Andy Young: A fiendish wolf in friendly sheep’s clothing

By Andy Young

Like pretty much every person who wasn’t born blind, I know exactly how I look physically. I’m 6-foot-2 inches tall, with perfect posture, an athletic build, and a full head of lush, dark hair. I know this not only from memory, but also from the way I appear each night in my dreams, when I’m recording the final out of the World Series, foiling armed bank robberies, or rescuing damsels in distress from burning buildings (and subsequently sweeping them off their feet).

Andy Young

Full disclosure: I have, on several occasions, accomplished all of these Herculean feats in a single evening!

But recently my positive self-image has been shaken to its core, and what’s worse, the person responsible is someone I had previously considered a close friend.

Kevin and I have known each other since college, starting when he was the sports editor of the University of Connecticut’s student newspaper at the same time I was calling play-by-play for the school’s baseball, hockey, and soccer games on the campus radio station. His off-beat sense of humor seemed to mirror mine, as did his professed love of travel.

After graduation Kevin began a distinguished career as a newspaperman, while I continued functioning as a fulltime adolescent while nominally seeking a broadcasting job.

Some years ago the two of us took a seven-city, 10-day, freelance writing trip to some major league baseball parks together. Later we combined business with pleasure when we teamed up for a cross-country drive from Arizona to Connecticut. Kevin was unquestionably one of my closest and most trusted friends, which was why I was looking forward to the two-week trip the two of us were planning on taking to Canada’s Maritime Provinces early this summer.

After spending an evening at my home following his arrival in Maine late last month, Kevin and I headed north. The scenery in Newfoundland was as breathtaking as advertised, and the people there (and also in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) bent over backward to make us feel welcome. We made some new friends, picking up a bit more useful wisdom along the way. Using his considerable photographic skills, Kevin snapped hundreds of pictures during our trip, capturing all the beauty and majesty of nature in the process.

But his photos revealed something else as well, which was that our whole relationship was a sham. Fraudulent. Bogus.

It turns out my close “friend,” who I’d have trusted with my life, was a total fake. Apparently, my ersatz chum had been waiting decades to undo my sense of self-worth, and when he saw an opportunity to take me down, he leaped at it.

Even worse, I wouldn’t have known of his craven doings had they not been called to my attention by an actual friend, who’d seen some photos of our trip Kevin had posted on his Facebook page.

Using what I assume is a magic, appearance-altering camera he acquired from the image-shifting department at backstabbers.com, my duplicitous “pal” had created images depicting me not as the matinee-idol handsome fellow I truly am, but as a frail, balding, doddering old geezer who resembles your aging grandfather’s wizened great-uncle.

Naturally Kevin professed his innocence when confronted with his treachery, but I told him to save his lame protestations. There’s no denying he’s responsible for those horrific photos depicting me as a haggard, shriveled old codger.

And how do I know for certain it was Kevin who used his diabolical technological know-how to alter the way others see me?

Because evidently the rat did the same thing to every mirror in my house the night he stayed there! <

Insight: Flaming chickens and angry bees

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

When you work as a journalist in Florida for any length of time, as I did, it’s a certainty that you will write more than your fair share of strange articles about some of the weirdest activities and events.

Not to say odd things don’t happen elsewhere, but Florida for me was a hotbed of unusual stories not commonly reported by newspapers in other states. There were articles published about Skunk Apes (a sort of cousin of Bigfoot with an odd odor), a guy in Miami high on bath salts who chewed off part of another man’s face, or a state law prohibiting singing while wearing a swimsuit.

Here are a few of many offbeat and peculiar stories I can recall from my time working for a newspaper there…

Late one night in 1995, a semi-truck driving south down I-95 near Viera suddenly jack-knifed and overturned when a passenger car swerved into its lane, spilling the contents it was hauling and leaking gasoline for a quarter mile onto the roadway surface. Following close behind, a second tractor-trailer truck also crashed at the site trying to avoid the first crash and spilling bales of freshly cut hay onto I-95.

A spark from the first truck sliding and scraping the asphalt caught the entire stretch of I-95 on fire and when news crews arrived on scene, it was reminiscent of what the inside of a malfunctioning oven might look like at KFC. There were thousands of whole frozen flaming chickens and ignited bales of hay burning to the bewilderment of Florida Highway Patrol officers who had barricaded traffic along the interstate.

Believe it or not, this was not the first such accident on a Florida thoroughfare involving the spillage of frozen chickens. Similar accidents involving trucks carrying frozen chickens have been reported through the years in Brandon, Jacksonville, and Escambia County.

About a mile or so south of where that crash occurred on I-95, I got to report on a different accident on the interstate and it created quite a buzz in the community in 2003.

I was driving north on I-95 to cover a high school tennis match when I received a phone call from an editor at the newspaper. She informed me that a truck with an open-bed trailer hauling eight beehives had overturned and traffic north on the interstate was at a standstill. She said a highway cleanup was underway and that they were letting traffic through on one lane, but she wanted me to stop at the accident scene and take photos for the newspaper.

After more than 20 minutes sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic approaching the accident site, I was able to pull over and take some photos of highway workers wearing Hazmat suits as they were removing broken beehives from I-95. A police officer told me that a swarm of more than 5,000 angry bees had left the scene when they escaped from the beehives following the accident.

The next day, I heard that the bees had traveled more than five miles to an apartment complex and residents living there were afraid as the angry bees divebombed them as they swarmed in the rafters of the apartment’s parking structure. Emergency crews had to evacuate people in those apartments, and some were forced to go to a motel for several days while the bees were captured and extracted from the apartment complex. And I later learned that one of those apartment residents forced to evacuate because of the bee invasion happened to be an ex-girlfriend of mine who was allergic to bee stings.

Around 2007, an unusual robbery and arrest was reported in Palm Bay, Florida. Apparently, a man entered a convenience store there, put a six pack of beer on the counter and asked the clerk for a pack of cigarettes. The clerk asked for the man’s ID to verify that he was over the age of 21 to buy the beer and cigarettes. As the clerk looked at the ID card, the customer pulled a gun and demanded that the clerk give him money from the cash register.

The robber was handed $40 by the clerk and fled the store carrying his six pack of beer. This was before video surveillance was widely used for convenience stores there. About 45 minutes had passed and police were at the convenience store investigating the robbery when the telephone rang behind the counter and a caller asked the clerk if he had found an ID card that he might have lost at the store.

Police suspected it was the robber and told the clerk to tell the caller to come by and pick it up before the store closed that evening. They moved their police cruiser behind the store and hid in the back room waiting for the caller to return and pick up the ID.

Within 15 minutes, the same fellow who had robbed the store walked in and wanted his ID back. On his way out of the store, he was arrested for armed robbery. You can’t make up stories like this and it’s only a small sample of what a typical news day is like there.

Insight: Weighing my options

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I admit it, there are times where I struggle with indecision. Faced with a dizzying array of options and choices for nearly every subject or issue, making the right selection has never been easy for me. 

It seems that I’m not alone in sizing up this dilemma. Results are in from the American Psychological Association’s annual survey of things that stress Americans out and about one-third of survey respondents listed “making a basic decision” as an issue they struggle with every day.

For those of us in this category, we can spend hours just perusing lists of television shows to stream on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Disney, or Apple+ channels. With that much content and programs to focus in on, indecision reigns supreme.

At times my wife has taken to reading a book while I scroll through the menu for Netflix. If I go over five minutes to choose something, she’ll stop and remind me that we’ve already watched a selection I’m pondering over.

Typically, I’ll fall into a routine of watching a television series to simplify my choice, but when we’ve watched all the episodes available, then once again I’m back to the indecisiveness of having to select another one.

The same struggle ensues when I hit the ice cream aisle at the supermarket. There are so many flavors, so many brands and so many options that come into play when I open that freezer door to make a choice of what to purchase and take home.

For my parents, the choice of what half gallon of ice cream to pick was always easy. My mother preferred vanilla and my father enjoyed strawberry while my brother and I liked chocolate. Therefore, when it came time for my parents to choose a selection for ice cream at the grocery store, they always picked “Neapolitan” with all three flavors included.

Through the years, I’ve found that opening the closet door to pick out items to wear for each day to also be a difficult task. I know enough to try and coordinate colors but have little fashion sense otherwise.

Between choosing a pullover sweater, a V-neck sweater, a button-down collared shirt, or a Henley collar shirt gives me the “Willies.” Do I wear jeans or pants, plaid or corduroy, long sleeve, or short sleeve?

No matter what clothing options are available to me, it is never an easy choice for me to make.

That’s why I preferred my clothing options when I served in the U.S. Air Force. There I had just two simple choices. If it was a formal occasion or I had to work indoors, I wore our blue uniform. For working outside, I wore our green fatigue uniform.

Imagine my indecision while driving and wanting to listen to music on the radio. My Hyundai Sonata came equipped with a Sirius XM radio system with thousands of channels available to me.

Early on, I chose to preset my car radio to avoid listening to thousands of snippets of songs or conversations and constantly fiddling with the radio dial to find something to settle on.

Even doing that, I’m torn between listening to commercial-free 1960s music, 1970s music, 1980s music, 1990s music, The Highway (country music), and an all-news channel or the Major League Baseball channel. There are only six preset buttons on my radio dial and during the summer, I’ve also been known to listen to live baseball games being broadcasted if I make a long drive somewhere.

As a newspaper editor, I have frequently questioned selections I have been forced to make regarding photographs that appear in the paper. Many times, it’s clear what choice to make for publication, but when it’s not, second-guessing can create genuine turmoil for me in wondering if I have chosen the right one or not.

No matter what the subject or the issue, having to make a decision on deadline for the newspaper is never easy when I have an assortment of great photographs to select from.

Every day the responsibility to make an immediate decision can be mind boggling when you are indecisive.

I had to get stamps at the post office and the clerk asked me which stamps I preferred, flags, sunflowers, squirrels, Women’s History Month, blueberries, or the Lunar New Year were available and a line half a mile long was standing and waiting behind me.

Imaging looking over the immense greeting card selection at Walmart or Walgreens for Valentine’s Day and trying to decide which card is right for this year? Or looking at a Chinese restaurant menu online and trying to select the right type of soup to go with my choice of meal.

As I’ve gotten older, a lot of my decision making is based upon experience or comes down to flipping a coin. I’ve also been known to take some time to think things over and weigh all the possibilities and potential outcomes when I have a difficult decision to make regarding a work situation. My inner voice always tries to convince myself that I’m confident in the choices that I must make no matter what.    

Now to determine what to fix for dinner tonight. Or not. <