Month: June 2019

Why Her And Not Us?

Editor’s Note: Not many people have been hurt at Snowbird, our hideaway in the mountains of North Carolina. And no one has ever been killed although there has been a close call or two including the biggest, closest, call of all last Friday night.

There were seven of us on the mountain: John Sullivan, an old newspaper friend who teaches journalism at American University; his young son, Ben; and five other men. All seven of us had been to the mountain before, some many times, so we had pretty much seen it it all, or thought we had.

There was a storm coming, it would probably be a rainy night, but Ben wanted to sleep outside so he and John pitched their tent on one of the few flat spots near the cabin. My nephew, Chuck Stith, and my friend, Shane Colvard, two Alabama boys who usually sleep outside, set up next to the fire, under a canopy.

But this is John’s story so I’ll let him tell it:

John and Ben's campsite
John and Ben’s campsite

“I’m not exactly sure what made us leave the tent. It might have been the lightning off in the distance, my lack of confidence in the rain fly I had hastily assembled by lantern light, or the heartburn from the smoked pork. But Ben, my 10-year-old son, and I grabbed our sleeping bags and pads and ran for the cabin.”

The Sullivan's had dodged the bullet.
The Sullivan’s dodged the bullet.

“By the time we had dashed 40 yards  to the porch rain was falling sideways. Chuck and Shane, who were camping nearby,  were holding onto metal poles supporting a canopy the wind had snatched and thrown into the air like a piece of paper. A few minutes later we heard a deafening crack.”

“Standing on the back porch of the cabin, peering into the darkness, we couldn’t see what had happened.  Then a

The oak had been damaged at its base by loggers in 2014-15.

flash of lightning illuminated the side of the hill: A tall oak tree had split open, broken off, and fallen across our tent.”

“Ben didn’t really understand what had happened, how close he and I had come to being killed. But the three men on the porch did. Chuck and Shane have kids, too. We hugged and thanked each other, and God, that we were safe.”        

“The next day we surveyed the damage. The top of the oak had crushed our tent, landing

Ben and John Sullivan
Ben and John Sullivan

where we had laid down to sleep. One branch had left a four-inch deep impression in the ground.”

“After we got home, back to Bethesda, MD, we heard the news story about an 11-year-old girl in Indiana who had been killed by a falling tree that weekend.”

“Why her, and not us?”

Coming Monday: The Fatal Surprise

You’re Gonna Hate Yourself

Do you know what kills  educationally challenged people?  Think about it.  This is not as hard as it might first appear.

Give up? 

You’re gonna hate yourself when I tell you the answer.

*  * *

That's me, with some of the 9-track tapes of government database.
That’s me about 1994, with some of the 9-track tapes of government databases I acquired.

I found the answer to that age-old question, OK, OK, just my question: What kills people who have relatively little formal education?   I also discovered what kills rich people and what kills, or at least used to kill, the best educated among us.   I’m going to throw those answers in for free. 

In the early 1990’s I was the database editor at The News and Observer, acquiring, loading, and analyzing mostly government databases. One day I got to messing  around with North Carolina’s death database, trying to find out what kills people who aren’t all that smart.

That database told me each dead person’s sex, race, and years of education, date of birth and, of course, date of death.  I lumped all the males together, by race, and by year of birth, and had the computer calculate the average years of education for white men, and black men, by year of birth. Same for females.

Then I compared each dead person’s years of education to his/her group average and put the difference between those two numbers in a separate field. For each person it was plus this or minus that, depending on how much education they had compared to people of the same sex and race, born the same year they were born.

[I eliminated everyone under age 24 because they may have died while they were still in school, before they had completed their education.]

Now I could compute the average education level for each cause of death. And I could find out what killed people who did not have as much schooling as other folks.

Have you guessed correctly?  People in North Carolina who  got run over in the street had a lower level of education than people who died from any other cause of death.

I told you you’d hate yourself.

* * *

Common sense, as well as various studies, tells us there is a correlation between how much education a person has and how much money he or she makes.  That allowed me, by grouping dead people with the best educations compared to their peers, to figure out what kills rich people.

The answer? Cancer.

Why is that?

Tell you what I think: highly educated people don’t have dangerous jobs.  They don’t roof houses or cut timber or climb power poles — they don’t get killed on the job.  They don’t get drunk and get in fights at bars at 2 in morning.  They don’t smoke but they do wear seat belts and go to the gym.  And they can afford to  go to the doctor when they feel bad.

But sooner or later every one of us has to die and if something else doesn’t get you, cancer will.

*  *  *

Now this may surprise you: What single cause of death claimed the best educated group of people compared to their peers — same race, same sex, same year of birth?

The answer: AIDS.

In the early years, before AIDS began killing drug addicts who shared contaminated needles, it was mainly a plague afflicting homosexuals.  And homosexuals, as a group, are well educated.

Postscript: This post is not “old news.” It’s new news.  I was not reporting when I did that data analysis and, in any event, this is not the kind of story I worked.  For some reason I wasn’t able to get other N&O reporters interested and it never appeared in the paper. Don’t ask me why because I think it’s a good one.

Coming Friday: Why Her And Not Us?