By Bob Gaydos

Darline Nordone is looking to fill her late brother Lindsey’s seat in the Senate.

   Some lessons last longer than others. My first job with a daily newspaper was with The Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton, N.Y. I was the police reporter.

   David Bernstein was editor, publisher and owner. He wrote the editorials, too. A terrific writer. People loved or hated his editorials.

    One of the rules he had in writing about people’s deaths, in stories or obituaries, was never to use the word “suddenly” in describing the person’s death. Everyone dies “suddenly,” he explained. You’re here one minute and poof, you’re gone the next. He didn’t use the word “poof.”

    However, people do die “unexpectedly,” went the logic. Seemingly healthy people with no major health issues often die unexpectedly. Others react with surprise, sadness or other emotions.

    Such was the case when Lindsey Graham died at 71 on Saturday, July 11. The Sunday morning social media sites were awash in reports of his “sudden” death. The New York Times followed Bernstein’s rule. Graham died “unexpectedly” in their stories.

    Suddenly, Donald Trump had lost one of his primary fan boys in Congress and Republicans, with Mitch McConnell still somewhere between sudden death and who knows, were close to losing their slight edge in the Senate.

   South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster announced, two days after Graham’s death, that a special Republican primary election would be held Aug. 11, to take Graham’s place on the November ballot. He also said, unexpectedly, that he would temporarily appoint Lindsey’s younger sister, Darline Graham Nordone, to finish her brother’s term.

    A day later, Ms. Nordone, who has no apparent political experience, unexpectedly announced that she would run in that special election in an effort to keep her brother’s name and work alive in the Senate.

    Suddenly, South Carolinians are faced with the prospect of a novice politician replacing a four-term senator in Congress and Trump, who encouraged Ms. Nordone to run for the office in her late brother’s place, sees an unexpected opportunity to try to groom yet another woman from a conservative family in a conservative state in the Deep South to come to Washington to carry his laundry.

    Suddenly, Graham’s unexpected demise doesn’t have the same resonance.

                                         ***

    I expect David Bernstein, as liberal as they came, would have approved of this column. I also suspect that Mr. Bernstein borrowed his rule from The New York Times.

By Bob Gaydos

A blast from the past.

I got a surprise birthday present  three weeks ago from my cousin, Tom Nalesnik. It was a surprise because a) It wasn’t my birthday b) I didn’t think Tom knew my birthday was coming up c) The gift itself was a memory of an ever-more distant past d) How he came by it was perhaps more surprising than the gift itself.

Yes, that’s me dancing in the Go Go cage with Crickett in the photo accompanying this column. The photo  is the gift. It’s a framed copy of a story I wrote about 60 years ago for The Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton, N.Y. There’s no date on the article, but I started working in Binghamton in 1965 and I clearly wasn’t covering the political beat yet when I wrote this. Disco was just coming to the Triple Cities area.

I also was quite svelte and better dressed than I am today.

Wow.

Tom said he got the article from my mom, who never said a word to me about my newspaper career. Never. Not even when I got fired. But that’s a story for another birthday.

This one is about time flying. Some call it progress. We’ve gone from Disco to TikTok in a virtual heartbeat. Typewriters, like the one I used to write about Crickett and her partner, Gena, are now museum exhibits. Soon, artificial intelligence will be plagiarizing this article to write a history of dancing to recorded music in bars and of pieces of folded paper called newspapers.

But not yet.

Crickett and me.

I don’t know if Crickett (Karen Levine) ever realized her dreams of publishing a big music hit or breeding racehorses. Or if her partner, Gena Maloney, ever did anything with her love of photography. (See, I did  interview the ladies.)

As far as I can remember, the bright idea to put the skinny reporter in the cage with the go-go dancers came from the photographer, Renee Myrae, an institution in New York newspaper photography. Make for a better photo, she said. That’s why there’s an annual award named after her for the best photography in the state. At least there used to be, when there were newspapers.

Anyway, I “danced” for about 10 minutes, there was applause and, as I noted, no one offered to buy me a drink.

The article wound up in The Sun-Bulletin, somehow made its way to my uncommunicative mom in Bayonne, N.J., who shared it with my cousin, Tom, in Linden, so he could tell me 60 years later that I inspired him to pursue a career in journalism and communication.

Some things are worth waiting for.

***

(Tom Nalesnik’s video commentary, “Whims of Resistance,” can be seen on substack.com, Instagram and Facebook.)