Well, I have been wanting to write a blog and since it's Father's Day weekend I decided it was only appropriate that I write about my dad. It's been a little over a year since he passed away on April 3rd, 2010. He was a career newsman and always punctual. He died at around 4:55pm, just in time for the 5 o'clock news. He would have liked that.



My Dad with my brother Jeff, my sister Jill and me on my birthday.

My father was the first generation in America from Switzerland. My Grandma Edith taught him German before he ever learned English. He was always proud of his Swiss heritage. We would attend the annual Swiss Picnic every year and wear little Swiss caps that almost looked like little beanies. He always wanted to travel to Switzerland one day and see the town of Canton Bern where his family was from.

It's funny how much you realize someone taught you when they're no longer here. I think of things every day that I learned from my father. I remember spending my Summer vacation waking up at the crack of dawn and tagging along with my dad to WBTC radio. I loved watching him write newscasts on his manual typewriter. He was also a master at editing reel-to-reel tapes with a razor blade. He would let me answer phones for his call-in show "Dial and Deal" and if I was lucky I got to do a weather forecast. It was a thrill. It was then that I got the "radio bug".  I knew from a very early age I wanted to be on the radio like him.



Dad in his heyday.

I got my first radio job at WTUZ in Uhrichsville, Ohio. My dad was so thrilled. He listened to me every day. He also was my biggest source for news. He had 2 police scanners in his apartment and called me with news tips all the time. When I moved to Lorain to work at WEOL my dad could no longer listen to me in his apartment in New Philadelphia, so he drove to the parking lot of an office building every day just so he could listen to me. Now, as I'm sitting in the newsroom of WTAM I wish so much that he could listen to me.  He's the only person I ever really did the news for.




My dad at WBTC radio in the 1980's.

Ken Courtright was a very humble, down-to-earth person. He never realized how good he was at what he did. I remember being in grocery stores with him and when people heard his very recognizable voice they were "star-struck". He would always get embarassed. He never wanted to be a star. He just loved radio.

When I think of my dad, I automatically think of cheeseburgers and chocolate malts, his favorite food. He also loved Pepsi. He told me once he was happy if he had enough change in his pocket to buy a Pepsi. It's these little memories that I'm so glad I have.

On this Father's Day, whether your father is on earth or in Heaven, take a moment to think about all the things he taught you. Happy Father's Day!

On September 29th, 2012 our lives changed forever as we welcomed our baby girl Lucy Vivien Haugh into the world. Stubborn like her mommy, she didn’t want to come out. She was already one week past her due date and I hadn’t gone into labor so my doctor decided to induce. My labor started the morning of September 28th and lasted all day. I finally started pushing at midnight on the 29th. Three hours of pushing and still no Lucy.

The decision was made that I needed to have a c-section. I was never so happy to have surgery. I remember thinking “Yea! I get painkillers!” Lucy was born at 3:54 in the morning and I’ll never forget the first time I saw her beautiful face.

It’s amazing how much joy and love a tiny little baby can bring into your life. I can’t remember what my life was like without her. The way she smiles in the morning just lights up the whole world. All the little things she does, the way she dances when we wind up the mobile over her crib and falls asleep in her bouncy chair with her head turned to the side and her hand in a fist.

 She’s so perfect. I now understand a mother’s love. I’ve never felt so much love in my life. It’s amazing how, at only two months old, we can already see little hints of Lucy’s personality. I like to guess what she’s going to be like when she gets older. Will she like ballet or baseball? Will she want to take piano lessons? Maybe she’ll become a concert pianist, she already has long slender fingers, perfect for a keyboard. Maybe she’ll be a writer, or a doctor, or she might want to be a news reporter like her mom and her grandpa. Whatever she does, I just hope she’s happy. I hope she’ll always have that smile that lights up the world.

It was September 15th, 1984. I was 6-years-old. I had butterflies of excitement in my stomach as my mom was scurrying packing a picnic lunch for our all day canoe trip. I put my bathing suit on under my yellow flowered jumper and I was ready to go. It was one of those days where the minute hand on the clock seemed like it wasn’t moving. Ever the impatient one (I got that reputation by being over a month pre-mature and being born at home, my dad always told me to slow down) I paced back and forth from the living room to my bedroom “Hurry up!” I was thinking to myself. My brother and sister were still getting ready.

 

 

Me at the time of the trip    

 

Our friends Lucian and Garo were coming on the trip with us.  They were Romanian Immigrants, escaped to The United States during the Cold War.  The Jurj's were moving to Detroit, Michigan so Lucian could go to law school and this was the perfect going away party trip.  My mom was always adventurous, I loved that about her.

 We were finally in the car and ready to go. The windows were down, the breeze was warm and the road seemed to go on forever. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was in the cassette player, I was in the backseat with a cold can of Pepsi, crammed in like a sardine with Jeff, who was 7, 4-year-old Jill, and our friend Garo, she was 16. Our friend Lucian was in the front passenger seat, he was 19. He wanted to become an American citizen and study to be a lawyer.

 

 

Garo Jurj and her brother John, and my sister Jill

 

 

 

 Lucian and Garo's parents owned the Buchaneer Motel in Daytona Beach. My family rented a cottage from their family. Gara worked as a maid at the hotel and took Jill and I with her to help clean the rooms, she paid us with vending machine goodies, cans of Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, or Mountain Dew, and Mentos or salted almonds, those were my favorites. The adventure has begun.

Bump, bump, bump, bump, we were pulling into the gravel driveway of the canoe marina at the Wakiva River. We had taken canoe trips before. I always loved seeing the alligators swim by. They never bothered you as long as you didn’t bother them, they ate at night after all. We walked out to the boat rentals and we got three canoes, my mom was in one with Jill, Lucian and Jeff were in one, and me and Garo were in one. My mom had the picnic lunch in her canoe. We would stop at a shore along the way when we got hungry.

My sister and I with Lucian Jurj, 1984

 It was around 2:00 in the afternoon and the sun was beating down on the water, we were paddling through the swampy Everglades. My brother Jeff was hungry so we decided to stop for lunch. We pulled our canoes on the muddy shore, first my mom and sister, then me and Garo, and finally Lucian and Jeff.  We had a great time for about an hour, when we decided it was time to paddle back to shore.

Lucian waded out in waste deep water straightening one of the canoes when he suddenly shouted “Ow, I think I stepped on glass!” We didn’t think anything of it, after all this was a popular place to go boating. Some fisherman probably dropped a beer bottle in the lake.

As the afternoon wore on we realized something was definitely wrong with Lucian, he wasn’t acting right. My mom asked to look at his foot and realized that wasn’t glass, Lucian was bitten by a deadly coral snake. Being a transplanted Floridian, after all we lived there for three years now, my mom knew a little about snake bites. It’s one of those things you learn. Like how we would laugh at the “Yankees” catching jellyfish on the beach. For snake bites, you need to suck the poison out. It might have been too late. Lucian was already stumbling and slurring his speech.

It was getting dark and a little chilly and we didn’t have a fire. We tried yelling for help but there was no one around. We were stuck, but we weren’t alone, we heard rustling in the distance and we all knew what that was, alligators, and they were hungry. We gathered palm branches and any possible kindling and built a little fire, it kept us warm but made us magnets for mosquitoes. We even used one of the canoes as firewood. I lost count of how many times I was bitten by mosquitoes. Lucian was laying up against a tree. Occasionally my mom would send my brother to get water for him. He wasn’t making any sense, crying and screaming. I was scared.

At one point we saw a pontoon boat go by and we all yelled as loud as we could for help. It passed right by us. They were probably alligator poachers and didn’t want caught.

We were running out of materials to use in our fire and we needed it to keep the gators away. We started burning our clothes. My mom threw one of her dresses into the fire and Jeff burned his favorite pair of swim trunks. We had nothing left, no food, nothing to drink but swamp water, and just the clothes on our backs. Lucian was dying, we were losing hope. It was 2:00am, we had been trapped for 12 hours but it seemed like much longer.

 It was so dark and so cold and the mosquitoes were swarming. Lucian had finally fallen asleep for a few hours. My mom and Garo didn’t know what to do. At one point in his hallucinating he grabbed my mom by the throat and choked her so hard it damaged her vocal cords.  Then, as if it was a miracle, he woke up.  The first thing he did was ask how "the boys are", signalling he was still a little out of it, out of it but he’s awake and he’s okay, all but a little shaken.

We knew what we had to do, we had to get off the island. The only problem was that meant taking one canoe with all 6 of us crammed inside out in the middle of the night in waters thick with alligators, if we tipped we’d be in the water with the gators, in other words we’d be “goners”. It was a coin-toss, a choice of life or death, stay stranded and let the alligators eat us, or try to save ourselves. We chose life, we’d gone through too much to give up. It was the dead of night, and I remember an eerie calm that came over me as I got back into that canoe, we only had one canoe now, one filled with water and we had to use the oar from the other one as firewood. I remember the ripple that was made by the paddle in the water, the occasional splash of an alligator in the distance. We barely made a sound the whole way back to shore. It seemed like we were in those boats forever.

There was a peak of sun so it must be dawn, we had finally reached the shore. We had to call the police to let us into Garo’s car because her car keys went overboard. My mom couldn’t get a hold of my dad, but was able to reach another friend to come get us. My sister and I both had over 200 mosquito bites, Jeff had burned hands from the fire, my mom had injured vocal cords and couldn’t talk, Lucian was still recovering from the snake bite, but we were all alive. I think back to that canoe trip and I’m still amazed we all survived to tell the story.

The following is the real newspaper article from the Daytona Beach Newspaper