Researcher
Smarter Than a 3rd Grader…
I can trace my love for communicative, creative and persuasive writing back to my 3rd grade year at Mt. View Elementary School in North Omaha, Nebraska when I was named the editor of our class newspaper by my teacher Ms. Hamilton. 
Along with doing what 8-year old boys did back then like excelling in little league baseball, climbing trees, riding bikes, sledding, playing with model Tyco trains; I collected maps, built models, drafted blueprints of houses and airports, designed cities on paper, experimented with my chemistry set, read encyclopedias and watch Walter Conkrite on the CBS Evening News with my family at dinner time, and 60 Minutes on Sundays.
The top news stories of 1970 – 1971 were: Vietnam War, South Vietnamese Army invaded Laos, Kent State Shooting; death of Egyptian president Nasser; First Earth Day; EPA created; ABC launched prime time football show called Monday Night Football; World Trade Center completed; childproof safety caps; 1st NYC Marathon; New English Bible is printed; Beatles last album released, “Let It Be”; Apollo 13 mission; floppy disc invented; Peru Earthquake killed 72,000, leaving 700,000 homeless; 
18-years old given the right to vote in federal elections; bar code introduced; Marshall Univ. football team plane crash; microprocessor is introduced; end of the Gold Standard for American Currency; Pentagon Papers are released to newspapers; Bangladesh is created; cigarette ads are banned from TV; floppy disc is created for computers; China joined UN; Attica State Prison Riot; US Supreme Court ruled desegregation constitutional; CAT Scanning was introduced; CAPT Samuel Gravely became US Navy’s 1st African American Rear Admiral; cell phone battery invented by African American inventor Henry Thomas Sampson; Disney World opens in Florida; Greenpeace founded; Amtrak created; D.B. Cooper skyjacked NWA Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle; Charles Manson convicted; Southwest Airlines launched; “Electric Company” debuted on PBS; United Arab Emirates formed; Doonesbury comic strip went national; NASDAQ debuted; Baltimore Orioles defeated the Cincinnati Reds in the 1970 World Series 4-1; Baltimore Colts defeated the Dallas Cowboys in the 1971 Super Bowl V at the Orange Bowl 16-13; and the Nebraska Cornhuskers defeated the LSU Tigers also at the Orange Bowl 17-12, winning their first of five NCAA Football National Championships. Go Big Red!
Back in North Omaha, I was now in Mrs. Cottle’s 4th grade class where we had to write in cursive. Inspired by the hit movie “Airport 1970″, I would go on to turned a short story that I now call “Airport 1972“. It was also around this time Mt. View School’s resource teacher Nancy Hallstrom (1932 – 2009), may she rest in peace, introduced me to a publication called the World Almanac. I was so amazed by all the facts: populations, sports, political leaders, aviation, countries, television show ratings, newspaper circulations, tallest buildings, etc. For the next ten years, I could always count on the latest World Almanac in my Christmas stocking. I am sharing all of this for a reason. To do what I did for the past four years, researching the Katrina response and aftermath, I had to rely on skills honed over thirty five years ago in North Omaha, as well as 21st Century e-tools like AOL, Google, Adobe and Microsoft Office. 
In addition, a very detailed and intricate outline was needed to compile the mounds and gigabytes of data for this book project. This would have been very difficult without my Omaha Public School System primary education and Microsoft Excel.
The original working title was Camp Epiphany; a name I suggested to Rick Mathieu four years ago to describe the location when he, his brother Manny and some other men from their side of the New Orleans 7th Ward ran rescue missions by day and partied by night between 8.29.05 – 9.07.05. This was the original premise for the book project. But because Rick is a lover of history and facts like myself, and because of his unselfish gesture of encouraging me to document the local, state, inter-state, federal and international responders as well, we found ourselves in need of a new working title. Three weeks before Hurricane Katrina, I found myself surfing airport-related websites; something that started back in the third grade when I wrote (mail a letter with a postage stamp) airport managers to obtain airport and runway layouts, oil companies like Standard Oil to obtain free city street maps and chambers of commerce across the country requesting info on their metropolitan area. Anyways, on this particular August 2005 day I visited Louis B. Armstrong International Airport’s website, and found a link to the Southeast Louisiana Emergency Evacuation Guide, which led me to a Contraflow Map. The plan seemed to be that in the event of a hurricane, all interstate lanes were to be turned in an opposing direction from the Gulf of Mexico. By December 2006, I had a firm understanding of the post-flooding mass movement of evacuees and survivors, all going the same westerly direction. After fifteen months into this independent research project, we finally gave it a name; the Contraflow Research Project, thus the forthcoming book title, CONTRAFLOW.
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