Trust these keys to a lasting marriage

Guys, fair warning, it’s fourth and goal for Valentine’s Day.

You can’t say you haven’t been warned. Cards and candy began appearing in stores before Christmas. This warning is especially important to guys because:

1. The Super Bowl was Sunday and that was a major distraction; and

2. The heavy lifting of Valentine’s Day falls to the guys. We are responsible for buying cards, candy, and flowers and making dinner reservations. Have you ever noticed that the girls rarely, if ever, step up and do for us on Valentine’s Day as we do for them? Just sayin’.

If you don’t think Valentine’s Day is important, just try missing one. Women offer no statute of limitations on the price you will pay for that. Valentine’s Day is important to me because on that day in 1999 Sandy and I formally started going together. We got married 10 months later. If you do the math, that means we’ve been married 25 years. Each of us had a previous marriage but this one is built to last.

So, what makes the difference? What is the secret to a forever marriage? I have my thoughts, and I also posed the question to my friends on Facebook. I got a lot of wonderful responses, and a few love stories were shared with me. Many of my friends with long, healthy marriages held similar views about marriage as Sandy and I do. This, my friends, is what it boils down to:

Make God the center of your marriage. Pray for and with each other. Prioritize your faith. If problems arise – and they will – pause and ask yourself, “what would Jesus do?” A Christ-centered marriage has the strongest of all foundations.

Be committed. If you think marriage is a 50-50 proposition, you probably won’t last long. Marriage is a 100-100 proposition. Both spouses must be in it 100%. Guys, while you were dating her, you would have climbed mountains, swam oceans, and slain dragons for her. So why stop? Is she not worth doing the dishes for, even if it’s not your turn? Marriage is a lifetime commitment, not a trial offer. Act like it.

Communicate! Be completely open and honest with each other. Never assume your spouse knows what you are thinking or feeling. Seek first to understand before you seek to be understood. You can’t expect anyone to care about your perspective if you are unwilling to try and understand theirs. This puts your spouse first and is a selfless act of love on your part.

Pick your battles. In marriage, you will always lose by winning. If you have a win-at-all-cost mentality, that automatically makes your spouse the loser. Nobody wants to be a loser. Marriage is a partnership. Seek the win-win solutions. Don’t hold grudges or try to be domineering. I’m not saying you should compromise on things of principle or extreme importance; just don’t let the molehills become mountains.

Prioritize. Never, ever put stuff before people – this includes your cell phone or other devices. If you see a screen more often than your spouse’s face, you probably have a serious problem. Make time to be together and do things together. Share your common interests. A sporting event on television should never be more important than your spouse. You will find that the more you invest in each other the more your relationship will grow and flourish.

Be forgiving. We all make mistakes. We all say and do things we regret. Be the first to apologize and make amends. Gracefully offer and accept forgiveness. Don’t make the other person feel bad when they screw up. Offer comfort and assurance that while you may be hurt, your love is not broken. (There is a caveat to this when it involves abuse, infidelity, alcoholism, drug addiction, etc. You can’t be an enabler and let someone walk all over you time and again.)

Be respectful. This is especially important for the guys. Men have a deep need to be respected. A man can be critically wounded when his wife loses respect for him or fails to show respect. And guys, respect is earned, not given, so be worthy of it. Likewise, women need and deserve respect. You should always be building your spouse up, not tearing them down.

Dream big! Share your dreams and goals and work together to make them come true. There is great satisfaction in having someone who believes in you and helps you on your road to success. As the saying goes, teamwork makes the dream work.

Lastly, don’t quit. Every relationship has its ups and downs and mundane plateaus. If you bail on your spouse because you don’t think things are going well, what’s to stop you from quitting on your next relationship? When things are down or flat, that’s the time to ignite a creative spark and get things moving in the right direction. Be creative. Be spontaneous. Have fun and enjoy the ride together because this is the only trip through life you get.

Exonerate the Edenton Seven of child sex abuse charges

 The criminal case that I cut my professional teeth on as a journalist turned out to be one of the biggest miscarriages of justice I’ve ever seen and it’s an egregious wrong in need of righting.

I was two years out of college working for my first daily newspaper in northeastern North Carolina. I was young, naïve, and had no training in covering cops and courts. I was assigned a two-county beat, which included the town of Edenton. My new boss told me that there was a guy there arrested for abusing some children at a daycare center and I might want to keep my eye on the case.

I didn’t have to do much to keep my eye on it because it blew up in my face. The Little Rascals Day Care child sex abuse case became national news in the early 1990s. It involved seven defendants being charged with more than 400 counts of sexually abusing dozens of children under the age of 5 left in their care at the center and elsewhere.

The defendants — collectively known as the Edenton Seven — spent years in jail awaiting trial. They include the center’s co-owners Robert “Bob” Kelly and Elizabeth “Betsy” Kelly, workers Kathryn Dawn Wilson, Shelley Alyce Stone and Robin Boles Byrum, and community members Willard Scott Privott and Darlene Harris Bunch.

I spent two years covering all of the arrests, court hearings, and other pre-trial wranglings until I was promoted to news editor and taken off the case. That was at the same time the first defendant, Bob Kelly, was going to trial. A change of venue moved the case to another county that was too far away for our tiny paper to staff it, so we relied on coverage from The Associated Press.

Those two years of pre-trial coverage were wildly bizarre. The larger the case grew the more swept up the community became in what can best be described as mass hysteria. It’s fair to compare it to the Salem witch trials of 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. I couldn’t go anywhere in Edenton without there being some mention of the case. It was a very electrified atmosphere, not unlike what we are experiencing now with national politics.

The case was based on the testimony of preschoolers — testimony we now know to have been coerced and manipulated by improperly trained police detectives and therapists. At the time, however, the prevailing mantra was “believe the children.”

The biggest hurdles I faced in covering the case beyond my own naiveté was the secrecy kept by both sides. Prosecutors played their cards close to the vest and defense attorneys barred media access to their clients — at least until late in the game when the TV cameras moved in. I was working on the assumption that prosecutors had mountains of evidence and that the children had voluntarily disclosed abuse. They hadn’t. The case started when Bob Kelly slapped an unruly child and the vindictive mother pressed charges.

I wanted to believe the children, but the outrageous things they were reportedly saying and the absurd fact that abuse on that scale could be happening without anyone seeing anything or noticing any unusual behaviors kept me vacillating between both sides of the case. Eventually some of the defendants began to bond out of jail. When Robin Byrum bonded out, I got to do a telephone interview with her. After speaking with her and interviewing her mother, my opinions swayed toward the defendants.

Robin was a newlywed 19-year-old with a newborn baby when she was arrested. Because she chose to stay in jail and spend the first year of her marriage and the first year of her baby’s life behind bars rather than turn state’s evidence against the others told me that she was a person of profound character and that she was telling the truth. None of the allegations were true. I was solidly convinced of that when the state rested its case against Bob Kelly without presenting any physical evidence, eyewitnesses or any conclusive proof of abuse.

Astonishingly, a jury convicted Kelly of 99 counts of sexually molesting 12 children and sentenced him to 12 consecutive life sentences. Dawn Wilson, the cook at Little Rascals, was tried next and convicted of seven counts of sexual abuse and sentenced to life in prison. Betsy Kelly pleaded no contest to avoid trial, as did video store owner Scott Privott, who was charged with taking indecent liberties with a minor.

The state supreme court overturned the convictions of Kelly and Wilson in 1995. All charges were dismissed in 1997. The other three never got their day in court. All seven, however, have spent the last 35 years with this hanging over their heads.

So why bring this up now? I recently finished reading a new book about the case called “Twenty-One Boxes,” by Betsy Hester and co-authored by Robin Byrum (now Couto). The title refers to the 21 boxes of case transcripts and evidence now housed at the law library at Duke University. The book brought back a flood of memories and nightmares. It answered questions that plagued me for decades.

The book shed light on the real abuse in the case — the abuse the prosecutors inflicted on the children via the coercion used to elicit the responses they wanted, along with the abuse of the defendants to try and get them to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. The book, coupled with a website about the case by retired newspaperman Lew Powell, make a very compelling case for complete exoneration of the Edenton Seven and for the state to issue a public apology to them.

As one who lived on the periphery of the case and knew a lot of the people involved, I must throw my voice behind the effort to finally and forever clear the names of the true victims of the Little Rascals Day Care case. It’s time to exonerate the Edenton Seven!

Space disasters pave way to bold adventure

 On Jan. 28, 1986, I had just come out of a class at Adams State College when a friend came up to me with a horrified look on his face and told me that the space shuttle had just blown up.

My initial reaction was disbelief. We quickly found a television in the student center and there it was, repeating footage of the space shuttle Challenger launching toward space and exploding 73 seconds later. I’ve always been a huge fan of the space program and the loss of Challenger and her crew of seven was gut wrenching.

It took nearly two years before NASA returned to space with the launch of Discovery. I kept following the shuttle flights over the years as best I could in the pre-internet days. One of the highlights of my career came in 1995 when I got to photograph the launch of space shuttle Columbia on the STS-73 mission. It was a two-week science mission with the microgravity laboratory onboard. The launch had been delayed so many times that Atlantis was already sitting on the next launchpad waiting to go up.

I took some decent photos and later did a phone interview with the pilot, Kent Rominger, who is a fellow Coloradan. He was the first astronaut I interviewed, but he was far from the last. I’ve long lost count of the number of astronauts I’ve met and interviewed over the years, but among the ones I cherish the most are the ones I did with moonwalkers Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt. I interviewed Schmitt on July 20, 2017, at Space Center Houston in front of the Apollo 17 command module he flew to the moon. Trust me, it doesn’t get any cooler than that!

Perhaps the most special memory I have of interviewing astronauts is the one I did with Vance Brand on the 25th anniversary of his Apollo-Soyuz Test Project flight, the first time Americans and Russians linked up in space. Brand is a hometown hero from Longmont, Colorado. I got to know him very well while I worked for the newspaper there. We sat on the base of the sign to the municipal airport that bears his name and talked for hours as the sun set and the stars came out.

Brand commanded three shuttle missions, twice on Columbia and once on Challenger. Both of those shuttles are gone, something we spoke about when I interviewed him on Feb. 1, 2003, when Columbia STS-107 disintegrated over Texas while coming in for a landing.

It just so happened that I was on weekend duty at the paper when Columbia was lost. I raced to the office early and spent a frantic day interviewing Brand and digging up all of the Colorado connections to Columbia that I could find — and there were a lot of them. I think I banged out about three stories and a few lists and timelines. My coverage blew away that of the Denver metro area papers. It was a career day and one I’m very proud of.

Brand described for me in detail the differences in his experiences on Apollo and shuttle flights and the surreal experience of coming through the atmosphere in a giant fireball. He told me in colorful detail what it was like going through the bumpy, fiery reentry.

Moving to the Houston area in 2008 gave me many opportunities to cover NASA and the space program. I was working in Hempstead in 2009 when I took photographs of Atlantis being ferried back to Florida on the back of a 747. On Sept. 20, 2012, I stood at the end of the runway at Ellington Field and photographed Endeavour as the same 747 took off with it after an overnight stop in Houston. That 747 is the same one on display in front of Space Center Houston.

It still amazes me that as technologically advanced as those shuttles were, they were brought down by a faulty O-ring and a chunk of foam insulation. It’s a simple reminder that details matter.

Of course, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Jan. 27 is the 58th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts during a routine practice on the launchpad. This time of year is tough for the NASA family and those of us who follow the space program.

Yet out of tragedy comes triumph and mankind is in a renewed fervor to return to the moon and go on to Mars, even while the International Space Station nears the end of its time in orbit. Between NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other private space companies there is more than enough out-of-this-world stuff going on to keep us focused on the future while we respectfully remember the past.

Mentor had a history of disappointing me

Bill McCartney had a history of disappointing me.

He was also one of my greatest sources of inspiration and a mentor of sorts.

McCartney — or Mac, or Coach Mac, or Coach, as he was often called — died last week at age 84 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. He is best known as a former head football coach at the University of Colorado and as co-founder of Promise Keepers.

His hiring at CU was my first disappointment. I grew up 10 miles from Folsom Field and had just suffered through the Chuck Fairbanks error, I mean era, when Mac was hired. He looked like a dweeb and he came off like Goober Pyle [played by George Lindsey] from the “Andy Griffith Show” during his introductory press conference. He went 7-25-1 in his first three seasons at CU.

He started recruiting Black players from the inner city of Los Angeles and they had run-ins with the law. Things looked pretty dismal for the Buffaloes. Then they got good — really good. He led the team to two consecutive national championship games against Notre Dame, winning the second one and earning Colorado its first and only football championship.

I was wildly excited about it. By then I had moved away from Colorado, but I was very proud of my hometown team. The second time he disappointed me was when he announced he was leaving CU to run some religious organization. After all those years of football follies, Colorado had its savior and at the height of success he quits.

My first marriage ended not long after that and I returned to Colorado. My mother bought tickets for my brother and me to go to an event at Mile High Stadium where Coach Mac would be speaking. I agreed to go because I wanted to be back in the stadium, and I wanted to see Coach Mac. That weekend of June 16-17, 1996, changed my life. It was the first of many Promise Keepers events that I attended.

The things that Coach had to say about being a good husband and father ate me up. He was passionate and on fire about the biblical role of men in the home and the community. It resonated deeply within me. He spoke about racial reconciliation. Having come from a very racially divided community in North Carolina, it really opened my eyes to my own shortcomings and opened my heart to people of other races.

The next year I was at Stand In the Gap in Washington, D.C., where over a million men gathered at the National Mall to repent of their sins, open their hearts to Jesus, and get marching orders to be servant leaders of their homes and communities.

In the following years I went to arena events as a reporter and/or volunteer. I got to meet Coach Mac a few times and have done several interviews with him. He used to have a short, inspirational radio program called “Fourth and Goal.” It was usually what came on my radio each morning when it clicked on as my alarm clock. I would listen to him, then turn off the radio and go start my day. One morning he came on and was reading an abridged version of one of my columns! It was about things that real men do. I was stunned to hear it and was deeply honored.

Shortly after Stand In the Gap, McCartney announced that Promise Keepers events would be free. That was the financial nail in the organization’s coffin. Promise Keepers didn’t die but it has existed on life support. In 2021, I went to a stadium event of theirs in Dallas, but it wasn’t the same.

The last time Mac disappointed me was when he resigned from Promise Keepers in 2003. I didn’t want to see him go, but I respected that he was walking the talk when he stepped aside to care for his ailing wife, Lyndi. By this time he and my church [Rocky Mountain Christian Church] had influenced me to be a man of God and they profoundly impacted the husband and father I would become in my marriage to Sandy.

Bruce Plasket, a former editor of mine, was a good friend of Mac’s. We spoke about Mac’s passing the other day. He recalled Mac as being one of the most strident people he knew, but in a good way. Coach Mac never stood down from controversy, including when his star quarterback impregnated his daughter, or the infamous Fifth Down Game against Missouri. Mac was always boldly outspoken about God and his faith in Jesus Christ. Sometimes that got him in hot water with the politically correct crowd, but he didn’t mind. He always stood by the truth.

Mac was blunt, passionate and compassionate. You always knew where he stood and why. His influence will live on, not only in the sports world, but in the lives and families of millions of men across the nation and around the world. His ministry and influence will impact many generations to come. I miss him and mourn his loss but celebrate that he is in heaven with Jesus and Lyndi. He has finally earned his eternal reward, and that is not disappointing in the least.