The gift of David’s Ducks

Or How I Spent My Thirtieth Birthday

I woke up along the edge of open water west of Barrow, Alaska the day I turned thirty. I’d been sleeping on a caribou hide on a shelf of ice that extended six miles out from the shore. It was mid May, and in spring’s thaw, the sea ice had begun to split into fissures big enough for bowhead whales to surface and breathe. Big whales, they weighed up to a ton a foot, and the biggest ones could be sixty feet long. They were already migrating through the Bering Straits into the Chukchi Sea and soon they would turn eastward here into the Beaufort Sea. The Eskimo whaling crew I had joined a week earlier was camped at the edge of the first lead of open water. A walrus skin boat perched atop a small block of ice pointed outward, along with a harpoon in the bow, ready for us to push into the water and silently paddle toward our prey when it arrived.

For this Man, Tomatoes are Gospel

The Reverend Fred Swedberg (Photo by David Boeri)

There’s only two things that money can’t buy
That’s true love and homegrown tomatoes

Living in the sticks of west central Massachusetts and growing fruit and vegetables here, I’ve come across some curious, wild and native breeds…of people.

On The Death of TV News Part Four: Sales Tips for the Street

Crime Scene, originally uploaded by freefotouk.

Covering mobsters and the FBI required most of the skills or least training if not skills that went all the way back to my days here. I had to get to know the mob personally. I take a lot of collect calls from prison.—this just in: they’re all innocent. And outside the can, I make a lot of visits. I’ve tracked them, ambushed them, and even dined with some of them afterwards.

On the Death of TV News Part Three: If You Don’t Like the News, Make the News

Vincent J. “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi, originally uploaded by WBUR.

Third in a series

Somewhere and occasionally in this alternative, non-news universe, I managed to lay claim to my share of legitimate stories or subversively slip content by the producers.

Bobby’s War, a story of Hell and Remembrance

Bobby’s War, originally uploaded by WBUR.

“[The decision to invade Iraq] was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions—or bury the results.”
– Ret. Lt. General Gregory Newbold, Marine Corps

“You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.”
– Kaiser Wilhelm to departing German troops, August 1914.

He Should Have Taken the Stand

Courtroom One Gavel, originally uploaded by Joe Gratz.

Click here for a selection of Boeri’ stories on Bulger, Connolly & the Boston Mob.

John Connolly, the one time star of the FBI’s war on organized crime who was convicted of second degree murder yesterday, has been calling me collect from prison for the last year of so. I’m waiting for him to call me today. Now that he’s likely to spend the rest of his life in prison, I figure he’ll be calling sooner or later. In between his endless campaign to overturn his first conviction—on charges of corruption and of giving “Whitey” Bulger a head start before the cops could arrest him—which took up most of Connolly’s first six years in prison, and his new campaign to overturn this conviction, he no doubt will be sending me still more letters.

On The Death of TV News Part Two: Dead People Everywhere…

Axis of Evil News, originally uploaded by Vaguely Artistic.

Second in a series

In November 1963, President John Kennedy was assassinated outside the range of television cameras. From that day on, no President makes a public outing without the presence of a pool camera…it’s called the “tight pool.” It consists of one camera and one reporter following POTUS: code name for President of the United States and FLOTUS, First Lady of the United States. Look closely and you’ll see the tight pool somewhere back in the procession of every Presidential Motorcade: the unofficial Death Watch.

On The Death of TV News Part One: The President has Been Shot

Breaking News, originally uploaded by Martin Deutsch.

First in a series

The President has been shot.

We’ll tell you which President and what country when we come back from the break. Stay tuned.

“He’s dead. But I’m live. Reporting for News Center Five” I was David Boeri.

On Barbara Anderson Carla Howell, Little House On the Prairie and the Non-Question of Question One

Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home & Museum, originally uploaded by Adventurer Dustin Holmes.

I hadn’t seen Barbara Anderson for years when I pulled up to her house in Marblehead last week, a small place tucked behind two big spruce trees with a woodsy backyard and a sense of stay from the confusion on Beacon Hill. Check out the sides of the modest, comfortable, cozy and cluttered home and you’ll find out something telling about the woman who has terrified both Beacon Hill’s ruling class and liberal interest groups for the last thirty years.

Bringing City Streets to the Newsroom

Photo: University of Massachusetts Amherst.

With the exception of EMTs, doctors in ER, and morticians, no industry, not even the military, encounters death as regularly as we in the news media do. So perhaps we can be forgiven for the disproportionate attention and sentiment we lavish on members of our guild when they die, as when Tim Russert was accorded the status of a head of state. That said, the capacity crowd of former mayors and reporters and the thinning ranks of reporters still practicing the trade who attended yesterday’s memorial service at BU’s Marsh Chapel for Alan Lupo was as much a requiem for the business he belonged to as it was a fitting tribute to a veteran who fought the good war.