It’s a longstanding tradition for those of us at Fox 10; Thanksgiving lunch.  We all gathered into the news studio, which became the Fox 10 Dining Room for a few hours, as we shared a great meal and lots of laughs, as you can tell by the pictures.

I spent a great morning at Mary G. Montgomery High School, getting students ready for the upcoming season of HiQ.  It’s an academic quiz competition that I’ve hosted for the past twenty-something years, along with producer Julie Harper and equipment managers Wendell Lewis and Joe Mills.  The 4 of us travel to 15 high schools in Mobile and Baldwin counties during the first few months of each year, doing our best to promote academic excellence.

As I told the students during this morning’s orientation session, I think they are academic stars who deserve the same respect as outstanding football or basketball players. 

The HiQ team members are all great kids; bright, eager and friendly.  Their faculty advisors deserve a lot of the credit for channelling that energy into achievement.  In fact, at least one faculty adviser this year used to be a HiQ team member. 

The 2010 season begins in January.  I’ll be posting stories on the matches here on fox10tv.com–and instant score updates on Twitter.  Just send me an invite @Bob_Grip .

Ken Burns got me thinking about veterans, Veterans’ Day, and one veteran in particular.

When I talked to him about his series, The War, he told me he wanted to tell the story of World War II from “the bottom up”. There were millions of those stories about the War, but now, veterans of that war are dying at a rate of 1,000 per day.

My dad.

Like so many other veterans, my Dad (pictured left) didn’t talk about his experiences much. He was drafted at the age of 32, he served as a rifleman in northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes and Central Europe, he nearly got killed at least once, and he came back home. Perhaps he felt his story wasn’t unique because WWII touched everyone. If you weren’t fighting, you were home working in a defense plant, trying to figure out how to get to work on your rationed gasoline.

My Dad served in Europe with the 94th Division (you can see the insignia on his helmet). When I was little, I would ask him to tell me another story about “the war”. At the time, I really didn’t know what “the war” was, but I knew it was an important part of his life.

He told me about a friend of his, Paul Hart, who was shot to death by a Nazi sniper while next to my Dad.

I learned that my Dad earned his Purple Heart on the front lines when a bullet clipped off the bottom of his ear. Luckily, someone had asked him a question and he turned to head to reply. That question saved his life.

I heard about a friend of his from the French resistance, who managed to survive the war only to die in a motorcycle accident in Algeria.

He told me about the Russian soldiers for whom he served as a translator when they were liberated from Nazi POW camps. He feared that they were no better off returning to the Soviet Union to face an uncertain fate.

I heard stories about frostbite, marching until your boots rotted and fell apart.

But the best story involved being on a train with others who were injured. The Paymaster was walking through the cars, distributing pay envelopes, asking the names of the soldiers. “Grip”, my father said. “Get out of here”, said the Paymaster. “I just paid you in the other car”. My Dad replied with language he cleaned up for my young ears at the time and said, “No, I haven’t been in another car”. The Paymaster told him, “Well, I just paid a fellow named Grip in the other car.” At that point, my father whistled. In my family, we had a whistle that all of us recognized. I can’t describe it, but I remember the seven notes.

When my Dad heard the whistle returned, he hobbled to the next car to find one of his brothers, whom he hadn’t seen since they were both sent off to war. Neither knew the other one had been injured.

I’m glad my Dad shared those stories with me. “Taps” has sounded for him, and so many other veterans. As Ken Burns discovered, there are still some who remember those days of sacrifice. Learn their stories now, before “Taps” is played again.

My favorite status update so far on Twitter:

Here it is, November 9 and we’re having to deal with tropical weather!

As our Chief Meterologist Jason Smith was explaining during an afternoon meeting in the newsroom, this is an extraordinary event.  When the temperature in the Gulf starts dropping, it robs tropical systems of the energy they need to thrive and survive.  That’s what is happening, but it will still leave us with a lot of rain and high wind especially Monday night into Tuesday morning.

BTW, we’ll be offering extended coverage tonight.  Our 5 p.m. newscast will stretch until 6:30.  The 9 p.m. newscast will go until 10:30.

It’s been fun watching certain “out of town” media come to town and try to become instant experts.  I just watched a live interview with Dr. “Saron” Hollinger of the Baldwin County school system. 

It made me think of a reporter who was dropped into Mobile as Katrina approached, doing a live broadcast in front of the U.S.S. Alabama.  She said, “The ship behind me has decided to wait it out, and remain docked here”.   That’s true.  It didn’t move .

In this case, BEST stands for Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology, and “Game Day” is Saturday at Davidson High School in Mobile.  You’re invited.

Starting at 9 a.m. in the Davidson gym, robots built by teams of students will fact off in a competition that’s a lot of fun to watch.  Each school basically receives a box of parts and instructions to design a robot that will perform certain tasks.  The rest is up to the imagination of the students.

25 schools have been working for months to get ready, and you can bet they will bring teams of cheerleaders, parents and supporters to cheer them on!

I’ve been asked, once again, to help present the trophies and prizes to the winning teams at the end of the day.  Join us!

I was reading a great article in this morning’s New York Times about David Bronner, the financial genius who runs Retirement Systems of Alabama, and made me think of a conversation I had this month while visiting in Chicago.

I was staying at a Passionist monastery on Harlem Avenue, helping to plan a conference to be held at Loyola in 2011, when I met one of the Brothers who lives there.  We got to talking during breakfast and he asked where I was living.  When I told him, he looked at me and said, “Do you know David Bronner?”.  I laughed and said I knew of him, that practically everyone in the state did.  It turns out this Brother was a classmate of Bronner, and said he still talked with Bronner about once a month.  Small world…

Well, not really, but I did think of Fugitive Files when I took a few days off to visit San Francisco, pay a visit to Alcatraz Island, and spend time in Berkeley to see a daughter and son-in-law.

I had the chance to be in Chicago when word came from Copenhagen that the Windy City had been eliminated in the first round of competition for the Olympics.  In my unofficial survey of folks, I found more relief than anything.  One person said traffic was bad enough without the Olympics.  Another said the city’s poor would have been displaced if Chicago won the games. The city’s mayor blamed the media for refusing to act as cheerleaders for the games.

Another Chicagoan put it another way.  He said losing the games just eliminated another opportunity for graft.

Over the past few months, I’ve had the chance to give AT&T’s GPS service a test drive.  Navigator is a free download for the iPhone, but costs about $10 a month to use, added to your AT&T bill.

For my first test, I let Navigator pick the quickest route from Orange Beach to the Grand Hotel in Point Clear.  Given the iPhone’s short battery life and since the battery-draining “Location Services” must be activated for Navigator to find its way, I selected a relatively short route.

I typed in the street address for the Grand and off we drove. Navigator took me up Highway 59, then north on Highway 98, and west on Gayfer Street in Fairhope. According to Navigator, the Grand Hotel was located on Gayfer Street, east of North Section Street – not exactly the waterfront property folks have learned to love over the years.  Luckily, I knew where I was going.  When I did arrive at the Hotel, I found Navigator had placed me in the middle of the Lakewood Golf Club across the street.  Its accuracy left a little to be desired.

The next test pitted Navigator against the “NeverLost” GPS system, hardwired into the Hertz rental car I was driving from the Pittsburgh airport to southwestern Pennsylvania.  Like the first test, I was familiar with this route as well, but there was an en-route challenge to both GPS systems.  Part of the trip involved a toll road that was still under construction. Would they be able to cope?

Leaving the Pittsburgh airport was routine with both systems, though I appreciated the timely reminders from NeverLost about upcoming turns.  The two female voices used by NeverLost were crystal clear as opposed to the sometimes-muffled voice coming from Navigator through the mini-speakers on the iPhone.  When it came to the map display, there was no contest between the two.  NeverLost looked like PacMan versus Navigator’s 3D street imaging.

When I drove onto the toll road, Navigator pulled way ahead in the competition.  Because Navigator downloads maps as needed along the route, it recognized the new stretches of highway and the detours needed to guide me to them.  NeverLost turned into EverLost as it tried desperately to keep me from driving through cornfields, or so it thought.  It finally gave up and warned me to return to the paved road.  In this case, Navigator knew exactly where I was, and how to get where I was going. It also offered to check for traffic along the route.

To its credit, AT&T has come out with several refinements to Navigator in the past few months which are available free via the App Store application on the iPhone. Neverlost didn’t show evidence of that flexibility.

The next time I really need to find where I’m going, I’m bringing my iPhone, Navigator and, for a long trip, an extra battery. 

BTW, I stopped in an Apple Store on my way back to the airport to lust after check out the iPhone 3GS.  The “S” really does stand for speed.  It booted faster, wrote pages faster and shot some really great looking video.