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The AIH Transcript for December 28, 2020

Hosts: Helen Mann and Ali Hassan

Prologue

HELEN MANN: Hello. I'm Helen Mann, sitting in for Carol off.

ALI HASSAN: Good evening. I'm Ali Hassan, sitting in for Chris Howden. This is As It Happens.

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AH: Tonight:

HM: Complex sentence. Saudi rights activist Loujain Alhathloul was sentenced to nearly six years in prison today. Her friend tells us she could be released much sooner, but freedom remains a long way off.

AH: Putting off a clinic. Ontario says staffing shortages have forced a slowdown in COVID-19 vaccination plans but plenty of health care workers in the province say they're eager to volunteer. We'll hear from one of them.

HM: Doctored orders. A citizen journalist in China has been sentenced to four years in prison for contradicting prescribed narratives about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

AH: Masterclass. Bluegrass guitarist Tony Rice was in a league of his own. But when it came to collaborators, the legendary flat picker knew how to pick them.

HM: And blind date. When Gene Weingarten set out to write a book comprised entirely of true stories that took place on a single day, it was less than thrilled to pull today's date out of a hat: circa 1986.

AH: And that December 28th was a Sunday. In that infamously sleepy time between Christmas and New Year's. But as Mr. Weingarten told Carol often feature interview last year, he became the perfect proof that there's no such thing as an ordinary day. As It Happens. The Monday Edition. Radio that's relieved he saved the date.

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Part 1: Saudi activist sentenced

Saudi activist sentenced

Guest: Atiya Jaffar

AH: For the past two and a half years, there has seldom been good news in the case of Loujain Alhathloul, but today brought a small sliver of hope. As It Happens has covered Ms. Alhathloul's case extensively. She's a prominent Saudi human rights activist and a vocal campaigner for the rights of Saudi women to drive. In May 2018, she was arrested in Riyadh and earlier this month she was convicted under a broadly worded law aimed at fighting terrorism. Today, she was given her sentence, nearly six years behind bars. But her family and friends say she could possibly be released as early as February 2021. Atiya Jaffar is one of her friends. We reached her in Vancouver.

HM: Atiya, what kind of emotions have you been feeling today after hearing this news of Loujain's prison sentence?

ATIYA JAFFAR: You know, it's been a real roller coaster, to be honest with you. I was definitely horrified when I woke up to see that she's received a sentence of nearly six years in prison. And then after I found out that part of that sentence has been suspended and another part of it is being backdated to May 2018, I was a little bit relieved because that means that she will be released in early 2021, in March. But then it really dawned on me, you know, that she has been convicted for terrorism. And that is horrifying. And that just is a terrible feeling because, you know, she's been convicted of terrorism and freedom in 2021 is still not freedom. She should be released immediately if she has not done anything wrong. All she has done is stand up for women's rights, advocate peacefully for women's rights. And, yeah, it's absolutely a sham trial and a sham conviction. And it's definitely very upsetting, though it's not the worst possible news.

HM: Can you clarify a little bit for us how the six year sentence means that she may be out in a couple of months? I mean, what are the terms that have changed?

AJ: Yes. So she has been sentenced to nearly six years. What the court has decided is that they're suspending two years and 10 months of her sentence and backdating the start of her jail term to May 2018, which is when she was first detained. She has been jailed essentially since May 2018. So that means, you know, with the combination of the suspension and also the backdating of her sentence, that means that she really only has about three months left to serve.

HM: What do you make of the fact that that suspension has happened, that they're giving her time served because really the prosecution was initially seeking 20 years. What does that indicate to you?

AJ: I think it indicates to me that they are nervous because of the global spotlight that has been on Loujain's case and the fact that there has been a global movement fighting for her freedom since she was first arrested in 2018. And, you know, we already have an incoming Biden administration in the U.S. that is going to change the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, and I'm sure there's some pressure that comes along with that. And then we have other governments, including, you know, the government of France, which is calling for the release of Loujain. So there's definitely a lot of pressure and a lot of support for Loujain and there's a lot of spotlight on her case.

HM: We have covered Loujain's case on the show before. Can you remind us of the kind of treatment that she has faced behind bars?

AJ: It's really hard to talk about because the treatment has really been awful. She has been tortured. She has been sexually assaulted. She has been held in solitary confinement for months at a time. It's absolutely inhumane. When her parents visit her, they've said that she is shaking uncontrollably at times. It's definitely just awful. And it's the kind of treatment that's going to impact her for years to come, I imagine, because it's been absolutely terrible. And she has protested these conditions numerous times. She has gone on hunger strike to protest the abysmal conditions that she's been detained under.

HM: Now, even if she is released in a couple of months, as you hope, what are the limitations perhaps on that freedom?

AJ: There will be limits on her mobility, you know, restrictions on her ability to travel, which is not real freedom at all, of course. And she will kind of have this looming -- the two years of her sentence have been suspended that will kind of be a dark cloud, right? It's something that could be used as an excuse in the future to possibly imprison her again. So living with that and living with a conviction for terrorism is not going to be easy. And I think that's why her family is saying that this isn't actually going to be real, true, freedom -- the kind that she deserves.

HM: How did you and Loujain become friends?

AJ: Loujain and I met at UBC. So we both attended UBC together. We met in 2010, so a decade ago. We met the night before a march that we were planning in support of Pakistani flood victims. And the night before, we were all just preparing things, getting signs ready. Everyone was exhausted, but she was the only person in the room who was actually energetic and making jokes and, you know, really lifting everyone's spirits. I can say for sure that she was the best person possible to go on that very long walk with and to organise together with at UBC.

HM: If you could describe the essence of who she is and what's driving her, what would that be?

AJ: I would say she is first and foremost just a person with just a tremendous amount of integrity and courage. She will always stand up for what is right. She fought against the driving ban, successfully. The driving ban in Saudi Arabia against women was lifted thanks to Loujain's activism. She continued to speak out in support of women's rights even after she was arrested because this arrest was not her first arrest. She has been arrested for her activism in the past. And even since she's been imprisoned in May 2018, she was offered a plea deal where she would just sign a document saying that she had not been tortured or sexually assaulted and she would have been granted freedom, but she refused to do that. She refused to compromise her integrity.

HM: She has had, as you pointed out, so much support around the world. If you could speak with her directly right now, what would you want to tell her?

AJ: I would say, Loujain I admire you so much. I am so proud of you. You have fought for so many important things. Your story and your legacy is admired and appreciated by so many people around the world. There are so many people paying attention to your story. You know, all day today, I have received nothing but messages and support and solidarity of Loujain. There are so many people paying attention to your story. There are so many people that want to see you free and there are so many people that will not stop fighting until you are really and truly free. So do not lose hope. We are with you, all of us, all over the world.

HM: Atiya Jaffar thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking time to talk about your friend with us.

AJ: Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for covering the story.

AH: Atiya Jaffar is a friend of Loujain Alhathloul. We reached Ms. Jaffar in Vancouver.

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Ontario vaccine rollout speed

Guest: Nili Kaplan-Myrth

AH: COVID-19 hasn't taken a holiday break. But in Ontario, vaccinations for the coronavirus did. The province's government says the life saving jabs had to be paused to ensure proper staffing in hospitals and long term care facilities. But now nurses and doctors are saying they'd volunteer if that's what it would take to protect the vulnerable. One of them is Dr. Nili Kalpan-Myrth. She's a family doctor in Ottawa, and that is where we reached her.

HM: Dr. Kaplan-Myrth when you saw the news of this Christmas vaccination slowdown, why did you offer to help?

NILI KAPLAN MYRTH: Well, you know, back in March, when the pandemic began, family doctors and other doctors in the community, we were all preparing our wills because we were told that we might be deployed to work in ICU as intubating people as opposed to working as family doctors or paediatricians or gynaecologists. And we've been ready to help the entire pandemic and have yet to be actually called upon. So I saw my colleagues writing and saying the official word is that hospitals can only operate on skeleton staffs during the holidays. And yet even our colleagues who work in the hospitals, our emergency room colleagues, haven't been asked to work. We would all be more than willing to work. And we're anxious. We're lying in bed at night worrying about our patients and worrying about our colleagues and worrying about our communities. And we want this vaccination to roll out as quickly as possible so that everybody is safer.

HM: Let's just break down that statement about the skeleton staff, because the spokesperson for Premier Ford responding to this controversy said, and I'm quoting, 'It was hospital sites administering the vaccines that asked for the slightly amended schedule, recognising challenges with holiday staffing and the need to care for patients. Personally, I'm happy to listen to frontline partners.' What do you say to that?

NILI KAPLAN MYRTH: Well, I would say that the frontline partners aren't invited to the table, and I feel like we're actually on mute. Like that's the 2020 thing that we're on mute, we're not being heard. I know that Anthony Dale for the Ontario Hospital Association said that, you know, we need to diversify distribution plans and avoid all this politicising. But then primary care has been left out of the picture from the very beginning. All the doctors are more than willing to work. And there's kind of like this red herring -- there's this idea that then people are saying, oh, well, we can we can train up some more people, we can get volunteers, we can get students, we can bring people out of retirement. But all of that is bogus because you have the workforce, you've had the workforce all along. But we're waiting for a sign from somebody that we're ready to go. And it just doesn't make any sense. Like if we receive 90,000 vaccines and we've only administered 11,227 -- what is happening to the rest of those? You can say, well, you know, we have to make sure that 21 days later, all the people who are first immunised are going to have their boosters. So that leaves 67,546 that are unspoken for, that we could have already been out there immunising people. What I hear from my own public health unit is that there is no problem, this is all going according to plan. But that's also what we heard, you know, throughout the pandemic. And we're kind of saying the emperor has no clothes. Like, you can't just keep saying, no, no, no, we meant for this to happen. It doesn't make any sense. Why would we delay something that would be preventing future deaths? Like as every day goes by, the target of trying to immunise the population for, you know, autumn of 2021 becomes ludicrous. Like, it's just simply impossible.

HM: We are hearing that other jurisdictions are getting these shots out more quickly. And in fact, I'm seeing numbers that suggest Newfoundland Labrador has gotten out five times as many vaccines as in Ontario. Who do you hold responsible for that?

NILI KAPLAN MYRTH: Well, I think we have to hold our leadership in Ontario responsible for that. And the politicisation of this is that then Ontario's and say, well, no, it's the feds and so on, so forth. But I mean, why in some provinces did they lockdown before there were monumental numbers of seniors dying? Why in other countries are they doing this 24/7 and we're saying, no, we need a break for Christmas? Like that doesn't compute for any of us who are actually, you know, the so-called health care workers who are out there saying we will work. So why is it that my colleagues are saying that they've received no communication on vaccines at all, not in the community as family docs or paediatricians, not in the emergency rooms where they would happily go back and work an extra shift, but they're not asked -- who is responsible?

HM: Who is responsible?

NILI KAPLAN MYRTH: I don't know, because I'm the family doctor in the community. I mean, there are multiple levels of bureaucracy here, but ultimately at the highest level in Ontario, it goes to Doug Ford, right. Like I mean, there is somebody who's meant to be in charge of this whole thing in Ontario, and it's Christine Elliott or Doug Ford or, you know, it's the people who are supposed to be ensuring that their constituents are taken care of. And I look at New Zealand as an example of a country that says, you know, we can aim high or we can take the lesser road. And if you aim high, like you might be able to achieve something. If you take the lesser road, you're pretty much guaranteed to be sluggish, to let people die, to let this drag on.

HM: Explain for us the difference that a few days makes when it comes to administering these vaccines.

NILI KAPLAN MYRTH: Well, every day that you don't immunise those targets for when we're going to have enough of our population immunised to have some form of herd immunity keeps getting pushed further along. So when I'm speaking to my patients, we're talking about, you know, they want to know, will it be safe for their kids to go back to school in September? Like, well, okay, let's see. We don't even know yet when you know the highest risk people are going to have received this vaccine, it seems more and more unlikely. You know, people were so upset that their Christmas plans were ruined. Well, how do you feel about next Christmas? Like, every single day is going to be a further delay. All of those people who need the vaccine then need their second vaccine. It takes time. So it doesn't matter a day or tw?. I mean, how many people are going to get sick and die each day and how much does that matter to me? It matters every single time a person -- every time I see somebody saying today my mother was diagnosed with COVID or today my sister died of COVID, or today my colleague goes into hospital and is worried that they have COVID. Every time I see that, I feel a tightness in my belly that is like, why are we still here? So, yeah, it makes a difference. But for me, the irony is that the government asked us to sign up on these lists to say that we will be available, will be deployable, and then they don't use us for the skills that we have. And we have the vaccine -- it's just sitting there. Why would it just sit there? It doesn't make any sense.

HM: Dr. Kaplan-Myrth I appreciate you speaking with us today. Thank you very much.

NILI KAPLAN MYRTH: You're welcome. My pleasure.

AH: Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth is a family doctor in Ottawa, and that is where we reached her. You can find out more on that story on our website: cbc.ca/aih.

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Chinese journalist convicted

Guest: Yaqiu Wang

AH: China sent a message today to those who might contradict the official message about COVID-19. A citizen journalist was sentenced to four years in prison for her reporting on the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan. Last February, Zhang Zhan gave the world a glimpse into life in Wuhan during lockdown. Her reports painted a very different picture from the upbeat coverage of state media. And now human rights groups are worried her conviction will have a chilling effect on anyone contradicting Beijing about what really happened at the height of the outbreak. Yaqiu Wang is a China researcher with Human Rights Watch. We reached her in New York.

HM: Ms. Wang, what crime has Zhang Zhan been convicted of today?

YAQIU WANG: She was convicted for picking quarrels and provoking trouble. It's a crime that is often used by the Chinese government to punish people who criticise the government.

HM: Provoking trouble, how?

YW: By going to Wuhan and seeing what she saw and using a phone to record what she saw, which is a completely illegal thing to do by Chinese law or by international human rights law.

HM: So she went to Wuhan at the height of the pandemic and was reporting on it?

YW: Correct.

HM: And what kind of people did she speak to? What kind of things did she put out in that video that she shot?

YW: She shot more than 100 videos. She went into the hospitals. So the videos has these scenes of the hospital of people or, you know, people who died in the bags. And also she talked to people on the street, the people who talked to her about how they feel and they worry about their job, their economic prospects and their health.

HM: And when we see the images that she's shot, what does it tell us about the state of the pandemic at the time in Wuhan?

YW: I think people were really worried. And also people were very fearful because some people who refused to talk to her, obviously, because as somebody who lives in China, you know, that speaking to a reporter, especially an independent reporter, that you could get in trouble.

HM: Mm hmm. Now, what kind of conditions has she been living in while she's been in detention?

YW: According to her lawyer, who met her when she was detained, her hands have been tied for 24 hours, for days. And she was forced fed because she started a hunger strike because she refused to cooperate with this so-called investigation.

HM: And when you say force feeding, they've inserted a tube through her nose?

YW: Yes, yes, yes.

HM: And what is the point of holding her hands down? Why are they restraining her hands?

YW: So she doesn't pull the feeding tube away from her.

HM: Do you know how she is doing physically and mentally?

YW: According to her lawyer, she's much thinner than she used to be and she looked really pale and she's definitely not in good health and her health is deteriorating. She has refused to cooperate with the so-called investigation because she does think that she hasn't done anything wrong and she thinks this prosecution is persecution for her speech.

HM: So she was motivated at the time that she went to Wuhan to try to expose what she thought was happening there. What is motivating her now?

YW: Because of her belief in free speech, she says she thinks that she has a right to go to Wuhan to cover the pandemic and she has a right to freely post her videos to show what's going on in Wuhan to the Chinese public.

HM: When you look back at those videos, what concerns have they raised to you about the reliability of the information we've got about COVID-19 and its origins?

YW: I mean, the Chinese government has portrayed its handling of the virus as very successful, as transparent, as benevolent. But from those videos, you can see that, you know, the hospitals were in a chaotic situation. People were very fearful. People were worried about, you know, their situation. So that is in stark contrast to the Chinese government's narrative of how they have controlled the pandemic.

HM: Zhang Zhan's conviction comes just before the World Health Organisation is sending a team into China to investigate the origins of the virus. Is there anything to the timing of this conviction, do you think that might be related to that?

YW: I think it's probably more related to the Christmas holiday conviction. The Chinese government has a record of trying and convicting human rights defenders during the Christmas holiday because most of the Western world people are on holiday. So that's a way for them to distract attention from the convictions. A good example would be the trial and conviction of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. He was convicted during the Christmas holiday.

HM: Tell me a little bit more about the kind of efforts that are underway to support Zhang Zhan in this situation.

YW: Both domestically and nationally, there were supporters who went to the court to try to, you know, support her, but some of them were taken away to the police station. Also there are extensive coverage by differing media in China. Also her supporters outside of China doing all kinds of petitions and speaking up on social media, trying to raise awareness of her case.

HM: Do you expect that to carry on?

YW: Yes, I think so. I mean, she's now sentenced to four years, you know, the effort to try to get her release will continue.

HM: What effect might this sentencing have on independent reporting in China?

YW: It will absolutely send a chilling effect to the reporters. I mean, if you go to the place, a public crisis happening and you just use your phone to record it, the scene, you can be sentenced to four years.

HM: All right. In terms of what Human Rights Watch is doing, will you have a continuing role in pursuing this case?

YW: I mean, we do two things. One is to raise awareness to the public. So we write a report on her case. The other is that we talk to foreign governments, asking them in their interaction with China's government, that they should raised the cases of human rights defenders and try to get them released.

HM: Do you think anything might change with the transition to a Biden administration in the United States?

YW: I really hope that the, you know, human rights could be at the centre of the U.S. government's interaction with China. I think one positive sign that the Biden administration has signalled that they wanted to work with other governments to work together to put pressure on China to push changes in human rights in China.

HM: All right, Ms. Wang thank you for speaking with us.

YW: Thank you for having me.

AH: Yaqiu Wang is a China researcher with Human Rights Watch. She was in New York.

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Part 2: Encore: One Day

Encore: One Day

AH: If you're a reporter working the holidays, you might pray to the news gods. News can be nearly impossible to come by. Most people are too busy eating sausage rolls and sipping eggnog to worry about keeping journalists busy. But Gene Weingarten doesn't believe in a slow news day. One year, The Washington Post's features editor instructed for reporters on Christmas Day to walk north, south, east and west no further than seven blocks and return to the newsroom only when they had a great story. It seems like a wild exercise, but to Mr. Weingarten, there's no such thing as an ordinary day. Mr. Weingarten, it should be noted, is obviously a glutton for punishment because he decided to turn this difficult exercise into a book. He put a bunch of numbers months and years into a hat and pulled out three pieces of paper. He came up with December 28, 1986 -- 34 years ago today. And the stories he ended up uncovering formed the basis of his book One Day: The Extraordinary Story of An Ordinary 24 Hours in America. We're revisiting the interviews that have stuck with us lately, and this was one of them. Here's Carol's conversation with Gene Weingarten from November 2019.

CO: Gene, first of all, welcome to As It Happens.

GENE WEINGARTEN: It's great to be here.

CO: This is an unlikely premise for a book, and I must say I approached it with trepidation because I didn't think you could pull this off. But it's extraordinary. The stories are… they’re life-altering, they’re jaw-dropping, they are too good to be true, too good to be fiction too. So were you just blessed with the gods of journalism, or was this a lot of hard work?

GW: Well, to be honest, I approached it with trepidation as well. This was sort of the result of a combination of stupidity and arrogance. I found myself approaching my mid-60s, and thinking that I was becoming a little too complacent. And so I decided to do something that challenged me in a way that I wasn't sure I could actually make it work. And for your listeners who happen to be writers or aspiring writers, I don't recommend doing this.

CO: [deep laughter] Okay, so you wanted to pick a random date in the calendar, and you came up with December 28th, 1986 — which I think most people in the business of journalism could tell you that that is a really bad idea. How did you come up with that date?

GW: Well, my editor and I went to a restaurant, and we brought in this old green fedora just for dramatic purposes. And we crumpled into it little pieces of paper with numbers on them. We had children select the numbers. There were three drawings, one of them for the 31 possible days of the month, one of them for the 12 possible months of the year, and one of them for the year. And we did that obviously simply to establish that this was going to be utterly random. What we wound up with was disturbing because number one, it turned out to be a Sunday — which as all journalists know, is the weakest news day of the week. It turned out to be the week between Christmas and New Year's — which is always the weakest news week of the year. And 1986 didn't really seem to ring many bells for great news. So we figured we had the worst day of the week and the worst week and a bad year.

CO: [laughing] But you couldn't back out. And, of course, you had all these witnesses around the green fedora. And so you were stuck with December 28th, 1986. And you set out to tell stories of 24 hours in America. And all the most extraordinary and ordinary stories you could find. So how did you do that?

GW: Well, we did have Google. And probably 75 per cent of the stories that I wound up finding out about were pulled from some websites from Google, from some legal websites, et cetera. But, of course, that was only the beginning of the story. You got a tiny hint of something that happened on that day. Most of the rest of it was research that seemed to last forever.

CO: [laughing] How long did you work on this?

GW: Well, there’s an interesting way to answer that question [laughing]. My book contract called for the book to be done in two years. And it was done in six years. And any journalists listening to this will have this quick intake of breath and horror. It took way longer than I thought because these stories became way richer and deeper and more complicated than I ever expected.

CO: This is what's so interesting because you take a story that looks small, and you keep pulling the thread until you get a big, big ball of yarn, don't you? And I want to talk to some of them. You start at midnight or just after midnight on this day. And you go through the day and the country with the stories. But there are two stories about fires in this collection. I want to ask you about the one that begins at three o'clock in the morning in Falls City, Nebraska — with a man named Todd Thrane, and two children who die in a fire with him. What did you start with in that story?

GW: That's a good question. That was one of those stories that started with a single paragraph. There was a story — I believe it was in the New York Times — that just said two children and their babysitter died in a house fire. That was all I knew. It's a little national story that kind of usually results in a paragraph. It developed into this gothic melodrama almost unbelievable in its complexity.

CO: All the people involved, you tracked them down, everyone that was involved in that fire, who was there, who wasn't who died, you found out the story, what had happened to them up to that point, and then what happened to them since — including the woman whose children were being babysat that night, Becky Gill. Can you tell us about her?

GW: Well, the complexity was that even though the newspaper reports called him the babysitter, Todd Thrane was not actually the babysitter of Becky Gill's two children. He was her boyfriend, and he was living in the house with her. He was a hellion. He was a guy who had never done anything right in his life. My memory is he was 20. And on that early morning, when he was alone with the children, he did something right in this really dramatic way. He could have run from this house. The fire started when everybody was asleep, but he went for the children. And it was a gigantic tragedy. Obviously, they all three died. But he died a hero. He was in their room trying to get them out of bed when he was overcome by flames and smoke. The story didn't end there. Because it turned out, and again this all happened through reporting, none of this was public. It turned out that Becky was pregnant with his son. And I found that son 30 years later.

CO: We don't want to spoil stories because all of them are there's cliffhangers, and they're dramatic. And, of course, I do want to ask you about some other stories. We’ll just tell people that we are listening to As It Happens, and I'm speaking with Gene Weingarten about his book The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America. The book is called One Day. And, Gene I want to ask you about… well, a number of these stories there are just chance things happen, and little things that change the course of lives. And you revisit a helicopter crash in Matlock, Washington. And it was a bad crash, could have gone a whole lot worse, right? What happened in that story?

GW: There were two friends who took a tiny helicopter to go fishing early in the morning that day. And on the way back, they encountered bad weather. Visibility became very difficult, and they had to do an emergency landing in this field that was filled with logging detritus. It's a strange thing with small helicopters, but one way to see better is to remove the doors so that you don't have to deal with fogging windows. So they removed the doors and took off again. And something almost unbelievably ridiculous happened. The odds against it were millions-to-one, but a metal band caught on one of the struts. The metal band was something that had held the lumber together. And it inverted the helicopter. The helicopter suddenly flipped upside down. And these guys landed on their heads. The last thing that the pilot remembers thinking was nobody ever survives this, but it turns out they did.

CO: But then within 24 hours, Brad Wilson has another accident, doesn't he?

GW: Yeah, he almost died twice within 24 hours. He was going with a tow truck operator to the scene of the crash to try to rescue what he could of his mangled helicopter. And something went wrong with his car, and he went sailing off at 50 miles an hour into a ditch. He actually survived that too.

CO: And then you don't stop the story there [GW sighs]. You carry on to find out in what way this man — Brad Wilson — might have regarded this extraordinary bit of luck that he survived two accidents in 24 hours. And he does some things that help others or save others, right?

GW: Brad is not a guy who thinks that much philosophically. He’s a very smart man. But, you know, he doesn't stop to wonder about cosmic coincidences. So I raised the question what do you do when your life is saved twice within 24 hours? You know, do you repay this? And his response mostly was nah. But then you dig deeper into what happened to his life afterwards, and he wound up saving four people in two different accidents with his helicopter alone. You know, just making these amazing, miraculous discoveries. Depending on how you look at life, you can look at this as something religious or you and look at it as amazing coincidence. But, you know, this man whose life was saved twice in one day saved four lives afterwards.

CO: Okay, this is why though the book is so successful — because you're a terrific storyteller. Though Brad Wilson would see these as random events not associated, you see the narrative arc, you see this ah-huh, here's the story. Here's where it begins. And then you arc it to include what other elements he may not have seen in that story. That's the essence of this, isn't it?

GW: It is. And I thank you for that. The idea of the book was to explore the thesis that there is no such thing as an ordinary day. That it didn't matter what day I wound up getting in that silly drawing with the old fedora. Whatever day it was, if you dig deeply enough into it, you would wind up with the full breadth of human experience. You know, tragedy, comedy, irony, cosmic comeuppances, whatever. And I wasn't at all sure that that's what was going to happen. I was hoping that's what was going to happen. But it did, to my astonishment actually.

CO: But you know this works because you have assigned people as an editor to go out and get a story, knowing that they either come back with a really good story or they shouldn't be there, and they should lose their job. So you have that skill, you expect that of others, don't you, in the business of journalism?

GW: I do. You know, I had tested this many years ago as an editor at the Washington Post where I took four of my favourite writers — five of them actually. And brought them into a room and produced five thick phone books. Remember when they used to be phone books?

CO: [deep laughter] Yes, I do.

GW: And I gave each of them a hammer and a nail, and said hammer this nail into the phone book as deep as you want. And then open the phone book and find the name that it ended on. And find this person and go and do a profile of them. This was examining the same idea, but in a smaller context. And we did get five great stories. Part of that is just the magic of stories being everywhere.

CO: I am speaking with Gene Weingarten about his The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America. The book is One Day. And some of these stories… well, you have more to work with, don't you? I mean, there's these kind of historical moments. You revisit a hospital in Virginia — where doctors are performing heart surgery for the first time — a heart transplant I should say. So what would drew you to this story?

GW: That was one of the stories that obviously got in the newspapers the next day. So it was easy to find. But all that I knew initially was that this was the first heart transplant ever done in the Washington, D.C. area. And it was done by a team of nurses and doctors who had never done one before. They had been practicing for two years in this grisly, macabre scene that kept repeating itself in the morgue. They were working with dead bodies. But none of them actually knew for sure this would work. It turned out that there were two remarkable stories behind this surgery in both directions. In one case, the question was who was the donor? And the donor was a murderer — a deeply disturbed young man, also 20 years old, who essentially had been stalking and beating his girlfriend. She had broken up with him just before Christmas, and he killed her and then committed suicide. You know, it was this horrific story behind the heart that would wind up going into an innocent young woman's body.

CO: Into a young woman who is not going to survive unless she gets a heart transplant. This is Eva Baisey

GW: Yeah, Eva was dying very short-term. With heart transplants, you don't have the luxury of days to prepare. You are told there is a donor, and that surgery happens within hours. And that what happened that day. The astonishing kind of amazing story behind that operation performed by people who had never done it — except two corpses — is that 33 years later, Eva is still alive. And it’s kind of emotional, but heart transplants patients don't live that long. She is among the longest lived transplant patients on the planet. And, interestingly, she was a nursing student at the time. And what she said was all she wanted to do in her life was help old people and babies. And that's what she does now.

CO: With the heart of Mark Willey.

GW: Yeah, the heart of a murderer.

CO: And I think part of the reason why you're emotional about this because you trace all these people down. This isn't just you make some calls and paste it together, you find these people, you spent time with Eva. And what does she say to you now about that, about the heart that's in her?

GW: I wound up having to ask her a really impertinent question. And no one had ever asked her that before. And the question was how do you feel about having the heart of a murderer? And she took a moment to think about this because she actually she hadn't thought about it before. There was something that happens with heart transplant patients where it is such a difficult ordeal to survive that they tend not to get involved in the lives of the donor. It's not ingratitude. It's that you don't really want to incorporate somebodies tragedy into your own life. You have enough problems to deal with. And so Eva had never really thought about that before. And she finally said something really profound, and it disturbed some people. But I found that amazing. She said, well, you know, this this could have been the result of something tragic, but utterly meaningless like a car accident. But in this case, it was the result of, for-better-or-worse, a misplaced passion. It came out of love in a way — even though it was a tragic love. But it came out of some human connection. And she said she thought that was better.

CO: In these stories, there's a whole range of things. You deal with people who have AIDS. You deal with Cold War tensions. You deal with the family of a young woman who is murdered because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There's so many, and I urge people to read these because they're just tremendous tales. But there's a love story that you tell close to the end. And this deals with a couple who… well, they meet in a strange way, and end up married. So can you tell us about them?

GW: This is the most improbable love affair that probably ever happened. It happened at a sleazy pickup joint in Long Island — where a woman who was on this awful crusade to find a new man. She laughs about it today, but she had had something like ten dates with twelve different men in the last two weeks. I think she was 39 at the time. And she went to this pickup joint just trolling for somebody. She went with a boyfriend she didn't care about. And she meets this guy, and they spend five minutes together. They have to split up when her date walks in the door. So they exchange information. They exchanged phone numbers. That's it. That's what happened on the day I was writing about. The following day, he doesn't call her — even though he said he would. So she calls him. He said yeah, let's go out tonight. And so they went out for dinner, and they go back to her house. He falls asleep with his head on her lap on her couch. The next day, he takes her out to an office party, and they get spectacularly drunk. And at one point, she says to him like in the slurred voice, we love each other, don't we? He said, yeah, I guess so. And she says why don’t we get married? And he says, yeah, sure. And then she says why don't we tell everyone? So he stands up and announces that he's engaged to this woman who's swaying at his side. And that was the third day they were together. On the fourth day, he shows up at her house and moves.

CO: [laughing] And, of course, all of this is the most improbable beginning for any relationship. I mean, so I'm reading this thinking oh, this is doomed.

GW: Exactly!

CO: But you take it years later. They have a child. They raise a family. They go through all kinds of things. They finish each other's sentences. They're still together years later.

GW: My favourite part is that when he literally moved in, he discovered for the first time that she had two little boys. [both laugh] It just hadn't come up somehow. So yeah, and they're still together, about as in love as two people can be [CO laughs]. And why this happened, and how this worked, it's very hard to pass exactly. But I think mostly, it was just these two people were meant for each other.

CO: But then again, you're the one who found the shape in that. And I know that you mentioned somewhere — I think in the acknowledgements — that you apologize to about 500 people you interviewed who may or may not have ended up in the book. I mean you talked to a lot of people, a lot of leads that didn't go anywhere. So [chuckle] where did they go? Because other ones pay off handsomely, don't they of these stories?

GW: There were various stories. I mean, part of it is that journalism was often called the first rough draft of history. And what I did discover is many of the initial stories I was reading about weren't quite correct. Others involved stories that I couldn't confirm to my satisfaction. I thought they had happened, but I just wasn't sure enough to put them in the book.

CO: Gene, do you have any idea what you were doing on December 28th, 1986?

GW: [Chuckling] You think I hadn’t asked myself that? I don't know what I was doing on that day, but I do know that I was an editor at The Miami Herald. I was the editor of the Sunday magazine. And on that day, a story that I had written a few days before appeared in the magazine. It wound up being an absolutely pivotal to the remainder of the book because it was about an accident that I had had — a car accident — where I had almost died a few years before. It was sort of miraculous. A car literally rolled over me, but didn't touch me. It bounced over me. And I should not have survived an accident. And I did. And I wrote about it, and the story I wrote about it happened to appear on the day I wrote my book about. The import of the story was that for a couple of months after that accident, the whole world changed for me. I wound up appreciating little things more than I could ever imagine, food tasted better, utterly everything changed. I became far more appreciative of the wonders of life. And then slowly that went away. And it was a tragedy. I tried to hold on to it, but I couldn't because this is how we live. You know, we live in the banal. And as it turns out, that idea was very important to the end of the book. So I wound up including my story as well.

CO: Well, I don't think you live in the banal — at least in your imagination. You have the ability to make the ordinary extraordinary. And you did that in this book, Gene. And I appreciate that. Thank you.

GW: Well, thank you. And it was a delight to be here.

CO: Bye-bye.

GW: Bye.

AH: That was Gene Weingarten speaking to Carol in November 2009 about his book One Day: The Extraordinary Story Of An Ordinary 24 Hours in America.

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December 28, 2020 Episode Transcript

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