# devriesmedia.com > AI-optimized mirror of devriesmedia.com containing 25 pages totalling 15,837 words of clean markdown content, structured data, and semantic HTML. Original source: https://devriesmedia.com/. Last updated: 2026-06-16T02:12:42.453Z. Each page is available as HTML (with JSON-LD structured data) and Markdown (text-only, ideal for LLMs and RAG). ## Homepage - [Tom DeVries](/content/site-root.html): Tom DeVries, a recovering journalist and television producer, lives just outside Yosemite in California. This is an archive of past journalism projects, and current blog posts. Photo above courtesy of Michael Macor, taken after the Oct 17, 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake in Oakland, California. The video being made in his shot is here. (288 words) ## Articles & Blog Posts - [sitemap-xml.html](/content/sitemap-xml.html) (1 words) - [Tom DeVries](/content/about/index.html): .... is a recovering journalist living in the Yosemite Valley neighborhood of California's Sierra Nevada... or Emeryville up by Oakland.  That too.   free dot devries at gmail dot com Tuscany, that too Bio. Born in Ann Arbor, MI Raised, schooled in suburban Chicago Worked in Chicago, Philly, DC, New York, and San Francisco. Lives in… (1,177 words) - [Stories don't tell themselves](/content/typing/index.html):    We have our stories, my tools and I.    Got my first chainsaw for twenty-five bucks from Ralph Hoffman, the small engine guy in Mariposa town. I think he was doing me a favor, giving me that price for a very used Pioneer, Canadian brand, noisy and heavy, life-saving. Fire crew boss at the… (1,486 words) - [Tom DeVries](/content/gallery/index.html): Pay-phones The Sign Project How it used to be (February 2019) Textures (108 words) - [Tom DeVries](/content/2012/10/19/campus-years/index.html): At its best, my childhood looked like Jean Sheperd's "A Christmas Story" with me as Ralphie.  I wanted the BB gun too, but also my school, the coal furnace, the front yard, clothes and snow suits… my life really looked like this.    Until I was ten we lived in Ann Arbor, the college town.  More than half… (646 words) - [Tom DeVries](/content/tv-archive/index.html): Earthquake When the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake hit Oakland just after 5 PM, cameraman Jerry McEowen and I, working for the NBC station in Bay Area, followed the smoke to the collapsed double-decked Cyprus freeway. Jerry was a big, plain, Midwesterner. His shooting was solid plus he was brave and funny. I helped, but this… (652 words) - [Tom DeVries](/content/2022/03/29/now-then/index.html): Had an exchange of letters with grandson Drew, a nearly-teen. He had a school assignment to contrast and compare his times with mine. Clickbait if ever I saw one. But it tripped me out. What, indeed, was it like, to be a kid in the 50s. So, thank you Drew, and check out the 1950s when… (1,156 words) - [Stories don't tell themselves](/content/2019/03/13/missing/index.html): A bit more than 25 years ago now I spent some time in Fargo ND working for America's Most Wanted. The case in particular was a missing child named Jeanna North, an 11 year old who had disappeared roller blading the three blocks between the Dairy Queen and her home. In that short distance she… (903 words) - [Tom DeVries](/content/2023/06/05/1306/index.html): (A flier for a college course about my younger days. Kind of tripped me out.) You're gonna study the 60s? First, ‘oh, good.’ The 60s were everything you could hope for in this world. Probably more. They were just wonderful. Enjoy them vicariously and recreate as much of them as you can, or as seems… (1,297 words) - [Tom DeVries](/content/2013/11/12/why-i-no-longer-work-for-nbc-news-ever/index.html): Back then, early oughts, I was field producing live shots for the Today Show.  Not much money, but kinda fun way to spend an early morning.  Usually pretty good stories, and the glamor.  That too.  So one night in April the crew booker called from Burbank – this would be maybe 8 pm Pacific –… (1,010 words) - [Tom DeVries](/content/2018/10/22/chicago-august-1968/index.html): (My daughter, who was not quite four years old at the time, asked me recently to talk about the 1968 Chicago convention for her children who are living thru this new awful time now.) On the cab ride in from Midway airport we passed sandbagged machine gun nests on the University of Chicago campus. That… (939 words) - [Stories don't tell themselves](/content/2019/06/09/fragile/index.html): Back in the mid-90s I spent two years on and off in Bosnia where there had just been a war. Quick review: in about 1993 a First World Country slipped into genocide in a matter of weeks, goaded by flagrant racist propaganda on TV…. an advanced multi-ethnic European country with push-button telephones, color TV, automobile… (667 words) - [Tom DeVries](/content/print-archive-2/index.html): Alaska Epic reporting trip to Alaska gold country for New West. Bush planes and helicopters, 8 year old pilots, morels and moose steak. All that, more, and I was even being paid. Living in the country My Anti-Mother Earth News screed about living in the country. It was heart-felt and as true as I could… (653 words) - [Stories don't tell themselves](/content/2020/03/02/how-we-became-country-hippies/index.html):           from our front porch  (by Stanley Knap from July 4, 1977 New West) It seemed like a good idea at the time. Is that enough? Judy was pregnant.  I was burned out or maybe just bored.  Hillary’s Mariposa house was falling into ruin.  Nixon had just been reelected. The hippy… (1,133 words) - [Stories don't tell themselves](/content/2023/06/05/the-tools/index.html):  We have our stories, my tools and I.    Got my first chainsaw for twenty-five bucks from Ralph Hoffman, the small engine guy in Mariposa town. I think he was doing me a favor, giving me that price for a very used Pioneer, Canadian brand, noisy and heavy, life-saving. Fire crew boss at the Forest… (1,203 words) - [Stories don't tell themselves](/content/2013/11/13/a-thanksgiving-tale/index.html): I got an assignment back then to do a Thanksgiving piece for NPR and soldiered off by phone and car to make a little radio story about turkeys.  They raise turkeys in the Central Valley down the hill from our Mariposa house and I figured the audio from a turkey ranch — twenty thousand anxious… (391 words) - [Stories don't tell themselves](/content/2019/03/04/rogers-gone/index.html): Roger Nelson was my best friend, in school, when I needed a friend the most. His folks were founders and stalwarts of the Winnetka Bible Church which my dad was hired to pastor in 1951. We lived in the parsonage next door to the church; Nelsons lived hardly a block away, and they were my… (484 words) - [Stories don't tell themselves](/content/2022/03/03/find-joy/index.html): My friend Michael Rossman argued that we must have rituals, and that if we're gonna give up on those offered to us, we should make up our own. Referencing Lorca, the poet of Spain, Michael insisted that there must be a wedding, even within a war. And so there was. Yes there was. And in… (440 words) - [Tom DeVries](/content/2022/03/06/i-heard-the-news-today-oh-boy/index.html): A bit under 20 years ago the US and Brits invaded Iraq, a country a little smaller than Texas. Our combined invasion force was about 195,000 which massed openly in a neighboring nation. The justification, mistaken at best, was that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction which they might use against the innocent or against… (415 words) - [Stories don't tell themselves](/content/2022/02/11/the-airplane/index.html): Winter of 1977 I was holed up in a Yosemite Valley hotel room writing. Took an afternoon break with a friend to get a beer at the Broiler Room and nearly everybody was talking about The Airplane, about the marijuana being salvaged from a lake toward the south end of the Park. If I'd been more… (282 words) - [Tom DeVries](/content/2014/12/12/321/index.html): It is my current opinion that in all matters of faith, including religion, politics and medicine, the limit of avowal should be "it works for me."   Beyond that comes pressure, coercion, violence and war, serious over-reactions for systems that after all include large impacts of the psychological.  In other words, maybe most, possibly all of… (223 words) - [Stories don't tell themselves](/content/2022/03/13/oh-brave-new-world/index.html): In the book of this name, Huxley most certainly did not approve of the technology of this modern world. So, honestly, I don't know what to think about an automatic, solar powered, Internet linked, self-harvesting, multi-hive bee apartment house with built-in health care. Don't know if Huxley would see BeeWise as furthering fascism. Don't know… (223 words) - [news-sitemap-xml.html](/content/news-sitemap-xml.html) (1 words) - [Stories don't tell themselves](/content/operating-manual-2/index.html): Stories don't tell themselves (59 words) ## Resources - [Full Page Index](/index.html): Browse all cached pages with rich metadata - [About This Cache](/content/about.html): Methodology, technical details, and usage guidelines - [XML Sitemap](/sitemap.xml): Machine-readable sitemap for crawler discovery - [Robots.txt](/robots.txt): Crawler directives