Life as a Supreme Court reporter must be really frustrating right now. You’ve been waiting for a retirement for years, and you think one is coming any day now, but until the announcement is made you don’t have something big to report. The question is, what can you report about in the meantime?
Instead of just recycling stories repeating the same old speculation about who might replace the Chief, Charles Lane of the Washington Post seems to have come up with a novel approach: write a story about a childhood photograph of one of the Justices (in this case, Justice Stevens) that you found on the Web via a Google search. From the story:
In cyberspace, Stevens remains forever young but also anonymous. The photo archive included no identification of the boys [in the photograph]. Leslie Martin, a research specialist at the Chicago Historical Society, says that no one there had recognized the justice until she was contacted by a Post reporter who had stumbled upon them in a Google search.
Robert V. Allegrini, a spokesman for the Hilton Chicago, which now operates the former Stevens Hotel, said that he, too, was unaware of the photograph.
But in a brief interview, Justice Stevens confirmed that he is, indeed, the boy on the left. The two others are his brothers, William K. Stevens, then 11, in the center, and Richard James Stevens, 13, who died in 2001. The oldest brother, the late Ernest S. Stevens, is not pictured.
The boys were working a jigsaw puzzle, Stevens recalls.
. . .
To be sure, when people hear the words “Supreme Court justice” these days, they probably do not think “youth.” The youngest justice is Clarence Thomas, 56. The eight others are 65 or older. Yet each of them was once a child.
Indeed. (Hat tip: Howard)
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