The first was on Thursday. I took a lovely trip to the Capitol with two of my fellow Newsroomers, Courtney and Rachel, for lunch and a committee hearing. We had lunch at the House dining room and then headed up to the 2pm hearing that featured MA Governor Deval Patrick! The hearing was on a program known in the Newsroom as LIHEAP. (Low income home energy assistance program) MA has benefited greatly from this program so Patrick was in town to basically say thank you and feel free to send us more money if you've got it.
Most of the members of the House Select Committee on Energy and Global Warming, the committee that Patrick testified before, were not there seeing as there was a much more important debate about spending going on at the Capitol. So it was a pretty empty room and I was the only photographer there, but it was still a good experience. I would say I spent some quality time with Patrick as I knelt in front of him for his entire testimony. We had a few laughs. Not a terribly exciting assignment but we had fun and it did end up in the New Bedford Standard Times.
My latest assignment was on Saturday, yeah I wasn't too happy about that. One of our newsroomers reports for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, and there's a big story going on up there that had a tie in down here. A freshman at Becker College, one of the many schools in Worcester, was killed at a party last weekend. He grew up in Scotland, MD which is pretty much as far south as you can go in MD. The other reason this was a big story was that the student's uncle is a famous college basketball coach, Tubby Smith. He's the head coach at the Univ. of Minnesota. So the funeral was in Maryland and the paper asked us to cover it since we were pretty close, and by pretty close we were two hours away. So I was up at 7am on Saturday to drive down to MD and do the shoot. Definitely not a fun day.
I borrowed David's car and Rachel, the Worcester reporter, and I drove down in the pouring rain. When we arrived there were hundreds of people in a line coming out of the church. Apparently people had been lined up at 8am for the visitation. By the actual service at 11am more than 1,500 people had been through to say goodbye to the young man. I've never seen anything like it. What was really crazy too was that the funeral was at a really tiny church, so there was no where to put all those people. There were about 100 people standing outside in the rain for the 2.5 hour service, including me. I got about 10 pictures, luckily one of them was pretty good. The story and picture made the front page of the Worcester T&G on Sunday.
So that brings me to today, the start of another week, I wonder what I'll do today. My guess...press conference on the Hill. They gotta pass that bailout bill sometime!
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