Tagged: Commentary

Thirty-one years had passed since the last time I slipped into a graduation gown. Last Saturday afternoon, when I participated in the commencement exercises for the Brandeis School of Law’s Class of 2013, I marveled at how much things had changed since my own law class of 1982 graduated. My role was to introduce the commencement speaker, my longtime friend and colleague from The Courier-Journal, Howard Fineman. Howard is one of the nation’s leading journalists, having excelled in 30 years as a top political correspondent for Newsweek, as well as a political commentator on MSNBC. Now he is a pioneer in another field of journalism—online—as editorial director of the Huffington Post Media Group. I think he and I share an admiration for the law school where we were trained over three decades ago, and we’re not embarrassed to tell others about the advances it has made.

Thirty-nine years ago, as a very young Courier-Journal reporter, I traveled south by train to Montgomery, Ala., to connect with the world that novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, knew in the early part of the 20th Century. The “peg” for the feature stories I planned to write was the opening that spring of what was then the latest screen version of “The Great Gatsby,” a multi-million dollar adaptation starring Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, Sam Waterston and Bruce Dern.

Hundreds of thousands of people will converge on Louisville this week to enjoy the dozens of events that make up the Kentucky Derby Festival. But what many of those celebrants don’t realize is that the festival is a rather recent development in the Derby’s 138-year history, and was largely the work of an ambitious racing editor at the newspaper and the public relations people who had a vision for making the first week of May something more than a couple of horse races.

On Saturday, one of Louisville’s last remaining neighborhood markets will close. The owners made their own minds up. Nobody drove them out of business. But even so, the demise of Burger’s Super Market, at the corner of Ray Avenue and Grinstead Drive, is an occasion to take note of, and to mourn.