Unless otherwise noted all pictures and text are by and copyright 2004 Mike Strong
 In early to mid 1973 about five or six months after leaving the Air Force (exit date: 8 Nov 1972). Uniform jacket with Staff Sargeant stripes (e5) beard and more hair. |
Mike Strong
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Links to Photo CV pages: Starting - Air Force - Lust - After the Air Force - News Room - Tilly - Kansas, KC-80's - The 90's - Dance Much of this CV is still to be added. It will be some months before I can get to a finish point. But please enjoy this offering as it is. |
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The News Room
WMBO / WRLX in Auburn.
WMBO was AM and was the main station. WRLX was the "follow-along" FM station. In those days AM stations still ruled and FM stations were often just some sort of sideline doing a simulcast or getting someone inexpensively to spin a few records in another format (such as classical), often anonymously, just music and commercials, no personalities.
We lost a news director there, Bill Schnee, because of a story which affected a Ford dealer in town, one of the station's major advertisers. I think the story wasn't even about that dealership but was a national story and had something to do with Ford gas mileage (this was after the 1973 Arab oil freeze). Bill was fired but eventually went to a Syracuse station. (Auburn is about 25 miles from Syracuse). That and the next station told me a good deal about commercial broadcast stations versus freedom of speech. The newspaper experience which followed those two stations was totally different.
Geneva, NY - WGVA and The Geneva Times
I left Auburn for the news position at WGVA in Geneva, NY in late spring 1974. I left a few months later, and joined the newspaper. The shift gave me a night-and-day realization of the difference in morality between commercial broadcasting and print journalism. At the radio stations commercial interests ruled the news, even then. At the newspaper the newspaper was divided into three distinct areas, the newsroom, the advertising office and the printing plant. Walking over to the advertising section was slightly akin to heading over to the red-light district. Never mind that without them none of us in the news-ed section would have had a job.
I was totally protected from commercial or other pressures to shape or avoid news. But I did have to have my notes and research and I did have to bring them in to managing editor, Don Hadley. As long as I could show accuracy I was good. I never had to worry about high-level, high-pressure dealings. That was taken care of for me.
When I joined the Geneva Times (now the Fingerlakes Times) the only position was "area reporter." I really wanted the photo job but Art Foxall had been hired for that only a few months before. Had I but known at the time. I really learned about writing on the Times thanks to my editors. Before that all my writing was for radio, much shorter and in several versions.
An area reporter had to live in and report on a geographic coverage area for the Times. I was hired to cover the south end of Seneca County which is a long north-south county between Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake in the Fingerlakes.
Perceptions, Notes, Memory and Accurate Reporting
Let me say right off, even if someone says they have been correctly quoted, doubt it. A couple of months after joining The Geneva Times I was complemented on my accuracy. This meant a lot because this is a very small town area (think Mayberry) and I came in as an outsider. My first meeting I was asked to write nice public relations information (apparently they expected this of me) and I had a very awkward few minutes in which I had to tell that board meeting, in a very public board meeting, that I couldn't write their release as my report. Lead balloon time for me. So I was very, very careful to get things right.
Getting the compliment from a couple of locals was encouraging and I decided to do even better by using my tape recorder for back up at that evening's Romulus town board meeting. I hadn't used the recorder since the radio station. It was a nice Sony stereo cassette with a numeric tape footage readout. I expected it to give me an assist.
Instead, when I got home and started to write the story I realized that I had at least four stories, not one. 1) the meeting I had attended in person, 2) the meeting in my memory, 3) the meeting in my notes, 4) the meeting as it played on the recorder and 5) the story I was trying to write. None of them agreed. I spent the entire night getting them together.
Puzzled I finally decided that people who had been at the meeting were using my story as a set of what I termed "clues" to reshape their own memories as they read what I had written. I never forgot that. Later at times when I was interviewed or at times when I watched various reporters work on stories I knew about, the percentage of error was large.
When the source of the leak was found the entire set of tanks was dug up. They had to be replaced. Those things we put in the ground sooner or later deteriorate. |
He had cased homes in the area by selling bibles. One of our own reporters, Jean Jones, on seeing this picture, remembered turning him away at the door because of an odd feeling that something was off. Under the fair-press free-trial guidelines our managing editor decided not to use this picture, citing the visible handcuffs on the boy. We used one of the photos from their entrance into the station. |
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Chris Meyer, owner, Orleans Dry Goods in Trumansburg, NY. | "The Conversation" boys at a basketball game in 25 March 1974 between Waterloo and Midlakes in Waterloo, NY. |  |
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Roxanne "Kamayani" Poorman Gupta had gone to South India to study. There she took up Bharata Natyam, a South Indian Classical dance form. Roxanne Kamayani Gupta, Ph.D. is the author of "A Yoga of Indian Classical Dance" © 2000 - from Inner Traditions International, One Park Street, Rochester, Vermont 05767 Roxanne organized vegetarian meals for the world's hungry and later ran a vegetarian restaurant. She was always active in social causes. |
This was a shot with one of my Leica M2's and the 35mm Summicron. The sharpness of the lens is incredible. It was one of the first Leica lens made in Canada. Leitz no longer makes lens in Canada. |
 This is actually a car salesman in Geneva. It was one of a pair I shot on 4x5 for an ad.They wanted a standard picture but this one is the one I really like. |
A chance shot at a carnival in Ovid, NY. A good example of how a split second time slice can create an interesting abstraction without really saying much about the situation.
 Willard Capping, 1975 - These nursing students have just completed their first year of nursing school at WIlllard State Psychiatric Hospital in Willard, NY. Capping day marks the end of that year and the start of their last two years before graduation as the class of 1977. |
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 Above is the photo The Geneva Times published, the boy friend being lifted into the ambulance. The picture at right was deemed too graphic for the pages. I remember this as the first time I had a distinct, visceral sense that a person had "left." She had left behind her body but she was gone. Her boyfriend survived. She had been from Ithaca, a phys-ed instructor. |
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This pair, girlfriend and boyfriend had been two out of a formation of a dozen skydivers over northern Seneca county, NY with the Seneca Falls parachute club. When the formation broke up his chuted opened first, under her. She had plunged through his opened canopy, into him, at high speed, rendering both of them either unconcious or too dazed to function. She never managed to open her chute. Neither had altimeter releases to open their chutes in such a circumstance. Both were highly experienced skydivers with at least a couple of thousand hours between them. I think he had something like 1,500 and she some 800, or maybe vice versa. He barely managed to get his open before hitting ground and was injured badly enough that he couldn't move from where he was by himself. I don't remember whether he was told of her death before transport. Seems to me he wasn't but it would have been hard not to have realized it although their landing areas were considerably separated on the field. On the left in the right-hand picture, the funeral home people who came to gather her and take her to the hospital morgue. The guy in the middle is taking official pictures. He is an investigator from the New York State Bureau of Investigation. The cop is New York State Patrol. I think the county guys are off to the right. I keep this photo for several reasons. Unlike most accident photos it is not simply gruesome. It shows a tableau of those persons who show up to take care of death. As I said above, there was a sense for me of her having "left" her body and not being there. It was a specific sense and I rememembered it because I had not felt that before. The New York State B.I. guy remaked to me that he had never seen a pretty woman in life who was pretty in death, reflecting on the animation life gives to any face providing what we think of as a physically attractive face on someone when we are really seeing the animation. Much later an artist friend of mine remarked at how puzzled she was after drawing a picture of her very beautiful friend that her drawing did not show attractive an attractive person. She redrew the picture when she realized that her skill at drafting had accurately gotten the physical features but had bypassed the animation which made her friend so attractive. I also remember the sense of total brokenness in her body from helping to pick her up to place on the gurney as if there were bits of bone grinding against each other in a soup. I also remember the long line of cars going by (road in the background) and realizing they were not merely looking out of ghoulish curiosity. They wanted to understand death, and life, and how all of us cross that line. I, too, was there for that except that I got to claim an official reason, as did all the other death workers on the scene. All of us thought about our mortality and our immortality. |
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North beach of Seneca Lake (4x5 Crown Graphic)
In 1976 I left the Times. I thought I would go back to college and get my four-year degree. I had plenty of credits from three places and an two-year degree. I figured the University of Kansas would be a good place. It was within reach of home in Nebraska and had a good reputation. I didn't realize that I would spend a year, drop out into other life and not finish a BS for another 15 years.
Lawrence Journal-World
At the Journal-World I did some part-time photo work as I took classes at the University of Kansas. Some game photos and a number of feature-story photos. Something to keep my hand in.
In the meantime I also took bartending classes and tended bar in Lawrence and in Kansas City at the Royal's Baseball Stadium in the Stadium Club on game day. This led to the next jump in occupations. The school owners remembered me from training and offered me a job as a school administrator. Little did I realize what a people mill the place was. They kept losing employees. It should have clued me in.