- "The Center of the World"
- Microsoft millionaires eye farming
- Mandatory hepatitis shots urged
- Valdez skipper to begin sentence
- Paul Mellon 1907-1999
- Love Is the Answer
- Musical Genius
- The Jasper Murder Trial

- Privacy and Public Records Online
- Twentieth Century Man
- Midlife Survey
- Free Computer, Strings Attached
- Tipper knocks mental illness stigma
- Anti-abortion site loses case Group
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Courtesy: Harry S. Truman Library & Museum

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Produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva Today's installment in the Lost & Found Sound series, comes from Grandview, Missouri, on September 12, 1957. Harry S. Truman had been out of office for five years. Back then, ex-Presidents didn’t get anywhere near the money or perks they now do.

Listener and media producer Reverend Dwight Frizzell grew up in Truman’s hometown of Independence, Missouri. Several years ago he went to the Truman presidential Library and found this transcription of a groundbreaking. With the help of a musician friend, he added music … but the tape is otherwise Unedited.

It’s a remarkable, bittersweet goodbye by a famous man to his boyhood home.  The Center of the World was produced by Reverend Dwight Frizzell a writer, multimedia artist and musician living in Kansas City, Missouri. Music written and performed by Michael Henry. The original recording is from the Truman Presidential Library.

By the way, the Truman Corners Shopping center still exists, but has been dwarfed by the Mega-Malls in the area.

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SEATTLE (AP) - A new venture - and one of the planet's oldest - has caught the eye of a handful of Microsoft millionaires: farming. A group banding together as Farmland Acquisition, Research and Management Limited Liability Co., or Farm LLC, is buying up land in the Sammamish Valley. The high-powered, high-tech investors have a low-key, low-tech dream: They hope to turn a profit in agriculture and save the scenic open space near their homes at the same time. In three months, they've raised nearly $1 million and bought their first acreage. By year's end, they expect to own about 80 acres, 7% of the farmland in the valley on the Seattle metropolitan area's northeast corner.

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ATLANTA (AP) - A federal health group wants 11 Western states with a high incidence of hepatitis A to require that children be vaccinated. Children are one of the highest risk groups for hepatitis A, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's advisory committee on immunization said Wednesday. The committee recommended that states with at least 20 cases out of every 100,000 people - twice the national average for hepatitis. A cases between 1987 and 1997 - implement routine vaccinations. Those states currently are Arizona, Alaska, California, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah and Washington.

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Former Exxon Valdez skipper Joseph Hazelwood can look forward to a month in Alaska each summer for the next five years. But it won't be a vacation. The veteran tanker captain will don a reflective vest to pick up trash along Anchorage highways and clean up litter in parks as part of a 10-person work crew. Hazelwood is scheduled to begin serving 1,000 hours of community service this year for his 1990 conviction on a charge of negligent discharge of oil stemming from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound. The sentence had remained on hold during eight years of appeals. Under an agreement reached with prosecutors in November, Hazelwood will serve 200 hours a year through 2004.

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The rich, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, "are different from you and me." But Paul Mellon was different from the rest of the rich. Without fuss or fanfare, he used his enormous fortune to nurture the art, the landscape, even the taste of the nation. In the course of a long life—he died last week at 91—he gave away close to $1 billion (more if reckoned in 1999 dollars). He hugely strengthened the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., founded by his father, Andrew Mellon, with gifts of an astounding 913 works of art plus one of the architectural triumphs of the late 20th century, I. M. Pei's trapezoidal East Building. He built the Yale Center for British Art, donating the centerpieces of its collection and erecting an extraordinary building to house it, designed by Louis Kahn. The annual Bollingen Prize for Poetry was his creation. Great chunks of precious seashore on Cape Hatteras and Cape Cod and an entire state park in Virginia were secured for the public by Mellon money. Only rarely did he allow his name to be attached to projects he sponsored, but there is little danger that it will be forgotten. He embodied an entrepreneurial tradition of personal philanthropy that is peculiarly American, and he leaves a land dotted with monuments to the use of private means for public good.

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Valentine's day is over but the romantic heart still lingers. Dateless in Daytona? These four online matchmaking services—among countless others on the Web—can hook you up.

Match.com
www.match.com
Price check: One week free; $34.95 for three months
Who's there: The Barnes & Noble crowd: upmarket, big-city dwellers, 21 to 49 years old. About half the users are male.
Best feature: Matches are two-way, and e-mail alerts tell you when appealing members register

Love@AOL
Keyword: Romance
Price check: Free to AOL's 15 million members
Who's there: "The same as AOL," says the company. So, from Meg Ryan to creepy chat denizens; 65 percent male.
Best feature: Majority of profiles include photos. By Feb. 14, the database goes on the Net.

Swoon
www.swoon.com
Price check: Free
Who's there: Aging Gen-Xers, poets snowboarders and music fans. Employed college grads; 60 percent male.
Best feature: Swoon's catchy name and hip art design have helped attract a well-defined user base

Yahoo Personals
personals.yahoo.com
Price check: Free
Who's there: Mirrors the Internet population: 65 percent male, 21 to 44 years old. Professionals and computer geeks.
Best feature: Perhaps your best shot at a love connection with 200,000 ads in its large database

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Ellery Eskelin -- Indpendent producer Nancy Updike tells us this story of saxophone player Ellery Eskelin. Ellery Eskelin never met his father, never even spoke to him. But throughout his childhood, Eskelin heard about his father's musical genius -- that his father could play any instrument he picked up -- that he could arrange and write music very fast. His father might write 30 songs and song poems in a single day. When Ellery finally got to hear his father's music, he found the work unfettered by any pretensions of the art world or the world of serious music -- and for Ellery Eskelin, it was inspiring. Since finding his father's recordings, Ellery says his own music is changing -- moving from regular jazz to more experimental.

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Jasper Trial -- NPR's Wade Goodwyn reports testimony began today in the murder trial of a white man accused of dragging a black man to his death behind a pickup truck last June. During his opening statement, Prosecutor Guy James Gray portrayed John William King as a man "full of hate" when he and two other men chained 49-year-old James Byrd, Jr. to the truck and dragged him for more than 2 miles. He said King was hoping publicity from the killing would help him recruit members for a white supremacist group he was starting. Gray also claimed to have physical evidence linking King to the crime. King's attorney did not make an opening statement. 

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An abortion clinic in Florida is suing CompuServe and other Internet service providers. The clinic charges the ISPs made it easy for anti-abortion activists to harass the its patients and staff by getting their home addresses online from driver license records. The case exposes the problems of trying to enforce federal laws designed to protect individual privacy in public records. Listen as NPR's Larry Abramson reports for Morning Edition.

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Twentieth Century Man
January 29, 1999

One thing that makes our country different from most others is this idea that you can re-create yourself as someone you'd prefer to be...sell everything off, head out west, start a new life. But what happens if you're too good at it? At throwing everything out and starting over? Over the course of his life, Keith Aldrich was a child of depression in Oklahoma, a preacher-in-training in booming California ... an aspiring Hollywood actor ... in the 50's he re-made himself as a self styled beat writer ... then as a man in a gray flannel suit. In the 60's he became part of the New York literati...then went thru a hippie phase...then moved to the suburbs for a 70's era partying, "Ice Storm" kind of life. When the Moral Majority helped put Ronald Reagan in office, he became a born again Christian. Today we're devoting our entire show to the story of Keith's life, as told by one of his nine children, Gillian Aldrich. His life is not only a history of most of the major cultural shifts of the second half of the twentieth century, it's also a case study in the question, "What happens if you're too good at transforming yourself?"

Act one. The first part of Gillian's story (33 minutes)
Act two. Gillian's story continues... (25 minutes)
Song: Noel Coward "20th Century Blues"

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A comprehensive new study of three thousand Americans between the ages of 25 and 74 offers a complex explanation of the midlife years. The survey -- called MIDUS, an acronym for Midlife Development in the United States, and commissioned by the MacArthur Foundation -- explores just about every facet of midlife from what percentage of adults take vitamins to how often they engage in sex or attend religious services.  Find out what the

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A line formed at the company headquarters in Palm Springs, California, and the Internet servers crashed as people flocked to the building and the Web site of Free-PC.com to get a free computer. Bill Gross, founder of Free-PC.com, is offering 10,000 free Compaq Presario computers to people who agree to use them regularly, provide basic personal information and expose themselves to advertising. Gross believes the demographic data gathered on users will allow for targeted advertising and promotional offers, and over time will generate more money in advertising revenue than the cost of giving away the computers. Listen for the details as NPR's John McChesney reports for All Things Considered.

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Tipper Gore says people with mental illness deserve the same level of treatment, insurance and support as those with physical illness. The wife of Vice President Al Gore said Monday that research is helping to dismantle the stigma of mental illness and encourage people to seek treatment for disorders ranging from depression to autism. Gore, a policy adviser to President Clinton on mental illness, spoke to a forum attended by about 200 mental health professionals at Vanderbilt University's Peabody campus. Gore received her master's degree in psychology at the school, then Peabody College, in 1975.

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PORTLAND, Ore., -- In a case that tested the limits of free speech on the Internet, a federal jury ordered anti-abortion activists on Tuesday to pay about $107 million in damages for publishing names and photographs of abortion doctors on the World Wide Web and elsewhere.  The jury agreed with a group of abortion providers who argued that "The Nuremberg Files"  Web site and wanted-style posters depicting physicians who performed abortions violated a law meant to protect access to the procedure. The verdict by the eight-person jury followed a three-week trial and five days of deliberations.   "The jury saw anti-choice 'Wanted posters' for what they are -- a hit list for terrorists," said Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Penalty totals $107 million

The jury found the defendants, including groups and individuals prominent in the anti-abortion movement, violated federal racketeering statutes and the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.  With 14 defendants each ordered to pay millions of dollars in punitive damages to six plaintiffs, the damages award totaled more than $107 million, said Maria Vullo, lead attorney for the plaintiffs.  "This jury decision indicates a turning of the anti-abortion violent tide," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who has been targeted on the site. "This jury ... said loud and clear that this is serious and must stop."

Increase in violence

Defendants denounced the verdict and suggested they would appeal on grounds that the verdict violated their free-speech rights under the First Amendment of the Constitution.   "If these posters are threatening when they contain no threatening language whatsoever, then virtually any document which criticizes an abortionist by name can be construed as threatening," said defense attorney Chris Ferrara.

'I think there's always going to be a threat...I'm not going to give away my vest.' -- Dr. James Newhall

But plaintiffs argued that their fears are real, pointing to some 300 acts of violence committed against U.S. abortion clinics over the past two decades, including seven killings in the past five years. The plaintiffs testified that they wear bulletproof vests to protect themselves against attack.   "I think there's always going to be a threat," said Dr. James Newhall. "I'm not going to give away my vest."  Vullo said plaintiffs' lawyers would return to court as soon as Wednesday to seek "the broadest injunction possible" preventing anti-abortion activists from continuing their activities.  Fellow plaintiffs' lawyer Martin London said the defendants also could be subject to criminal prosecution under the same statutes cited in the civil lawsuit.

One defendant sobbed quietly, but otherwise the courtroom was quiet during the reading of the 17-page verdict, which took a half hour. After court was dismissed, the plaintiffs and their lawyers celebrated with hugs.

Threats or freedom of speech?

Planned Parenthood, the Portland Feminist Women's Health Center and four doctors filed the lawsuit against anti-abortion activists in 1995, citing the "Deadly Dozen" posters offering cash rewards for information about certain doctors who provided abortions.  The suit was later expanded to include "The Nuremberg Files," which first appeared on the Internet in 1996 or 1997 and included detailed dossiers of names, addresses, phone numbers and photographs of doctors who provide abortions. On the Web site, the names of doctors who have been killed in anti-abortion violence have a line struck through them, while those who have been wounded are listed in gray.

Among those listed on the site was abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian, whose name was crossed out within hours after he was killed by a sniper while standing in the kitchen of his home outside Buffalo, New York, last October.   Anti-abortion activists defended their activities, saying they could not be held accountable for the violent actions of others.  But the plaintiffs said the publication of such detailed information amounted to a threat of bodily harm in a heated atmosphere of clinic bombings, burnings, shootings and acid attacks.