Sagging lead

Greg McCowan and Don Martin have pretty much had it up to here -- make that ''down to there'' -- when it comes to young men wearing their britches around their kneecaps and putting their underwear on public display.

Features to read

It's high time to pull those pants up, said McCowan, 61, and Martin, 38. And they're teaming up to spread the gospel against the fashion practice called "sagging."

McCowan, who grew up in Fresno and now lives in Oakland, and Martin, who runs a T-shirt and poster-printing shop in Fresno's Tower District, are embarking on a grass-roots campaign to encourage youths to hitch their pants back up where they belong.

Martin and McCowan are producing sweatshirts, T-shirts and posters with a message that encourages self-pride and offers a tongue-in-cheek rebuke: "Respect yourself, check yourself. Pull 'em up."

The design depicts a young man reaching down to yank his jeans up over his boxers.

"We're starting local because Fresno is our home," said Martin, owner of Insight Design and Print. "This is a movement to take our city and our country back to values of respect."

Sagging originated in prisons, where inmates were denied belts because they could be used for committing suicide by hanging.

But over the past decade or so, it's been popularized by musicians and rappers and mimicked by young men of all ethnic groups. "It's not just a black thing; it's everyone," said McCowan, a retired construction worker who now dabbles in graphic design.

McCowan said he has been bugged about sagging for years. But he was prompted to do something about it when he saw his sons and nephews letting their waistbands sag.

"Man, pull your pants up," he said. "Nobody wants to see your crack."

Martin and McCowan also are printing signs and posters with the "pull 'em up" message, as well as other signs proclaiming a "No Sag Zone" that they hope to encourage schools, churches and other public places to post.

"And in fairness, we're printing up shirts for the kids that say, 'I'll pull 'em up for a job,' " Martin said.

Finding a job already is difficult for many young people, McCowan said. It's even harder when the saggy-jeans look is a turn-off for most employers.

"They see these big stars wearing their pants low, so they do it to be part of the 'in' crowd," McCowan said. "But they're cheating themselves out of a chance, and they're doing it just for style."

Mentors in Fresno's African-American community say the message is sorely overdue.

"When I first saw the shirts, I was in awe," said Gerald Perry, a high school basketball coach who also runs a youth basketball academy. "The shirt speaks volumes."

And it does so in a non-threatening way, Perry added. "If you tell kids to do something, they take it as being disrespectful to them."

Martin and Perry said they've seen teens self-consciously reach down and casually raise their pants after seeing an adult wearing a "Pull 'em Up" shirt.

"No one is pointing a finger at them and telling them to pull their pants up; they just do it," Martin said. "If you see something enough and read it enough, you have to think about it."

Paul Copeland, executive director of Helping Our Own Destiny, or HOOD, a West Fresno youth outreach, agreed.

"We've been dealing with this situation for a long time," he said. "This shirt makes the same point, but it's more impactful" than just telling someone to pull up his pants.

Martin and McCowan say they're working with organizations like Copeland's and Perry's, and social media like Twitter, My-Space and Facebook, to reach a broader audience.

They're not necessarily aiming to duplicate the flash-in-the-pan success of "General" Larry Platt, whose 2010 appearance in auditions for the TV show "American Idol" became a viral video sensation with his song "Pants on the Ground," which lampooned the saggy-pants "gangsta" look:

"Pants on the ground, pants on the ground, lookin' like a fool wit' your pants on the ground."

"We want to get across the same message," Martin said. "But we don't want to just get laughs with it. That's the difference."

Blacksmith Feature

At the Woodland Oaks Ranch in San Dimas, the welcoming committee is out. Hens and roosters, clucking and crowing in the morning light, are the first ambassadors, followed by Milo the Lab, Julia the Corgi and Sparkle the goat.

Digger, a chestnut gelding, sticks his head out of a barn and watches as John Gorton steps out of a white Ford F-150 pickup and lifts the side panels and rear door of the shell, revealing racks of horse shoes and a clutter of tools. He pulls on chaps, hefts an anvil onto a knee-high table and fills a bucket with water.

"Hi, Digger, how you doing?" He stands in the doorway of the barn, halter in hand. "Let's go get some new shoes on you."

He has a calm voice and a quick but easy manner. Little about him is startling. Gorton can sneak around horses better than most and has been shoeing them for 36 years.

Like pool cleaners and gardeners, he is part of the wandering workforce of Southern California, and in a region better known for its more cosmopolitan pleasures, his trade occupies a vital, if gritty, niche.

Horseshoeing may be a throw-back to the past, but so too are the rural neighborhoods and communities that Gorton visits: nooks and crannies in the region's topography, forgotten easements and municipalities where horses are still accepted.

Out here paved roads turn to dust. The rattle of the city doesn't quite disappear. It recedes, and when Gorton puts heat to metal, hammer to anvil, the digital world goes analog and when he stands beside a horse, his senses quicken to the flicker of the ears, the darkness in the eyes, a wildness that is beautiful, dangerous and life-affecting.

He keeps to a tight skein of freeways and sees about 200 clients in the San Gabriel Valley, the Puente Hills and the Inland Empire, all within 30 miles of his home in Chino. He built his business through word of mouth, making the rounds of stables at 17 and sloughing off the question, "Where's your dad?"

He's 53 now, and clients like Tonia Looker, who owns Digger and 11 other horses at Woodland Oaks, wouldn't trust her animals to anyone else.

Not all of his customers are pricey champions in the jumping circuit like Digger, who is valued in the low six figures. Just the day before, Gorton spent the morning at the L-S Ranch in Whittier. The horses there may not offer the same return on investment but they get the same care.

To understand the farrier's trade, you need to realize that the horse's hoof is a shock absorber that evolved almost 50 million years ago. Its development allowed the species to grow big and to run fast. Domesticity, however, has not been easy on the hoof. In confined settings, it doesn't wear naturally and needs to be trimmed or shod every six to seven weeks.

One horse takes about an hour, and on a busy day Gorton can get to six. If he has to do eight, he wakes up the next day back aching, hips and knees sore.

The trade has a sharp attrition rate; most farriers quit after five years. The work is physically challenging, hours spent stooped over, horses' legs pinned between knees. They have to negotiate the whims of horse owners, know how to use their hands and run a business that in a good year can bring in close to $100,000.

Gorton often partners with other farriers. He likes the company and the advice. Shoeing a horse is more than hammering a bar of iron onto a hoof. It requires understanding the complex relationship between the hoof and the leg, and Gorton doesn't pretend to know everything.

That morning at L-S, Clem Crum joins him. Tucked between the 605 Freeway and a Metrolink rail line, the L-S — that's "L Bar S," as if it were the brand for a cattle ranch — sits at the end of a road just beyond warehouses and storage yards. Scarlet trumpet vine carpets the sound wall, and the whoosh of traffic is inescapable.

Gorton and Crum head to the stalls to grab two quarter horses. They walk past a red three-story barn that houses the office and a water tank, covered with a trompe l'oeil of a countryside that would make Grandma Moses proud. Horses gambol through green pastures divided by country roads.

A little more than 50 years ago, this scene might not have been so fanciful. Before development overtook the Puente Hills, L-S and a broad swath of surrounding land was owned by one of the region's largest dairy farms, itself just a few land barons removed from California's Spanish heritage.

Gorton and Crum tie the horses by the truck. With long-handled nippers they trim the hooves' front edges. Clem pares the sole with a short curved knife, and Gorton lights the propane burner to the forge.Greg McCowan and Don Martin have pretty much had it up to here -- make that "down to there" -- when it comes to young men wearing their britches around their kneecaps and putting their underwear on public display.

Both men learned shoeing at Valley Vocational Center in the City of Industry. While other students studied auto mechanics, welding and appliance repair, Gorton applied himself to equine anatomy and the dynamics of the forge. His teachers were "half horse," and each hammer strike was a lesson from generations past.

Crum, 63, came to shoeing after working as a baker and attended classes just before the program closed in 1996. Becoming a farrier had been his dream since childhood.

The men work quickly. Burns, strains, cuts and scrapes are taken in stride; Gorton wears a back brace and prefers Naproxen to Ibuprofen. It's the skittishness of a horse, though, an animal that often weighs more than a 1,000 pounds, that makes him most wary.

When a noisy garbage truck pulls into the parking lot at L-S, the farriers step back, not certain how the animals will react.

"Working with horses is like working with elementary kids," Gorton says. "You have to be sensitive to what they want and to how they're feeling, and you have to know the difference between scared and belligerent."

Almost 10 years ago, he was standing beside one horse that suddenly kicked and threw him head-first into a rail. The accident put him in traction for six months, and he still hasn't recovered full strength in his right hand.

"You can't do this job and be a sissy," he says.

A week after putting shoes on Digger, he is in La Habra Heights, the southeastern edge of Los Angeles County, where Barbara Stracner keeps Rascal in a small barn 30 feet from the master bedroom.

She leads the gelding into the driveway. She is concerned about Rascal's left foreleg. Gorton massages and pinches the muscles and judges the reaction. He thinks it might be a sore shoulder.

Stracner, 59, grew up in this home after her father bought the property in 1959. It was a world that Gorton is familiar with. When he was 10, his newly divorced mother bought a third of an acre in Hacienda Heights where he and his sisters kept a variety of animals, including his first horse. He bought the pinto for $175 with money earned at a stable in Industry Hills where there is now a hotel and conference center.

Over the years Gorton has seen barns, paddocks, riding trails converted into tennis courts, pools and landscaping. Mansions with sweeping driveways are preferred to the ranch-style homes of the 1950s, which still front many of the equestrian properties in the Heights.

Gorton and Crum give Rascal aluminum shoes and special rubber pads that help keep his legs and hooves in alignment. Stracner writes a check for $205.

The final stop is down the street. Gorton and Crum take a private driveway past an aging split-level home to a ravine where a complex of dusty ramshackle barns lies in the shade of spreading ash trees. Across the ravine is the neighborhood church.

John Connell and his wife bought the property a year ago. They left Seal Beach for nearly two acres with chickens, bees, peacocks, quail, a cat, two dogs and seven horses, five of which belong to neighbors.

Bobbie-Socks is the first to be worked on. Crum starts trimming, and Gorton fires up the forge. He seldom bends straight bar stock anymore; it is too strenuous. Instead, he lays a glowing prefabricated shoe on the horn of the anvil and makes adjustments with his hammer. Heavy blows mix with light blows.

Twer-rink. Twer-rink. Twack.

He places the iron lightly against Bobbie-Socks' hoof. The air smells of singed hair; the burn mark confirms the fit. He cools the shoe in the bucket of water and centers it on the hoof.

One tap sets the nail, and three blows drive it flush. Bobbie-Socks doesn't flinch. The tip flares through the wall of the hoof, and with a twist of the hammer's claw, he shears the end, cinches it down and rasps it smooth.

Sound of sirens drifts from the city streets below. A hawk sails over head. On most days Gorton likes his work. There are times, though, when he gets home and thinks about other jobs, but he knows he takes for granted what he appreciates most.

Once a horse lets him into its world and he hears its breath, feels its heart up close, there is no turning back.

"You feel life," Gorton says.

The next day he returns to San Dimas. Digger will be heading off to a jumping competition the following week, and Gorton has no reason to bother the gelding. Casey and Sable instead are on the schedule, and after examining their hooves, he decides that they can go longer without a trim.

That is fine by him. The sky is threatening rain, and the welcoming committee is nowhere to be seen.

Condense these long-winded leads

1. The Rev. Thomas J. Reese, an American Jesuit who is a frequent television commentator on Roman Catholic issues, resigned Wednesday under orders from the Vatican as editor of the Catholic magazine America because he had published articles critical of church positions, several Catholic officials in the United States reported.

2. What should have been a fun and exciting weekend turned into a destruction derby for some PCC students. It is a nmorm for students to gather to celebrate the weekend. Excessive damage was caused to the campus this weekend when some parties got out of control. What was the main cause of it all?
''It's typically directly related to alcohol consumption and too much of it,'' said Nate Buseman, director of housing.
The suites were the main site of destruction over the weekend. Buseman said bannisters were splintered, emergency lights broken, a window shattered and one of the doors was damaged due to abnormal bending at the top of the door frame.

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Lead writing #1

Leads Exercise 1

Please write a one-sentence hard news leads based on the information that follows. Your leads should be one sentence long and 25 words or less. You cannot fit all the information provided in each fact set in your lead, so one of your tasks is to determine what information belongs in the lead ... and what does not. Lead #1: Earthquake  When: Today, at 8:33 a.m. Where: Santa Clara County, in the foothills off Alum Rock Falls Road. What: a small earthquake, with a preliminary magnitude of 2.2. Who: N/A, but the source of your information is the U.S. Geological Survey. Why/How: No injuries or damage was reported. The USGS said the quake’s epicenter was about four miles deep and about nine miles northeast of San Jose City Hall. Lead #2: Highway Closed  When: Yesterday. Where: Santa Clara County, just west of Saratoga at Pierce Road. What: Highway 9 was closed for almost nine hours, from 7:30 a.m. to about 4 p.m., by the California Department of Transportation. A California Highway Patrol spokeswoman provided this information. Why/How: Several trees had fallen across the roadway overnight, apparently because of wind and rain. Caltrans crews closed the road so they could clear the trees from the road. Who: N/A

Which story is more newsworthy?

Fill in the blank with the word that makes each story more newsworthy to local readers, and explain your reasoning.

1. An earthquake  struck –––– today, killing at least 50.
a. Malaysia   b. San Diego

2. The office of –––––– was evacuated today after a clerk opened a letter believed to contain anthrax.
a. Oprah Winfrey.   b. the British ambassador to Egypt.

3. Police arrested 20 suspected terrorists in downtown Toronto today –––––.
a. after intercepting suspicious e-mail messages.  b. after a three-hour gun battle.

4. –––––– is being treated at local hospital. 
a. The governor's son. b. An ebola victim.

5. A local policeman died last weekend after ––––––.
a. his plane crashed in the Alaska wilderness. b. he tried to rescue a young boy from drowning.

6. A drunk driver was killed after his car hit a tree __________.
a. on New Year's Eve      b. on the way to his 100th birthday party

7. Convicted double murderer Arthur Itis escaped from prison _________.
 a. one year ago today   b. last night

8. ________takes effect at midnight tonight.
a. a pay hike for state legislators   b. a new local pooper-scooper law