OK, I take back SOME of what I said about Facebook…

Rowland Scherman

Izzy Stone in his print shop…

by Glynn Wilson

When I signed up for Facebook a litte more than a month back, I was not thrilled with the prospect. I already manage several Web sites, most of which carry an economic interface where I can get paid and create something for the future with the real possibility of generating enough revenue to pay other writers and photographers.

My skeptical question was: How is Facebook going to help with that goal considering that the programmer geeks at Facebook make all the money off the free content tens of thousands of people post there every day?

Now, thanks to an incident that happened today, I see the power of social networking software and realize the utility of the concept.

I ran into my old friend Rowland Scherman on Facebook in the past couple of days. Today, he sent me the photo above to use on this site. This gives me the opportunity to tell a couple of stories and connect a few dots.

The photo is of an old investigative journalist named Isidor Feinstein Stone (December 24, 1907 – June 18, 1989) better known as I.F. Stone or Izzy Stone. He was an iconoclastic American investigative journalist, best remembered for his self-published I.F. Stone’s Weekly. At its peak in the 1960s, it had a circulation of about 70,000, but was regarded as very influential. In fact, The Weekly was ranked 16th in a poll of his fellow journalists of “The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century,” according to Wikipedia.

Stone was an intellectual descendant of the muckraking journalists of the early 20th century, and this site is influenced by their work and Stone’s, as well as Jack Anderson, Henry David Thoreau, Norman Maclean, Hunter S. Thompson and even Norman Mailer. I am the modern day descendant of those traditions, just publishing on the Web rather than in print.

This should not be that hard to grasp, but you would not believe some of the idiotic comments I get from time to time from right-wing critics in Alabamaland, who have as much trouble grasping this concept as Sarah Palin understanding why so many people are appalled at seeing her shoot wolves from helicopters.

The people of Birmingham seem to get it when one of our heroes who have made it to the finals of American Idol talk about their musical influences. So why is it so hard to grasp that writers and photographers draw upon influences as well?

Rowland Scherman gets this right away. He’s one of the smartest guys I know : )

He may not remember me so much from the first time I met him, since he was fairly souced on red wine at his old jazz bar on Southside, a bar called “Joe,” and since I was just a mere teenager just old enough to drink and play the drums in bars like the old Cadillac Cafe and The Courtyard.

But I remember him as the curmudgeonly proprietor who hung out with writers such as Dennis Covington. I met Covington at Joe Bar and then took his creative writing class at UAB in 1981. Not long after that, I moved back to Tuscaloosa to finish my undergraduate work in journalism and then headed for Baldwin County and other points out of Birmingham.

I ran into Rowland again when I returned in 1986 to open the Newsbreak bookstore and coffee shop on Birmingham’s Southside well before Books-a-Million and Starbucks came along. In fact, and Rowland may not realize this, but I was in negotiations to rent the space right next door to Joe Bar for the shop — when sadly, the historic Studio Arts building burned down.

I ended up renting the space at 30th Street and Highland Avenue instead, and the rest, they say, is history.

Now if you Google Rowland Scherman you will run into his unfinished Wikipedia page, where you learn this.

Rowland Scherman is an American photographer.

He studied at Oberlin College, and was dark room apprentice at LIFE magazine. He was the first photographer for the newly-formed Peace Corps in 1961. His photographs appeared in Life, Look, Time, National Geographic, Paris Match and Playboy, among many others. He won a Grammy Award in 1968 for his photograph cover of “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits.” He published “Love Letters,” an alphabet formed by posed dancers, and “Elvis is Everywhere.” He lived in Birmingham, Alabama, and documented Alabama’s Highway 11.

You will also see that he was recently written up in the Boston Globe.

Rowland Scherman gets another shot at fame

What you won’t learn there is that Rowland also keeps up with the news online as well as anyone I know. He is an activist citizen of the United States who is always involved in the “good fight” for the advancement of American democracy.

Now, in this era of the Web and social networking, you can follow his work and thoughts on Facebook, where you can see some of his photographs from his world travels, including Ireland and Teineman square in China.

Which gives me an idea.

Hey Rowland: Have you ever been to Cuba?

I haven’t been since that crazy trip with photographer Spider Martin and Dickie Jemison in 2000. We never got out of the city of Havana to do what I really wanted to do, go a searching for that illusive ivory-billed woodpecker out in the countryside.

Now that would be a great expedition, if we could put together the budget for the trip. What are you doing for Christmas this year?

(This also gives me an idea for a takeoff on my Southside chapter for the memoir, now in progress. I was kind of stuck on that period from 1986-89).

Now for that portrait I promised: A photo taken of The Triad of Dissent by Rowland Scherman, with my Nikon D-50, at the Garage Cafe courtyard, June 23, 2006.

Rowland Scherman

Tags: Facebook, Izzy Stone, Rowland Scherman

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Connecting the Dots, Making Democracy Work, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.