He got his chance. They would eventually make young Frank Frosch the UPI bureau manager in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Like I said, he was a genius.
I took “Plato” over to Frank’s house in Atlanta a couple of days before he left on his new mission. We sat on his front porch and took turns patting the dog, and I recall asking Frank if it ever occurred to him he could get killed.
“If I do,” he laughed, “at least it won’t be because a beer truck ran over me on my way to cover a stupid county commission meeting.”
There were all sorts of stories about what actually happened to Frank Frosch. There were even rumors maybe Frank knew too much about My Lai and political motives were at the dark bottom of his death.
Nine years later, the details are still sketchy.
Frank was working in his office in Phnom Penh. A report came in of fighting on the outskirts of the city.
Frank grabbed a photographer. They jumped into a Volkswagen and drove out in search of the reported action.
When they didn’t return for several hours, other reporters went searching for them.
They found both Frank Frosch and the photographer dead in an open field near their car. They had been shot several times by automatic rifle fire.
There was blood in the car. They had apparently been ambushed.
UPI now gives an annual Frank Frosch award for meritorious service to journalism. And his dog lived a long, full live. One hot day when he was fourteen, “Plato” curled up in a cool creek and died in his sleep.
Why I’m discussing Frank Frosch should be obvious. Another American newsman trying to get a story in a foreign country was murdered Wednesday.
The television film of the cold-blooded execution of ABC’s Bill Stewart in Managua was sickening. He was unarmed. He was helpless. And some animal kicked him and then blew his head off at point-blank range.
The list of American correspondents killed in stinking places like Cambodia, Guyana and Nicaragua grows while the rest of us in this business wrap up our days with tax relief, gasoline shortages and a four-column headline on the Astros’ winning streak.
Frank Frosch of UPI. Ron Harris of NBC. Bill Stewart of ABC. And all the others, rest their brave souls.
At least they didn’t die because a beer truck ran over them on the way to cover a stupid county commission meeting.
MOURNFUL SILENCE FOR STEVE VANN
ON A CLOUDY DAY, spring’s first rain approaching, they came by the hundreds to mourn the death of Steve Vann. One of the preachers got up and said, “This is the Christian act of mourning. That is why we are here.”
The chapel was packed with people who had known him, who had loved him. Who still did. Perhaps now more than ever. The hallways outside the chapel were also crowded. Those who couldn’t find standing room inside waited in silence outside. Grief is rarely loud.
He was seventeen. He was a senior at Lakeside High School in DeKalb County. He was a quarterback on the football team. He lived in an upper middle-class neighborhood. He had a lot of friends. He had parents who gave him their time and their attention and, of course, their love.
Saturday morning, somebody found him dead in a creek.
“There were all sorts of rumors going around,” said a classmate at the funeral. “Somebody at first said he had been stabbed. I knew that wasn’t true. If Steve had an enemy, I never heard about it.”
The county coroner was on television trying to explain it. Steve Vann died of exposure to cold. He was found in creek water that had been below freezing the night before. The temperatures the night before were also below freezing.
Evidence of drugs were found in Steve Vann’s body. There was no overdose, but there were drugs.
I talked to more classmates at the funeral.
“I don’t guess anybody will really ever know what happened,” said one. “He went to a party Friday night, but Steve just wasn’t the type to take anything. He might have smoked some grass, most everybody else does; but I can’t see him drinking and taking pills.”
“Somebody could have slipped him something,” added another. ”I knew him as well as anybody in school, and he knew better.”
The death has been ruled an accident. The most popular conjecture is Steve Vann, because of drugs, became disoriented, wandered into the creek and remained there—unconscious—until the cold killed him.
Something like this shouldn’t happen here, I was telling myself at the funeral. Look around you, I said. This isn’t the ghetto. This is suburbia, good life America.
Steve Vann was no mindless punk.
He was an athlete. He was the second-string quarterback, but Lakeside is a state power with a huge student body from which to draw its talent.
“He had the best arm on the team,” somebody said. “It hurt him that he wasn’t a starter, but he threw a touchdown pass in one of the last games. He must have thrown the ball sixty yards.”
But it happened. Steve Vann’s death was drug-related. There is no way to hide it.
A young man standing outside the chapel said, between puffs on a cigarette, “If this don’t make you think nothing will.”
I could make this a sermon. Parents tell your children. Teachers shout it. Drugs kill. What I had rather do is take you back to the funeral. There can be no more drastic lesson.
There were flowers, always there are flowers, and their scent inside a funeral home is a sickening sweet.
The casket was a metallic blue. There were flowers on top of it. The mother cried hard. The father appeared stunned. Old people hung their heads. Young people stared in disbelief.
An organ played softly. A man sang, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and “I Come to the Garden Alone” and “The Lord’s Prayer.”
One preacher said, “We are all in shock.”
Another said, “This is a great tragedy.”
A third said, “He esteemed his elders, he respected his leaders, he was growing into a man of worth.”
And at the end, the father walked to the podium and spoke from his breaking heart.
“If any of you are ever in trouble,” he told his son’s friends, “if any of you need any help, or need to talk, then come to me. This,” he went on, looking at the casket before him, “is enough.”
God bless him for saying that.
ONE YEAR LATER: A FATHER’S PAIN
THE LONGER I SAT and talked with Ed Vann last week, the more I realized what had happened to him since the last time I saw him.
That was at a DeKalb County funeral chapel. He was standing behind a flower-draped casket telling the young people who had gathered there not to take drugs.
Inside the casket was the body of his seventeen-year-old son who had been found dead in a shallow creek one year ago today.
Steve Vann’s death shocked the community in which he had lived. He had been an athlete, quarterback at Lakeside High, an upper middle-class suburban school that is an annual football power.
He had scores of friends. The teary young eyes at the funeral home said that. And he was certainly no foggy-brained junkie. He had no prior record of ever having taken drugs.
But evidence of drugs was found in his body. What on earth could have happened?
Conjecture at the time—still undisputed—was Steve Vann had possibly taken some pills at a party he attended the night before his body was found.
Later, because of the effect of the pills, he had become disoriented and he had wandered into the tiny creek. Unconscious, he died there from exposure to the wet and cold of the March night.
Ed Vann still isn’t satisfied with the investigation of his son’s death by police. “Somebody gave my son bad pills,” he said last week.
And he will never be satisfied with his performance as a father.
“Maybe Steve needed something to pick him up, maybe he was tired and was being pushed too hard to excel,” Ed Vann said. “I did a lot of talking to him, but that was the problem. What I didn’t do was listen. Everybody wants to talk to kids. But
nobody ever listens to them.”
What has happened to Ed Vann is he is haunted by guilt. Unnecessarily so, probably, but the agony that has lingered this long runs deep within him. “Living hell” is what they call this.
He and Steve’s mother are no longer living together. He said she has had her own problems, coping with their son’s death.
Ed Vann has taken a small apartment, one he had already leased to give to his son after his high school graduation.
He writes poems about his son. He carries them with him at all times.
He grasps at every straw. He asked a family friend along when we met last week. The friend claimed to have seen a vision at Steve’s funeral.
“I was standing in the back of the chapel,” the man said, “and suddenly everything in the chapel disappeared and in its place came another picture.
“I saw a spring day and a green hill. I saw Steve walking up the hill with Christ. When they reached the top of the hill, Steve turned and waved goodbye. Then, they both disappeared over the hill.”
Others have seen similar visions, Ed Vann told me. Another friend, he said, claims to have seen his son twice in the past year.
He even attaches significance to the fact his hair, solid gray a year ago, is now getting darker.
“Who ever heard of that?” he asked. ”I don’t know what is happening here, but all these experiences must mean something.”
Ed Vann’s emotional plea to his son’s friends at the funeral received a great deal of publicity. That bothers him, too. “Ed Vann Joins Fight Against Drugs” is one of the headlines he can recall.
“I don’t want that,” he said. “My son was a wonderful human being. You wouldn’t believe the things his friends have told me he did for them. I’m not the one who should be praised for anything. The good one, my son, is gone.”
I didn’t have any answers for Ed Vann last week. I don’t know what it is to lose a son. But I do know if a person doesn’t eventually accept death, no matter how difficult that might be, he will eventually go straight up a wall.
All I can offer is a couple of suggestions. First, let go, Ed. Forget the visions. Forget your guilt and bitterness. They will destroy you.
And what you might do to help purge those feelings is whenever you see a man with his children still by his side, simply remind him to enjoy and cherish every minute of it.
You would probably be surprised how many fathers need that reminder.
FRANK SCHLATT: DON’T FORGET
THE STORY DIDN’T MAKE the front page the other day, and I doubt the television stations even bothered with it. It was filled with a lot of legal-beagle mumbo-jumbo, and it didn’t have anything to do with the price of oil, cracks in big airliners, or who’s running—or not running—for the U.S. Senate.
“Slaton Appeals Ruling,” whispered the uninspired headline.
So what? So this:
The story told about Fulton County District Attorney Lewis Slaton’s efforts to convince the Georgia Supreme Court to reconsider a ruling it made May 31.
On May 31, the Georgia Supreme Court cited a technicality and overturned the murder conviction and life sentence of somebody named David Burney, Jr.
The court said that when David Burney, Jr. was tried, the trial judge had erroneously disallowed his request to act as his own co-counsel.
The legalese in the story was taxing, but from what I could gather, the trial judge had decided that since David Burney, Jr. already had two defense lawyers, granting him the right to act as his own co-counsel would have led to “undue disruption” of the trial.
District Attorney Slaton said a trial judge has the inherent authority to make decisions like that.
I don’t know one end of a gavel from the other, and I would certainly hate to see David Burney, Jr.’s right to a fair trial violated, so I’m not about to take a stand for or against the Georgia Supreme Court’s ruling.
After reading the story, however, I did want to bring up three other persons who have a fair stake in all this. They are the ones usually lost in the shuffle in such high-level maneuverings by men carrying law books. They come under the heading of “victims.”
They shouldn’t be forgotten.
There was Frank R. Schlatt, who was thirty-one. He was an Atlanta policeman. One day he answered a robbery call in a local furniture store.
David Burney, Jr. and three other goons were at the store. One of them blew off Officer Schlatt’s head.
I went to his funeral. It was a pretty day and lots of people came. The chapel was packed. Fellow officers wearing white gloves stood at each side of Officer Schlatt’s casket.
Somebody blew “Taps.” Lester Maddox sat down front. High com missioners and police department czars arrived in limousines.
The preacher talked about what a good life Officer Schlatt had lived. I remember him trying to explain, then, how the Lord could allow such a good man to die. I forget his explanation.
At the graveside later, a policeman said to me, “We’ll find the animals who did this, no matter how long it takes.”
Then there was Officer Schlatt’s widow. She was young and pretty. For a time, she held together well, but then the reality of the moment hit her again, and she cried hard and long.
God, there is nothing that tears at the heart like the sight of a young widow crying.
By her side under the funeral tent that day was Officer Schlatt’s little girl.
What a brave little girl, everybody said. She was nine, I think. She fought off her own grief and tried to console her sobbing mother.
There was an American flag on Officer Schlatt’s casket. Atop the flag lay a single flower. The little girl had placed it there for her daddy.
For as long as I live, I will never forget the moment an honor guard solemnly folded the flower into the flag and handed it to the grieving widow and daughter.
I don’t really have an ending for this. I just wanted to make sure Officer Frank Schlatt and his family were at least mentioned while our judicial system contemplates how it can best serve David Burney, Jr.
DEATH OF A STRIPPER
PEOPLE ARE KILLING OTHER people in droves in this city. So far in 1979, there have been 109 murders in Atlanta. In 1978, there had been “only” 73 murders by this date.
One hundred-and-nine citizens shot, stabbed, and strangled by other citizens.
Sometimes it happens in the nice neighborhoods, and it’s page one. But mostly it happens where the sun doesn’t shine. The victims wind up no more than statistics in the roundup of brutal crimes in the next morning’s newspaper.
Young Hui Griffin, for instance. They called her “Young.” She was thirty-two and petite and pretty. She was a native of South Korea. She married an American serviceman, and he brought her to this country.
The couple had a child, a daughter. Later, they divorced. Young Hui Griffin had to go to work to support herself and her child.
She took a daytime job, but that didn’t bring in enough money. So she took a nighttime job, too.
She was a dancer at a place called the Purple Onion on Stewart Avenue. I don’t need to tell you what kind of dancer.
She danced without her clothes.
Young Hui Griffin needed money. Young sent her daughter to live with the child’s grandmother during the school year. Grandmother lives in the country.
“She didn’t want the kid growing up in the city,” a friend of Young’s explained. “She had to live in a bad neighborhood. She was afraid to leave the kid in her apartment while she worked. She was saving to buy a house so the two of them could be together all the time.”
There were also Young’s relatives back in South Korea. She was sending as much as $500 a month home so that two brothers and a sister could receive the education she never had.
Young Hui Griffin made the papers this week, inside section, in a roundup story headed, “Four Slayings Boost City’s Total to 109.”
Police had received a report of her screams. Evidence, said
the story, indicated she had staggered into her living room after being stabbed in a bedroom.
So far, there are no suspects.
The man at the Purple Onion this week said he would be glad to talk about Young Hui Griffin.
“She was a damn good person,” said Mike Acker, the manager. “You know about how she was trying to help her kid and her relatives, don’t you?”
I said I did.
“She was like that. She worked here off and on for three years. She was a good worker. She had a reputation as always being respectful to management.
“She was never late, and if she was going to miss work or some thing, she would always let you know about it in advance.”
I asked Mike Acker about his place, the Purple Onion.
“It used to be a little rough,” he said, “but we moved, and we get just about all kinds in here now. We get the men who fly the airplanes, and we get the ones who load ’em. We get construction foremen, and we get construction workers.
“Young danced topless. She would do Oriental dances, like with fans, to basic rock ‘n’ roll music. A lot of customers really got off on that. She would dance two numbers, and then wait tables.
“Know what else she would do? She was some kind of cook. She was always bringing in things like egg rolls for the other employees to eat. We’ll miss that.”
There had been some talk around, Mike Acker said, some talk that maybe Young had taken some crazy home with her and that’s how she got killed.
“I don’t pay any attention to that, though,” he said. “What she did after she left this place was none of my business. And we’d probably all be surprised how many working girls leave their regular jobs and turn tricks for money or kicks or whatever.”
I’ll tell you what else would probably surprise us. To find out those 109 Atlanta murder victims were real people, not faceless, nameless statistics. Real people with hopes and dreams and crosses to bear like the rest of us.
Real people like Young Hui Griffin, a topless dancer who got her throat cut. But she was also mother to a daughter, and a sister who cared to a family who loved her and needed her and, no doubt, hates like hell that she’s gone.
Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You: A good beer joint is hard to find and other facts of life Page 17