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This is what I wrote for the final print edition of my students’ newspaper, which landed on newsstands May 9 at Sacramento City College. So proud of the editors and staffers who worked very hard to make the final 24 pages truly beautiful ones.

You are holding in your hands the last printed Express newspaper at Sacramento City College.

As one of a couple dozen advisers of the paper since its beginnings as The Blotter in 1922, I have to say that this is a bittersweet moment. The paper itself is not ending; in fact, it’s thriving with new content every day of the academic year at saccityexpress.com. But it’s time to bring a close to its monthly existence on newsprint. Beginning in the fall semester the Express will be a completely online publication.

This reminds me of another important moment in the paper’s history, when Ginny McReynolds was hired in 1986 to replace longtime journalism instructor and adviser Jean (“Doc”) Stephens, who was retiring. The story has become part of our history: Jean made no secret of the fact that she didn’t want to have to deal with computers, which were very much becoming a part of newspapers. So it was Ginny who ushered in the first small Macintosh computers into the Express lab, and she and her students set about learning the new technology to put out the paper.

“When I came here in 1986, I was extremely grateful to have been chosen for the job and I was nervous,” recalls Ginny, who is currently associate vice president of instructional services at City College. “My whole first staff of editors had been Jean’s students, and it wasn’t an easy transition for any of us. But, before long, we formed our own team, and Jean was very helpful and supportive of my work.”

Ginny also notes that as the program transitioned to using computers, she had “enormous help from people who actually knew what they were doing. Over the years, all of that has changed a number of times, but it has always been a kind of ‘each one, teach one’ situation. Without very savvy tech-savvy colleagues and students, I would never have been able to facilitate that!”

My journalism colleague Dianne Heimer also oversaw a major technological shift when she advised the paper—creating an online version of the Express as with the new century in 2000. Dianne, who is retiring this month, brought the paper into the digital age.

Ravenstorm Labarcon, design adviser, works on the final print issue of the Express.

None of this would have been possible without thousands of dedicated students, who, since 1922, have made up the staffs of The Blotter, the Pony Express and the Express. We have included the names of as many of those former staffers as we could find in our staff box on these pages.

The goal of the journalism department has not changed since the days of the first newspapers on campus: to educate students in the skills and ethics of journalism so that they can continue their educations in the field, if they choose, or go to work as professional communicators. Many have done both. We are proud to point to Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Ron Edmonds, who was a photographer on the Express in 1968.

But we are equally proud of young journalists who did outstanding work while reporting and photographing for the Express.

When a student was shot and killed on campus Sept. 3, 2015, Express editor-in-chief Kris Hooks and news editor Vienna Montague immediately went to work. Most of the immediate coverage was put up instantly on the Express’ social media platforms and on our website. Local news outlets were following our reporting that day. Our Express editors put up stories first online and then decide which stories to include in the monthly print editions, from the coverage of the reaction to the death of former City College student Stephon Clark and decision this year not to prosecute the city police officers who shot and killed him.

As we’ve been looking at the end of the printed editions of the Express, I’ve struggled for ways to write about this. One of my former writing students, Dawn Orosco, put it this way in the final stanza of a poetic tribute to print newspapers:

But still, this is not an obituary —
newspapers will never die
They will always be held;
they will always be opened —
forever recycled
in my bank of memory.

Expresses 1981 and 2019 (Photo by Randy Allen)

It’s been a great run on newsprint, and we are grateful for the support of literally thousands of (before 1959) Sacramento Junior College and (after 1959) Sacramento City College students, faculty, staff and administrators who have read (and sometimes railed at) the Express. The paper has been an ongoing practice in democracy and the First Amendment—not without disagreement and challenges—but it has largely succeeded as the voice of students reporting on other students and their college experience.

Here’s to many more years as that student voice, in whatever form of delivery is appropriate to the changing times. In the meantime, the Express will still be going strong each academic year at www.saccityexpress. We hope you’ll continue the journey with us.

Jan Haag and Randy Allen
Express advisers, spring 2019

Photo adviser Randy Allen commemorates the delivery May 9, 2019, of the final print edition of the Express newspaper at Sacramento City College by its staff (from left, Danielle McKinney, Rose Vega, Ravenstorm Labarcon and Luan Nguyen).

Claudio Alvarado (photo by Charlie Casey/UCD Health)

That’s the great headline on this UC Davis Health story about one of Dick’s saviors, Claudio Alvarado, who sank to his knees beside me on mine seconds after Dick’s collapse in Honolulu Jan. 15.

Claudio—as you may remember if you’ve been following this story—was in line behind us to board Hawaiian Airlines flight 20 bound for Sacramento that day with his partner, Camron Calloway.

“I’m a nurse,” Claudio said to me as I wondered if I should start CPR. I moved aside to let Claudio do what he does professionally as a nurse in the Emergency Department at the UCD Medical Center in Sacramento.

The rest, as they say, is history. (You can read an earlier post about Claudio and Camron here, if you like.)

We are grateful to Charlie Casey, senior public information officer at UCD Health, for interviewing both Dick and Claudio to write this story for the UCDMC community .

I’m also delighted by the fact that as of this summer I can call Claudio a colleague of mine at Sacramento City College where we are both professors. He’s been hired as a full-time nursing professor and starts working with SCC nursing students doing their clinical practice over the summer. In the fall, he’ll teach a full load of classes in addition to his job at UCDMC.

As Dick says of Claudio in this story, “That dude is a hero.”

He so is!

Before my brain could begin
to process it—you, falling to the airport
floor, pulse fluttering in your neck
until someone rolled you onto your back,
and the fluttering stopped—
Loss opened the shuttered door
in my heart, walked through again,
stood next to me, put his arm
around me, and said, “There, there.”

We stood there, Loss and I,
watching as strangers knelt around
you, a perfect halo of helpers.
Grief showed up, lending his warmth
to our little huddle. “Hey, girl,”
said Grief, old friend that he is.
“Don’t watch—or maybe, do.
It’ll help later.”

Then Hope joined us, nudging me.
“Take a picture, honey,” she whispered.
“If he comes back, he’ll ask
if you got a picture.”

That made me smile; Hope knows
us so well. I extracted myself
from Grief’s gentle arms and said,
“Excuse me,” without explanation,
because Grief understands.

I stepped into the glory of humanity
around you, took out my phone and
snapped an image of you there,
a large man pumping your chest,
a smaller one holding your head,
checking your pulse, another arriving
with a machine, someone placing
pads with wires on your chest.

“You know,” Loss whispered, trying
to prepare me, “this doesn’t always work.”

But Hope grabbed my hand and,
though no one else did, sang out,
“Clear!” a second before one
of the helpers pushed the button.
And suddenly, there you were, pale
blue eyes open, eyelashes fluttering,
the throng around you able to breathe again,
you, back on our side.

“Bye-bye,” Loss said, releasing me.
“For now,” Grief said, already fading.
“There you go,” Hope whispered,
as my life restarted with one
heartbeat:

yours.

(Also published here. Thanks to Persimmon Tree for including “Stopped” in their special section, “life-changing moments.”)

Faith United Methodist Church (photo/Dick Schmidt)

After retrieving my nametag from the tall usher in the foyer, I quietly opened the door and snuck into the Methodist Church called Faith that Dick and his family have considered theirs for decades.

The pre-service Easter music wafted up to the exposed beams holding up the pitched ceiling, and I was delighted, as I slid into the pew next to Dick and his cousin Ron Saylor, to see a friend of mine sittin’ in at the grand piano. Rachel Kang, a professor of music at Sacramento City College where I also teach, gave me a quick wave, never missing a note.

Though I’m not an official member of Faith United Methodist Church in Sacramento, I pop in periodically with Dick. Easter is one of those special occasions—not just for the religious reasons but because it was Easter 1999 when Dick’s mother attended church there for the last time before she died nine weeks later. Dick’s parents and many of his relatives, including his sister and her family, have been an integral part of the backbone of that church. His mother and sister played organ and piano there; his father sang in the choir and sat on the church board. Dick’s cousins Leonard and Naomi Schmidt have served for decades as lay leaders and shared their musical talents—directing the choir, playing the organ and piano, and (my favorite) leading and performing in the Faith handbell choir.

To sit in Faith church is, I believe, an act of homage and love on Dick’s part, in memory and honor of his family and loved ones, and I’m always honored to be there.

This Easter, though, we also had people to thank—lots of people who had written and called and sent supportive messages after Dick’s cardiac arrest Jan. 15 and subsequent triple bypass in Honolulu in January. From Pastor Barbara Horikoshi-Firebaugh to Ron Saylor to friends like Elaine and Loring Pollock and Sara Zeigler, this would be the first time Dick got to hug some of them since returning from Hawaii.

It was also a chance for us to stand next to Ron, a Methodist minister himself with a lovely singing voice, and listen to him sometimes take up the melody, sometimes come in with a nice harmony. Dick remembers a much younger Ron, fresh from his home in Canada, coming to visit Faith church in 1961 and becoming quite taken with Dick’s cousin Carol, a fine pianist and composer. They later married and had two sons.

Easter is all about resurrection, and though it embarrasses Dick that I keep referring to his, I have to say that sitting next to him in church this Easter brought home the great emotional weight I’ve been carrying since Jan. 15. Especially when we were singing lyrics like the ones in “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today”:

Made like him, like him we rise,
and
Where o’ death is now thy sting?

I felt myself getting teary as I thought of The Resurrection of the man whose ascendance into heaven is the bedrock of the faith of these people of Faith. And then I had only to glance at the man next to me to feel more tears spill as we sang, “He lives! He lives!”

I know Dick is not the first person to come back to life at the hands of compassionate strangers who administered CPR and shocked his heart with a defibrillator. There may have been others like that in church, too. But this is my resurrected one, and when I think of that, I am moved to tears. I hope to be less emotional about it someday, but right now I dissolve while trying to sing, “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart.”

Like the son of God, “he walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way,” as the song says.

I see his hand of mercy, I hear his voice of cheer,
and just the time I need him, he’s always near.

For a few minutes there in an airport in Honolulu, I came face to face with the knowledge that Dick will not always be near. This was not news to me, but I hadn’t experienced it with him. I have lived through the death of a husband and have had literally hundreds of sweet examples of that one returning to me—in sleeping and waking moments—as my companion spirit. But, as I told Dick, although it’s not up to me, I really want to hold his hand of mercy and hear his voice of cheer for as long as possible.

So I did what I usually do in church. When it was time to sing, I clutched a first, a second, then a third tissue as the tears came and my nose ran, and I tried to make a joyful noise with my voice breaking. (It can’t hit high notes very well any more either.)

I held the hymnal given in memory of Dick’s mother, her name just inside the cover, and felt his hand close to mine, and I sang my gratitude—to the heavens, to God and his resurrected Son, to all the saints and companion spirits who helped return my beloved to me, here on earth.

Card from Mark, 6th grade, Honowai Elementary School, Oahu

We think that Mark, who drew this card that Dick received this week, has a future as a cartoonist. A packet of 20 handwritten, hand-drawn thank you notes from Oahu arrived at Dick’s, Cora’s and Connie’s houses, each unique card made by a sixth grader at Honowai Elementary School in Waipahu. (You may recall that Cora and Connie traveled from their respective homes in Nevada and Colorado to care for Dick after I had to leave Honolulu to return home. They all stayed another two weeks in a house we rented in Pearl City.)

Apparently about 60 keiki (children) were recently trained in CPR and the use of an AED, thanks to donations from Dick, Cora and Connie to Kids4CPR, the nonprofit part of the AED Institute. This is just one of many trainings volunteers with Kids4CPR do all over Hawaii, and, it turns out, these kinds of donations will ensure that the small program continues.

Dick, Cora and Connie knew that their donations would be used to train kids in these lifesaving techniques, but they didn’t know they’d be so richly thanked.

We liked this card from Kenneth, too:

Diana Sellner, program coordinator of Kids4CPR, also sent a note:

“As you know, CPR training for kiddos is so important. The kiddos really enjoy CPR training and soak up the info like sponges. Here are some thank you cards written by students at Honowai Elementary School. This was Honowai’s first time receiving training. They had so much fun that they immediately scheduled for 2020.”

According to a letter that also came from Morgan Hawley, relations manager for Kids4CPR, Inc., “Each year in the U.S., nearly 350,000 people suffer cardiac arrest outside hospitals, and less than 30% will receive CPR from a bystander. Without immediate bystander CPR and defibrillation, a victim’s chance of survival decreases 10% for each minute that passes. The national survival rate from cardiac arrest is less than 10% and potentially even less in Hawaii.”

This is the essence of what the kids learned: that CPR stands for call (911), push (do chest compressions) and respond (EMS personnel come to help). Kids4CPR’s mission is to improve the cardiac arrest survival rate in Hawaii, Hawley said. By teaching lifesaving CPR and AED use in schools, they hope “to help turn the sudden cardiac arrest (death) statistics upside down.”

The idea is that after training them, like the Honowai keiki in sixth grade, their skills “will be reinforced as they progress through school,” Hawley wrote. “By the time they graduate, we hope to have created a generation of CPR/AED-savvy students who have the confidence and willingness to save a life. Future heroes in training!”

Here’s more that we learned from their website:

• Kids4CPR is a 100% volunteer-run organization. “Teaching children to save a life and be a superhero is what we do best.”

• “A key component of our program is encouraging and inspiring students to go out and teach family and friends, exponentially increasing the number of potential lifesavers in the community. Everyone benefits from children receiving CPR training because of their willingness to share what they learned with others.”

Pam Foster, the founder of the AED Institute, taught her first kids’ CPR class at Iolani School in 2005. In 2009-2010 Pam met Sharon Maekawa, whose 28-year-old daughter died of a cardiac arrest at the school where she was a teacher. No one there knew CPR, and there was no AED on campus. Together, Pam and Sharon formed Hawaii Heart Foundation, which was renamed Kids4CPR. Since 2010 the organization has trained more than 100,000 kids for free in CPR and the use of AEDs.

“In the last two years,” she says, “the foundation has had growing pains. We have a lot of requests for classes but can only offer about two to three classes per month because the AED Institute is so busy.”

Kids4CPR has struggled to find funding, as well, Pam told us, adding that she’s not sure how long they can continue doing trainings in schools. “The schools do see the importance, but do not want to teach it themselves,” she says. “Who knows what the future holds, but [training kids] is a passion.”

These are kids like Brehannan, whose letter arrived in the package sent to Connie.

“I would like to thank you for teaching me CPR cause when I was little people would ask me what was my dream and I would say help people and save people and you helped me learn what CPR means and what to do when they collapsed or at least something happens and what to be and say. Now that you taught me I can accomplish my younger self dreams so thank you.”

Another keeper from Mark (note the Zooming superhero with AED in hand).

We can’t guarantee great cards like this if you or someone you know donates to Kids4CPR, but if you do, and if you receive gratitude in this form from a bunch of eager sixth graders, tell us about it. It seems like a great gift to us. You can make a tax-deductible donation to Kids4CPR to help them continue this great work and even mention Dick Schmidt, if you like.

He’s kind of a superhero now, too.

www.kids4cpr.org

Dick Schmidt and Claudio Alvarado

When the four of us met in person for the first time just inside the restaurant door last night, we hugged as if we’d known each other forever. Bystanders might have thought we were family—the older, gray-haired couple meeting the young men, one 26, one 32, we learned.

Actually, it wasn’t the first time we four had met. But on January 15, Dick had collapsed at the airport in Honolulu, and these two strangers materialized—Claudio Alvarado, the UC Davis Medical Center nurse, to kneel by Dick, and his partner Camron Calloway, who stood with me and put his arms around me.

Claudio, it turned out, was the monitor, the one who checked Dick’s pulse after he fell, noticed it fluttering and that he was still breathing. But by the time he rolled Dick onto his back, both pulse and heartbeat had stopped. By then, another stranger was kneeling on the other side of Dick—Salesi Maumau, an off-duty Honolulu firefighter—and somehow, with few words spoken, Salesi and Claudio became an instant lifesaving team as Salesi began CPR on Dick.

At the same time the Hawaiian Airlines folks at the desk sprang into action: Heather Tanonaka called 911. Chris Ohta ran for one of the portable defibrillators, an AED, which are placed 90 seconds apart at the Daniel K. Inouye Airport.

But it was Claudio and Salesi who knelt on the ground with Dick, and Camron who comforted me, when Chris arrived with the AED.

“Salesi and I put the pads on your chest,” Claudio told Dick last night after we settled into a comfy booth at Roxy. “But Chris was so eager to push the button after the AED said to administer the shock that he forgot to call ‘clear.’ I still had my hands on Dick’s head, holding his neck straight.”

Dick and I were startled. “You didn’t…?” I said, holding my breath.

“No,” Claudio said. “I pulled my hands away just in time.”

Because—if you haven’t been reading all my blog posts—AEDs stop hearts, giving them a chance to restart. The thought of Claudio’s heart stopping in those crucial minutes nearly stopped mine.

“I was fine,” he emphasized, taking in our faces.

Well, Claudio had to be fine since he remained upright and checking Dick’s pulse throughout the approximately three minutes he was—to be frank—dead on the ground.

We sat there, looking at these two young men who had been a couple for all of a month before this event that changed all our lives. Both of them are military men—Claudio, a Navy nurse before he was discharged (though he’s still in the Naval reserve) and now works in pediatric emergency at UC Davis, and Camron, a courier for the Air Force, flying all over the world managing documents and cargo.

They’d had a long-distance relationship and got really good at FaceTime before they finally got to spend actual time together—Claudio living in Sacramento and Camron now living in Vacaville assigned to Travis Air Force Base. And the trip they’d just finished on Oahu was Camron’s chance to show Claudio an island Camron has come to love and explored extensively in the recent years.

And after Dick came back to life with one shock of the AED, after the emergency personnel arrived to take over and get Dick and me to the hospital, Claudio and Camron and Salesi got on Hawaiian Airlines flight 20 back to Sacramento. We didn’t know this until the next day when Pam Foster, from the AED Institute in Hawaii, came to see us in the hospital and tell us the story. That’s when we learned that AEDs had been used in airports in Hawaii 69 times with 50 survivors. Dick is number 50. Pam also had Claudio and Camron’s names, and she was on the trail of finding Salesi.

Camron introduces us (again!) to Claudio while Dick was still in the hospital.

Before he and Claudio raced to get on the plane, Camron and I thought to trade contact information. And three days after Dick’s triple bypass, Pam Foster contacted me to say that Camron, who was once again on Oahu, wanted to visit. He arrived at the hospital in his light-colored camo fatigues and made a FaceTime call to Claudio so all four of us could meet right there in Dick’s room. It was all we could do not to weep with gratitude.

A couple of weeks ago we got to meet Salesi and his wife Eryn for dinner in Sacramento. And last night we finally got to feed the guys and learn more about them, hear their version of our story (because it truly is our little village’s story). The fact that Dick was brought back to life by the quick action of a team of young people who didn’t know each other but who knew what to do still amazes us—all of them with ties to both Sacramento and Hawaii (like us), all of them under the age of 35 (not like us).

If ever you doubt the willingness to help strangers, the strength and resilience, the competence and compassion of people significantly younger than you, I want to introduce you to these people: Salesi, Chris, Camron and Claudio.

Claudio last night delivered his good news: He’s just gotten a full-time job as a nursing professor at Sacramento City College. He starts teaching in August after spending his summer doing clinical work with SCC nursing students at UCDMC.

I knew Claudio had applied for this job, and I wrote a spontaneous letter singing his praises to the two directors of my college’s nursing program. The letter couldn’t be used in the formal interview process (it was too late for that), but the two women who received it knew about Claudio’s actions that helped save Dick.

So this weekend, as Christians celebrate a great resurrection, as Jews commemorate Passover, Dick and I will go to his family’s little Methodist church on J Street and give our thanks for his passing over and for his resurrection, too. In Dick’s case, he gets to continue to walk the earth for a while longer. We hope it’s a good while longer.

And I plan to write another letter, this time to the president and one of the vice presidents of my college, telling them what a brilliant hire they’ve just made in Claudio Alvarado, one of our heroes, part of our ohana, whom we can’t wait to take to dinner again and again.

Claudio, Dick and Camron

So many of us feel this way, slogging off to work every day, dragging ourselves back home, living for the weekends. “Back on the old treadmill,” some of us say.

Well, today, Dick got back on the old treadmill—literally—and in seven minutes was pooped out. But that was the idea since the treadmill is a test administered by the heart folks at Kaiser in Sacramento. And though we don’t know the results of the test yet, or the EKG he had before the treadmill test, we do know that Dick’s blood pressure remained good before and after—and that he felt strong and confident as he walked, even if it seemed as if he was hiking uphill part of the time. Because that’s what the test aims to do.

He’s also gone to three sessions with dietitians at Kaiser, including two classes that were advocating plant-based diets. We’ve been practicing mostly fish- and plant-based diets these days—with occasional forays into beef… including Dick’s only burger indulgence: the lean, mean buffalo burger. This, for a guy who in his prime as a newspaper photographer was a two-cheeseburger-a-day guy, is a pretty big deal, we think.

Having the EKG (look at that incision healing nicely!)

And he’s been good about avoiding most refined sugar. It also helps that he’s eating less than he used to, which has him down to a little less than 180 pounds now.

Dick is taking walks every day for a good 45 minutes at a pretty good clip—many of them without me now, though I love to join him when I can because walking Woodside is like walking in a park. (Local Sacramento folks, you are welcome to come walk with Dick and check out the newly refurbished duck pond in his ‘hood!)

In other words, he’s doing great!

Dick also wants me to include this photo:

Dick is the cook in our group. He’s great at baking fish and steaming veggies. But all this heart-healthy stuff has inspired me to get back into wok mode of chicken stir-fry in olive oil, which is a good way for both of us to eat our vegetables over a little brown rice. I find that if I make up a batch, that’s good for dinner for us both, plus leftovers for Dick the next day. Dick likes this photo because it’s not my usual spot in the house. I’d still rather sit on the sofa and work on a poem than cook, but I have to say that once all the veggies and chicken are cut up, the stir fry sure goes quickly. And, if I do say so myself, it’s pretty tasty, too.

And, in some of the best news of all, Dick’s been off the big league painkillers for two months now. He’s had comparatively little pain throughout this whole ordeal, and when we found the perfect sign as we walked Woodside one day—well, it just called for a photo.

On tax day, April 15, it will be the three-month-a-versary of Dick’s cardiac arrest. If there are only two sure things in life—death and taxes—Dick has experienced both this year… and, come to think of it, he did get a bit of a refund on both, the lucky duck. We will take a moment on the 15th and be grateful, once again, for his miraculous resurrection.