Don't have the date of publication of this first story I'm posting. Probably was published on Labor Day, Sept. 5, or the day before in the Sunday paper. Two other Pine Bluff Commercial stories I wrote are also posted here. I wrote five or six stories during my time (second time) as a reporter for the Commercial, but don't have copies of all of them. I recently found these copied to my Yahoo Notebook, along with lots of other early 2000s stuff I wrote, most of it unpublished.
By David Trulock/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
For Hurricane Katrina refugees, Labor Day weekend is no holiday. Some displaced workers say the holiday only reminds them that they are now among the jobless.
Joann Arnett of Albany, La., 30 miles north of New Orleans, worked in a Wal-Mart distribution center before Hurricane Katrina hit the area.
“This distribution center is open now, but my home has no electricity, and of course no gasoline is available,” she said.
Standing in line with several other evacuees at a table set up by the Arkansas Department of Workforce Services in the Pine Bluff Convention Center on Friday, Arnett was trying to find out if she was eligible to file a claim for unemployment insurance.
Arnett and her husband, Scott Arnett, a retired New Orleans paramedic, left Albany on Tuesday. “The temperature inside our house was above 90 degrees,” Scott Arnett said. “I’m a diabetic. There was no way we could stay there without electricity. But at least the house is okay — or was when we left. Our neighbor's house had three trees fall on it.”
William Campbell, manager of the Pine Bluff office of the Department of Workforce Services, was one of several people handling claims at a table in the lobby of the Convention Center on Friday afternoon. He said about 100 unemployment claim forms had been filled out at the table.
“We really got hit hard when we got here this morning, but things have slowed down this afternoon,” he said.
Campbell said the unemployment claims would be sent Friday by Federal Express to Baton Rouge, for Louisiana residents, and to Jackson, Ms., for Mississippi residents.
One of the Mississippi residents who filled out a claim at the Workforce Services table was Amber Blair of Picayune, Miss. Blair worked for a hospital as a home care nurse before she, her two children and her mother fled the storm on Sunday. Blair’s husband wasn’t able to leave Mississippi, since his job required him to stay.
Blair said her husband works for BellSouth, which is trying to reestablish phone service in the area, and is also with the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron of the Air Force Reserve, known as the Hurricane Hunters.
“He flies into hurricanes,” Blair said. “He was the one who told us to leave when we did.”
As far as her unemployment claim is concerned, Blair said she was told to come back and check on it Tuesday. “We want to go home, but we don’t know yet what the situation there is,” she said.
She mentioned hearing rumors of looting in the area and said her mother has emphysema and needs to be in the air conditioning. She hoped to find out soon from the Mississippi state police when it would be safe to return.
Blair also mentioned her family’s stay in Pine Bluff hasn’t itself been a financial burden. “The Red Cross has been just wonderful,” she said. “We’ve hardly had to spend a dime since we arrived.”
Some of the storm refugees staying in Pine Bluff have found temporary employment. Becky Simpson of Express Personnel Services, 2608 Olive St., said that six displaced workers have applied for jobs through her agency, and three of those have been hired.
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FEMA CHECKS SPELL RELIEF FOR SOME KATRINA EVACUEES
By David Trulock/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Thursday, September 15, 2005 12:36 PM CDT
Amos Lassen of New Orleans, an evacuee at the Red Cross shelter in the Pine Bluff Convention Center, said Wednesday that he had applied for a Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief check on Friday and his check had already arrived.
"I picked it up Tuesday morning, but it might have actually arrived here Monday afternoon," said Lassen. "It took me several tries to finish the application online, which was frustrating, but after that, it went pretty fast."
Lassen said he was happy to get his check promptly, but was concerned about the other people he'd seen having trouble using the online application system set up at the Convention Center.
"Many of these people are elderly or poor, or both, and they've never used a computer before," he said.
William Reece, a resident of the French Quarter prior to Hurricane Katrina, agreed with Lassen.
"Most of these people do not have e-mail addresses and really didn't know how to use the computers," he said. "On the first day, there were about 150 people in line to use the computers and they didn't know what to do once they got up here."
Reece said that FEMA workers arrived later in the week to help people use the computers, but they still seemed to be overwhelmed.
"When I looked at the register, 200 people had signed up and only 30 had been helped," he said.
Reece and his fiancee Debra Bowers, also from New Orleans, tried to get help from the FEMA toll-free number when they arrived in Pine Bluff a little over a week ago.
"I've found that you can sometimes get to an operator by pressing zero, even if that's not on the voice menu," Bowers said. She tried that with the FEMA hotline and it worked, but she was told she'd have to wait until the Internet-connected computers were set up at the Convention Center to apply for a FEMA check.
"Their exact words to me were, 'Get it in your head, it's going to take a few days for computers to be set up,'" Bowers said.
Reece said that once the computers were set up, they applied for FEMA money, but as of Wednesday neither he or Bowers had received a check, and they were unable to find information on the FEMA Web site regarding the status of their application.
Bowers had tried calling the toll-free FEMA number again, but was unable to get a response.
"They fixed it so you can't get through by pressing zero," she said. "They only have a recording in English and Spanish, and then they disconnect you."
A call to the FEMA number (800-621-FEMA) confirmed that a recorded message referred callers to the Internet address and then automatically hung up.
Leisa Tolliver-Gay, a spokeswoman for the United States Post Office at Little Rock, said that as of Wednesday afternoon there had been about 35 FEMA checks delivered to evacuees at the Pine Bluff Red Cross shelter. Other checks may have been delivered to people who gave addresses different from the Convention Center address, she added.
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ALL ABOUT AWARENESS: INTELLIGENCE KEY IN SELF DEFENSE, LECTURER SAYS
By David Trulock/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Friday, September 16, 2005 11:50 PM CDT
"This seminar is basically about just the opposite of what you thought it would be," Joe Steward said as he began his lecture on self-defense at Carr Memorial United Methodist Church in Pine Bluff on Thursday night.
Steward said he was going to talk about self-defense awareness, not about fighting off an attacker.
"It takes years to learn to take a knife away from somebody without getting hurt," he explained. "This class is about avoiding that big burly guy with the knife."
Self-defense awareness applies equally to beginners and to people with years of training in the martial arts, he added. "The awareness of danger, the awareness of your surroundings, enables you to not fight -- and that goes for everybody."
One of the keys to self-defense is "self-confidence building" Steward said, and he mentioned the use of eye contact as a way of accomplishing that.
"Making eye contact shows confidence. When attackers choose a victim, they choose easy targets, not someone who might give them trouble," he said.
He also emphasized the importance of being observant. "When you walk out of a building to go to your car, look around and see what's in front of you," he said. If you observe something suspicious -- a person or group of people standing around your car, for instance -- "don't hesitate to turn around and go back inside."
"We don't think like criminals, and they outsmart us," he added. "Your first line of defense is to use your intelligence."
Steward learned about self-defense awareness the hard way. In the 1970s he was in the Boston train station after bad weather suspended all flights from the airport. "I was walking along an isolated section of the platform when somebody hit me from behind with an iron pipe," he recalled.
Later he remembered passing by a person bent over something just before he was hit, but said he had not given it any thought at the time -- an example of not practicing what he called "positive mental survival training."
Steward barely survived the beating and needed several surgeries before he could return to normal activity.
Steward now holds a third-degree black belt in Taiho-Ryu, a discipline founded in Pine Bluff by Fleming "Bo" Hardy in the early 1970s. Hardy now lives in Fayetteville, but began his martial arts training as a member of the Pine Bluff Boys Club in 1962.
In 1971, after graduating from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Hardy opened the Pine Bluff Academy of Self Defense, according to information posted on the Taiho-Ryu Web site, www.taiho-ryu.org.
Hardy also is the author of a 1992 book, "Defensive Living," based on his self-defense awareness training techniques. Steward had copies of the book for sale at his lecture, and said it could also be purchased online through the Taiho-Ryu Web site.
Along with fellow Taiho-Ryu practitioners Joe Clark and Eric Kriner, Steward demonstrated practical self-defense tips for his audience of about 10 people.
When grabbed from behind by Steward, Clark pretended to faint, falling to the floor on his back. Clark demonstrated the right and wrong way to fall to the floor -- the wrong way was to fall on his back, and the right way was to fall lying almost all the way on his stomach, with one knee pulled up slightly and arms covering his head and face. "You must protect your vital organs if you're going to do this right," Steward emphasized.
Near the end of the hour-long seminar, Kriner offered a quotation from the book "The Art of War" by the ancient Chinese writer Sun-Tzu as an example of the idea of self-defense awareness: "To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence."
Another self-awareness tip Steward gave primarily for women who might routinely drive alone at night was to know of several safe, well-lighted places along the route to drive to in case of being followed or harassed by people in another car.
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I worked for the Commercial, right after moving back to Pine Bluff from Austin in 2005, from late August to early October. Not very long! Writing quickly and with correct details, as required of a reporter working at a daily newspaper, I just can't do on a continuous basis. As one of my physics professors at the University of South Carolina correctly surmised in 2001, not long before I quit that job (lab instructor), I'm not a systematic thinker.
