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7.3.2020
“Didn’t realize a press release was capable of making me feel emotion.” — me, talking about Charles Booker’s statement after he conceded in the U.S. Senate Democratic primary
FIVE.
1. Booker said, “As a poor black kid growing up in the West End, I spent a lot of my life feeling alone and invisible. I don’t feel alone anymore.” (Full statement.)
Final tally: 247,037 for Amy McGrath, 231,888 for Booker. That’s a difference of 15,149 votes. This thought won’t dislodge from my brain, after seeing data in stories (here and here) by C-J reporter Phillip M. Bailey: Of the more than 1 million votes — a record for a Kentucky primary — 737,000 were by mail. How many of those were sent in before Booker’s name rose to national prominence during the protests?
Al Cross wrote a column for the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism titled “Does Amy McGrath have any chance against Mitch McConnell?” and it ran in both LEO and the C-J. Cross describes Booker as “the ideal surfer of a historic wave of outrage about police treatment of his fellow African-Americans.
“McGrath escaped by less than three percent of the vote, and it seems clear that if most ballots had been cast on primary day, not earlier by absentee, she would have lost. That would have been one of the greatest pratfalls in modern American politics, since she’s raised more than $40 million, more than any other Senate candidate this year.
“She’s a long shot, but this is a volatile time.”
2. Tyler Gerth had been taking his Nikon downtown to document the uprising in Louisville’s streets for weeks. Last Saturday night, the 27-year-old was shot and killed when a man opened fire at Jefferson Square Park during a protest. Today would have been his 28th birthday. Instead, today was his funeral.
In a June 15 Instagram post from Jefferson Square Park, 12 days before he died, Gerth wrote, “Seeing the young people there reminded me why we need change. So they can have a brighter future than the past generations.” You can see his photographs on Instagram: gerthyimages (his funny play on Getty Images). The most recent post, from his family, describes Gerth as “brave, creative, gentle, tenacious, and so so kind.” He played the ukulele. He gardened. He wore silly socks, tie-dye being his favorite. He had seven nieces and nephews. He had a dog named Jordan.
His sisters have a started a GoFundMe for the Tyler Gerth Memorial Fund, which will raise money for the “social justice concerns close to Tyler’s heart.” The page includes a text he sent his sister Tiffany on June 9, after an encounter with an armed individual at a previous protest. “It was scary. For a second, I thought, ‘What if he shoots me?’ But just like when I travel to shoot photography alone, I don’t let fear prevent me from living my life, and I wasn’t going to let fear prevent me from doing what is right. For too long, we have been silent and not standing up. No more.”
3. I somehow missed this national story from the Ringer about Breonna Taylor and the Louisville protests. The piece has intimate details from Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, including:
“Her labor was long, hard, painful. Eighteen hours, then an emergency C-section. ‘I was a kid having a kid,’ Palmer says. ‘I knew I wasn’t ready, but what could you do at that point?’”
“Long before she ever thought of becoming an EMT or emergency room technician, 7-year-old Breonna would march around her grandmother’s house in search of the blood glucose monitor, and she would stick her grandmother’s finger and check the results.”
Palmer tells a story from “when she was a scared teenager in a hospital, delivering a baby she didn’t know she could raise. Lying there, surrounded by her sisters and cousins and aunts, the women who’d built her family, she wondered about her new child. What will be her name?
“‘It was a group effort,’ (Palmer) says. ‘We had all these names written down…And then once we said, Breonna, everybody was like, Yeah. Breonna.’”
4. We at the magazine have been busy editing our next issue, which will be out later this month and will include projects about the protests, the pandemic and the high school class of 2020. (You should subscribe! If you already do, first off, THANK. YOU. And second, will you consider giving a gift subscription?) On April 15, Jenni Laidman interviewed Mayor Fischer for a story about the pandemic. In the context of his legacy, I keep thinking about this quote and how quickly it seemed dated once protesters started screaming Breonna Taylor’s name in late May: “I will be mayor for 12 years, God willing, and I’d say the resurgence of our city and this particular (pandemic) crisis will probably be the two defining takeaways from my term as mayor of the city.”
5. Rick Pitino tweeted Wednesday that the NCAA should consider pushing the start of the college basketball season to January and only play league games, “to buy some more time for a vaccine.” And my biggest reaction was that I somehow COMPLETELY forgot that Iona College, in New Rochelle, New York, hired Pitino as its hoops coach on March 14. I’ve heard of burying bad news late on a Friday, in hopes that it’ll disappear over the weekend. But announcing a controversial hire on a Saturday while much of America is entering a lockdown due to a global pandemic? This week’s (sinister and belated) slow clap goes to Pitino.
Support for Louisville Magazine comes from the Eye Care Institute on Story Avenue. CEO Mark Prussian, who co-wrote the book One Eye or Two?: Insider Secrets to Help You Choose the Right LASIK Surgeon, wants you to know about LASIK, which — this is going to take some asterisks, but stay with me — is now cheaper than coffee*.
*If you buy a cup of coffee every day for a year**.
**For a total of $995***.
***Per eye.
The offer is good through the end of the month.
OH!
A little something from the LouMag archive.
More not-surprising-but-official cancelations: Brew at the Zoo, the St. James Court Art Show and the Bats’ season. No baseball in Louisville this summer, so instead I’ll just be staring longingly at this cover of Louisville Magazine from 1951. It captures the Louisville Colonels at Parkway Field, which opened May 1, 1923, off Eastern Parkway near what is U of L’s growing footprint today.
(Yep, I also could go for some of that Kentucky Tavern in the ad on the back of the previous issue.)
TOO...
In the past three months I’ve baked zero loaves of sourdough, planted zero gardens, run zero miles, cleaned out zero closets, drunk zero smoothies, painted zero canvases, read zero novels.
JUST. EVERY. DAY. THIS:
Miles, my three-year-old, says that last pic is of a “spaceship for my tools made out of my car bins.”
Haven’t been counting, but it’s safe to say I’ve had more than zero beers.
Josh Moss
editor, Louisville Magazine
jmoss@loumag.com
Support for Louisville Magazine comes from the Louisville Ballet, which has announced its Season of Illumination Memberships, which go on sale July 15 and give access to all productions in the ballet’s 2020-’21 digital season. In mid-October, the ballet and Kertis Creative plan to release their first in a series of cinematic collaborations, performed and filmed inside the ballet’s studio on Main Street.
Speaking of the ballet, you should read Dylon Jones’ 2018 profile of the ballet’s artistic director, Robert Curran. Oh, and in mid-April, Curran told the magazine that this quote made him laugh during quarantine: My house is like Vegas — I’m losing money by the minute, cocktails are acceptable at any hour and nobody knows what day it is.
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