Clips

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City Weekly

  1. Cover Story: Long May They Reign—Once Mighty, Monarch Butterfly Numbers are Dwindling Across the State
  2. Cover Story: Are You Ready for Some Futbol? Utah’s Newest Pro Sports Team Strives to Set a Standard for Women’s Professional Soccer
  3. Power to the Props—Utah Voters Approve Ballot Initiatives, but for Some, the Fight is Not Over
  4. Recycling Enforcers: An inside look at who’s trying to help Salt Lake City residents stay up-to-date on the recycling world’s changes.
  5. ‘How Much Longer Do We Have to Deal With This Shit?’—Thousands of Students, Teachers and Parents, March to the State Capitol Demanding Action to Curb Gun Violence
  6. Cover Package: Midterm Mayhem
  7. Signed, Sealed, Delivered—Young Womxn Students and Educators deliver nearly 4,000 Letters to the Governor’s Office Urging Him to Protect Public Lands
  8. Anti-Trump Protests: ‘An Arm Here and an Arm There’—President’s Visit, National Monument Reduction Spurs Utahns to Make a Statement
  9. Author page

 

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Tennessean

  1. How one Williamson County development could change the rural landscape
  2. Tennessee yarn shop asks ‘women’s movement’ supporters to shop elsewhere (viral alert)
  3. Franklin Pumpkinfest’s scarecrow has one final message after 25 years (with video)
  4. US Attorney: Fort Campbell soldiers sold stolen Army gear to buyers overseas
  5. Williamson County’s odd couple: A ‘match made in cow heaven’ (with video)

Link to all Tennessean work, click here.


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Leaf-Chronicle

  1. 101st soldier’s death ‘preventable,’ report finds (FOIA)
  2. Investigation: Soldier’s suicide prompts escort policy changes (FOIA)
  3. New Clarksville liquor laws might leave some shutting their doors
  4. Gulf War series: (Also published in Tennessean)
    1. Gulf War at 25: Desert Storm a milestone for 101st
    2. Monday: Military police experience turns into lifelong career
    3. Tuesday: Life in desert was ‘culture shock’ for Desert Storm veteran
    4. Wednesday: Female medic initially told she couldn’t deploy for Gulf War
    5. Thursday: Gulf War logistics no easy task for 101st
    6. Friday: ‘Highway of Death’ still stands out for one Gulf War veteran

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Wichita Eagle

  1. Wichita police team helps homeless with housing, counseling and health care
  2. Roving Pantry grocery delivery: service with a smile
  3. Wichita officials weight revising scrap-metal ordinance to fight copper thefts
  4. Long standoff ends with suspect dead; unknown if self-inflicted shot
  5. Town of Wellington to raise money for railroad worker hurt in accident

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Columbia Missourian

  1. Wright’s passion for education runs in the family
  2. 47th District includes mix of urban and rural concerns
  3. Richards brings strong personality, love for history to 47th District race
  4. VOTERS GUIDE: Amendment 3 would give governor more say in selecting judges
  5. New Interfraternity Council policy draws mixed reactions

SPANISH PUBLICATIONS

Tiempo de Títeres (print version) Click the above image for a link to the online version.
Published on April 21, 2012 in El Sol de San Telmo.
Published on April 19, 2012 on 24Con

PAGE DESIGNS

Below, you will see news front and sports front page designs, photo pages and double trucks. All these pages were designed on deadline. (For a downloadable .pdf, click here)

BruinsChampionsDGB   Healing HealingDoubleTruck StormCleanupFuninthemud TourdeFrance WorldCup

Recent Posts

To Lucas Allyn

May 25, 2013

Sonia, me, Lucas. May 25, 2013

I remember it like it was yesterday. Lucas sharing with me one of his many outlooks on life:

“Girls like guys who are good looking or guys with a lot of money,” he said. “And with this gut, I’m sure as hell not gonna be good looking so I better be making a s***load of money when I’m older.”

Now I could go on about the flaws in that reasoning, but that’s not what we’re here for. In fact, like many things Lucas would say, some of that is more true than we’d like to admit. What I really want to do is spend some time reflecting on a friend’s life. A friend who was engaging, charming and saw the world as he saw fit.

I lost my closest friend, Lucas Allyn, to a boating accident in Utah this past week. The medical examiner determined carbon monoxide poisoning as the cause of death.

Lucas was that friend I could trust with anything, including my life. He was even going to be my best man (if I ever were to get married). My family took him in almost a year ago when he moved out of his apartment and since then, our bond became even stronger. He became essentially, the brother I never had.

It’s never easy to be reminded of life’s frailty with the passing of someone close to you. You can go from having the whole world ahead of you to being someone people write memorials about with the snap of a finger. All aspirations gone like that.

If anyone knew Lucas, they know he was a fun-loving, charismatic guy. He was someone who made you feel important, like you meant something to him (whether you really did or not, only he knew). If you were around him, you could just feel that energy and drive he had. He had the tenacity of Mark Cuban coupled with the business mind of Charles Koch.

Hell, he’d always tell me he wanted to be a multi-millionaire by the age of 30. And after that, a billionaire.

You see, he had this plan we’d start a business together. What that business was, we had no idea, but that didn’t matter. It was the idea that drove Lucas and boy, was he an idea man. His business ideas ranged from creating one that installed peep holes in people’s front doors (Low start-up costs, he’d tell me and “You’d be surprised how many people don’t have one.”) to building high speed trains that would transport the city’s trash to a new waste management facility in the west desert (for when the current facility fills up in the next 20 to 30 years. “They’re going to have to put it somewhere,” he said). And yes, you can laugh here, just like I did the first time I heard ’em.

That brings me to trains. He loved trains. He turned into an 8-year-old boy when it came to trains. He even attended the midnight premiere of Unstoppable, the movie starring Denzel Washington about, you guessed it, runaway trains.

Lucas told me many times that when he had enough money and if none of us were married by 40, he was going to buy us a bachelor mansion with acres of property. On that property was going to be a full-fledged, real world train system — one he would drive around whenever he pleased. He would joke about this, but I know at some level, he was completely serious.

“Can’t get a DUI on my own property going around in circles,” he joked.

And that was the great thing about Lucas — he hadn’t quite grown up yet. He still had that charming naïveté a lot of us lose over the years because we get caught up in the fear of failure and “getting that degree”. Lucas wasn’t quite there yet, and that’s why we loved him. Sure, he had his share of burned bridges (probably more than most of us), but he didn’t let that faze him.

Lucas would bring up the business dream half the time we were perusing downtown Salt Lake. I was supposed to handle communications and marketing “because I can’t write worth a damn,” he’d say. Another friend was going to handle sales, brokering deals, etc. And Lucas was going to be the head honcho, the deal maker.

“You see, I’m the one that’s good at making people feel comfortable and confident in whatever their investment is,” he’d always tell me.

He was right. He was pretty darn good at that.

Whether that dream would ever to come to fruition, we’ll never know. But the beauty of it was just that, a dream — something to motivate ourselves.

No, Lucas didn’t last more than a year in college. (I’m sure we all know someone where hitting the books just wasn’t for them). And we all know who else never received college degrees … So who’s to say he couldn’t have been someone we all were talking about 10, 20 years from now?

Side note: I was in the process of helping him enroll in school again. In the end, he wanted to do whatever it took to get to the top. I’ll always remember this quote from him: “You’re never penalized for over-dressing … just like you’re never penalized for being over-educated.” Lucas liked to live a life of excess, in all senses of the word. He even had dress shirts with his full name, Lucas Marcellus Allyn, embroidered on the collar.

In talking with his mother on Sunday, I said to her, “I think he looked up to me as much as I looked up to him.” She responded with the all too true cliché, “I guess opposites do attract.”

What she was getting at (and if we’re looking to put labels on things), was that I was the “responsible” one in the friendship. Lucas, on the other hand, was the “wildcard”. He took his share of risks. He knew things I didn’t. And I knew things he didn’t. We saw the world through different eyes and that’s why we got along. Lucas was taking the non-traditional path to a career. I “played it safe”. Went to school.

There’s no right way here, it’s simply about where we would end up.

If he taught me one thing, it’s to enjoy life because it’s too short not to.

Too short, indeed.

Lucas Allyn – Oct. 9, 1990 to June 29, 2013

UPDATE: The Daily Mail posted an article Tuesday with more details of the incident.

"Please, no pictures." - Lucas Allyn

“Please, no pictures.” – Lucas Allyn

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