution. The federal rate for that same 2010 class is 64 percent.

Palaima isn’t buying the NCAA’s numbers. If a student doesn’t make the grade, Palaima points out, he’s dropped from the program and usually transfers to another school. The fact that the student failed in the first place is ignored. The rubric is set up to allow academics to take a back seat to athletic performance. Under the NCAA rules, a student can fulfill the requirements yet still fall a full year short of graduation even after four years in college. “It’s all a smokescreen,” he says.

Most people see Shon Mitchell as a success story, but to Palaima, his is a cautionary tale, one of some things done right and some things done wrong.

According to an NCAA survey released at its convention earlier this year, student athletes at Division 1 schools like Texas spend 43.3 hours per week on athletics during football season. That number decreases to 42.1 hours for baseball and 39 hours for basketball. Women’s basketball reported 37.6 hours per week.

The allowable maximum, according to NCAA regulations, is 20 hours.

“I can’t even imagine that,” Palaima says. “That’s a full time job. NCAA has the information right there and they don’t do anything about it.”

Well-funded tutoring facilities and increased one-on-one academic advisor attention can’t replace favorable studying conditions. “The system’s almost set up to ensure they fail,” Palaima says. “It’s a flaw in the structure.”

If you’re an athlete with talent suitable for UT’s top-notch program but could benefit academically from time in junior college like Mitchell, then being a Longhorn is doing you a disservice. It’s good to reach for the apple, Palaima says “but because the coaches are so highly paid, you have to generate the money to pay them. You got to win. Which means bringing in athletes that are better suited elsewhere.”

He questions whether the sports department has the best interests of the student athlete at heart, citing the Buck Burnette case.

It was November 2008 and Barack Obama has just been elected President of the United States. Burnette, a sophomore backup lineman, updated his Facebook status shortly after: “All the hunters gather up, we have a #$%&er in the whitehouse.”

The next day, he was not only dismissed from the team for his racist remark, but transferred to Abilene Christian University. His comments made national news. So, crisis averted, right? Wrong, Palaima says. “I could see a big business, a professional sports team sweeping this under the rug, but a school institution should address the problem in a way that helps the whole,” he says. “They had a damage control mentality.”

There was no reference counseling or team discussion, even though many of Burnette’s teammates were African American. Instead of turning Burnette’s offense into a learning experience, Longhorn officials simply killed the messenger.

“They’re very protective of reputation,” Palaima said. “Which is not necessarily in the interest of the student athlete. They dropped that kid so fast…”

Palaima was equally shocked when UT signed Jamie Carey to the women’s basketball team in 2002, after her previous school, Stanford, advised her to never play again because of recurring concussions. (She successfully played as a Longhorn for three years and was drafted into the WNBA).

So what is UT supposed to do? Treat student athletes like students who play sports, not athletes who have to be in school to keep playing here, Palaima says.

He laments that virtually no university has figured out how to balance sports and academics in a meaningful way. The latest report of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics said 95 out of 114 university presidents surveyed said they felt hopeless about NCAA reform. “But the truth is nobody’s got it right because nobody’s trying,” says Palaima.

***

In April, Palaima made his final coalition presentation to the Faculty Council. For the last time, he listed his solutions.

The first is to turn the sports program’s “voluntary” annual donation to the university into a mandatory one. In 2010, the athletic department donated $5 million to the academic side. The thought of applauding a division of the university for giving back to the institution it is a part of is laughable, Palaima says.

Second, instead of splitting revenue from trademark licensing 90-10, sports’s share should be lowered to 40 percent. And instead of handing the money to the president’s office to be doled out as he sees fit, create a fund with oversight from faculty, staff, and students.

Palaima also wants stronger enforcement NCAA code violations. The 2011 college basketball season was riddled with compliance issues. The University of Toledo basketball team had an cademic progress rate of 858. In response, the NCAA revoked three scholarships. Rather than play without a scholarship, student athletes left out of the deal and transferred to other schools.

He also wants to keep sports extracurricular. “Any student who would choose a flagship university because of its football team is no student most faculty would want in their classes,” he argues.

He is under no illusion that any of these proposals will be adopted. In fact, all the momentum is heading in the opposite direction. Just recently the university announced it has signed a $300 million, 20-year contract with ESPN to create the Longhorn Network, a 24-hour television broadcast network for all things Burnt Orange. UT gets $12.4 million per year. Half of the revenue from the first several years of the contract is earmarked for academics. Already in the works are two $1 million-endowed faculty chair positions in philosophy and physics. In tough economic times, it’s a hard gift to turn down. But it gives the university’s industrial-size sports program even more leverage in the battle over resources and prestige.

***

As for Tom Palaima, he says it’s time to move on. He will resign from the coalition after the academic year ends. He’s wrapped up his thoughts in his last two pieces, one for the Statesman, the other for the Chronicle of Higher Education. “It’s a rather thankless position,” he says. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m here.”

He’s written over 80 articles for the Statesman alone, from sports to his passion of history. People know where he stands after more than a decade of op-eds, meetings, debates and interviews. “A voice becomes tired after a while,” he says. “We need fresh and new voices.”

Palaima believes that Powers is a special president---open and tolerant---even though he is a passionate advocate of all things sports. Voices like Palaima’s are free to exist and criticism are welcomed and addressed. Powers is present at Faculty Council meetings and responds to comments on his blog.

Still, Palaima adds, “It’s safe to say I don’t think I’ll ever be invited to the president’s skybox again.” And that’s okay by him. “I don’t like being in the sky box,” he says. “I feel uneasy and I get the creeps. Too much power and wealth, like ‘look at those people down there.’ Our playthings.”

The debate about college sports stems back to 1920, when coaches and presidents argued about football players using helmets. Tom Palaima believes the debate has a long way to run. He’s a realist---anyone criticizing sports at a place like the University of Texas has to be. Still, he says he’s glad he tried.

“I just want to get it on record,” he says. “At least when they go back in history, they’ll see ‘well yes at least somebody tried’. I don’t have any illusions that I’ll change things. The point is that you never know the impact of your words. All of a sudden something happens and they finally get it.”

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TILTING AT WINDMILLS

A small band of crusaders lobbies for mercy in the home of the death penalty

By Allison Harris

The sun set on an ironically warm and cheerful day in February at the Texas State Capitol as 11 people men and women from anti-death penalty groups silently stood outside the gates holding handmade signs. Members of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty were there to protest the execution of Timothy Wayne Adams that was due to take place in a few minutes.

Texas has executed 466 people since it reinstated capital punishment in 1982, more than any other state, and the events have become so routine that few seem to pay much attention. On this particular day, a rally against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to the group’s left overshadowed the anti-death penalty protest. The anti-Gadhafi protestors outnumbered the anti-death penalty crowd by almost three to one and frequently drowned out their conversation with raucous drum beats, chants and cheers.

Still, Angela Diener and Maureen Samuels, members of the coalition, chatted amiably and ruefully about how outsiders view the state through the prism of capital punishment.

“My daughter’s in-laws lived in Saudi Arabia for 20 years,” said Diener, a woman with short gray hair and glasses and casual clothing who is a member of the Austin chapter. “Her mother-in-law tried not to say they were from Texas, because every time they mentioned it, no matter where they went, they said, ‘Oh, that’s where they execute all those people’.”

The conversation turned toward how to influence legislators to support HB 819, a bill that would abolish the death penalty. The coalition claims that life without parole, which was signed into law in 2005, is cheaper than execution. Both women agreed that this could influence budget-minded legislators, even if it’s not the reason they themselves oppose capital punishment.

“I think that’s the only way legislatures will ever decide [to abolish the death penalty]—the cost,” Diener said.

The two women discussed Adams, who had shot and killed his two-year-old son during a standoff with police in 2002 after he threatened to kill his estranged wife. At the trial, he said he had planned to kill himself along with the child. His parents and brother supported his plea for clemency, while his wife supported the execution.

Samuels, who wore a baby pink suede jacket and is a member of the Huntsville chapter of the coalition, said the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles should have recommended clemency because Adams had led an “exemplary” life before the murder. She rattled off the details: he had a religious background, served in the military, had no previous criminal record. Samuels said she had seen the negative impact of war during her service as a psychiatric nurse at a VA hospital during Vietnam.

“You’re given a gun, to kill, and then when they come home the gun is taken away from them, they’re told not to kill,” Diener said. “That, you know, it’s got to be very hard.”

Finally, at 6:21 p.m., Texas Moratorium Network president Scott Cobb, a tall man dressed entirely in black, announced the execution was taking place.

Murmurs spread through the group. The news was hardly surprising. Governor Rick Perry had only granted one clemency exemption during his tenure as governor, and the pardons board had rejected Adams’s plea the previous week. Diener and Samuels left after a couple of minutes.

Anne Mund, who had been awarded the Austin chapter’s volunteer of the year at the its recent conference, stayed a little longer. Mund was dressed casually in a blue sweatshirt with a navy and white bandana tied around her neck, jeans and white sneakers. She had joined an execution vigil three years ago and has regularly attended since then. She said the protests were a way an ordinary citizen like herself could work to end the death penalty.

But did the protest actually influence anyone?

Mund made an expression between a grimace and a smile. “I don’t know it has any impact on anything, but it’s one thing I can do.”

There was, of course, one other thing the coalition could try to do in coming weeks. HB 819 had as much chance of passage in the Republican-dominated Texas legislature as a bill outlawing horseback riding. Still it was a cause and campaign—something for Anne Mund and the small crew of determined campaigners to focus on. After all, even when you’re tilting at windmills, it helps to have a lance—and an unassailable sense of optimism. All of which would be sorely tested in the days to come.

***

Bob Van Steenburg, a bald 70-year-old man in glasses and a dark blue suit, strides to the front of a legislative conference room in the capitol with the confident manner honed in 27 years in the military. He is the president of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and like the army colonel he used to be, he laid out a battle plan for the 15 activists who had gathered to lobby for HB 819.

“I don’t think I’ve used the moral argument from any conversation I’ve had in this building this session,” he says in response to a question. “It’s been cost; it’s been fairness; it’s been innocence and the burden on the counties.”

Van Steenburg was speaking to the group during their lobby day, March 8, which gives members a chance to speak to their representatives. The group hoped to get a second public hearing on the bill and increase the number of representatives who sign on to eight, from the four that they garnered in the previous session.

The death penalty remains popular in Texas despite controversies like the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004. An August 2009 investigative report by the Texas Forensic Science Commission concluded that the prosecution could not sustain its central claim that the fire that killed Willingham’s three children was deliberately set. Still, 78 percent of Texans support the death penalty, according to a February 2010 Texas Tribune and University of Texas at Austin poll. Perry showed his staunch support last year when he condemned a Houston judge for granting a pretrial motion declaring the death penalty unconstitutional.

“Today’s ruling is an example of an activist judge legislating from the bench in blatant disregard of opinions issued based on both the Texas and U.S. Constitutions,” the governor declared in a press release. “Like the vast majority of Texans, I support the death penalty as a fitting and constitutional punishment for the most heinous crimes.”

Van Steenburg spends 30 hours a week working for the group, many of them lobbying legislators. He came to it slowly, and he came to it via the church.

Van Steenburg converted to Catholicism when he got married in 1954. It was their religious convictions that led him and his wife to repair homes in the inner city in Akron, Ohio, adopt two children there and work in a prison ministry in Kansas. After leaving the army in 1991, Van Steenburg recalls a conversation with friends, when someone asked how the country could have ever practiced slavery or segregation when both are now broadly considered immoral.

“The next question is that, ‘What will future generations say about us?’” Van Steenburg recalled.

One thing quickly came to mind. “How could we have ever had the death penalty? And I know future generations will ask the question of us today.”

Van Steenburg began to work against the death penalty in his local Catholic parish. He moved to Austin in 2002, joined the Texas Coalition in 2003, and has served on the governing board since 2005. He says he sees his work for the coalition as public service just like his military service. Even in Texas, where he concedes ending the death penalty will be a slow process, he is determined to lead.

“I’m trained to get involved,” he says. “That’s what you do as an army officer: if there’s something that needs to be done, you do it. I felt something needed to be done to the death penalty; I’m doing it.”

Van Steenburg admits to moments of disappointment since joining the coalition. He feels the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected Timothy Adams’s clemency plea senselessly.

“We’re just inflicting pain on other people,” he says, shaking his head with disgust. “That’s all we’re doing with the death penalty, inflicting pain on someone else.”

He said he copes during such moments by maintaining realistic expectations and telling himself that some progress has occurred. For instance, the number of new death sentences had declined. Ninety people were sentenced between September 2001 and September 2005, according to the Houston Chronicle. After life without parole became an option, the number went down to 50 people over the next four years.

“We can see the attitudes of Texans are changing,” says Van Steenburg. “So our leaders, our elected officials are not assessing the situation like our citizens are, I believe.”

Any commander leading troops into battle needs to prepare them for the challenges ahead. At the same time, a leader must inspire the troops to believe their mission is worthwhile. Van Steenburg explained to his members how their lobbying would help build ties with legislators.

“It creates that, a relationship, so you can go back to them later on and later on then again, with a letter, a phone call,” he said. “And after a while, you’ll gain recognition.”

The Texas House of Representatives has 101 Republicans among 150 members, after 22 Republicans took seats from Democrats in the Nov. 2010 elections and two Democrats switched parties. The coalition would need to influence Republicans to ever succeed. It is, to say the least, an uphill struggle.

***

Afternoon sunlight streams through a window, illuminating a cubicle where Jason Steele, a legislative aide to Dallas Rep. Jim Pitts, listens to two members of the Dallas chapter of the coalition extol HB 819 with his chin propped in his left hand.

“This is an issue that we have a lot of concerns about, and we’d like total about some of those concerns that we have,” begins Paula Keeth.

During the training session, Bob Van Steenburg had told Keeth to emphasize their claim, based on a 1992 study by the Dallas Morning News, that the average death penalty costs more than the average life in prison sentence, since Pitts is the Republican chair of the Appropriations Committee.

“Talking point with Pitts: money, money, money, money, money, money then money,” Van Steenburg had said. “This is another broken, expensive government program that doesn’t work as advertised. It doesn’t always punish the guilty, it doesn’t always protect the innocent.”

Keeth had laughed and told Van Steenburg she knew Pitts had sponsored a bill in 1998 that would have lowered the age of inmates who could be executed to 11 years old. It failed to pass.

Both Keeth and Maria Castillo, who accompanied her to the meeting, became involved in the anti-death penalty movement for religious reasons. Castillo became involved through her local Catholic parish.

“It’s my number one priority, highlighting the sanctity of life,” she said.

Keeth said she became involved 10 years ago through knowing the family of Spencer Goodman, an inmate executed in 2000, through her local Quaker church.

“I knew the family didn’t raise him to kill somebody,” she said. “Even though he did a terrible thing,” she added. “He didn’t deserve to not live anymore.”

Keeth has been in the coalition for three years and spoke to one of Pitts’ aides about a bill to abolish the death penalty during the last session. Keeth said the aide took notes but there was little discussion. She wanted to do better this time.

“I think I was a little too…self-righteous,” she recalled. “This time if it’s a little more open, and like me asking more questions of them, then it would be better.”

Keeth starts by giving statistics about the death penalty, emphasizing that 15 states do not have executions (Illinois became the 16^th earlier this year). She says new death sentences have declined after peaking in 1999 now that life without parole is an option.

She also brings up the issue of innocence, noting that Texas has exonerated 12 people from death row since 1973.

“If someone is in prison, you can get them out,” Keeth says. “But if they’re executed, there’s nothing you can do for them,” she finished.

“I understand that argument, yeah,” Steele replies with a smile.

She then makes the budget saving claim.

“Cost saving is the word, yeah,” Steele says, leaning back and forth in his chair.

Then Keeth hits a roadblock. Steele says his boss will not make a statement on his position until the bill comes to the House floor—which it clearly won’t. Keeth asks if Pitts will support a public hearing in the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee.

“Well that would, that would be up to the chairman, Pete Gallego,” says Steele. In other words, not a chance.

Still, Steele doesn’t sound totally unsympathetic to their cause. “When capital punishment was set up, it was set up to be a deterrent,” he says. ‘From what I’ve learned, and this is just from my teaching, is that capital punishment right now is not an effective deterrent.”

After leaving the room, Keeth says she is pleased with how the meeting went. Steele was knowledgeable, brought up the deterrence issue without prompting and engaged the women in a conversation.

Still, she knows Pitts won’t be supporting HB 819. “Unless they have to vote on something, they can really avoid coming out on one side or the other until they actually have to vote.”

***

Bob Van Steenburg sits at a table in the Capitol Bar and Grill with a small black spiral notebook outlining his meetings for the day. He is wearing a dark blue suit and carrying a small canvas suitcase. Today, he will meet with aides from five offices, four of which he had visited three or four times already. It’s Thursday, March 24, and a public hearing on HB 819 will likely be scheduled for next Tuesday. He’s making a final push to increase the number of representatives signing onto the bill while it still matters.

His first visit of the day is with Bernie Aldape in Rep. Veronica Gonzalez’s office. He doesn’t expect Gonzalez, a Democrat from McAllan, to sign on.

Aldape stands up to greet Van Steenburg at his desk when he walks in.

“We’ve got the information to her,” Aldape tells him. “I think she’s kind of formulating her position.”

Van Steenburg reminds Aldape the public hearing is next Tuesday.

“I saw it when I went up, so I was like ‘oh, got to make sure she gets it,” Aldape replies.

“That’s as good an answer as you can get,” Van Steenburg says after the meeting. “It’s on her desk.”

He tries to spin the inconclusive results in a positive light.

“We’re getting out there, we’re getting our name out there and that’s what counts,” he says.

Next is the office of Ron Reynolds, a freshman Democrat from Missouri City whom the group has never contacted before. Jennifer Brader, Reynolds’ chief of staff, leads him to her back office. She interrupts his introduction to the group, saying she is familiar with the group since she has worked at the Capitol for a long time. She says the representative supports a moratorium on the death penalty, but she’s not sure where he stand on repeal.

“We don’t think a moratorium does much,” Van Steenburg tells her. “It’s harder to do than repealing the death penalty, and it isn’t enough.”

He explains that for the governor to call a moratorium, the state constitution would have to be changed, requiring approval by popular vote. He says the effectiveness of a proposed commission depends on who is appointed to it.

“In our political environment in our state, it’s not going to be a good commission,” Brader says.

Van Steenburg tells her 34 states have the death penalty, but only 10 use it extensively. He says it’s likely that Texas has executed innocent people. She agrees, and he brings up the Cameron Todd Willingham case.

“I was just, just astounded,” Brader said, referring to a TV special she saw on the case. “It just looked to me like the man was innocent.”

Van Steenburg returns the conversation to the moratorium issue, noting that Illinois had had a moratorium for 10 years before repealing the death penalty. It is the fourth state to do so in the last 10 years. He notes a reduction in death sentences, including only eight new death sentences in 2010. “It’s coming,” Van Steenburg said. “The end of the death penalty is coming. And I’ll tell you, even in Texas, there are changes in attitudes.”

Brader promises to talk to Reynolds. After he leaves, Van Steenbirg says he’s very pleased with the initial meeting with Brader and hopes to talk to Reynolds soon.

“Obviously, she is aware of the issue, I would say leans positively toward the issue,” he says.

Von Steenburg’s last meeting is with Ryan McHutchion, in the office of Naomi Gonzales, an El Paso Democrat. McHutchion leans against a chair in the front office.

“Actually, I’ve not had a chance to talk about it,” he says.

Van Steenburg tells him he will send a follow-up email and leaves. Walking down the corridor, he rubs the back of his head.

“I have no idea what to do with that,” he says and gives a weary laugh.

Van Steenburg’s only got three lawmakers signed onto HB 819—one less than last year—and the hearing is four days away. He plans to email three or four other people besides McHutchion.

***

Bob Van Steenburg arrives at the Texas State Capitol for a public hearing on HB 819 in the House’s Criminal Jurisprudence Committee at 10 a.m. with his wife Jean. The public hearing doesn’t start until 2 p.m., and it doesn’t get around to HB 819 until 8:30.

Pete Gallego, the Alpine Democrat who chairs the committee, calls Representative Harold Dutton, Jr. from Houston to introduce HB 819. Stepping up to the podium, Dutton starts by acknowledging that the bill will not pass the committee, but explains he is doing this for moral reasons.

“Every session, the Legislature reauthorizes the death penalty statute in Texas,” he says, adding “we do that by omission, because we don’t do anything about the death penalty.”

The case he attempts to make is strictly about morality. “When someone is executed after this session ends, I hope you’ll do what I do. I say a prayer, and I ask God to forgive me,” he says, his voice deepening with emotion.

Over the course of his introduction, three more members of the committee enter the room. The parade of witnesses begins. Delia Perez Meyer, a member of the Texas Moratorium Network, testifies that her brother, Louis Perez, a death row inmate, was wrongly convicted of murdering two women and a 10-year-old girl in 1998.

“My brother is a wonderful, loving, precious human being, and I’ve seen him every week for the past 13 years travel to death row,” she tells the committee.

The next witness, Gloria Rubac of the Houston-based Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement, presents statistics on the cost of the death penalty.

“It is too damn expensive,” she says, speaking directly to Stefani Carter, a black Republican from Dallas elected in 2010. Carter tilts her head to the left. “It costs three or four times more to execute somebody than to lock them up for the rest of their life,” she adds.

Moving along, Gallego calls Deets Dufour, the director of the Criminal Justice Ministry of the Catholic Diocese of Austin. Dufour tells the committee members he used to support the death penalty but changed his opinion after comparing homicide rates in states with and without the death penalty and finding states without the death penalty had lower rates. “It just may be, with the death penalty, that we are creating a culture of death that executes kill about twice as many Texans as we really have to kill,” he says.

Dufour is followed to the podium by a United Methodist Church bishop, a convicted murderer exonerated after 10 years on death row, a field organizer for the Witness to Innocence Project and a spokesman for the Texas Catholic Conference. Gallego, exhibiting fatigue, yawns during one speaker’s testimony. He and the other lawmakers say little.

The only person to speak in favor of capital punishment is Maura Irby, widow of a Houston police officer who was killed during a routine traffic stop in 1990.

“Even in states when they have life without parole, the legislatures can come behind and change that and put murderers back on the streets,” she says.

Irby sighs deeply and describes her husband’s gruesome murder. “The man who killed my husband shot him over the top of a car then strolled slowly in broad daylight around the front of the car and shot him three times around the front,” she says.

Carl Wayne Buntion, the man convicted of James Irby’s death, is currently facing a new trial due to flawed jury instructions. If sentenced to a life term as under the statute in 1990, Buntion would be eligible for parole, Irby says. “I ask you to consider the message this sends to our law enforcement officers and the sacrifices they make every day,” she concludes. “I hope y’all have a nice evening. I’ll be back.”

Finally, Bob Van Steenburg is called. It is now 9:50 p.m., 12 hours after he first arrived at the Capitol.

“I come from a career where the failure to adhere to discipline and the violations of law and standards were not tolerated,” he begins, seeking to dispel the notion that he is soft on crime.

Van Steenburg notes that the pursuit of the death penalty differs by county due to high costs and that the quality of defense varies by whether or not a defendant can afford private legal counsel. “This arbitrary system isn’t reserved for the worst of the worst, but often for the poorest of the poor or the unluckiest of the unlucky,” he says.

He says the number of exonerations suggests that the state may have executed the innocent wrongly. “When a person’s life is at stake, we cannot make mistakes,” he tells the committee, reading from a statement from former prosecutor Sam Millsap. “These mistakes are not just regrettable, for a just society they are intolerable.”

Van Steenburg says the fiscal shortfall should make legislators consider if the cost of capital punishment is truly worth it, and points to a reduction in death sentences since 2005 after life in parole was implemented as evidence of changing public opinion. He also brings up the moral implications of the death penalty. “What does it say about us as a society that’s willing to kill its own citizens?” he asks. Then he sits down.

It’s one month later, and another representative has signed onto the bill, bringing the total to four, the same number achieved in the last legislative session. Official legislative activity ends May 30, and the governor has until June 19 to sign bills. Needless to say, HR 819 won’t make it to his desk.

Still, Van Steenburg pronounces himself satisfied with how the session has gone. The main achievement, he says, was the chance to present information against the death penalty. Still, the coalition has stopped meeting with individual lawmakers since it’s clear the bill won’t make it out of committee.

“We looked at what the Legislature is dealing with. They’re dealing with budgeting and redistricting,” Van Steenburg says. “They’d be looking at us, saying, ‘why are you doing this?’”

Van Steenburg says the group made some progress during the session in increasing its visibility. “We’ve established a relationship with staff members,” he claims. “We’ve made progress. We’ve moved the ball a little further down the field. It’s a long effort.”

After the session ends, Van Steenburg says, Coalition members will continue to publicize their message at local churches to try to reach representatives. He also plans to increase activity in Austin by appealing to the local progressive community here in Austin. “We’ve got to let representatives know that they can oppose the death penalty without endangering their possibility of reelection,” he says.

“I still remain confident,” Bob Van Steenburg says. “We will succeed.”

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It’s May 3 and once again members of the local Austin chapter have gathered in front of the Capitol gates to commemorate an execution. This time, they’re joined by 10 Buddhists from the local Plum Blossom Sangha.

Angela Diener is here again, dressed in a pink, short-sleeved shirt, jeans and sunglasses, along with her husband Herb. Both hold signs proclaiming that “Execution is NOT the Answer.”

Tonight, Cary Kerr will be executed for sexually assaulting and strangling a woman to death in 2001. He will be the first inmate executed with pentobarbital, as Texas no longer has access to sodium thiopental. “I guess they’re letting it go, that Texas can use the new drugs, unfortunately,” says Dieners.

She glances at a table with a purple cloth where coalition members have stationed an analog clock, with a bell and candle. In front of the table, the number 467 is displayed prominently.

The local Buddhists sit with their legs crossed and eyes closed as they meditate. Terry Cortes-Vega taps a metal drum at 6 p.m. to indicate the time Kerr is taken into the chamber.

Diener remarks that it was nice of the Buddhists to join their vigil. “Sometimes when we’re here, if it’s a high profile case, you get a lot more people,” she says. “Otherwise, it’s just the few of us.”

At 6:20, Egan Elliot, a white haired man in a plaid flannel shirt and black baseball cap, will ring the bell and light the candle, marking the execution over with.

As the group waits, a gust of wind knocks over the clock and Herb’s sign. Diener picks up the sign while her husband returns the clock to the table.

“I guess we better enjoy the cool weather while we can,” she says with a laugh. “It gets real hot standing out here in the summertime.”

Finally, it’s 6:20. The two bells are rung, and a candle is lit. The vigil is over.

Three executions are scheduled for June, and clearly the sun hasn’t set on the Texas death penalty. For Angela Diener, Bob Van Steenburg and the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, there is more work to do.

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DESIGNING THE FUTURE

For Chris Pham, fashion is both a passion and a way of life

By Kristen Morado

Christopher Pham wriggles his nose and adjusts his black thin-framed Burberry glasses while he gazes upon the vest he is working on. His small eyes roam the room. Patches of clothing, needles, rulers and measuring tapes are spread among the large sized table before him.

He lets out a huge sigh.

“I spend more time in here, than I do sleeping,” he tells me.

Chris is in the sewing lab on the second floor of the Gearing building at the University of Texas campus from 2 p.m. until the wee hours of the morning. He wakes each morning at 4:30 to head to Texas Crew rowing practice at Town Lake. From there he proceeds to his senior classes, goes to work as a costume sewer for the theatre department, and then climbs the stairway at Gearing.

He and his fellow design students are working to prepare for Innovation, their fashion show and competition, set for April 21 at the Frank Erwin Center, and time is flying by. For all of them, it’s an anxious moment.

“This fashion show is very important to us,” says Chris. “It basically defines us and symbolizes what we’ve been working on during the past four years here at UT. It’s definitely a huge part of our portfolios that will make us or break us upon receiving jobs.”

The vest is taking longer to complete because of its tedious detail.

“I want to place traditional looks inspired by the Henley Regatta, which is the oldest most prestigious rowing race in England,” he says.

The Henley Regatta goes back to March 1839 and is an invitation-only event that draws distinguished rowing clubs from all over the world, each of them signified by their own colors and patterns. Pressed, tailored and ivy-league-like, their dress code is the story behind Chris’s collection.

The vest is the last piece to be done for tomorrow’s judging. The anxiety of hearing the critiques from the panel of judges awaits.

***

It comes to no surprise to Chris Pham that he ended up in the fashion world. Growing up in Plano, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan region, he knew he was different at a very early age.

“I started playing and dressing up Barbie dolls when I was five years old with my sister,” he recalls. “I was that weird kid that played with dolls rather than action figures.”

His parents were uneasy about what they saw. “I’m the black sheep of my family,” says Chris. “My brother and sister are both med students so my parents weren’t exactly jumping up in joy when I informed them that I was interested in a fashion career.”

He started out at Plano Community College, then transferred to the University of Texas. From the beginning, his design talent singled him out as someone special.

The previous summer, Chris spent his vacation time interning for Ralph Lauren in New York City. He impressed his bosses enough that they have offered him a job once he graduates in May. His fellow students believe he has landed a dream job. Although he doesn’t disagree, he has another city and job in mind: designing active wear for Nike. His brother and sister both attend medical school in Portland, Oregon, which is where Nike headquarters is located. To add to the family connection, Chris’s father just recently transferred to Portland for work.

There’s another potential issue at the moment: Chris isn’t sure he will graduate this spring. There’s confusion over the credits from Plano Community. It’s as if his old life is interfering with his new one.

Chris wears his life on his body. On his left arm he has tattooed a message in bold black letters: FEAR NOT. On his other arm, there is a compass pointing to all four directions.

“It’s a compass to remind me to stay committed to what I do and love,” says Chris. “It reminds me to always have direction and move forward. Many people get distracted and lost, this tattoo keeps me going”

For Chris, everything serves a purpose. The tattoo helps keep him motivated. A bright neon yellow Livestrong band on his right wrist reminds him that life is a contest. The Livestrong marathon this past weekend was organized by Lance Armstrong to help fund the fight against cancer. The runners ran all 26 miles including hills. In his work, Chris keeps going just like he’s running the marathon without stopping.

“I’m not leaving this lab til this vest is done and tailored,” he insists.

His fingers graze the patterns over and over. There is no escape. He remains in the sewing lab until the sun rises and it’s time to go to rowing practice.

***

It’s 2 p.m. the following day. As I enter the sewing lab, mannequins on wheels zoom by me. All the senior fashion design students are dressed accordingly to present their second pieces to the panel of judges. They are wearing dresses and slacks, each fit to their own personalities. Chris is wearing khaki pants, with a plaid button-down shirt and brown Sperrys.

The five judges, one man and four women, observe Chris’s second piece, looking at every little detail. They sit behind a table, each jotting down notes quickly. They’ve only got three minutes for each student, so the pressure is on. Chris uses these three minutes to the best of his ability to explain his vest as if he were selling his soul.

He explains the background story of the Henley Regatta and the techniques he used to sew his piece. He points at the vest and drawings, speaking confidently about the work he put in.

“Your drawings are fabulous; these are absolutely gorgeous,” says one of the judges, Stephen MacMillan Moser, Austin Chronicle fashion writer. “You’ve got a distinct flair for elegant detailing and fine fabrics.”

Moser’s brightly colored rings stand out while he waves his hands to punctuate his words.

One judge leaves her seat and walks around the table to touch the garment. She brings her thin black-rimmed glasses to the edge of her nose.

“You are really, really, good, and I don’t say that often,” she tells Chris. “You’re going to have a great career.”

“TIME!” yells Eve Nicols, director of the fashion design program.

***

Slow to shed its cowboy hats and leather boots, Austin is a relative newcomer to the world of fashion.

I spoke this spring Sergio Guadarrama, a prominent New York designer who is originally from Austin. His collections, Celestino Couture, are very successful and are seen on models in many known publications. I asked him about the local fashion industry.

“I left Austin straight out of high school because there wasn’t a market here,” he told me. “The talent wasn’t here, the money wasn’t here, and the knowledge wasn’t here. Now, it’s safe to say that it sure is growing and I can see myself moving back here later on in the years. However, I still believe to start off, the best place is still New York. That’s where it’s at, honey.”

One thing Chris has found in Austin is a high level of respect and support from the design faculty. I enter the sewing lab randomly one day to find Karen M. Bravo, one of Chris’s lecturers, with her freshmen class. She’s wearing a black business suit and is sitting on a high stool observing her students sew mini dresses. She smiles widely when I ask about Chris.

“What separates Christopher from the rest of the students is that he never gives up,” she says. “Never ever. He would do a project and come in during his free time and make another just for fun.”

Her students stop what they’re doing and listen as Karen speaks about Chris. She emphasizes how knowledgeable he is about the industry.

“He’s very informed and updated on current fashion,” she says. “He would come in here and start babbling about what the Gossip Girls were wearing on the show from the previous night. There is no doubt in my mind that he isn’t going to be successful.”

I get my things together and make my way down the Gearing stairwell and out the wooden doors. At the bus stop corner I spot a copy of Study Breaks magazine. There on the cover is Chris with his black thin-rimmed glasses, wearing a white Ralph Lauren long sleeve button-up, standing behind a blond girl who is his model for his women’s collection. She is wearing a navy blue tailored vest with a white long sleeve button-up underneath that he designed.

Christopher Pham Designs for Ralph Lauren. College Student Takes on High Fashion in NYC.

Not long after there is buzz about Chris’s appearance in another magazine. Tribeza is known for its features on Austin music, community, art, culture, fashion and cuisine. Located in the Fashion’s Rising Stars section is a column on Chris along with a photo of him and two models. The first thing I notice is the muscle flex in his right arm as he pretends he is taking measurements of the female model who stands next to him. He’s looking at the camera through his trademark thin-rims, lips pressed together, his tan skin color glowing; he’s wearing a blue shirt and dark blue jean pants. The female model is wearing an evening gown he created and the male model standing next to her is adjusting his tie with both hands. He’s wearing Chris’s Henley Regatta-inspired menswear.

A quote in white letters is spread across the page. “Working harmoniously and in sync with people is something that you should know how to do in my career.” – Christopher Pham

Avalon McKenzie, who is the style writer for Tribeza, conducted the photo shoot with Chris and was intrigued with his personality. McKenzie is known for her work in New York for Cosmopolitan magazine and for her features in Texas Monthly.

“Christopher is one of those people who uplifts everyone around him,” she says. “His positivity is contagious. Working in any creative field, including design, is stressful. You have to be able to generate ideas quickly and have the flexibility to collaborate with those around you. Christopher’s attitude will definitely be one of his greatest assets.”

***

It’s 6 p.m. on a Tuesday in late March and Chris, along with five other senior design students, is glumly retrieving their things, placing their garments in plastic bags and cleaning up the tables. There are pieces of fabric on the floor of the lab, along with scattered ironing boards and sewing machines.

The group is in a down mood because this afternoon they underwent judging for their second piece. It was a semi-disaster. The students had looked forward to constructive criticism that would guide them in enhancing their collections and portfolios. Instead, they complained, the judges were opaque and almost mute.

“It’s just really upsetting,” Chris says, shaking his head. “They’re just not saying anything and not giving any feedback. We put a lot into this and the panel was not credible.”

Still, Chris’s reputation is spreading. The following Sunday he gets a phone call at 8:30. It’s from a friend who works for an events company that is assisting Janet Jackson in organizing her performance in Austin later that evening. She says Janet Jackson needs a personal stitcher for her costumes before the concert---can Chris help out?

“I made myself available,” says Chris. “It was pretty amazing.”

The friend dispatches him to the W hotel where Janet Jackson is staying. There he is confronted with what Chris calls an “entourage of men in black suits.” They give him instructions and he sets to work. Although he never gets to meet the star herself, it’s another enthralling moment in a young clothes designer’s life and times.

***

It’s just two days until Innovation and the designers are practically living in the sewing lab making final adjustments for their collections. This year the directors decided to name the fashion show Innovation because of the new and innovative techniques that the senior class was placing into their designs. There is massive detail incorporated into these designs and every button must be perfect.

Chris is pacing back and forth in the sewing lab rattling on about all the things he has to do.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Death. Destruction. Mayhem,” he cries out. “I’m in a one-minute panic mode with a huge paper due, these collections and a rowing competition in Tennessee this weekend, which means a 17-hour bus ride.”

Chris is feeling the pressure because as soon as he arrives back from the regional rowing championship, Innovation takes place.

A few days before, Tribeza hosted a fundraiser at Perla’s restaurant to raise money for the fashion show. They asked a few designers to showcase their collections, Chris among them.

“How did the fundraiser go?” I ask.

“I was hilarious drunk,” he says. “Although it wasn’t very organized and I’m all about professionalism.”

He instructed all three of his models to show up at the fundraiser to showcase three of his designs. Tribeza only allowed one of them to model for those who attended.

“I was pissed,” he says. “All in all, if you’re going to do something, do it right.”

“Oh well,” he says with a shrug. “And then I got drunk and ate all their food, so joke is on Tribeza.”

“So what now?” I ask.

“Terrible terribleness is next til the fashion show,” he says.

***

April 21 arrives within a snap of a finger. The Frank Erwin Center is crammed with people.

There is a crowd of voices along with the clinking of heels on the floor. The exhibition center is filled with roaming bodies. Illustrations are set up on tables and there is a large round table in the middle of the room with fruit and beverages. Chris speaking to people about his collection. He is wearing a navy blue vest similar to the one he made for one of his models, with a white long sleeve underneath with sleeves rolled up. His hair is spiked up and I get a whiff of a spicy scented cologne.

“I was up all night making this vest,” he says. “I don’t know why I did that, I could’ve actually slept and just have gotten something from Macy’s or something.”

He continues mingling and I make my way around the room viewing all of the illustrations. I run into Chris’s parents. His mom is taking a picture of his father standing next to a setup of all the press covers that Chris is on. His father is beaming. Apparently, having a fashion designer son is not such a terrible fate after all.

I head to the main setting where the fashion show takes place. It’s a gigantic auditorium with endless rows of seats. Stephen Moser is sitting across from me on the other side of the runway. He has his sunglasses on and waves a white hand fan to keep cool.

Fashionably Austin, an online fashion magazine, is present and is airing the show live. The music starts and the lights die down. The spotlights turn on and three models make their way down the runway. Every designer’s collection gets showcased, with an echo of applause after each. A picture of Chris is displayed on a projector on top of the runway as his models strut one after the other. An entire section of Texas Crew members get up from their seats and cheer loudly. Stephen Moser is smiling and clapping on the other side of the runway with his sunglasses still on. He leans over to the woman next to him and whispers something.

The modeling ends and it’s time for awards. Chris ends up with three. He receives Most Marketable and Creative from the University Co-op, honorable mention for Best Collection, and honorable mention for Best Evening Gown. The Texas Crew team section cheers and bursts of “I love you Chris!” echo throughout the auditorium.

The show ends with a runway walk of the designers with their models. Chris enters the stage with his model wearing his evening gown piece. When they hit the end of the runway, Chris poses from side to side for the cheering audience. Eve Nicols gives a big thank you to the sponsors and the crowd starts for the exits. I’m overwhelmed by the extreme talent I have seen. The fashion show is like graduation for these senior design students. They have showcased tonight what they have gained from their instructors and practice over the past four years.

It’s not long before I hear great things about Chris’s collections. I attend a trunk show for an internship that I’m pursuing. Ross Bennett, who is a local designer and is widely known in Austin, speaks to me about the show. He’s wearing Ray Ban sunglasses, a suit with a bow tie, and hair combed to the side. My boss, Anthony, joins the conversation.

“What did you think, Ross?” Anthony asks. “I was unable to attend because I had a meeting, but I keep hearing positive things about it.”

“You know,” Ross pauses. “Innovation was by far the best fashion show I’ve seen. There was this one guy who went all out for his collection. He incorporated so much detail.”

“Christopher Pham?” I ask.

“Yes! That’s the name,” he says. “Christopher Pham.”

***

The end of the year has come abruptly. I walk over to the Gearing building and up the stairs for the last time. Of course, like always, Chris is there with three others. They just finished having a pizza party to celebrate not having anything to do.

He acknowledges me with a huge smile. I notice that he is keeping up with spring fashion and is wearing corral colored shorts with a white Ralph Lauren polo.

I ask him about Innovation.

“It was the most surreal night of my collegiate life,” he says. “It was worth all the sleepless nights, all the shit we got from people, the 10 pounds that I gained from it, and the fat ass that I looked on the runway.”

What about his future plans?

“Well, it’s safe to say that I’m graduating,” he tells me. “I just found out a couple of days ago.”

He informs me that he plans to take a break to travel to Cape Cod with friends and make it to Boston for the Fourth of July.

He also tells me that he won’t be making the transition with his family in Portland.

“If I wanted to pursue Nike in Portland right away, I would’ve already done it,” he says. “So I’m going to work the Purple label for Ralph Lauren in New York. I think it will be a great start for me.”

“I need to go to New York first as a paid employee to figure out if I really love it or not,” he tells me nodding his head with assurance. “I need to do it now or else I’ll never do it and will never know.”

Will he ever come back to Austin? “Sure, I’ll be back to come visit,” he says. “I just have to go experience other things and keep going.”

We all encounter bumps along the road, get confused, and have to make decisions about the future. It's really important that we just keep going no matter what.

I nod in agreement. The compass tattoo catches my eye once more. It’s pointing in all directions.

THE STRANGER

The lonely odyssey of Taylor Adams, gamer and public speaker

By Joseph Muller

“You're such a fucking faggot,” a voice from the TV screams at Taylor Adams.

Taylor's face cringes for a second, but he stares more intently at the screen and keeps going. He's playing Halo 3 on Xbox LIVE, which allows gamers to exchange comments while playing against each other through the Internet. He hits the buttons on his controller harder than before.

“Oh! I just killed you! How does it feel to get beat by a gay guy?” Taylor asks with ill-intent.

Taylor rips off his headset.

Taylor and I have been speech teammates at the University of Texas at Austin for about two years now. I've seen him in good moods, and I have seen him in pain. But something about Taylor that you should know is that he always tries to fake like he's happy. We'll get to that later.

For now, all you need to know is that Taylor has been playing video games for as long as he can remember, and it has always been a source of conflict in his life.

“The video game world is very heterosexual and many of the people playing aren't comfortable with gay people,” Taylor says. “It's a culture shock for them.”

Not only does he get harassed by other players, but playing video games puts his schoolwork in jeopardy.

He spends anywhere between one to three hours a day playing games, which significantly diminishes the amount of time he is able to focus on school. That's an average of 728 hours a year of staring at a Game Boy, computer or television screen – for gaming purposes.

“I've been trying to get my GPA up, but it's just so hard because I have no motivation to do anything. I don't know what I like to do. I just know that I really like playing video games.”

The speech team cares about Taylor so much that we have hosted study parties to insure he finishes his homework.

But Taylor lives in two worlds. There is the macho, overly heterosexual, testosterone-filled world of video games. And there is the second, more welcoming, more accepting but equally competitive world of the University of Texas Speech team.

Speech is an activity where your team competes against other universities across the country for bragging rights. Participants like Taylor create some sort of an argument and support it through the performance of literature. It's a lot like acting, except the performance supports an argument created by the performer.

For example, this year Taylor's bread-and-butter presentation is an argument about homosexuals in the video game community. How appropriate, right? He argues that members of the video game world exclude all sexualities other than heterosexuality.

Essentially, through performance Taylor is drawing awareness to an issue that is dear to him and that most people are unaware of, which is the point of speech – it allows people like Taylor the opportunity to pour out their hearts to a community where free speech is the number one value. It gives a voice to those who may not have the means or resources to speak for themselves. Basically, Taylor is speaking on behalf of all gay gamers.

But two things Taylor loves most, performance and games, are in direct conflict with each other. The acceptance of the speech community is in contrast to the rejection of the egocentric, manly video game world.

“I just get really sad sometimes for like no reason,” Taylor concedes. “I feel so lonely...a lot.”

Taylor admits that this loneliness leads him into trouble. But with speech nationals coming the first weekend in April, Taylor is trying to remain optimistic.

It's been fun watching Taylor perform something he believes in. He has always been a rather timid guy, so it's no wonder he always seems to be just a little bit disconnected from everybody else. I asked him why he feels comfortable talking to me about his situation.

“I'm just glad somebody cares enough to ask,” he says.

Taylor has been preparing tirelessly for the upcoming national competition. He has lost sleep in recent weeks because he is trying to develop his performance to the best it can be.

“It's time that people see what the video game world really is because it's bullshit,” Taylor says. “But I love it.”

Obviously, Taylor is a complicated guy. And here's my question: will his conflicting passions help him find his identity or push it even further away?

***

The walls of our cluttered speech team room are plastered with the team's accomplishments. Three blue tubs filled with articles on foreign and domestic affairs – fodder for building arguments - occupy the floor space.

In the far corner, Taylor sits alone, separated from the other four people, myself included. His left leg is crossed over his right, and he's in a blue and black striped V-neck. His 6'2” frame is long and slender. His mussed, short brown hair looks as if he spent ample time fixing it to give off the image that he didn't give it any attention at all.

He's wearing the new Beats by Dre over-ear white headphones his brother gave him as a spontaneous gift. The $230 headphones blast music loud enough that I know he is listening to Radiohead's new album “The King of Limbs.” Colin, his roommate, looks quizzically at him.

“Taylor, isn't that my computer charger?” Colin asks.

The black cord dangles to the ground three feet below the table.

“What?” Taylor says.

He removes the headphones from his ears and puts them around his neck.

“Isn't that my computer charger?” Colin repeats.

“Yeah,” Taylor says raising his thick, brown eyebrows.

This is not the first time that Taylor has gotten into it with Colin. As a matter of fact, Taylor gets into little tiffs with people all the time. I don't know why Taylor can be so incredibly frustrating yet undeniably endearing at the same time. It's part of his charm, I suppose.

Taylor puts the headphones back on and bobs his head to the beat. He takes a bite of his pepperoni pizza. Colin persists.

“Well, are you going to bring it back home tonight?”

Taylor's eyes remained focused on the French assignment on his silver MacBook Pro, not acknowledging the question. Colin rolls his eyes and leaves. The door slams behind him.

It is not uncommon for Taylor to ignore someone when he knows that he is in the wrong. I will tell you, however, that he has difficulty coping when somebody is upset with him.

For two minutes, the only sounds are scuffles of movement, the air conditioning, the clicking of a keyboard and vehicles on the street.

The silence is broken when another teammate, John Groves, enters the room.

“I need to work on my rhetoric of video games homework,” John says. Rhetoric and Video Games is the name of the course he is taking. “Can you help me, Taylor?”

Somehow through the music blasting in his ear, Taylor's head pops up and he removes his headphones. He smiles. I know this look. Having ignored the issues with Colin, Taylor attempts to compensate by helping John and talking about video games for the next half an hour. But I know the issues with Colin and him are not over.

***

Three days later, Colin opens the front door and walks inside the house he shares with Taylor and one other. Taylor is sitting in the living room on his computer using Colin's charger. Colin's computer has been dead for half of the day, so he silently unplugs the charger from the wall and from Taylor’s computer and heads upstairs to his room.

“Messy, irresponsible and disrespectful” are the words Colin uses to describe Taylor as a roommate. They have lived together for nine months.

“He's disgusting,” Colin says. “He doesn't clean up after himself. He leaves everything everywhere, like food, clothes, mail, textbooks all in common living areas.”

Colin says he knew what to expect from Taylor as a roommate before moving in. However, he did not think he was going to be the one responsible for cleaning up after Taylor. The landlord was living in the house when the roommates moved in, but she was offered a teaching position in Korea, so she left the country, leaving Colin responsible for maintenance.

Three people now live in the house: Taylor, Colin and Kevin Giffin, another UT speech team member. Most of the mess, Colin says, is due to Taylor.

“I still clean the kitchen,” Colin says. “But I stopped cleaning the central areas around December.”

Taylor's messiness is not something particular to his house. I've always noticed this about him, even in the speech team room. Whether it be his computer, backpack, study materials or whatever else, you're not surprised to always find something of Taylor's lying around. But, I always thought of it as a little endearing. When I bring this up to Colin, his whole demeanor seems to sag.

“People acknowledge that he's irresponsible,” Colin says. “But they don't have to deal with it on a day to day basis.”

At the same time, Colin says he finds Taylor “talented, spastic and funny.” This description is one held by many people who know Taylor. He has this quality that just makes people want to be his friend.

Colin is basically our speech team mother, the person who is always there for everybody. He's the one who keeps the team room clean and tidy. So when Colin says that somebody is overly messy, I don't take it lightly. I asked Colin why he thinks Taylor is this way.

“He was never conditioned to take care of himself,” Colin says. “His mom did everything for him.”

Whoa, I thought. That's a tough criticism of a college sophomore. Then Colin told me about the time Taylor's mom came to visit from Illinois.

She cleaned his bedroom and bathroom by herself. Then she said, “I wish I lived closer so I could do this every month!”

So why does Taylor have such trouble taking care of himself? That's what I wanted to learn next.

***

Taylor walks into my apartment at 8:15 p.m. with McDonald's in one hand and a gray JanSport backpack on his shoulders. He's wearing a gray and white V-neck and khaki shorts. The bottom of his shirt rests at his black belt, which he often fiddles with during conversation.

He heads into the living room, drops his backpack onto the floor, plops on the green and red speckled couch and lets out a long sigh. As he takes his two cheeseburgers and chicken selects out of the bag and puts them on the table, he peers at the television.

“American Idol?” Taylor says with disbelief. “I didn't know anybody still watched this.”

Taylor's eyes alternate between the TV and the food. He finishes his first cheeseburger before Karen Rodriguez completes her 1 minute 40 second rendition of Celina's “I Could Fall in Love.” Idol judge Jennifer Lopez was critical of Karen's performance, and Taylor agreed.

After all, Taylor is in the men's choir at UT. We already know that he's on the speech team, but he also did choir and theater in high school. Why all the performance venues?

“Well, I never really got the chance to speak at home,” Taylor says. “I took every opportunity I could for other people to hear my voice.”

He was born in Charleston, Illinois, the youngest of three children. His older brother and sister were in high school when he was born and he describes them as more of an aunt and uncle. He often feels like an only child.

He lived in a house built by his father on 66 acres of farmland. A little over two football fields east of his house is Adams Memorials, the family business. Taylor remembers being forced to work there when he was on break from school.

“It was really depressing,” Taylor says. “People come in and tell us that they need a tombstone for their mom, their grandma, their son or whoever. It's really sad.”

The company started in 1975 with four employees and now has 55 employees and 14 locations. Taylor's mom chalks up the growth of the business to his father's dedication and passion for work. Taylor, however, says that's where all of his problems begin.

“I've always been told that I should work, work, work,” Taylor says. “If I don't, then I'll just get in trouble. I don't know why I should work other than I don't want to get yelled at.”

I've known Taylor now for two years. I know he lacks motivation as a student, but I've never known why. Then he told me his theory.

“My parents would tell me that if people like me then I'm doing things right,” he says. “So I've spent my whole life searching for acceptance.”

When Taylor discovered in fifth grade that he was gay, gaining the acceptance of his family was difficult. Even before he understood the implications of being gay, his parents told him that it was wrong and people who were gay were not going to be appreciated. Taylor pushed the notion of his sexual orientation aside.

Then one day on the bus ride home from a choir trip in eighth grade, he was holding the hand of his at-the-time girlfriend, “but it was just flesh.” He found himself “looking at guys...a lot.” In particular, he was interested in gaining the attention of a fellow male student.

Again, Taylor's parents pushed these thoughts out of his mind.

“The only thing I base my self-worth [on is] pleasing other people,” Taylor says. “I didn't want to mess that up.”

We step onto my balcony, and I look down at the street four floors below us. Taylor pulls out a long, slender Virginia Slim cigarette, which he calls a “lady cigarette.” He begins to fidget with the end of his belt.

Freshman year was when his sexual identity revealed itself to his parents. When Myspace was the leader of social media, it left an option for sexual orientation. Taylor replied, “Not Sure,” and left his computer to use the bathroom. When he got back, his mother was staring at the computer screen in disbelief.

Then his mom got hold of his phone and read his text messages. This was the first time that his parents received direct confirmation of Taylor's sexual orientation. When Taylor got home, his mom confronted him again, crying, pleading.

“You don't have to be gay,” Taylor remembers her saying. “Please don't. And if you do, don't tell anybody. I beg you.”

The next day at a theater rehearsal, Taylor's mom randomly walked backstage, asking, “Did you tell anybody? Please say you haven't mentioned it to anybody.”

Mortified, Taylor came home that evening to find his parents waiting for him in the living room. His mother was crying, and his father was silent. The session felt like a botched intervention.

The parents shelved the issue for three years. It was never discussed. Then the summer after his senior year happened.

Taylor was excited to get accepted by UT Austin, “a place far away from home.” He was working at Green Tree, a landscaping business, in order to get out of working with his father.

It was a Wednesday night and Taylor was in the living room playing Sony PlayStation. His dad came in after getting back from work and immediately became infuriated.

“You're so goddamn lazy,” his father said.

He grabbed the controller from Taylor's hands and threw it against the wall. He grabbed Taylor's cell phone, maneuvered his way into the garage and threw it on the ground.

“Why are you being such an asshole?” Taylor demanded.

Taylor, flabbergasted, fled. When he closed the front door, the calmness of the outside startled him. He went to a friend's house. His parents did not know where he was.

Taylor felt alone.

He continued to work at Green Tree and was miserable for the few days of being a runaway. Two nights later, Taylor returned home. He was greeted by an uncomfortable father and a sobbing, pleading mother.

“We 'made up,'” Taylor says using air quotes to indicate the opposite.

Feeling awkward in his own home, Taylor went back to his friend's house. Two other classmates were there. The three boys were unhappy to see him.

“They told me we couldn't be friends anymore,” Taylor says. “When I asked them why, they told me it was because I was gay.”

Not knowing what to say, Taylor went home and went straight to bed. He had no one to trust.

When he arrived at work the next morning, his manager told him that his services were no longer needed at Green Tree.

Confronted by his father, ran away from home, betrayed by a confidant and fired from his job. All in four days.

Still on the porch, Taylor takes a deep breath. The time on his cell phone reads 11:21 p.m. It rings.

“It's my dad,” Taylor says. “I have to take this.”

***

Taylor excuses himself and goes to the kitchen. I sit on the couch. Taylor picks up his phone and turns around, clearly establishing a private conversation. I can tell he is using an overly friendly voice.

“Yeah, that sounds great,” he says. “Thanks so much!”

When the conversation ends, Taylor drops his head, takes a moment to collect himself, sighs and joins me on the sofa. I ask again about his fascination with video games. Taylor appears sullen.

I’m staying away from asking about the phone call. Instead, I change the subject to something more immediate to his mind: speech nationals, coming up in two weeks.

“I can't wait,” Taylor says. “I just want to show everybody what I feel. I think a lot of people don't know about it and can actually learn something.”

Again, Taylor's selection argues that the video game community marginalizes all sexualities except heterosexuality. And two weeks later, he has the chance to try and do just that.

When the day of departure arrives, 18 teammates, Taylor and myself included, gather in front of the speech team room to wait for rented vehicles to travel to Kearney, Nebraska. Taylor looks more tired than anything. As the rest of us grab breakfast tacos, Taylor sits one the nearby steps with his headphones on his ears. He sluggishly makes his way to the tacos.

When the coaches show up with the four vehicles, we load our luggage, find a seat and prepare for the 14-hour trip. I sat next to Taylor and after an hour of being on the road, he leans against the window and falls asleep. Given the length of the ride, the rest of us played van games. These games consist of but are not limited to rhyming games and spotting specific billboards. Anything we can do to help keep the driver alert, we do. Therefore, while Taylor sleeps, it is not only selfish, but a little disrespectful.

He does not seem like himself on the van ride and he sleeps for a long stretch. Of course, when he wakes up he delivers his charming, witty one-liners that everybody is accustomed to, but his demeanor just seems to drag.

The national tournament is a three-day event, but competitors are only guaranteed two days of performance. About 150 people were vying for 24 spots in the initial three rounds. Based on judges' rankings, those with the best results advance to the quarterfinals.

Taylor wears his taupe suit with light blue shirt and brown paisley tie.

“I feel calm,” Taylor says. “I feel really chill about it.”

The tournament begins. College students from all over the nation have gathered at the University of Nebraska Kearney dressed in their finest professional attire.

“I feel calm,” Taylor says. “I feel really chill about it.”

While Taylor is charmed by the camaraderie, his mind is elsewhere – to share his heart.

***

Unfortunately, I am unable to watch Taylor perform, as I am competing in rounds of my own. But my few interactions with Taylor allow me to monitor his deteriorating confidence.

The first time we met, I ask him how his round went.

“It went pretty well,” Taylor says. “No complaints.”

The next time I see him he’s not so sure.

“It was ok,” Taylor says with enough hesitation to indicate greater dissatisfaction.

After his final performance, Taylor looks depressed.

“It just didn't feel good,” he says. “I don't think anybody got it. Like, they just didn't understand.”

He laughs, but the pain in his watery eyes is evident. Everybody from the tournament gathers in the common area to watch postings drop. This is the most nerve-racking part of speech. The postings hold the names of the individuals who advance to the quarterfinal round. And it is time to find out.

I'm standing at an elevated point at the top of the stairs looking down at the competitors, clearly nervous. I spot Taylor anxiously awaiting his fate. The postings are on papers large enough for everybody to read, probably 20 feet in length.

When they drop, a hush falls over the crowd and the only noise heard is the distinct “whoosh” from the unraveling paper. This is called the “whoosh of fear.”

Taylor scans the paper desperately looking for his name. Disappointment falls on his face . He quickly searches the postings again in hopes that he just skipped over his name.

It’s not there.

Clearly disappointed that his heart and soul did not appeal to the judges, Taylor forces a smile while he congratulates his teammates and friends who have advanced to the quarterfinal round.

Taylor is one of the three members of the UT speech team who did not make it through to the next round. Taylor's heart, it seemed, was broken.

***

Back in Austin, I reenter the UT speech team room. Taylor sits in a rolling chair with his feet propped on a table looking down at his Android cell phone. He is playing a video game called “Mother 3,” whose significance he attempts to explain to no avail.

I pass Taylor and sit about 10 feet away from him. This moment is when he sort of passingly mentioned something I thought he'd never say.

“I don't really know how I feel about video games anymore.”

Confused, I jolt my head and look in his direction. He continues playing the game on his cell phone, ironically.

“These past few weeks helped me learn a lot,” he says. “I realize that I can't spend as much time in the video game world as I want to. I'm going to forget who I am. I was trying to live in this fantasy world and speak my mind about the real world. I was so involved in video games, I forgot who I was in the real world.”

Although Taylor is playing a video game while saying this, I can hear sincerity in his voice. The only other person in the room was Colin, his roommate with whom he had earlier trouble. Colin's back is facing Taylor and his face is toward mine. I can see him roll his eyes while Taylor speaks, as if to say that he does not believe Taylor will change his behavior. Although they seem to still have their qualms with each other, I stay a bit more optimistic.

I have noticed a significant change in Taylor since nationals ended, but I did not know if he was simply trying to please other people by putting on a smile or if he was legitimately happy. He told me that he is finally learning what his parents have been trying to teach him: there is more to life than fun and games.

Colin collects his items and excuses himself to class, leaving Taylor and me by ourselves. I guess Colin's absence helps Taylor feel more comfortable and he decides to open up to me about the phone call with his dad.

“It was a really friendly conversation,” he says. “He called to tell me that he was proud of me. He wanted to know when nationals was. He wanted to wish me luck.”

This sort of consciousness was atypical for Taylor. During the conversation he put his phone in his pocket. Although it seems like such a small gesture, it speaks volumes for how serious Taylor was taking this matter. He rolls his chair close to me and looks me straight in my eyes.

“Video games let you feel like you're … accomplishing something. When you finish a level, it's like you're moving forward. I just need to learn how to get that same satisfaction from doing things in the real world.”

It appears that Taylor is now aware he will never be able to change the way the video game world functions, but he's learning about who he is and what he deems important.

He grabs his backpack and heads out the door, his head held high. He is developing a better relationship with his parents and a better understanding of himself. He walks out into a new world.

A game he can play forever.

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