Posted by Curt on April 21, 2012 under NPR, WBUR | 
The first 787 Dreamliner departs for Boston on March 4, 2012 (Photo Ken Mist)
I didn’t expect that answer.
“What needs to happen for Massachusetts to do more business with China?” I asked the panel I was moderating. The answer: “Get a nonstop flight to Shanghai.”
On Sunday, Boston will indeed get its first ever nonstop commercial service to Asia. Japan Airlines, in conjunction with American Airlines, is starting nonstop service to Tokyo’s Narita airport. It also happens to be the United States’ first commercial service by Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner.
The new nonstop route, making Japan’s commercial capital just 13 hours away, could give a lift to Boston’s economy. Local hospitality, tour and retail businesses are gearing up for an influx of high-spending Japanese visitors. But the other real hope is stronger business ties with Asia.
I produced the story for WBUR and NPR aired the story nationwide. You can listen to it here:
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Here’s an example. Say you’re a Japanese pharmaceutical company. And you’d like to put your North American headquarters in Cambridge for the strong research cluster there.
Still, no executive wants to have to descend past Boston to New York City and then take a shuttle flight back up the coast. However, that calculation changes when the nonstop goes direct to Logan, and it’s a ten-minute cab ride to Kendall Square.
MBTA ads for the new route. (Photo Marieke Van Damme)
Boston finally has a nonstop flight to Asia. But routes get cancelled all the time if the load factor disappoints. What kind of reports are Japanese tourists and business travelers going to take back? How many Massachusetts businesses are going to explore new opportunities in Japan?
Right now, the Japan Airlines flight takes off four times a week. Daily service is scheduled to begin June 1st. Let’s hope the traffic is there soon enough and that the route proves a big success.
Then Boston might just get that nonstop to Shanghai.
Posted by Curt on March 22, 2012 under WBUR |
Small change for small businesses? (photologue_np/Flickr)
Two’s company, three’s a crowd. Good thing, then, that there are only two chambers of Congress. The U.S. Senate has passed the JOBS Acts and with it, equity crowdfunding.
Right now raising large amounts of money from many small donors is legal… as long as you’re not selling equity ownership. Popular crowd-sourced platforms like Kickstarter may promise donors special access or other benefits. However, shared ownership is a no-go.
But consider this: Kickstarter is on pace to raise more money this year – in large part on behalf of art/music/design projects – than the National Endowment for the Arts will disperse.
The power of crowdfunding is real, and many Boston-area startups and entrepreneurs are excited about a new way to get cash. They currently have to spend tons of time trying to raise seed money when they don’t really have it (the time, that is).
I profiled the issue for WBUR earlier this month. You can listen to my story here:
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So what’s there to worry about? Fraud. What’s to stop someone from raising money for a business, pocketing a big salary, and then shrugging to investors, “Sales did not meet expectations?”
Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts had a hand in amending the Senate version of the bill to require intermediaries to vet businesses before raising money from ‘unsophisticated’ investors. It’s an important issue that will continue to be debated as the House of Representatives and the Senate conference on a final bill.
Even so, the fraud issue may obscure some of the promise of this bill.
Contra-case in point: Mozilla. Its crowd-sourced developer community includes more than a million volunteers (if you count beta testers). Yet at last check, the company is sitting on millions of dollars in cash. So why aren’t they clamoring for that money?
Clearly, people have very complicated rewards systems for participating and investing in startups, projects and ventures. Sure, crowdfunding opens the door to small monetary contributions.
But this emerging participatory economy is about more than just the cash. Harder to quantify is the potential for small businesses to leverage not just the dollars, but also the expertise, of their crowd-sourced investor communities.
Posted by Curt on February 18, 2012 under NPR, WBUR |
Paul Revere's 1801 bell is raised into the belfry at Old South Meeting House in Boston. (Photo Curt Nickisch)
One of the best things about working and living in Boston is hearing and seeing the echoes of history. One voice, long silent, has spoken again, and I was there to hear it.
Old South Meeting House is the Puritan gathering place where Benjamin Franklin was baptized, the Boston Tea Party was planned, and Samuel Adams held fiery speeches. But its clock tower has been silent since 1876, after the brick building was nearly destroyed in the Great Boston Fire. Its congregation built a new church in Boston’s Back Bay and took the original bell that had been made in London.
“No one alive has seen this clock actually strike a bell,” said horologist David Hochstrasser at Old South as he was hooking up a new bell – an American one cast by Paul Revere – to the 1766 tower clock. “I’ve had a lot of doubts and a lot of worries along the way.”
Those doubts faded with the reverberations of the last strike at noon on a rainy Thursday. My WBUR story aired on Radio Boston, and NPR ran the story during All Things Considered. You can listen to it here:
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“It felt like something I was put here to do,” said James Storrow at the first ringing. He’s from an old, wealthy Boston family and donated the money to buy and install the bell. “I feel my ancestors patting me on the back, saying, ‘Good job,’ ” he said. “And that’s not a feeling that I’m used to.”
Ah yes, the echoes of history. Most poignant is Paul Revere’s role. He’s believed to have taken part in the Boston Tea Party. The silversmith used his engravings to foment revolution.
After his agitation helped found the United States, later in life, Revere turned to casting bells. Now his cast bronze creation rings on the hour over Boston, a symbol of peace, democratic order and freedom.
Posted by Curt on December 7, 2011 under Off The Air, SDPR |
The American flag flies at half-mast at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. (U.S. Navy photo)
December 7, 1941 was a Sunday. When you went to church often sealed your fate.
My wife’s grandfather, Louis Van Hout, had volunteered at Wheeler Field for guard duty and was relieved at 7 a.m. that morning. He was on his way to Sunday Mass when the first wave of Japanese aircraft hit at 7:55 a.m. That’s what saved him.
Jim Peacock, a sailor from Sioux Falls, S.D., survived because he was still on his way to church. The service was set for 8 a.m. on board the USS Oklahoma, which was docked alongside Peacock’s ship, the USS Maryland, on Battleship Row.
Pearl Harbor is where Jim Peacock learned “what destruction really was.”
He watched a bomb flip the USS Oklahoma.
He cut through hulls of ships to rescue trapped sailors.
He watched servicemen swim through a thick layer of burning oil.
Listen to Jim Peacock remember the day “that changed everything” here:
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I had the privilege of telling Peacock’s story for the book Blue Stars: A Selection of Stories from South Dakota’s World War II Veterans
. Greg Latza, a fine photographer and great friend, invited me to produce a companion CD to his moving portraits.
Pearl Harbor veteran Jim Peacock. (Photo Greg Latza, greglatza.com)
Each of the veterans’ stories is compelling, yet Jim’s contains a unique narrative symbolism. He was one of a handful of people who witnessed the start of the war at Pearl Harbor and the war’s end on board the USS Missouri. (Another vet in the book, Rudi Bohlmann, saw Nagasaki after the atomic bomb.)
After 70 years, there are fewer of these remarkable folks around to tell their stories.
Louis Van Hout passed away in 1997.
When Jim Peacock died in 2008, Greg Latza wrote a touching memory.
What’s your family’s story? Feel free to share it in the comments below. And of you have a friend or neighbor or family member who was at Pearl Harbor and you haven’t heard the story, find out today.
And then, keep telling the story.
Posted by Curt on December 3, 2011 under WBUR |
GOP candidate Mitt Romney is campaigning on his private sector experience. (Photo Gage Skidmore)
Presidential campaigns are as scripted as they come. Unscripted moments tell stories.
Right before the last New Hampshire presidential primary, former Republican candidate Mitt Romney was speaking to the Nashua Rotary Club. Karen Bill stood up. She runs the town’s humane society and asked what he’d do to fix the nation’s overpopulation of dogs and cats.
Romney was stumped.
“I’m gonna use this to describe how I solve tough problems,” Romney began. “I don’t know how many excessive pets there are in this country. I have to be honest with that.” The crowd laughed when he added, “I was pretty well briefed for the debates the other night.”
Romney then said to solve any problem, he would get experts together and form a committee. “When you find a problem you start with the data!”
Romney’s data-driven problem-solving approach comes from 25 years in management consulting and private equity. I profiled his business experience in a WBUR story on Romney’s quarter century of corporate turnarounds. You can listen to it here:
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Not only is it interesting how Mitt Romney’s quarter century of corporate turnarounds shapes his thinking and his bid for the White House. It’s also interesting how that private sector experience comes across to voters.
Karen Bill was not impressed with Romney’s off-the-rolled-up-cuff answer to her question. “I think he was just trying to give a general answer without having any feeling about the actual issue,” she remembers, “and making me believe that he had a stake in solving the issue.”
Romney’s answer, that you have to start with the data, tells you a lot about his mind.
Karen Bill’s reaction to that pragmatic business acumen may say something about why the former Massachusetts governor has a hard time winning the hearts of the Republican base.
Posted by Curt on November 14, 2011 under WBUR |
When I finished my story about a Massachusetts immigrant turned World War One veteran, I hadn’t expected echoes of the “Great War” to continue for days. I’m glad they have.
Book-ended between the Civil War and Second World War, the first is more easily forgotten. So it was a fresh angle for Veterans Day, to produce a story not just about WWI veteran, but one who had a remarkable pre-war story. Antonio Pierro of Swampscott, Mass. was an Italian immigrant who returned to fight on the continent he left only a few years after he left it.
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I heard about ‘Tony’ from author David Laskin, who profiled him in his book on immigrant veterans of that war, The Long Way Home. Laskin interviewed Tony in 2006 (after hearing of him from radio producer Will Everett, whose documentary on the remaining WWI veterans was extremely helpful for my story). Even at 110 years of age, Tony’s eyes lit up talking about Magdalena, his post-war girlfriend in France.
On Veterans Day, the day the story aired on WBUR, I flew to London, and I didn’t realize that the United Kingdom formally celebrates the 11th of November on the nearest Sunday. For this country, Remembrance Day is sort of like Veterans Day and Memorial Day in one, honoring service and commemorating those who died doing it. Even so, I’ve been astounded by the public support, the ubiquitous imagery of a dusty red flower.
I’d known the story of the poppy, the poem and the potent symbolism ever since I got a tissue paper emblem from the VFW when I was a kid. In London, they’re everywhere. On the hoods of cabs, buttonholed in ironic flannel shirts in the hipster district, even on mannequins in fashion boutiques.
Even then I wasn’t ready for the televised national memorial celebration. It was held in Royal Albert Hall, an almost square hall, with ranks of service members standing in the center, surrounded by the civilians, and with the royal family looking on. The service was poised and proper and poppies were tucked in every lapel.
Then, at one point in the service, poppy petals are released from above, thousands of them. They fall symbolizing lives lost. The dusty red petals skip and flutter lightly downward in silence. They settle on shoulders, they come to rest on sharp white round-top military hats. They nestle in hair. They cover the shined black shoes and boots and eventually blanket the ground, as if the audience were standing in red clay.
It’s one of the most poignantly beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
And it did make me wish the United States had something of equal symbolic power. Sure, there’s the yellow ribbon, but its origin story starts later. I wore a POW/MIA bracelet for years, but it’s different.
Author David Laskin wrote that it was touching to talk to 110-year-old Tony Pierro and see his eyes light up talking about a long-ago lost love, writing hopefully that love can be more enduring than war. In London, at least, a symbol of life and memory endures.
Posted by Curt on June 18, 2011 under NPR, WBUR |
Bruins fan Tom Collins beams for cameras in front of the statue of legendary Bobby Orr. (photo Curt Nickisch)
Boston, as the Josh Rouse song goes, is “feeling 1972.”
The hometown Bruins hockey team, one of the NHL’s Original Six, is back on top. The’ve won their first Stanley Cup since 1972 (before I was born).
I had the pleasure of covering the Bruins’ unlikely championship run (an off-beat privilege that comes from working in a small newsroom). The assignment let me run with a grittier milieu than I typically come across covering Boston’s business and technology stories.
First of all, covering the games, I somehow never came across anyone from Boston. Invariably, the folks I interviewed were from Boston suburbs, where backyard rinks still dot the landscape, and the Boston area’s blue-collar industrial roots are more apparent.
And boy, do they love these hard-nosed Bruins. The point was driven home to me after watching the Bruins win Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final.
“Vancouver looks better on paper,” Bruins fan Justin Sultzbach of Peabody, Mass. told me. “Unfortunately hockey’s played on ice.”
The deciding Game 7 proved that. The Bruins won by playing the way Bruins teams have always played: scrappy, physical hockey that put the NHL’s top scoring team on its back. Vancouver, it seems, saved its aggression for after the game, when disappointed fans rioted, burned cars and looted stores. In Boston, it was simply delirium.
You can listen to my WBUR story on Boston’s post-game celebrations here:
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They key insight in the story, I think, came from stupefied fan Jesse Sklarz of Ipswitch, Massachusetts.
“There isn’t a better team to represent Boston, in my opinion,” Sklarz said. “Just hard working, grind-it-out hockey. The Red Sox, we’ve got all the big bats now. Football, we’ve got Brady. But the Bruins, it’s a bunch of no-names! And we finally did it. It’s unreal.”
The following morning, I updated the WBUR story for NPR with some morning-after perspective. I caught up with bleary-eyed fans waking up to the surreal reality that their Bruins are “Big Bad Bruins” again after 39 years. Fan Tom Collins posed for pictures in front of the statue of Bobby Orr, who led the Bruins to their last championships in 1970 and 1972. The fan from Quincy had made a replica of the Stanley Cup trophy from a colander, cardboard and tin foil.
Read my NPR story or listen it here:
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While I was interviewing Collins I noticed he had chipped and broken teeth. I asked him if he had played hockey.
“No,” he said. “I grew up in Southie.”
Posted by Curt on May 10, 2011 under WBUR |
Gate B32 at Boston's Logan Airport, where AA Flight 11 left on 9/11. (Photo Marieke Van Damme)
I was on a plane about to take off for Boston, when I saw the news on Twitter. When I landed at Logan’s Gate B34, two gates over from where American Airlines Flight 11 left from on 9/11, I got to work. I had my tape deck with me, and interviewed American Airlines gate attendants and pilots.
One pilot told me he was flying across the country when an announcement came over the radio that bin Laden had been killed. The radio chatter picked up as pilots started talking about it to each other.
I’ll bet it sounded very different from the ominous ‘we have a bomb on the plane’ radio announcement almost ten years ago. This pilot was glad for the chatter: “Because there’s such a thing as justice in this world.”
It was surreal for some of the gate attendants, who said it was welcome news but it brought back painful memories of that day. It struck me that two of the gate attendents I talked to have a son and son-in-law serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The subdued reaction at the airport was in stark contrast to the festive mood of the hundreds who gathered on Boston Common, which I went to cover next.
I was up all night reporting. Hear the WBUR feature I produced here:
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“It’s a little morbid to be out at three in the morning celebrating because someone died,” said one student who was playing music to keep the mood festive. “But at the same time … It’s more the end of an era, an end to something bad.”
Posted by Curt on April 28, 2011 under NPR, WBUR |
NFL punter Zoltan Mekso at his private equity internship. (photo Curt Nickisch)
Once, lunching in a university cafeteria, I was introduced to a man named Brian Hansen, and told that he had played in the NFL, as a punter for the New Orleans Saints.
“Isn’t it ridiculous?” Hansen said to me. “Get paid to kick a football in the air when there are so many more important things in life?”
The comment struck me, not because I got Hansen’s point at the time, but just the way he was distancing himself from what so many people revere.
So now, a few years later, I relived that moment, producing a story about the punter for the New England Patriots. Zoltan Mesko is using the NFL labor dispute to get his foot in the door of a Plan B career: private equity.
He’s a wild story even if you leave the NFL out of it. An ethnic Hungarian born in Romania, Zoltan speaks four languages well. He was dumbfounded, as a punter in high school in Ohio, to hear that his counterpart on an opposing team had been offered a college scholarship. “For kicking the football?”
NPR aired my story on Zoltan’s entry-level internship this morning. It’s a neat story about a young man who probably understands what Hansen meant. Have a listen here:
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Zoltan already sees how difficult it is to move to the ‘civilian’ workforce after a career in the NFL, and doesn’t want to be left behind by people like you and me, who are getting real-world job experience.
Feel free to listen, or read the WBUR original.
Posted by Curt on March 16, 2011 under NPR, SDPR, WBUR |
South Dakota farmer Rudi Bohlmann, a unique witness to Nagasaki's devastation. (Photo Greg Latza)
There’s a sweet little melody that my Zojirushi rice cooker plays when it finishes steaming up a cup. The digital twinkle of notes always make me and my wife smile, so Japanese.
But last night, that compact singing appliance (a wedding gift from my WBUR colleagues) evoked a melancholy tone in us. The news from Japan has been astounding and sad, and the drama keeps unfolding with each venting of radioactive gases from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power complex.
Here in the U.S., we follow and relate to these stories through our mediated and immediate experiences of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. But I can’t help to wonder to what extent Japan relates to the crisis through its awful history as the only target of nuclear weaponry.
A few years ago I produced a story for NPR about a U.S. sailor who was on the first American ship to enter Nagasaki Harbor after the atomic bomb leveled the city (I produced it first for South Dakota Public Radio).
You can listen to his haunting, visceral accounting here:
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What I like about this piece is the uniquely personal view it offers on the epic world event. Rudi Bohlmann grew up in the unmechanized world of rural prairie agriculture. As a kid, he trapped skunks to sell their skins. But world war put him on a ship barreling across the Pacific intent on invasion. The war made this simple farm kid a witness to the dawn of our modern nuclear age.
Maybe it’s the uncanny rendezvous of the unseen specter of radiation with the images of leveled cities… this time by the tsunami. But Bohlmann’s story seeing Nagasaki Harbor after the nuclear bomb wiped the city bare comes back to me, and I wonder how other such memories are being resurrected today in Japan.
