Happy Birthday (suit), America!

In 1974, I was attending a friend's graduation at the University of Colorado, when the School of Business was announced. At that moment, a student clad in only his tennis shoes and acedemical mortarboard streaked the stage in search of something besides his diploma. I grabbed my Nikkormat 35mm camera with zoom lens and manually fired three frames. After the ceremony, I contacted an editor at the Rocky Mountain News who told me he would take a look at my first freelance submission. This picture ran full page across the front of the next morning's edition. The Denver Post bought the other two frames for the afternoon paper. United Press International picked up the photo and sent it over the UPI newswire for which I was paid an additional $10. It was later published in "Life Magazine's Year in Pictures" for a feature on the streaking fad. For that, I received no additonal compensation, aside from jump-starting my career in photojournalism.

What would these statesmen do to BP?

The morning sunrise greets "Statesmanship" just fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico where none exists. Sculptor David Adickes placed the busts of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin along the downtown Houston corridor of Interstates 10 and 45. I'd like to think they would be mad as hell (Sam Houston confronted a congressman beating him with a hickory cane. In the 1830's he visited Washington to expose the frauds practiced upon the Cherokees by government agents). BP owes it to these guys to start telling the truth and pay the billions to clean up the mess. It sickens my heart to even think about it.