FIVE. OH! TOO…

FIVE.

1. In the New York Times, Rukmini Callimachi has the most thorough piece I’ve read about Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black woman killed by LMPD officers in her apartment March 13. Should be required reading, especially if you live in Louisville. The details provide a complex look at her life — her favorite things (“fast cars and hot sauce,” the latter of which she’d even put on pancakes), her hopes (“the Post-it notes and envelopes on which she wrote her goals”), her past (an ex-boyfriend whose “frequent run-ins with the police entangled her”), the “fumbled raid” being “set in motion by an attempt at police reform,” and so much more.

The story includes this from the night Taylor died: She and her boyfriend “jumped out of bed and rushed to get dressed. In the confusion, Mr. Walker put on his girlfriend’s pants. The knocking continued. Mr. Walker, a licensed gun owner who said he’d never discharged his weapon outside a firing range, grabbed his 9-millimeter Glock.”

Taylor tweeted this in January: “2020 deff gonna be my year WATCH!”

2. Yvette Gentry will become the first woman and third Black person to serve as LMPD’s chief, though only in an interim capacity. (She’ll replace interim chief Robert Schroeder, who’s retiring Oct. 1.) “I think our city is at a point of reckoning that only truth can bring us out of,” Gentry said. WDRB asked what she would say “to those who assume the department hired a Black female as interim chief ahead of the AG’s announcement (regarding the Breonna Taylor investigation),” and Gentry replied, “I am no optic. I’m not here for that. Anybody that knows me, that has known me, I am not here for that — to be propped up, to be the Black face.” Gentry has said she doesn’t want the job permanently, and that she wasn’t among the more than 20 who applied for the role, which Mayor Fischer hopes to fill by the end of the year. In a Louisville Magazine column by Phillip M. Bailey in 2015, Gentry, at the time a recently retired LMPD deputy chief, said, “There’s nowhere else for me to move upward in that police department.”

3. “In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow.” That’s the opening line to Tom Junod’s iconic 2003 Esquire story “The Falling Man.” I read it again this morning, just as I do every year on 9/11. Emilia, my first-grader, asked, “Are you crying, Daddy?”

4. WAVE did a story about folks lining the streets in Germantown-Schnitzelburg as George Hauck’s funeral procession traveled down Goss and Hoertz avenues, the corner where he ran Hauck’s Handy Store for decades. The store started in 1912. Hoertz Avenue is also known as George Hauck Way.

Several years ago, Arielle Christian spent an afternoon at Hauck’s for a magazine story, writing that Hauck had just suffered a heart attack but was doing OK. His daughter Karen said, “He’s already talking about Disney,” referring to the family’s annual Florida trip. (His family sold the property last year.) Inside, “old UK basketball clippings cover the door to the fridge, which holds Hauck’s only meat: bologna.” I debated buying some cans of Monnik Beer Co.’s too-easy-to-drink Hauck’s American Pilsner, but this weekend I’ll pay my respects like a true Hauck’s regular with a can of Bud Light, maybe even a tallboy.

5. I know, I know: 2020 — or is the correct way to write it 2🤯2🤯 (or 2💩2💩)? — has meant this newsletter can occasionally be a downer. But! The next two Saturdays, Sept. 19 and 26, the Belle of Louisville will become a pirate ship for two different cruises, the first one kiddo-friendly and the second offering a boozy punch. Arrrggggghn’t you glad I included something a little lighter?