And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, Editor Emeritus

... that the summer solstice arrived around 3:15 p.m. Sunday, and so radio and TV types were announcing that that was the longest day of the year.
Many times over the years, that comment has reminded me of the time I was corrected for saying that. As a student in the radio and TV section of the journalism program at The University of Iowa, I started doing news broadcasts on WSUI, the university’s radio station. I stayed enrolled for the summer between my junior and senior years because I learned that, due to the shortage of air personnel, there would be some money involved for summer work. We had always been told that a faculty member or grad student monitored our broadcasts, but I had not seen much evidence of that, and certainly, as by then I was a veteran, I felt that was unlikely during summer. So, the day after I had announced the “longest day” a faculty advisor stopped me and said that wasn’t true. I said I had read it on one or more of the wire service reports that morning. He said he did not doubt that, but had I thought about what I had said? “How many hours and minutes are there in that longest day?” he asked. I think I muttered 24. “So what you really should have said was that there were more hours of daylight that day,” he suggested. Correctly.
The U.S. Open golf tournament was played in the state of Washington last weekend. There has been continual drought in the Northwest and water sources are drying up. So as to not waste water on a golf course, the fairways have not been watered, and the greens only sparingly. The roll-out on those dry and sun baked surfaces was almost comical. And unpredictable. As a further bow to water saving, the greens were seeded with different types of grasses. On TV, they reminded me of a carpet I had seen someplace, in shades of green, black, yellow, etc. Ugly. And so poor they had to use markers to show where a green started and the fairway ended!
There was a course we sometimes played in California, somewhere close to Sunnyvale, as I recall. Green fees were cheaper because after spring rains, they did not water anything but greens and tees. There was a long par five dogleg, which required a 250 yard drive to get to the bend. Well beyond my range, but with roll on the hard packed surface, I could often make it. And the second shot required a somewhat shorter shot to the top of the hill, but if the roll took your ball to the hill, it rolled right down to the green.
We knew it wasn’t a fair test, and it really wasn’t that satisfying as a result.