“Show Me… Natures Wrath”
If nasty weather counted as a criminal offense, then the number of felonies committed in the Missouri region would be quite simply mind-boggling. Crimes from the skies would result in a rap sheet beyond the ability of mere mortal meteorologists to compile – and the antics of Jesse James and his outlaw band would soon be forgotten.
Enter the pages of “Show-Me… Nature’s Wrath” and you will soon find yourself experiencing the horrors of destruction wrought by freak hail storms and fatal lightning bolts. This weather compendium is packed with tales of supercell tornadoes smashing into towns large and small – from as far back as 1880 and as recently as yesterday. Also included are the alternating calamities of drought and flood, as well as the blizzards and ice storms ushered into Missouri by winter’s winds of Thor.
With prose accounts by journalist Don Corrigan, and with detailed photo illustrations and newspaper front pages recalling the worst that weather has to offer, “Show-Me… Nature’s Wrath” is at once a historic chronicle of the forces of nature and a prized keepsake. With images and lyrical descriptions of dozens of incredible weather events in the Show-Me-State and adjacent areas, this is literally a book for all seasons.
Weather watchers who revel in what winter can bring will enjoy the stories of great blizzards that buried the Ozarks and brought major metropolises like St. Louis and Kansas City to a halt. Missouri’s great spring floods and withering summer heat waves have been an object of fascination for poets, prose mongers and artists such as Thomas Hart Benton. And then there are those terrifying funnel clouds which can drop out of a menacing Missouri sky any season of the year. It’s all here in “Show-Me… Nature’s Wrath.”
You don’t have to be a climatologist to get a thrill out of the thunder and lightning in “Show-Me… Nature’s Wrath.” This book is a great classroom book for youngsters studying weather, as well as a unique armchair book for oldsters trying to recall the details of the storm of their lives. To paraphrase Missouri’s Mark Twain, this is a great book for those who don’t quite know what to do about the weather, but who sure enjoy talking about it. In short, it’s for everybody.
Reedy Press, LLC, publishes cultural, historical, and sports books of premium quality. You can find us on the Internet at www.reedypress.com
“Show Me… Natural Wonders”
Both expert and novice outdoor enthusiasts will enjoy a new book, “Show-Me… Natural Wonders,” by author Don Corrigan with pencil line Illustrations by artist Ed Thias. “Show-Me… Natural Wonders” is an escape manual – a guidebook to special places right in our own backyard. Enter the pages of this unique guide and you will soon find yourself hiking up tall bluffs; scrambling along the banks of springs and streams; descending into the underground wilderness of Missouri’s many caves; or simply kicking back for a rest on a 500-million-year-old boulder in a country glade at sunset.
With soothing and inspiring prose by journalist Don Corrigan, and with detailed nature illustrations by renowned pencil artist Ed Thias, “Show-Me… Natural Wonders” is at once a practical how-to book and a prized keepsake. With images and descriptions of almost 100 nature sites in the Show-Me-State and adjacent areas, the book has a little something for everybody. Hikers and bikers, cavers and climbers, New Agers and environmentalists, poets and prophets will all find something to take away from the experience of “Show-Me… Natural Wonders.”
“Show-Me… Natural Wonders” invites readers to celebrate their own special places. Enjoyment of natural wonders should not be a passive, spectator sport. One of the book’s missions is to inspire folks to get active. Take a hike in the wondrous, natural asset of Roger Pryor Forest. Try out a mountain bike on the popular Chubb Trail above the Meramec River. Grab a paddle and enjoy the Vilander bluffs or the Devil’s Elbow Bluffs or Cardareva Bluff while canoeing Missouri’s many fine rivers. An appendix includes clearly-explained directionson how to find the Show-Me-State’s Natural Wonders.
“An enticing introduction to the pleasures of the Missouri countryside, with lovely pencil sketches by E. J. Thias that portray natural Missouri about as well as I can imagine! Don Corrigan draws on his own childhood experiences with nature and invites us all to share those experiences with words that are personal and thus very meaningful for us. It doesn’t get any better than this!“
-Peter H. Raven
President, Missouri Botanical Garden
“Don Corrigan has long been one of St. Louis’ most important writers on current events, the environment and journalism. Now he turns his attention to the natural wonders of our state. As Tintern Abbey was to Wordsworth, so are caves, bluffs and streams to Corrigan. They can make our lives better and more peaceful-if we know where they are. We do, thanks to this book.”
-Charles Brennan
KMOX Radio
“The words of Don Corrigan and the pictures of Ed Thias remind us of what we Missourians sometimes forget to notice. That is that we live in a state of beauty and natural wonders. Thanks to them for making us more aware and more appreciative of our special place.“
-William H. Danforth
Chancellor Emeritus, Washington University
“I have had the great fortune to visit wilderness areas of all seven continents. These adventures have only increased my appreciation for the many wonderful array of treasures we have right here in the Saint Louis area: Great rivers, clear Ozark streams, springs, caves, swamps, and majestic limestone bluffs which offer scenic vistas. Don Corrigan has captured these treasures and shares them with us. Ed Thias’s magic pencils bring them alive. The sounds are left to our imagination, but they are there. This guide will prove valuable to teachers, students, and adventurers young and old. It’d fun to read about places we have visited, but we are reminded of so many more joyful adventures still await us. Enjoy!“
-Charlie Hoessle
Director Emeritus, Saint Louis Zoo
From Nature Writing To Political Columns To Journalism Criticism
In addition to his nature writing with “Show Me… Natural Wonders,” Corrigan is at work on a new nature exploration for Reedy Press entitled, “Show Me… Nature’s Wrath,” slated for publication in Fall 2008.
A prolific writer, Corrigan has published more than 3,500 newspaper stories, 750 personal columns, 300 pieces of journalism criticism, as well as numerous magazine articles. His criticism of public journalism has been published in a book by Praeger Publishing. A columns collection is available from Webster-Kirkwood Times Inc. In addition, his work appears in books such as Retta Blaney’s, “Journalism Stories from the Real World” and “Flying High: Inside Big-Time Drug Smuggling” by Wayne Greenhaw. These and other works are described below:
“COLUMNS: Favorite Columns From A Hometown Newspaper”
“COLUMNS: Favorite Columns From A Hometown Newspaper,” a new book by Times Publications, is a collection of humorous, serious – and occasionally insightful – newspaper columns from Suburban America. The columns have been published over a period of 20 years in two weeklies that cover the southwest suburbs of the St. Louis metro area. The book is comprised of 100 previously published columns by Dwight Bitikofer, Don Corrigan, Cele Cummiskey and Kevin Murphy – 25 from each. Many of the columns in the volume have won both national and state awards and have been singled out for recognition by the Missouri Press Association. Listed below are some of the columns found in the book:
• TWA 800: Intruding On Private Grief
• Harry Cargas’s Achievement
• Papal Youth Gathering In St. Louis
• Covering A United States President
• Remembering the Troops In Bosnia
Corrigan’s book, “Columns: Favorite Columns from a Hometown Newspaper,” is available by contacting Times Newspapers at (314) 968-2699
or at amazon.com
“The Public Journalism Movement in America: Evangelists in the Newsroom”
By Don Corrigan
Longtime St. Louis professor and newspaper editor Don Corrigan has published a scathing critique of the public journalism movement in America. “The Public Journalism Movement In America: Evangelists In The Newsroom” takes a hard look at the movement, sometimes referred to as civic journalism, to reform journalism practices in both print and broadcast.
According to Corrigan, a major flaw in the public journalism creed is that it fails to view the industry as a business, and consequently, much of public journalism’s critique is misdirected. Writers and working journalists are not the cause of the industry’s problems. The decision-making at the top of this industry is primarily responsible for the public’s disenchantment with the news media. Corrigan contends that public journalism practices, which began in the 1990s, are not the answer to the decline of newspapers and a decline in the public’s rescpect for the news media. Among Corrigan’s prescriptions for reviving the news media:
• Investigate. Make people mad. Write about outrages and injustice.
• Tell us things the authorities don’t want us to know.
• Make us laugh. We don’t have to be serious all the time.
• Turn writers loose. Spend less time agonizing over the product.
• Liberate the op-ed pages. Let the people have a forum.
• Start looking at the product and stop squeezing the bottom line.
Corrigan’s book, “The Public Journalism Movement In America:
Evangelists In The Newsroom,” is available at amazon.com.
“Journalism: Stories From The Real World”
Edited by Retta Blaney
Author Don Corrigan broke into journalism in the late 1970s job as the first male writer on a daily newspaper’s “women’s pages.” His articles about the experience have appeared in several magazines and he has lectured on the topic of gender and the news media. His articles became the basis for a chapter in the book, “Journalism Stories From The Real World,” published by North American Press and edited by Rheta Blaney.
An important academic book and general interest selection, it includes a Foreward by national broadcast legend Walter Cronkite. Corrigan’s chapter in Blaney’s collection is entitled, “Joining the Women’s Pages.” The chapter is a great look at how “women’s news” was once confined to a back section of most newspapers, and women were once thought to be interested primarily in food, advice columns, engagement and wedding announcements. Corrigan uses the selection, “Joining the Women’s Pages,” as a journalism professor in his media history class to illustrate the discrimination women reporters coped with in newsrooms in the not-so-distant past. The account of being the first male on the women’s pages is both hilarious and disturbing, because it reveals the second-place status women have endured at newspapers even in recent times. In 2006, Corrigan received the Quest Award for Communication from the Missouri Federation of Press Women. Story titles from Retta Blaney’s book include:
• “Joining The Women’s Pages”
• “My Date With Hugh Hefner”
• “Reporting in Dallas on that Fateful Day”
• “Covering Sensitive Stories Accurately”
• “A Conversation With Howard Hughes”
Here is an excerpt from Corrigan’s book contribution, an article which also appeared in several women’s magazines:
“On the afternoon I left Living Today, my editor apologized for some of the treatment I had received at the hooves of the chauvinist pigs on the paper. I assured her that no irreparable harm had been done, and that I looked on much of my ordeal as humorous. At that point, she looked at me with great disappointment, as if I were part of the problem and not part of the solution to the status of women in journalism. She reminded me, that as a male, I could take the second-hand treatment on the women’s pages more lightly, because the escape hatch was always open for me.
“Since my trial in the late 1970s as the first male on those women’s pages, I’m certain we’ve all had our consciousness raised in the news business. Women are no longer found primarily writing 95-ways-to-make-tuna-casserole news. Many newsrooms have an equal number of female and male journalists. The content and status of those thinly-veiled women’s pages has improved, along with the status of the writers who put them together. That isn’t to say there aren’t miles yet to travel. And, that’s not to say that newsroom offices don’t still harbor a few female-phobic males with attitude problems.”
Blaney’s book, “Journalism: Stories from the Real World,” is available at amazon.com.
“Flying High: Inside Big-Time Drug Smuggling”
By: Wayne Greenhaw
Wayne Greenhaw’s, “Flying High: Inside Big-Time Drug Smuggling,” involves the fascinating tale of The Company and draws from Don Corrigan’s long tale that appeared originally in St. Louis Magazine in June of 1982. The article on the billion-dollar marijuana import business remains one of the longest pieces ever run in the city magazine. The story is about three Metro East boys who decided to go into the drug business after two returned from service in Vietnam. They bought trucks, airplanes, air fields and bribed law enforcement officials and politicians.
In “Flying High: Inside Big-Time Drug Smuggling,” Greenhaw includes quotes from Corrigan’s original St. Louis Magazine piece in which Corrigan interviewed St. Louis DEA Chief Ed Irvin:
“It’s no big deal identifying a plane coming back from South America loaded with marijuana. You can take a look at some of them and figure out they’re carrying something. The trick is to catch them while they’re loaded, to catch the planes on the ground while they’re unloading.
“What the Company did was disguise the numbers, tape over and paint over them. They would fly in, unload somewhere, and tear off the strips. They’d take off and land at an airport – five people get out – and you can’t identify anything… The matter of just seizing the evidence isn’t effective. You certainly cant brag about grabbing a ton of marijuana and no defendants. It was just a thorn in their side, because theyd turn around and go back for ten more tons. If you grab ten tons of marijuana and have no defendants, it’s a real embarrassment.”
Stories from Wayne Greenhaw’s book include:
• “Super Pilot”
• “Downtime In Darlington”
• “The Final Squeeze”
• “The Trial”
