Chapter 27: Children

Summer 2025

Kelly’s desire that I limit my time with travel and consulting led me to review my finances and priorities. I was doing a week every month in downstate Georgia and the equivalent amount of time teaching at various police academies. I was currently making between $1,000 and $2,000 a month from each of five different police and sheriff’s departments for consulting services and as a retainer. Special projects cost extra. In effect, that worked out to about $85,000 to $90,000 a year before taxes. Teaching, on the other hand, was a lot less lucrative. I wasn’t making much more than $15,000 a year from that, though I was beginning to sell my training materials online. On the other hand, it was all the face time I got from teaching that led to my success with the consulting.

What was really profitable, however, was being a historian. My three history books on policing in America had all sold more than 50,000 copies each, with an average sale price of $30 per copy, and a royalty rate of ten percent. That worked out to $150,000 from each book, and the more books I wrote, the amount rose. Every time I released a new book, sales of my older books took a quick spike. Things looked good enough for Posse Comitatus: A History that Simon & Schuster raised the price from $29.95 to $34.95, partly because of inflation but also because of the good sales of the last two books. If I could write a book every eighteen months, the paycheck from being a historian would equal or exceed that from teaching and consulting.

I promised Kelly I would try to cut back on teaching and try to limit the time I spent in southern Georgia. I was also going to concentrate on my next book. I decided not to write a history of Conover County for the simple reason that it was too close to home for me. I didn’t think I would be able to take a step back and look at it professionally and impersonally. Instead, I decided to do something with the change in how officer-involved shootings were handled since the invention of the cell phone and the Internet. There was an awful lot of material out there to research.

I also spent some time working on Ken Burns’ The Police project. They wanted me to do some introductory dialogue for the first segment of the miniseries, The Shire Reeve. When I asked how this was to be done, I was told not to worry about it. The actual video recording would be done at WPBA in Atlanta. I was curious how that was going to be accomplished. I discovered the method in July. They sent me the suggested monologue and told me to be in Atlanta the Tuesday after the Fourth of July holiday.

“What’s it like being on TV?” asked Seamus.

I smiled and shrugged. “There’s usually a lot of hurry up and wait. I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve only done things like book tours, and they’re totally different.”

“How so?”

I gave him a curious look. “Want to go with me? See what it’s like?”

Seamus’ eyes lit up. “Could I?”

I gave him a thoughtful nod. “Only if you’re on your best behavior.”

“I promise!”

“We’ll see. Go ask your mother what she thinks.”

Seamus took off like he had a rocket up his ass. I shook my head in amusement. Realistically he would be quite well-behaved; he kept his antics at home. Then again, he was only eleven, and would probably be bored. We’d just have to see.

Kelly came out of the laundry room, where our son had found her. “You’re taking Seamus to the videotaping?”

I smiled. “Why not? It’s not like he has school or a job. You can have a day with Riley.”

Kelly rolled her eyes at that. “Is that a threat, and if so, to whom? She’s a teenager and I’m just her mother.”

“It could have been worse.” Kelly eyed me curiously, and I finished. “You could have had three teenaged boys all at the same time, like my mother!”

“God forbid!”

“Could you imagine if we had had fraternal twins, one boy and one girl? Think of all the experiments we could have performed to determine whether it was worse raising boys or girls.”

“Go find something to do before I give you some chores! Out!”

Tuesday morning, Seamus and I drove over to WPBA. After entering we were stopped at a locked airlock system, since nobody wanted idiots wandering into a television studio on their own. I gave my name, and somebody came to escort us inside. Seamus had never been to a television studio before, and he stared with amazement at everything. He was a bit disappointed, though, when the first place we went was a conference room. Inside we found Sandra Kellogg and a couple of younger men.

“Grim, good to see you again. Who’s this?”

I shook Sandra’s hand. “Sandra, nice to see you. I brought my makeup man. He’s here to buff my head if the shine fades.”

“Dad!” protested Seamus.

The adults all laughed, and I continued, “This is my son, Seamus. He wanted to see what we’re doing today. Seamus, this is Ms. Kellogg.”

She stuck her hand out and he shook it. “Ma’am.”

“Nice to meet you, Seamus. This is Matt Gondorf and Chuck Winsall. Matt’s one of our technical guys with Florentine and Chuck’s a cameraman here at the station.”

We all shook hands. Chuck said, “Seamus, we’ll be needing your talents. The first thing your dad is going to do is go to makeup and tone down the reflections on his head, keep it from blinding the camera. You’ll need to buff him up afterwards.”

Seamus grinned at that. “Can you get a picture of that for me? That’s definitely going on Facebook!”

I smiled at that. “Don’t get your hopes up.” I looked at Sandra. “Still planning on me speaking on the topics in the email?”

“Basically. I would think it would be pretty basic for you. We’ll also do some prep work for future interviews.” I gave her a confused look. “We need to create your office.”

“My office? That’s a corner of my living room. We film me there we’ll have my wife and the kids bouncing through and Barney the dog jumping on my lap and falling asleep in the middle of everything!”

The others smiled and looked over at Seamus, who was nodding. “Barney snores, too,” he added.

That generated some laughter. “No, that’s not quite the image we want to project. We’re going to put you on a small set with a green screen backdrop and then do an office or study or something on a digital background,” said Matt.

“What’s a green screen?” asked Seamus.

“Come with me. We’ll show you. I have a studio prepped,” said Chuck. He stood up and we followed him out of the conference room and up the stairs to a floor with a hallway with several studios on each side. The first on the left was ours. Inside was an armchair, an end table, and a coffee table. It was all on a large carpet that looked like it had been cut from a roll of brown carpet. The most obvious thing, though, was a giant green screen hanging from a metal rack behind everything.

I had seen green screens before on the sets where I had done my book tour interviews, but they were always fixed walls. This one was fabric and was just hanging from the rack. “I thought they had to be solid.”

Chuck shook his head and said, “No, anything green in the right color will do. You can buy it as paint or fabric. Just make sure you don’t wear green clothing, or that will disappear, too.”

Seamus said, “Huh?”

“Watch. Doctor Reaper, have a seat. We want you to look at a few different office and study backdrops. Once we find one that we all like, we can save it for the future.”

I took a seat in the armchair and told Seamus to stand back with the others and stay quiet and not to touch anything. Chuck placed a laptop computer on the coffee table facing me and had another one on a desk behind the camera. After a couple of minutes futzing around, he said, “Let’s start with the college library.”

I just sat there looking around, but Seamus let out a loud, “WHOA!”

I glanced at the laptop and where before I was sitting in the armchair with a green background, now it looked like I was in a college library, with some book stacks behind me. “Cool, huh?” said Chuck.

“Cool!”

“Now, let’s try the home office.” The scene changed to something that looked like I had converted one of the kid’s bedrooms. “And the home library.” We went through several different possibilities

After getting over his initial surprise, Seamus joined the others discussing which of the choices was best. We settled on the home library set. “You can also do this sort of thing at home,” I was told.

“Really?”

Chuck explained, “A lot of the television commentators broadcast from a home studio. It’s easy. Set up a green screen backdrop and then mount a video camera on a tripod. You sit on a stool in front of the camera and then run it all through your laptop, with your ‘office’ on the screen. Watch the morning talk shows sometime. You’ll be watching at eight in the morning on the east coast and they’ll have some talking head on the air from California. It’s five in the morning there yet he’s sitting with a sunlit backdrop.”

“You know, I’ve seen that. I wondered how they did it,” I admitted.

Matt announced it was time for makeup. “Can I watch?” asked my son.

I shrugged and looked at the others. “Sure. Why not,” said Matt.

We all went down the hall to a small room with lots of mirrors and lights where a woman was waiting for us. As expected, one of the first things she did was dust something onto my head to make me less shiny. Seamus laughed at that, and the makeup artist went on to explain how she had to brighten some dark spots and darken some bright spots, so that everything looked even on camera. The lights on the set were very bright and tended to wash out the color. She offered to work on him and laughed loudly as he scampered out of reach.

Then it was back to the studio. I had brought several sport coats and suits in a hanging bag, and we looked through them before settling on one. I ended up in a dark tan sport coat with a checkered shirt and khakis; the absence of a tie was meant to show I was an academic. Where they came up with this stuff was beyond me. Several copies of my books were placed on the end table. The laptop was removed, and Sandra Kellogg sat on a stool opposite me but out of the line of sight. She had a notepad in her lap and said, “The way this works best is if I ask you a question, then you answer it, but not like you’re talking to me personally. More like you’re answering a question in a classroom somewhere. I don’t exist. I’m just going to have you go through several different topics. We’ll do the editing back in Walpole, cutting and pasting into the rest of the production.”

“I think I’m following you.”

“Don’t sweat it if you mumble something or stutter or whatever. We can redo it, and nobody will ever know.”

We went through a few minutes of practice and then Sandra said, “Let’s do it. Doctor Reaper, where does the word sheriff come from?”

“Sheriff is a contraction of the two words shire and reeve and dates to the Ninth Century. A shire was a county and is still found in many place names in England; Hampshire, Devonshire, Yorkshire, for instance. A reeve was a magistrate appointed by the king. The shire reeve was literally the king’s magistrate in a county. This dates to the Saxon period in England, but when the Normans conquered the island, they kept the system.”

“Tell me about Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham.”

“By the late Twelfth Century we see that the sheriff was a highly placed government official. This was when the legend of Robin Hood came about. By then the shire reeve had been shortened to sheriff. In the legend, the Sheriff of Nottingham declared Robin of Locksley an outlaw. This was an extremely serious punishment. It meant you were outside the protection of the law, out of the law. You couldn’t own property, you couldn’t be given food or support, you couldn’t possess or use money, your property was taken away, and you could be killed, and nobody would be charged with your murder.”

And so it went for about an hour. I talked about law-and-order dating back to classic Rome and Greece, medieval history, and some other really old history. A lot of it would be cut and end up on the editing room floor. Some might be used in later segments. The plan right now was that the first two segments would be on what most people would think was ancient history. In addition to me, they were using some other historians to talk about what was going on in these societies at the time.

I figured Seamus had to be getting bored by it all, but he was sitting there quietly and watching it all. Eventually we were done, and it was time to go back to makeup to clean up. Chuck said, “Seamus, come with me. Let’s turn you into a movie star.”

“What?” he asked, his eyes lighting up.

“Come on!”

Seamus took off and I sat down in a chair and the makeup lady used some cold cream and other goop and removed the stuff she had put on me a couple of hours ago. Then I headed back down the hallway to the conference room, where Sandra reviewed what would happen next. By then I was getting hungry, so we went to find my son.

They had moved the furniture and rug out of the studio and Seamus was standing in front of the green screen and waving a fake sword around. He looked to be goofing off, but when I glanced at the laptop on the desk, I could see he was standing on the deck of a pirate ship. Then the screen changed, and Chuck said, “Now, when I wave at you, I want you to drop to the floor and then when I wave a second time you stand up and say, ‘There’s too many dragons around here!’ Got it?”

“Dragons? Cool!”

“Get ready.” The scene had changed to a castle exterior. Chuck waved his arm and Seamus dropped to the floor, and when Chuck waved again, he stood up and said his line. “Seamus, want to see what we did?”

“Yeah!”

“These are just some standard scenes we keep on tap to show people how this works,” Chuck said to me.

Seamus came over to the desk and watched as Chuck showed him the scenes they had done in front of the green screen. The best was the last; when Seamus dropped to the floor as a dragon flew across the screen roaring and breathing fire. After it passed, Seamus got to his feet and said, “There’s too many dragons around here!”

I laughed at that. “Can we get that on a thumb drive?” I asked.

Chuck laughed. “Sure.”

“You can show that to Riley and your mother. They’ve never battled dragons before,” I told my son.

“Yeah!”

We had to wait a few minutes before Chuck transferred the video files to a WPBA-labelled thumb drive. Then we grabbed our gear and took off. We hit a barbecue joint and then went home.

Kelly and Riley were very impressed by the thumb drive and the videos. Kelly saved it to her laptop and the two of them put it into a Dropbox file and sent out emails to family members so they could see it as well. He was getting return emails all night long.

Summer continued its merry way. I did a few more rounds through South Georgia and the various academies but didn’t increase the number of my clients. Short of hiring extra consultants, I was at the limit of what a single consultant could do and do well. More important, I didn’t want to expand much more. I had a system to evaluate a client’s needs and a training and planning program that worked well. Hiring additional consultants meant I would have to train them in my system and then hope they got it right. At what point would Reaper Security Consulting turn into Miles & Madigan? I wasn’t at all sure I liked that idea.

July turned into August and then into September. I promised Kelly I would take off all of Labor Day week, which pleased her, but not by as much as I had been hoping for. School had started for both her and the kids, which meant most of my week off I would be home by myself. I suggested selling the kids, and while she was in favor of the idea, the best we could do in the short term was to send them to her parents for a few days. Even that didn’t work out, because they ended up in New York for the weekend and my parents took Grandma down to Pensacola. So much for a wild and wicked weekend.