Sheri Sizemore was getting anxious.
Where, she asked in an e-mail last Monday, is Rex Bowman? “He has not had a current article since the 10th of April.”
In early March, Times-Dispatch reporter Bowman was embedded with the 1st Marine Division as it moved from Kuwait into Iraq. Sizemore said her son was in that division and “without Rex’s articles we here at home have lost track of where [the division] has gone. . . . Can you PLEASE give me some information?”
Sizemore reads this newspaper online at her home in Indiana.
She was quickly told that with the fall of the last major Iraqi cities, Bowman had “disembedded” and was then in Kuwait awaiting transportation back to the United States. Bowman, a native of Roanoke and this newspaper’s Roanoke bureau reporter since 1997, arrived home Tuesday.
After his first report on March 4 during a stopover in Amsterdam on his way to Kuwait, Bowman’s byline appeared on 27 articles filed from the war zones. In one of his last stories, he described the Marine unit’s entry into the eastern limits of Baghdad.
“Jubilant Iraqis swarmed over the Marines, showering them with blown kisses, friendly waves and cigarettes,” he wrote.
Mom Sizemore was a member of a large audience closely following Bow- man’s reports. Perhaps typical was another T-D reader who said she read Bowman’s stories first, before moving to any other war coverage.
Jo Ann Gideons of Powhatan County wrote me that “Bowman did our family a wonderful favor when he hiked through the desert and found our son, Major Chris Gideons, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment . . . to send our well wishes and love on March 17th. We owe him such a debt that just saying ‘thank you’ does not seem nearly adequate.”
Sara Clark of Oceanside, Calif., sent me an e-mail to be forwarded to Bowman. She asked whether Bowman had seen her husband, Marine Staff Sgt. Mike Clark. “If so,” she wrote, “is there any way you can let him know that his wife and daughters love him and pray for his safe return?”
A larger sample of reaction to Bowman’s coverage from moms, dads and girlfriends can be found by logging on to www.timesdispatch.com and then clicking on the “forum” link on the “Front Page” of the online newspaper.
As this column was written, Bowman and his editor, Gordon Hickey, were planning a print-and-online project to be published today.
The pros and cons of the Department of Defense policy of embedding – attaching reporters to military units – likely will be long debated in press and military associations, but there is no debate as far as Mom Sizemore is concerned.
“The embedded reporters are a great idea,” she wrote. “I think all of the families would agree with me on this. It is so much better than hearing nothing for months”
. . .
A caller was delighted to read that T-D columnist Mark Holmberg had been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, but she had a question. “How many finalists were there?”
The answer: three – Colbert I. King of The Washington Post, the Commentary category winner for his editorial page columns; Edward Achorn of The Providence Journal, for columns on government corruption in Rhode Island; and Holmberg.
Yes, the Sunday columns in Holmberg’s portfolio included one on elusive Black Dog. You can read four of the columns sent to the Pulitzer competition on timesdispatch.com. Click on “News” in the directory, then on “Columnists” on the “News” page and scroll down to April 7.
. . .
Garry Trudeau, author of the satirical comic “Doonesbury,” was born in New York City but is of French-Canadian ancestry. Last week he ignited a brouhaha at The Times-Dispatch over his panels for the Sunday comics of May 4. The panels engage aging disc jockey Mark Slackmeyer and eternal hippie Zonker Harris in a takeoff on French bashing by Americans.
The problem: The dialogue in those cartoon balloons is almost entirely in French, and editors here suspected that at least a few T-D customers couldn’t read the language.
A second problem: The color comics for May 4 are already printed and being distributed to client newspapers. A third problem: No warning had been forthcoming from Universal Press Syndicate about the language until the fait was accompli.
After expressing his displeasure to the syndicate boss, Executive Editor Bill Millsaps ordered a translation be published on the second page of that Sunday’s Flair section.
The Times-Dispatch realizes comics readers will be inconvenienced looking from comics to Flair, but as we say in Richmond, c’est la vie.
. . .
In March, I passed along a proposal from David Peck (not “Teck” as reported earlier) of Wakefield that Virginians put a single candle in a window to symbolize support for troops in Iraq. His brother, Sgt. Derek S. Peck, is a U.S. Army cavalry scout there.
I followed up with him last week and was told the idea had caught on with “right many” acquaintances in Wakefield and Courtland.
While he hasn’t heard from his brother since three days before the invasion of Iraq began, he said the family had downloaded a picture of him off an NBC Web site. A family member had spotted Sgt. Peck in a group of soldiers photographed at a Sunday morning prayer service.
“That was pretty cool,” said his brother.
