Sunday, November 15th Ames Reading with Jeff Barnes

The Heritage Room welcomes Jeff Barnes as its November Ames Reader. Barnes has recently published his first book, Forts of the Northern Plains. In preparing this guide to the historic military posts of the Plains Indian wars, Barnes traveled some 13,000 miles to visit 51 historic sites making photographs, doing research and interviewing informants about the forts and their history. A freelance writer and fifth-generation Nebraskan Barnes has worked as a newspaper reporter and editor. He is the past chairman of the Nebraska Hall of Fame Commission and former marketing director of the Durham Western Heritage Museum. We look forward to hearing about his adventures. The Reading will take place Sunday, November 15th at 2:00 PM in the Jane Pope Geske Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln.

More New Titles: A book about the city of Lincoln--November 2009

Among the new titles that came to the Heritage Room in the past several months are several that share an interest in local history and local businesses. These books address some of the many ways in which our local economy and the character of family life are interconnected. Heritage Room staff will share thoughts inspired by several of these books over the next month or so. We begin with:

Mary Jane Nielsen and Jonathan Roth, Lincoln Looks Back. (Foreword by Gil Savery) Lincoln: JMJ Inspirations, 2009.

This is a large format book richly illustrated with black and white photographs from the Edholm & Blomgren Collection and the Nebraska State Historical Society's MacDonald Collection. The book surveys Lincoln, Nebraska's social and commercial landscape, its neighborhoods, schools, businesses, restaurants, drive-ins, and bars from the 1950s to the present. It offers a kind of nostalgic celebration of the kinds of things people remember about a town after the years pass, things like teenage hang-outs, schools, interesting buildings, a big fire, a first visit to Robbers' Cave, meeting a local television personality, or a visit by a national celebrity like Gene Autry or Elvis Presley. The text is a collection of short vignettes and recollections by the authors and the many long-time Lincoln residents they corraled into contributing.

The authors have done a wonderful job of bringing the many photographs and individual reminiscences together. They seem to capture the spirit of a certain era very successfully. But their account thins noticeably in the late 1970s. What? No-one wants to look back at the 1980s? Well, anyone who lives in Lincoln now might realize that the book describes Lincoln during an historical era that was ending by the 1980s. In that time, Lincoln's businesses were still mostly locally owned, even along the then nascent "Miracle Mile" North of O Street along 48th Street. In that time, Lincoln still possessed, even on the "Miracle Mile," its most intensely commercial space, a distinctive local landscape, created by local businessmen. In that time, Lincoln still had a commercially viable downtown retail district, attractive to shoppers. If (local) business was better off in those years, community life and family life were also stronger, then, than they would be years later.

If we want to ask why the city of those times differs so much from today's Lincoln, we leave Nielsen and Roth's book behind us. But we will return to it.

By the late 1970s Lincoln was in trouble, but it was a kind of trouble it would not perceive or begin to pay for until decades later. Developer Joe Hampton was on the city council in the 1970s, and no one in city government was interested in the planning commission's doubts or the pleas of sometime city planner Doug Brogdon to limit suburban development, to keep the downtown area alive. As elsewhere in America, there were huge fortunes to be made in the suburban build-out. With so much money at stake, the build-out could not be slowed or moderated by planners who could see trouble ahead. The present writer recalls a neighbor, one of his mother's friends, crying in her front yard. Had her dog died? No, she was crying over the city. "They're just ruining Lincoln," she told my mother. This lady had attended planning commission meetings for years, but after that evening she stopped. There was no longer any point to that kind of involvement.

Like other American cities, Lincoln was transformed by suburban build-out. The downtown area lost most of its larger retail businesses. What remained were much smaller businesses catering to students from the University and downtown office workers, and lots and lots of bars and restaurants. Today Lincoln's commercial landscape is dominated by national chain big box stores and franchise fast-food joints. Money spent in these places leaves town right away.

The main shopping areas are now spread out over great distances: North 27th Street, South 27th Street, Cornhusker Highway, Highway 2, various businesses on O Street, both East and West. The sprawl makes Lincoln an ever more inconvenient and unattractive place to shop. Someone willing to drive the distance between these areas might easily remember that a bigger city, Omaha, is only 50 miles away. There, the big box stores are bigger, and there are more of them. Omaha's boxes are even, sometimes, closer together. Someone not willing to drive those distances can now shop online. As a poorly planned conglomeration of developments, built by different developers on different hillsides, with only the weakest of centers, Lincoln can expect its sales tax revenues to continue to fall.

America's suburban sprawl been described as plundering the future in order to raise production and consumption in the present. In his 1993 book, The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler (not a Nebraska writer) described the way this has corroded our sense of community. "The American highway... is now like television, violent and tawdry. The landscape it runs through is littered with cartoon buildings and commercial messages. We whiz by them at fifty-five miles an hour and forget them, because one convenience store looks like another. They do not celebrate anything beyond their mechanistic ability to sell merchandise. We don't want to remember them. We did not savor the approach and we were not rewarded upon reaching the destination, and it will be the same next time, and every time. There is little sense of having arrived anywhere, because everyplace looks like noplace in particular."

This passage of Kunstler's helps me answer the questions I asked when reading Nielsen and Roth's Lincoln Looks Back. No, I don't believe anyone wants to remember the 1980s. In fact I doubt that anyone will bother to write the kind of nostalgic treatment of Lincoln as a community that these authors did for later decades. In the memories of Nielsen and Roth's interlocutors, and especially for those remembering their teenage years, Lincoln's "Miracle Mile," the city's commercial edges and homegrown fast food joints were exciting places. But when the edge metastasized, and became a cancer that ate everything else, it made a wasteland. Nielsen and Roth present us with a group photograph of the businessmen who built the Miracle Mile ("Those Magnificient Men of the Miracle Mile" is its title), just as an earlier generation presented us with "the 'O' Street Gang." Would anyone today bother to take a group picture of the managers of Lincoln's big box retail stores? And if they did, would anyone care to publish such a picture? Kunstler is right, we don't want to remember these places.

Lincoln made sense as a more compact city. If it had retained some of that compactness, it would been distinctive in comparison with Omaha. It might have been a more attractive place to live, shop, and to do business. Without that distinctiveness, Lincoln's future looks bleak, since Omaha, only a little ways down the road, has a bigger population and with that, more resources, including more interesting retailers. It still seems surprising that Lincoln did not do better over the years, given the twin advantages of the presence of State Government, and the University. Government workers and University students are an economic resource, and no doubt they have saved the downtown, which is only moribund, from becoming a deserted urban combat zone, as it might have become, in their absence.

In other times, the presence of state government and the University might have reminded us of the importance of public concerns. Adequate repect for public purposes is the essence of good urban planning. In his book, Kunstler observes that the "joyless junk habitat" that we see along our commercial highways and arterials is a product of our having discarded public concerns to pursue "a fetish of commercialized individualism." Unable to give anything but lip service to public needs, we had "nothing left but private life in our private homes and private cars." So "we wonder what happened to the spirit of community." We discover that we "created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people." Our ugly, anonymous places empower those who lie, cheat and steal.

Kunstler laments suburban sprawl as a cultural and environmental catastrophe. He shows us that sprawl is now a physical embodiment, a map, of our character and of the poverty we will face in the 21st century. Sprawl embodies our lack of connection, it maps our lack of respect for public goods, it maps our hatred of nature, it maps our greed, it maps our lack of respect for each other (consider the way people drive on expressways like Lincoln's North 27th Street). Low density sprawl, with its monotony of housing types and strip malls, is utterly dependent on cheap energy, and "virtually impossible to retrofit with decent public transportation." Distant from productive economic actitity, these are future slums. Not every McMansion can have a second life as a money-making group home.

The sprawling mess of suburbia will be a monument to an America that imports almost everything and that has exported its skilled and industrial jobs of all kinds to other nations. Building the suburban wasteland has been a way to shore up employment, to store workers, and keep the country's economic decline from becoming too soon visible. Yet the historical period defined by low gasoline prices, and by complacency about trade policies and technology and the outsourcing of American jobs seems about to end. As the wreckage of suburban sprawl becomes increasingly costly to live with and remedy, we will remember this era with anything but nostalgia.

Lincoln already struggles to escape the problems brought on by this kind of development. Teenagers form their social networks not at the Drive-in, or any of the other places Nielsen and Roth describe, but on-line. Local business leaders and politicians are trying to remedy the sickening of the center with new development, a new downtown arena, the Antelope Valley Project, and retail recruitment. But many of these efforts seem to share the assumptions of the passing age of “happy motoring.” (Kunstler's term) Some, though, as in the Haymarket, try to build on the remains of an earlier and more attractive urban environment. The local trails network tries to make the place more livable, and sometimes succeeds.

For this reader Lincoln Looks Back served as a reminder of an entirely lost world, separated from us by a disaster--one we barely understood as it engulfed us. The contrasts between that world and today's are striking. It is scary to step back from the Lincoln we think we know, and realize that physically, it so largely resembles the landscape of "the futureless economy" that writers like Jane Jacobs and James Howard Kunstler described long before the recent mortgage crisis began.

Stephen Cloyd

Some New Titles in the Heritage Room--October, 2009

This is the first of several notices sampling new books we received over the last several months. Among them are:

Nonfiction:

Michael Forsberg, (with Dan O'Brien, David Wishart and Ted Kooser), Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, copyright 2009 by Michael Forsberg. A photograpic exploration of the wild places of the Great Plains by Lincoln photographer Michael Forsberg, with a forword by Ted Kooser, chapter introductions by David Wishart, essays by Dan O'Brien, and essays and field notes by Forsberg. Like Forsberg's earlier book on the Sandhill Cranes, this work has received rave reviews in the national press. Its jacket includes high praise from such luminaries as poet Jim Harrison and writer Larry McMurtry. The Heritage Room will welcome Michael Forsberg as our Ames reader in January, 2010.

Lane Van Ham, Capitol Punishment and Other Ordeals: A History of Punk in Lincoln, '78-'86. Lincoln native Van Ham surveys Lincoln bands and musicians in the Punk genre.

John Sorenson and Judith Sealander, ed., The Grace Abbott Reader. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Grace Abbott (1878-1939) of Grand Island, Nebraska along with her sister Edith, pioneered social reform and helped to shape the agenda of social work in the early twentieth century. Grace Abbott's career took her from work at Jane Addam's Hull House in Chicago, to the Chicago Immigrants' Protective League and on to head the Children's Bureau of the Labor Department under Presidents Harding, Hoover, and Roosevelt. When she left this post she remained an advisor to Roosevelt's Labor Secretary and served on Roosevelt's Council on Economic Security. This is a collection of her most influential writing, accompanied by a biographical introduction and timeline.

Don Holst, Famous Football Players in Their 4th Quarter. Chadron: Don Holst Art and Books, 2009. Chadron author Don Holst bases his book on face-to-face interviews with great players of the past, exploring how they look back on their careers and what they think about today.

Poetry:

William Kloefkorn, Out of Attica. Omaha: The Backwaters Press, 2008. A collection of poems inspired by the poet's youth in Attica, Kansas, by Kansas born Nebraska State Poet Bill Kloefkorn.

Fiction:

Sally J. Walker, Letting Go of Sacred Things. Corvalis: The Fiction Works, 2005 (2002). The book follows its heroine's trials of love and loss from 1910-1981 in a series of episodes.

Sally J. Walker, Desert Time. Corvalis: The Fiction Works, 2009. A historical romance novel situated in St. Louis and New Mexico in the 1850s and 1860s.

Sunday, October 18th Ames Reading by Amil Quayle

Amil Quayle was born and raised near Henry's Fork on the Snake River in Idaho. He earned a degree in sociology from the University of Utah, ranched in Nebraska for seven years, and then got his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska. He is a poet with a deep appreciation for the land and the natural world gained from years of working on the farm and ranching. Grand Canyon and Other Selected Poems is his latest work. We welcome him as our October Ames Reader on Sunday, October 18 at 2:00 P.M. in the Heritage Room on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library

Some Upcoming Lincoln Events for October

Those readers familiar with Lincoln's literary history will know that some of Lincoln's most interesting literary conversations have taken place among the graves at Wyuka Cemetery. Wyuka will celebrate its 140th Anniversary Celebration on Sunday, October 4, with a free day of fun family activities, to include walking tours, living history vignettes by the Flatwater Shakespeare Company, a photography contest, old fashioned toys and games, and a concert by the Southeast Nebraska Community Band. The entire Wyuka property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Time is 1:00-5:30 PM, Sunday, 10-4-2009. Tel: (402) 416-5056 or 474-3600
Wyuka Funeral Home & Cemetery
3600 O Street, Lincoln, NE 68510, USA

On a very closely related topic, Nebraska author Alan Boye's book, The Ghosts of Lincoln, is the most frequently stolen item at Lincoln City Libraries. Any librarians present will be looking sideways at folks who show up for the Ghosts of Lincoln Bus Tour on October 6th and 7th. Ghosts of Lincoln Tour Director Dale Bacon will tell stories about ghosts and what people saw. Lots of new ghost stories plus the best of the old. The tour is family friendly, but please do not bring small children, toddlers and babies. Do not bring purloined copies of the above mentioned book, either.
Cost:$10 per person. Times: 6:45-9:10 p.m., 10/6/09 - 10/7/09.
Telephone:(402) 770-8604 or 580-1402
Tour will depart from and return to: Here and Back Again, Indian Village Shopping Center, 3219 S. 13th Street, Lincoln, NE 68502, USA (View Map)
Phone:(402) 817-4177 No alcoholic beverages allowed.

Exhibits look at the 1930s

As we discovered when when we put together our online exhibit on Nebraska writers of the 1930s, the hardships of the time caused deep reflection about American history, community and shared purposes. American intellectuals and the New Deal programs they helped create seemed uncomfortably radical to some at the time, but at heart, they opposed the despair and empty radicalism that triumphed abroad in same decade.

When the Nebraska History Museum opens its new exhibit "Out of the Despair of the Spirit: Nebraska's New Deal Art" on October 3, (See the Museum Events Calendar there will be three concurrent exhibitions of 1930s era artwork running in museums around Lincoln.

The other area exibits are:

Artists of the New Deal: Print Exhibition of WPA Artists
This ongoing exhibit at the Lux Center presents portraits of America in the 1930s by artists Harry Sternberg, Lily Harmon, Marion Greenwood, Guy Pene DuBois and others who worked for the New Deal's WPA (Works Progress Administration) division known as the Public Works Art Project.
The Print Exhibit runs from 9/4/09 - 3/3/10 at the Lux Center, 2601 N 48th Street, Lincoln, NE 68504. See http://www.luxcenter.org Phone:(402) 466-8692


Agents of Change: Mexican Muralists and New Deal Artists
Opening September 29, 2009 this Sheldon Museum of Art exhibit presents works done in the 1920's and 1930's by Mexican Muralists and artists in the United States' Works Progress Administration (WPA), all from the Museum's permanent collection. Included are works by well known artists Diego Rivera, Jose Orozco and David Siquieros, as well as work by other Mexican Muralists whose names are less recognized. A description is here.
The exhibit will run from 9/29/09 - 1/17/10. See also http://www.sheldonartgallery.org Phone:(402) 472-2461

In addition, on the national level, the Smithsonian Institution Exhibit "1934: A New Deal For Artists" is ongoing through January 3, 2010.

Nebraska Writers and Film: A new display in the Heritage Room

Nebraska writers’ encounters with Hollywood and film-making have been as diverse as writers are individual. Some writers sought attention from film-makers, others shunned it. Some Nebraska writers have been pleased by what film makers did with their work, others were horrified and hated it. Some writers came to write novels after careers as playwrights and screen writers, others specialize in screen writing, or have turned to it as a profitable sideline.

The display itself is mostly devoted to the books and writers themselves, but in preparing it, we also looked at the history of film-making in Nebraska, and careers of actors and directors from Nebraska. Usually we hide that sort of background preparation. This time we decided to summarize our notes on the history of film-making in Nebraska here. That history seems to encourage us to ask these questions: Does Nebraska make it onto the silver screen as a real place, or is it more often assimilated to Hollywood clichés about middle America and “fly-over country”? What role has film experience played in the careers of Nebraska writers? Has the work of Nebraska writers been well represented on film? What will Nebraska look like in the films of the future?

Made in Nebraska

The first “feature” film with Nebraska connections was William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s 1913 self-promoting epic, “The Indian Wars.” Cody borrowed cavalry from Fort Robinson to reproduce the “Battle” of Wounded Knee on the original battleground in South Dakota. The film, so far as is known, does not survive. Contemporary reviews of the film make interesting reading. There was some concern with authenticity. The Wounded Knee sequence showed the soldiers as aggressors, vastly outnumbering the Indians and crowding them into the ravine where they were mowed down. That scene had critics though, among them the wife of the Pine Ridge agency superintendant who commented that General Miles, the “technical consultant” for this part of the film, “would not allow them to show the women and children in the fight and that was left out.”

The first feature film actually made in Nebraska was made by Nebraskans in 1915. Chadron residents organized the Black Hills Film Company of Chadron, Nebraska to make “In the Days of ’75 and ‘76” or (in a different advertisement) “The Thrilling Lives of Wild Bill and Calamity Jane” entirely with local talent. The Twelfth Cavalry out of Fort Robinson appeared again, portraying troops of the earlier era. The film survives and the community effort recalls an enthusiastically presented high school play that is as much a local festival as an attempt to dramatize a story.

Early in the Hollywood era, most filming was done entirely in Hollywood, but beginning in the late 1930s scenes for some films were shot in Nebraska. The first such film was Boys Town (MGM, 1938) with Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney. Tracy won an Oscar for his portrayal of Father Flanagan, and the sequel, Men of Boys Town (1941) also filmed scenes in Nebraska. In 1940, background scenes for Cheers for Miss Bishop, the film adaptation of Nebraska writer Bess Streeter Aldrich’s novel Miss Bishop, were filmed on the University of Nebraska campus, and several hundred students served as extras.

In the summer of 1945 MGM filmed background scenes for The Sea of Grass (1947) on former Nebraska governor Sam McKelvie’s By the Way ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills. Martha McKelvie wrote about work of filming and the Sandhills people involved in the By the Way newsletter for Christmas, 1945. The action in the story, based on Conrad Richter’s novel, takes place in Arizona and New Mexico, so the Sandhills just served as generic “ranching country” landscape for the film-makers.

A fairly comprehensive list (http://www.neded.org/content/view/516/1256/)of films made (at least in part) in Nebraska is available on-line from the Nebraska Film Office, a department of the Nebraska Department of Economic Development. The Film Office’s interest is in how much money film-makers might spend in the State, and the economic boost such spending can give to local communities.

Looking at the Film Office’s list, we see some patterns emerge in films made in Nebraska. First, it looks like the relatively few big-studio films made here could have chosen any state or town in the Midwest as a setting. We remember Terms of Endearment (Paramount, 1983) now mostly because of then Governor Bob Kerry’s romance with Debra Winger. It’s fun to see bits of Lincoln on film, but similar scenes could have been shot in Des Moines, Kansas City, or Minneapolis.

Second, we encounter stories that reflect on real life or that have actual Nebraska roots mostly in smaller scale documentaries or television productions of work by Nebraska writers. Notable, among these, are the NETV-PBS 1987 documentary The Trial of Standing Bear, the 1992 Hallmark Hall of Fame O Pioneers!, and the 1994 filming of My Ántonia all for television. Sean Penn’s Indian Runner, 1991, and Omaha-The Movie (1993) also have Nebraska moments (well, for the latter, a visit to Carhenge, anyway!).

Finally, the list reminds us that screenwriter-director Alexander Payne has made more movies here than anyone else.

Payne grew up in Omaha, went to High School at Creighton Prep. He writes his own movie scripts, usually in partnership with writer Jim Taylor. Payne is not trying to tell Nebraska stories at all. Yet he is interested in a reality that big-studio, big budget films tend to miss. “I want my protagonists to be more like real people than like typical movie characters,” he told an interviewer, “I’m interested in capturing life…. I don’t do special effects.” Payne returned to Omaha to make his first film, Citizen Ruth, in 1996. His commercial breakthrough film, “Election,” a dark high school comedy with Reese Witherspoon and Mathew Broderick, filmed at Papillion-La Vista High School in Omaha. And most recently, his “About Schmidt, 2001, filmed in Omaha, Nebraska City, and Lincoln, and starring Jack Nicholson. Payne has won critical acclaim and many awards, including two Golden Globe awards and an Academy Award for his scripts. What is more, all his films have been commercially successful. Payne, reviewers have pointed out, has something of a formula: His small film, low budget strategy allows him to retain editorial control of the film. If he spent more, studios would want more influence. With his strategy he has been able to make profits from his films without being compelled to seek a mass audience. He seems to favor character studies that present something of the tragedy of the human condition with a biting sense of humor.

Might Payne’s example give us a look at the future of film in Nebraska?

The concern of the Nebraska Film Office, whose list of films we have been considering, is to explore motives that bring film-makers to the state and promote the state to film-makers for the sake of economic growth. To this end, the office commissioned the 2002 Nebraska Film Industry Development Study (available at the link as a pdf file). The document is a little dull—writers in this genre are obliged to collect facts, avoid thinking, and repeat whatever economic clichés are widely acceptable at the moment. But despite itself, the Study offers amusing observations. As in: “Wow, those folks really dropped a lot of money in Loma!” (No, no. Not an actual quote!) The 1994 filming of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar spent some 8 million dollars in the state. The film, with opening scenes in New York, New York and a San Francisco denouement, offered up the story of three bicoastal transvestites stranded in small town Nebraska. It wasn’t really a home grown story. But it did show that a big studio, this being a Universal/Amblin Entertainment production, can drop an astonishing amount of money to purchase pretty simple requirements.

The most interesting aspect of the Study, is that, though confined to the decade from 1991-2001, it tells us still more about Alexander Payne. Omaha—The Movie (Payne was executive producer) dropped $50,000 here, Payne’s first film, Citizen Ruth, spent $1,500,000 in Nebraska, Election, $1,252,840, and About Schmidt, some $8,000,000.

The choice of Nebraska for To Wong Foo, Thanks… can be seen as a rare, chance event, unlikely to recur with any frequency. This view is reinforced by the Study’s observation that, from now on movies that require a generic “Great Plains” landscape will be filmed on the Canadian prairies, because the cost there is so much less.

Payne, by contrast, chose to make some of his films here from real local knowledge and connection to Omaha. If we see much of Nebraska on film in the future, it’s most likely to be in films that have that kind of real local connection. We might expect such films to follow some of the patterns seen in Payne’s films. They would likely have smaller budgets, with more artistic control by directors who choose to film here. They would probably not seek to draw mass commercial audiences. They would be less driven by fantasy and sensationalism and more by diverse engagements with the fabric of real life. Such films will be made, if they are made at all, by people with direct connections to the actual local culture and the film culture of the state.

This would seem to be treacherous ground for the economic development frame of mind to tread. Nobody can simply promote a working culture into existence. The personal connections, institutions and funds that support local culture are either built and sustained over time by genuine community effort, or they will fall away and we will be lost in the “geography of nowhere,” where every street, every mall, every subdivision looks alike, and culture is reduced to a daily dose of frivolous spectacle whose only theme is distraction. But Nebraska’s film community now seems lively, though small. Alexander Payne continues to contribute, returning for special events and serving on the board of Omaha’s Film Streams theater.

Some notes on Sources:

The above is based mostly on these sources, or web resources already cited in the text:

Andrea I. Paul, “Buffalo Bill and Wounded Knee: The Movie,” Nebraska History, Winter, 1990, Vol. 71 No. 4, pp 183-190, describes Cody’s movie and contemporary critical responses. Thomas R. Buecker, Fort Robinson and the American Century, 1900-1948 (Nebraska State Historical Society, 2002) also describes the involvement of the Twelfth Cavalry from Fort Robinson in this film and in the Chadron film.

On the Black Hills Feature Film Company of Chadron, Nebraska and its seven reel epic, see Paul Eisloeffel “Preserving Nebraska’s Film Heritage” Nebraska History, Spring 1995, Vol. 76, No. 1, pp. 28-9.

Alexander Payne, quoted in Bob Fischbach, “Pure Payne” in the Omaha World Herald, Arts and Travel section, October 24, 2004. On Payne filming in Nebraska, L. Kent Wolgamott in the Lincoln Journal-Star, December 30, 2005.

All the amounts given here are listed in the Nebraska Film Industry Development Study in a table titled “Direct Expenditures” under the column label “Revenue Generated.” The labeling is ambiguous because these kinds of studies sometimes fudge things by considering “revenue generated” to include the total economic activity. That would considerably magnify the amount actually expended by including the estimated circulation within the community of the original amount spent. This measure of “revenue generated” is also a legitimate measure of economic activity, but should not be confused with “direct expenditures.” That does not appear to be the case here, however, as far as I can tell.