July28
Boy, does this bring back the memories! Vince Staten, the highly popular columnist for my hometown paper, the Kingsport (Tenn.) Times-News, wrote this column about myself and Saving Gracie. Thanks, Vince!
July 28, 2010
Jo Zimmerman remembers Carol Bradley. “Oh, you couldn’t forget Carol.”
Carol was a student in Jo’s sophomore English class at Central High in the early 1970s. And Carol remembers Jo. “She was definitely my favorite teacher. She was by far the coolest teacher I ever had — the only one ever to drive a turquoise Porsche.
“She also had a way of injecting a contemporary edge into our studies. One of the things she had our sophomore English class do was debate whether Roller Woods ought to be leveled to make way for the Fort Henry Mall.”
Jo says she remembers most all of her students, but Carol stuck out. “You knew she was going places.” Carol, who is in town this week for a book signing, hopes one of those places is the New York Times best-seller list.
Carol got her start on the way to the best-seller list back at Central in the 1970s.
It may have been the 1970s, but for student journalists working on the Paw Print, the student newspaper for the recently opened Central High School, it might as well have been the 1870s.
Carol remembers, “Under our archaic system, students would write stories in longhand, turn them in, and six weeks later either see them in the newspaper or not — it was strictly up to the English teacher who served as our sponsor.”
So Carol decided to challenge the system.
“I wanted to prove to our sponsor that students could handle the whole kit and caboodle and that we should be given freer hand in the paper’s contents.”
It was the era of alternative newspapers, so Carol published her own student newspaper, “The CHS Free Press: An Alternative to Censorship.”
“I came out with four issues of my paper over an eight-week period.”
The administration didn’t see it as a demonstration of student prowess.
“The principal tried to have me expelled but failed. Bowing to pressure, our sponsor reluctantly made me co-editor of the Paw Print my senior year. All of this was way too much fun. I’ve been bitten by the journalism bug ever since.”
Jump ahead 35 years, and Carol, who has been working in newspapers all those years, is back in town with her first book.
“Saving Gracie: How One Dog Escaped the Shadowy World of American Puppy Mills,” published earlier this year by Howell Book House, is an outgrowth of her year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, where she studied animal law.
She will be signing copies on Friday at Books-A-Million on Stone Drive at 7 p.m.
Carol defines a “puppy mill” as a commercial kennel “where dogs are treated like livestock, forced to produce puppies in often squalid conditions.”
“Saving Gracie” follows a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, a little dog with big eyes, who was rescued from a Pennsylvania puppy mill.
And yes, Tennessee has puppy mills, lots of them.
“The state has 10 dog breeders licensed by the federal government, but that’s a fraction of the real number, and some of these kennels are horrific. Since last fall alone, 90 dogs were taken from dark sheds and makeshift pens in Roane County; 50 inbred and emaciated dogs were seized from a breeder in Lawrence County; 50 dogs suffering parasites and infections were removed from a kennel in Dickson County; more than two dozen dogs caked with urine and feces were taken from a Maury County kennel; and this spring 230 dogs suffering heart problems, eye infection and birth defects were hauled out of a kennel in Sparta. One of the largest puppy mill busts in the country occurred in 2008, when nearly 700 dogs crowded two and three to a hutch in unrelenting summer heat were rescued from a kennel in Lyles, Tennessee, southwest of Nashville.”
Gracie, who was one of more than 300 dogs seized from the Mike-Mar Kennel in Oxford, Pa., was nearly blind and balked at human contact. But she has flourished under the patient, loving care of her adoptive owner, Linda Jackson. For Gracie, at least, there is a happy ending.
Contact Vince Staten at vincestaten@timesnews.net or via mail in care of this newspaper. Voicemail may be left at 723-1483. His blog can be found at vincestaten.blogspot.com.
