The Santa Anita Derby has a post time of about 1:30 PDT out here on Saturday, and the clock just rolled around to Saturday about 35 minutes ago.

I''ll be up at 6AM to go visit the diner where the NorCal horses work down the street from me in the morning.

The one woman diner/worker/owner and I always chat on the mornings of big racing days.

I haven't capped it yet, but I have a feeling it will be a good trifecta wager race when I analyze the complete Daily Racing Form, with coffee and a western omelette....no meat..., with wheat toast and salsa, on the side.


I may be leaving this particular venue soon for a 3,000 mile move with my wife.

When I moved here permanently 11 years ago after 25 years of visits and living, I never thought I would ever miss the place.

I was perhaps a tad wrong.

I will miss among many things, the local horse racing connections and fans.

I had one wager today, and ended up a negative $42. Perhaps hard to explain, but as a gambler, that's NOT a bad day in my gambling style and book. I didn't see a whole lot I believed in, so I backed down the action and just let it play.

Yep, I lost $42, but I'm still claiming a win of sorts.

Mike Wallace, '60 Minutes' star interviewer, dies
By FRAZIER MOORE Associated Press
April 8, 2012

NEW YORK -- CBS newsman Mike Wallace, the dogged, merciless reporter and interviewer who took on politicians, celebrities and other public figures in a 60-year career highlighted by the on-air confrontations that helped make "60 Minutes" the most successful primetime television news program ever, has died. He was 93.

Wallace died Saturday night, CBS spokesman Kevin Tedesco said. On CBS' "Face the Nation," host Bob Schieffer said Wallace died at a care facility in New Haven, Conn., where he had lived in recent years.

Until he was slowed by heart surgery as he neared his 90th birthday in 2008, Wallace continued making news, doing "60 Minutes" interviews with such subjects as Jack Kevorkian and Roger Clemens. He had promised to still do occasional reports when he announced his retirement as a regular correspondent in March 2006.

Wallace said then that he had long vowed to retire "when my toes turn up" and "they're just beginning to curl a trifle. ... It's become apparent to me that my eyes and ears, among other appurtenances, aren't quite what they used to be."

Among his later contributions, after bowing out as a regular, was a May 2007 profile of GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, and an interview with Kevorkian, the assisted suicide doctor released from prison in June 2007 who died June 3, 2011, at age 83.

In December 2007, Wallace landed the first interview with Clemens after the star pitcher was implicated in the Mitchell report on performance enhancing drugs in baseball. The interview, in which Clemens maintained his innocence, was broadcast in early January 2008.

Wallace was the first man hired when late CBS news producer Don Hewitt put together the staff of "60 Minutes" at its inception in 1968. The show wasn't a hit at first, but it worked its way up to the top 10 in the 1977-78 season and remained there, season after season, with Wallace as one of its mainstays. Among other things, it proved there could be big profits in TV journalism.

The top 10 streak was broken in 2001, in part due to the onset of huge-drawing rated reality shows. But "60 Minutes" remained in the top 25 in recent years, ranking 15th in viewers in the 2010-11 season.

The show pioneered the use of "ambush interviews," with reporter and camera crew corralling alleged wrongdoers in parking lots, hallways, wherever a comment -- or at least a stricken expression -- might be harvested from someone dodging the reporters' phone calls.

Such tactics were phased out over time -- Wallace said they provided drama but not much good information.

And his style never was all about surprise, anyway. Wallace was a master of the skeptical follow-up question, coaxing his prey with a "forgive me, but ..." or a simple, "come on." He was known as one who did his homework, spending hours preparing for interviews, and alongside the exposes, "60 Minutes" featured insightful talks with celebrities and world leaders.

He was equally tough on public and private behavior. In 1973, with the Watergate scandal growing, he sat with top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and read a long list of alleged crimes, from money laundering to obstructing justice. "All of this, Wallace noted, "by the law and order administration of Richard Nixon."

The surly Ehrlichman could only respond: "Is there a question in there somewhere?"

In the early 1990s, Wallace reduced Barbra Streisand to tears as he scolded her for being "totally self-absorbed" when she was young and mocked her decades of psychoanalysis. "What is it she is trying to find out that takes 20 years?" Wallace said he wondered.

"I'm a slow learner," Streisand told him.

His late colleague Harry Reasoner once said, "There is one thing that Mike can do better than anybody else: With an angelic smile, he can ask a question that would get anyone else smashed in the face."

Wallace said he didn't think he had an unfair advantage over his interview subjects: "The person I'm interviewing has not been subpoenaed. He's in charge of himself, and he lives with his subject matter every day. All I'm armed with is research."

Wallace himself became a dramatic character in several projects, from the stage version of "Frost/Nixon," when he was played by Stephen Rowe, to the 1999 film "The Insider," based in part on a 1995 "60 Minutes" story about tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, who accused Brown & Williamson of intentionally adding nicotine to cigarettes. Christopher Plummer starred as Wallace and Russell Crowe as Wigand. Wallace was unhappy with the film, in which he was portrayed as caving to pressure to kill a story about Wigand.

Operating on a tip, The New York Times reported that "60 Minutes" planned to excise Wigand's interview from its tobacco expose. CBS said Wigand had signed a nondisclosure agreement with his former company, and the network feared that by airing what he had to say, "60 Minutes" could be sued along with him.

The day the Times story appeared, Wallace downplayed the gutted story as "a momentary setback." He soon sharpened his tone. Leading into the revised report when it aired, he made no bones that "we cannot broadcast what critical information about tobacco, addiction and public health (Wigand) might be able to offer." Then, in a "personal note," he told viewers that he and his "60 Minutes" colleagues were "dismayed that the management at CBS had seen fit to give in to perceived threats of legal action."

The full report eventually was broadcast.

Wallace maintained a hectic pace after CBS waived its long-standing rule requiring broadcasters to retire at 65. In early 1999, at age 80, he added another line to his resume by appearing on the network's spinoff, "60 Minutes II." (A similar concession was granted Wallace's longtime colleague, Don Hewitt, who in 2004, at age 81, relinquished his reins as executive producer; he died in 2009.)

Wallace amassed 21 Emmy awards during his career, as well as five DuPont-Columbia journalism and five Peabody awards.

In all, his television career spanned six decades, much of it spent at CBS. In 1949, he appeared as Myron Wallace in a show called "Majority Rules." In the early 1950s, he was an announcer and game show host for programs such as "What's in a Word?" He also found time to act in a 1954 Broadway play, "Reclining Figure," directed by Abe Burrows.

In the mid-1950s came his smoke-wreathed "Night Beat," a series of one-on-one interviews with everyone from an elderly Frank Lloyd Wright to a young Henry Kissinger that began on local TV in New York and then appeared on the ABC network. It was the show that first brought Wallace fame as a hard-boiled interviewer, a "Mike Malice" who rarely gave his subjects any slack.

Wrote Coronet magazine in 1957: "Wallace's interrogation had the intensity of a third degree, often the candor of a psychoanalytic session. Nothing like it had ever been known on TV. ... To Wallace, no guest is sacred, and he frankly dotes on controversy."

Sample "Night Beat" exchange, with colorful restaurateur Toots Shor. Wallace: "Toots, why do people call you a slob?" Shor: "Me? Jiminy crickets, they 'musta' been talking about Jackie Gleason."

In those days, Wallace said, "interviews by and large were virtual minuets. ... Nobody dogged, nobody pushed." He said that was why "Night Beat" ''got attention that hadn't been given to interview broadcasts before."

It was also around then that Wallace did a bit as a TV newsman in the 1957 Hollywood drama "A Face in the Crowd," which starred Andy Griffith as a small-town Southerner who becomes a political phenomenon through his folksy television appearances. Two years later, Wallace helped create "The Hate That Hate Produced," a highly charged program about the Nation of Islam that helped make a national celebrity out of Malcolm X and was later criticized as biased and inflammatory.

After holding a variety of other news and entertainment jobs, including serving as advertising pitchman for a cigarette brand, Wallace became a full-time newsman for CBS in 1963.

He said it was the death of his 19-year-old son, Peter, in an accident in 1962 that made him decide to stick to serious journalism from then on. (Another son, Chris, followed his father and became a broadcast journalist, most recently as a Fox News Channel anchor.)

Wallace had a short stint reporting from Vietnam, and took a sock in the jaw while covering the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. But he didn't fit the stereotype of the Eastern liberal journalist. He was a close friend of the Reagans and was once offered the job of Richard Nixon's press secretary. He called his politics moderate.

One "Night Beat" interview resulted in a libel suit, filed by a police official angry over remarks about him by mobster Mickey Cohen. Wallace said ABC settled the lawsuit for $44,000, and called it the only time money had been paid to a plaintiff in a suit in which he was involved.

The most publicized lawsuit against him was by retired Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who sought $120 million for a 1982 "CBS Reports" documentary, "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception." Westmoreland dropped the libel suit in February 1985 after a long trial. Lawyers for each side later said legal costs of the suit totaled $12 million, of which $9 million was paid by CBS.

Wallace once said the case brought on depression that put him in the hospital for more than a week. "Imagine sitting day after day in the courtroom hearing yourself called every vile name imaginable," he said.

In 1996, he appeared before the Senate's Special Committee on Aging to urge more federal funds for depression research, saying that he had felt "lower, lower, lower than a snake's belly" but had recovered through psychiatry and antidepressant drugs. He later disclosed that he once tried to commit suicide during that dark period. Wallace, columnist Art Buchwald and author William Styron were friends who commiserated often enough about depression to call themselves "The Blues Brothers," according to a 2011 memoir by Styron's daughter, Alexandra.

Wallace called his 1984 book, written with Gary Paul Gates, "Close Encounters." He described it as "one mostly lucky man's encounters with growing up professionally."

In 2005, he brought out his memoir, "Between You and Me."

Among those interviewing him about the book was son Chris, for "Fox News Sunday." His son asked: Does he understand why people feel a disaffection from the mainstream media?

"They think they're wide-eyed commies. Liberals," the elder Wallace replied, a notion he dismissed as "damned foolishness."

Wallace was born Myron Wallace on May 9, 1918, in Brookline, Mass. He began his news career in Chicago in the 1940s, first as radio news writer for the Chicago Sun and then as reporter for WMAQ. He started at CBS in 1951.

He was married four times. In 1986, he wed Mary Yates Wallace, the widow of his close friend and colleague, Ted Yates, who had died in 1967. Besides his wife, Wallace is survived by his son, Chris, a stepdaughter, Pauline Dora, and stepson Eames Yates.

Thomas Kinkade, Artist to Mass Market, Dies at 54

Lightpost Publishing A detail from “The Forest Chapel.” Much of Thomas Kinkade’s work reflected idealized America.


By MATT FLEGENHEIMER
Published: April 7, 2012


Thomas Kinkade, the prolific painter of bucolic and idealized scenes who estimated that his mass-produced works hung in one out of 20 American homes, died on Friday at his home in Los Gatos, Calif. He was 54.

He appeared to have died of natural causes, according to a statement that his family issued to The San Jose Mercury News.

Though often disdained by the fine art establishment, Mr. Kinkade built a decorative art empire by creating sentimental paintings that were, for the most part, relatively inexpensive and resonated with the desires of homeowners who did not ordinarily buy art. He sold his work directly, through his own franchise galleries or on cable television home shopping networks, and eventually online.

Much of his work reflected Christian themes or visions of a traditional, rustic America residing in comforting solitude. The paintings — of homey cottages and rural churches and rivers flowing gently through brilliant foliage — rarely included people, which allowed the owners to project themselves into the scenes.

Mr. Kinkade referred to himself as the “painter of light,” usually with a trademark symbol, for naturalistic scenes with highlights that appeared to glow. Often his canvases were mass-produced prints to which he added small, brightly toned details. He made no apologies for commercializing the art field, comparing himself to million-sellers in, say, music and literature.

Occasionally, Mr. Kinkade presented well-known urban places, like the Rockefeller Center skating rink and Indianapolis Motor Speedway. When Gene Monahan, the longtime trainer for the Yankees, retired last year, the team gave him a Kinkade portrait of the old Yankee Stadium.

Mr. Kinkade grew up in Placerville in Northern California and was raised in relative poverty by a single mother. He said that he was drawn to art at a young age. As a young man, according to The Associated Press, Mr. Kinkade traversed the country by boxcar with another artist, James Gurney, to sketch the American landscapes that they encountered.

He studied briefly at the University of California at Berkeley and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, before moving to Hollywood to paint backgrounds for an animated film called “Fire and Ice.”

In the 1980s, Mr. Kinkade said, he became a born-again Christian. The change dovetailed with a shift in his career path. Rebelling against what he considered the elitism of modern art, Mr. Kinkade moved his focus to retail, not a traditional gallery system. He began publishing inexpensive prints of his work and, later, opened his own galleries.

“I view art as an inspirational tool,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “People who put my paintings on their walls are putting their values on their walls: faith, family, home, a simpler way of living, the beauty of nature, quiet, tranquillity, peace, joy, hope. They beckon you into this world that provides an alternative to your nightly news broadcast.”

In the late 1990s, Mr. Kinkade broadened his popular reach by licensing his name to dozens of companies, like Avon and La-Z-Boy, to produce Thomas Kinkade lines of home furnishings. But another frontier remained: building the homes themselves.

He soon began fashioning gated communities in California, with houses and grounds in the likeness of his paintings.

“When Walt looked out over his citrus grove and envisioned Disneyland, it wasn’t real to him yet,” Mr. Kinkade said, speaking as a Thomas Kinkade Community opened in Vallejo, Calif. “When he walked down Main Street it became real. So this is that moment for me.”

The homes were available then at a starting price of $425,000.

A decade ago, Mr. Kinkade’s Media Arts Group, once a publicly traded company, took in $32 million per quarter from 4,500 dealers across the country, according to The Mercury News. His paintings ranged in cost from hundreds of dollars to more than $10,000.

His works were reproduced in books and on posters, canvas prints, hand-signed lithographs and collector’s plates. He likened himself to Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney, insofar as all three “really like to make people happy,” he once said. Many of Mr. Kinkade’s paintings captured scenes from Disney.

Mr. Kinkade thought himself to be the nation’s most collected living artist, with sales for his works and associated products approaching $100 million annually.

He also published books, including “Masterworks of Light” and “The Artist’s Guide to Sketching,” which he wrote with Mr. Gurney, that became best-sellers.

After news of his death spread on Saturday, fans and critics alike remembered him on Twitter for his seemingly ubiquitous paintings that they knew from the living rooms of grandparents and the waiting rooms of doctors’ offices.

“Rest in peace, Thomas Kinkade. May your afterlife be as beautiful as your art,” one person wrote.

Another called Mr. Kinkade “a great mass-marketer,” adding, “whether or not art should be mass-marketed is another discussion.”

Yet even as he became wealthy, Mr. Kinkade said his work retained a simple, authentic aim. “People are reminded,” he said, “that it’s not all ugliness in the world.”

He was survived by his wife, Nanette, and four children.

I remember Mike Wallace's reports from Dallas on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Well, I remember mostly from CBS footage I saw and have around here somewhere broadcast 25 years after.

I always appreciated his hostings of the Biography series from about half a century ago.

In his later years, I never went out of my way to watch him.

He was a Michigan guy, you know.

Thomas Kinkade, the prolific painter of bucolic and idealized scenes who estimated that his mass-produced works hung in one out of 20 American homes, died on Friday at his home in Los Gatos, Calif. He was 54.

I'm shocked to learn that I am hellaolder than Thomas Kinkade.


Well, at least older.


Kinkade struck me as too commercial from the get go for me to ever become a serious fan.

Not that I know jack about art.

I did get an "A" on a potato print in 4th or 5th grade.

In prepping for the 3,000 mile move my wife and I are about to undertake, I dug deep into old boxes that have been packed away and traveled with my family and now finally me over the decades and centuries.

Have I mentioned I've been lugging around a bunch of stuff over the years?

Yesterday I pulled out an " NFL parlay card" of mine.......yes, gambling....from the weekend of December 9 & 10 of 1967.

I had a three team play for $5.

Cleveland Browns over the St. Louis Cardinals

Green Bay Packers over the Los Angeles Rams

Washington Redskins over the Pittspuke Steelers.


I was 11 at that time, and as best I can recall I made the wager with proceeds as an "assistant" on a newspaper paper delivery route. Akron Beacon Journal and Plain Dealer rules of the day required a kid to be at least 12 to "own" a route, and I later had both in my neighborhood. But in December of 1967, I was just an assistant.

I also made some bucks in those days in retail. I peddled chewing gum purchased for 3 cents a pack from "Miracle Mart" for 15c to 25 c to kids in school during the day. A good markup. The cute girls sometimes got great deals, of course.

I also dabbled in making cinnamon toothpicks at home in the evening, and selling them for a nickle a piece over the next days at school. Huge markup.

I'm not going to look up whether I won that parlay card wager in December of 1967, but my December wagers were normally winners.

I usually bought Christmas gifts for my parents and Grandparents with gambling winnings in December in those years.

rusty2 wrote:

Hillbilly wrote:Rusty:

I assume you have already seen this video but just in case you haven't, check out the Golf Boys ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM2NocuEihw

Thanks for showing that . Always makes me laugh. Funny thing about that video. Ben Crane (helmet man) is considered to be a very boring slow player.

Bubba Watson sponsors a tournament at my club. Has a house at High Rock Lake NC. His wife was the womens champ at Willow Creek in High Point NC.

Little known fact. Bubba is a complete phony. Wears the overalls in that video and has the name of Bubba. In reality he is pure country club brat. Would not talk to you unless he had to.

I have no grounds to disagree with your observations and experiences, Rusty. In fact, I trust and accept your opinions.


Personally, I'd be working on stories about knowing the 2012 Masters Champion.

I have a personal policy to never miss the last four holes of The Masters. This year I had extenuating circumstances that prevented me from seeing live. I did have updates on the truck radio, and on the iPhone.


And I made it home to watch his post-Championship moment interview on The Golf Channel.


It's all a compelling story.

TFISC, I too watched every minute of Bubba's press conference. I found him to be very humble and sincere. Very likeable.

At our club, the employees found him to be very difficult and aloof. This event (youth tournament) he sponsored was to honor one of his early financial backers.

Interesting piece of trivia. Bubba Watson owns either a replica (maybe the movie) or the original General Lee of the Dukes of Hazzard.

Bubba spent a good deal of time on the range hitting 180 yard wedge shots with a 40 yard hook for grins and giggles.

That last shot on 10 he has practiced for a long time.

I'm not a huge golf fan, I tend to just watch a little bit of major events so alot of you have watched alot more golf than me. But that hook shot on the playoff hole by Bubba is one of the best shots I've ever seen. Taking into account it was a playoff hole at The Masters and all the pressure and everything. Just an unbelievable shot.

Bubba can do things (when it works) that no other golfer can even think of. He probably hit that shot about 180 yards to cover an 135 yard distance. 40 - 45 yards of hook.

This morning on Mike and Mike. Mike Greenberg called it the greatest shot in golf history.

Curtis Strange came on to say it was a very good shot but not one of the greatest shots.

I have caddied and played golf for a long time. Bubba, Phil, and maybe Tiger are the only players that would even think of trying to get that ball on the green.

Unfortunately because Augusta does not allow commentators to follow the golfers on the course we were not allowed to fully see how difficult a shot and angle it was. Most golfers would have just pitched out.

Charles Manson is up for parole today. Now aged 77.

Odds are, he no shows the parole board.

After many prison relocations he is currently a "resident" of Corcoran State Prison.

I've been by the place.

Corcoran is just a baseball throw from Visalia, with a club in The California League.

Trivia, Visalia was the hoped for destination of Crash Craddock at the close of Bull Durham....to maybe become a minor league manager.

I only caught the last few minutes with Bubba Watson on The Letterman Show about an hour ago. In the time I watched, Bubba came off well.

I didn't see his playoff hole shot live, and I've gotta say the replays I have seen do not seem to do it justice. I've seen the lie in the woods and the opening in the trees and the club strike, and then the camera cuts to the ball in the air about to hit and roll towards the pin.

I really do not yet have an appreciation of the angle he coerced.

Did he make the ball basically make an airborne 90 degree or so cut to the green?

That's my take, at this point.

Basically he did. I don't want to downplay the shot but for him it is something he practices . He had a clean lie. (pine straw) Since he is left handed he had to draw the ball. Which is natural for him. So natural, that his driver is set up very open so that he will not draw it. He did have an opening which helped. Hitting it as close as he did is a great shot from anywhere but Bubba did expect to hit it on the green just not that close.

Most everyday players could not hook a 52 degree wedge.