Daily Planet praised for efforts; urged to go to daily publication

My congratulations to John North and his staff at the Asheville Daily Planet for publishing the most informative weekly newspaper that I have had the pleasure of reading.

As everyone knows, Asheville is growing out if its small-town image into a more cosmopolitan atmosphere. Condos and restaurants are going up everywhere, as local government seems to be overwhelmed by new development.

However, the only daily newspaper readily available, the AC-T (Asheville Citizen-Times), seems to be stuck in a small-town reporting mindset that seems to end at the Buncombe County line.

The AC-T’s publisher, Mr. Randy Hammer, has stated publicly that his newspaper’s future is digital. Most dailies have Web sites and we may be in a digital age, but some of us still get their newspapers delivered and don’t want to sit in front of a computer screen to find out what’s happening outside of Asheville.

Therefore, may I suggest that Mr. John North consider taking the Asheville Daily Planet daily. The advertising revenue already seems to be there, and with Asheville’s current growth, it can only get more lucrative.

No doubt, Asheville is ready for a more informative newspaper with a better balanced political “Opinion Page.”

Seems to me, the Asheville Daily Planet’s publication title would be more appropriate as a daily and, perhaps, that’s what Mr. North had in mind from the very beginning.

BERT BASS
Weaverville

Watching Oprah Winfrey termed a mistake

By coincidence, I read your (John North’s) article (“When one’s clutter runneth over” in the March 19 Daily Planet) today.

My significant other, Stephanie, happened upon two episodes of Oprah Winfrey’s show, which aired on March 26-27, devoted to “The Secret Lives of Hoarders.” Not believing what she was seeing, she asked that I join her in viewing the episodes. This brings my total viewing time of Oprah’s fine program to two hours total throughout the course of its apparently successful run.

Throughout the episodes, Oprah and various “experts” evaluated the mental state of a woman obsessed with obtaining and retaining every form of “junk” imaginable (didn’t we all used to call these people “pack rats?”), and prescribed treatment for her “condition.”

Now, this was a different situation than the one that you describe in your article, in which a person simply keeps items of importance to the individual. The subject of these episodes probably has some sort of legitimate problem (I suppose), given that she had managed to fill a 3,000-square-foot home with an attached three-car garage to the point of absurdity.

In the end, there were most likely about 300 square feet of actual moving/living space left available to her and her husband, if not less. This apparently took place over approximately 15 years

 I would submit the main issues the woman had were these: too much money, too much free time.

What I found amazing was that it took a team of 100 people thousands of man hours to remove all of the “junk” this individual had acquired. In addition, restoration had to be performed on parts of the home because of mold issues, mice nests, etc., that had occurred over time due to food items being stored under mountains of acquisitions, and other issues.

The woman was also given donated furniture from such manufacturers as Broyhill to complement her (in my opinion) very nice, newly refurbished home. Appointment schedules were set for free psychiatric treatment of the individual and her husband, the apparent “enabler” (to use a current buzz term) in the relationship (his only infraction being that he had tax and credit-card records dating back some 35 years).

I am ill-qualified to estimate the amount of money spent on the “anti-hoarding” company in man hours, restoration teams for the home, donated furniture, and psychiatric-treatment fees. The best estimate I could determine would have easily been somewhere in the neighborhood of an amount that could have improved the lives of at least 10 families of lesser income per year in a substantial manner; families with legitimate issues such as insufficient health-care funds, insufficient livable wages, or a host of other issues.

I would suppose that I could sum up the whole two-hour ordeal (that is to say, my ordeal of actually sitting through these episodes) with one word: disgust; for it appeared to me that the entire sub-heme of the show was simply “come watch as a rich person helps some rich people stay rich at no cost to the host, or to the recipients.”

I feel better now that I have shared. I hope that you don’t feel that you have wasted your time reading this letter in the same manner that I feel that I have wasted two hours of my life over the last two days. I believe it safe to say that I won’t make that mistake again (the mistake of watching Oprah).

BENNY CLAYBORNE
Asheville
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P.S.: I believe that you were also the writer of an article about John Lennon and “Imagine” a few months ago. I found that to be informative, as well. I had not, until that time, been aware of his environmentally controlled room used for storing his fur coats; very interesting, indeed.