A Sour Taste Made Worse

Previously, I posted about the Lemonade Case of Avigayil Wardein, daughter of KC Shaw. While checking some Google referrers, I came across this post from Dan at nthyear.com. Dan found this link and wanted to, as he says in the title of the post, reveal the "truth about the lemonade stand permit story." Curious, I clicked the link and lo and behold:

As portrayed nationwide, the story of the little lemonade girl, the nasty neighbor and big, ugly government goes something like this:

A 6-year-old girl in sweltering Southwest Florida tries to make a little summer money by starting a lemonade stand. A crabby neighbor demands that the stand be licensed or shut down. Heavy-handed police officers force the child out of business.

Finally, stingy city officials cave to public pressure and grant the license - for free.

But the reality of Avigayil Wardein's lemonade adventure is different from the story repeated on national radio and television shows, and ultimately distorted on talk radio and around the world via the Internet.

The article's author is Chuck Murphy. Now, as I made clear in the overabundant sarcasm in my initial post, my anger with the situation is directed at the idea of the state requiring business permits, licenses, and such. I don't particularly care how the story itself developed (though I certainly took part in the mutual agitation of millions at the mention of a city government acting as the veiled oppressor of a little girl's entrepreneurship). However, Mr. Murphy has some interesting details about the situation, assuming they are true.

For starters, police didn't really shut down the stand, much less arrest any children, as some have claimed. And the city had granted the license without a fee long before the first word about the controversy was broadcast or printed.

In truth, it's a rather pedestrian tale of a long-running neighborhood dispute over a carport radio and a neighbor who retaliated for months of complaints from next door by reluctantly asking police to check on the stand.

Petty neighborhood politics? When I first read that, I groaned. I began to wonder how out of proportion things had been blown.

And if it hadn't given the city of Naples such a nationwide black eye as America's anti-Mayberry, police Chief Steven Moore would only chuckle at what everyone calls simply "The Lemonade Case."

"It's really no different from hundreds of complaints that we respond to all the time," Moore said this week. "But the mother has done an excellent job of marketing this."

The mother is KC Shaw, 49, a savvy, polished technology consultant. Her neighbor is Sheila Lewis, a 52-year-old Realtor who has consistently refused to grant interviews. She also declined to comment for this story.

Of course, once it became known Ms. Lewis repeatedly declined interviews, the knee-jerks among us jumped to the assumption she had something to hide. I was one of those. But another, just as simple explaination, is that she didn't and doesn't want to comment and have her words twisted, cynically deconstructed, and otherwise mocked despite her best intentions. Considering the nature of the news media and the market it serves, I sympathize with such a view if she holds it. I should have been more open-minded when I wrote my post, though I'm not sure how deep the impact would have been.

Shaw moved into the little home south of Naples' postcard-perfect downtown about three years ago. And for a year or so, she and Lewis apparently got along fine.

But Shaw became annoyed by Lewis' habit of playing a radio outside, beneath her carport. And, despite a large, palm hedge separating Lewis' carport from Shaw's, the radio could still be heard next door.

"When she would play her music too loud, I would call her and she would comply and turn it down," Shaw said this week. "But at some point, I guess she got tired of me calling and she told me not to call her again.

"So I really have had no choice but to use the police for volume control."

After reading this, my opinion of Ms. Shaw dropped decidedly. No, I wasn't there to hear how loud the music was or how obnoxious it sounded. But the very nature of that last sentence is ugly. That isn't what the police are for!

When I first moved to the apartment I live in now, I played my music too loud for two different neighbors. Both came to my door and asked me to turn it down...one of them came twice. I have since changed my listening habits (the bass was the big problem, EQ-ing it solved most of the trouble) out of respect, as I'd hope my neighbors would respect me if I asked the same of them.

So apparently Ms. Lewis didn't get the hint that her music habits annoyed her neighbor. Does that give the neighbor the right to call the cops and have them get the volume turned down, through the threat of force?

Naples police records show that Shaw has called police six times since October to complain about Lewis' radio. Each time, police arrived and asked that the volume be turned down or found that it already was. Then they left.

It obvious Ms. Lewis either doesn't give a damn about annoying her neighbor or she can't understand the problem. Six times is a fairly solid pattern of behavior. I'm not sure what I would have done if I were in Ms. Shaw's place, but I'd be plenty pissed off if the volume was at a genuinely distracting level. It'd certainly be intrusive.

Lewis has called police just once about Shaw. But her call made it all the way to the Late Show with David Letterman.

[...]

The call Lewis made contradicts many of the accounts on the Internet and the airwaves. For starters, a recording of the call makes it clear that Lewis never demanded that the stand be closed or anyone be cited. And she made no effort to disguise her motivation.

"She calls the police on me if my father turns the radio on once over there. . . . So I mean, she drives me just nuts. Now today she's got her little 5-year-old out there, unattended, with a stand. Right at the corner," Lewis told a dispatcher. "Could you just like send the guys there . . . and at least tell them that she is supposed to have a permit so she doesn't start doing this every day this year."

For her part, Shaw acknowledges that she knew the call was coming. As she was setting up the stand with Avigayil and other neighborhood children on the morning of Friday, June 13, Lewis came out and asked if she had a permit, Shaw recalled.

"I said, "It's a lemonade stand, Sheila. I don't need a permit,' " Shaw said. "Then she said she was going to call the police. She said, "Now you'll know how it feels.' "

The unpleasant spat gets ugly. At this point, I'm unable to decide which person is in the greater wrong. Ms. Shaw may have been oversensitive to the volume and by being so, sent the police unjustly to Ms. Lewis's home for trivial matters. On the other hand, Ms. Lewis should have figured out that Ms. Shaw isn't going to just deal with the music level and should have talked it over rather than just ignoring her and dealing with the police. They both resorted to using the police for utterly trivial (and vindictive) means.

I'm happy the situation didn't escalate to violence, but the whole deal seems so preventable.

It took just a few minutes for Shaw to recognize the potential in that confrontation.

By Shaw's account, a neighbor, whose child was also working at the stand, ran inside to call a local television station before police had even arrived. The station passed on the story - until there was a story.

The widely circulated tale diverges from reality here again. Though it has been reported that Naples police officers shut down the stand, a record of the call says the officers went to the home on ly to advise the mother of the ordinance. Chief Moore cautions that they never even got the chance to act, as Shaw voluntarily closed as soon as the officers arrived.

"When we got there the mother said she would close down the stand until she could get a permit, and that's what she did," Moore said. "People have us actually taking two 6-year-olds in handcuffs. I got an angry e-mail like that today. No one seems really interested in what actually happened."

Ugh. I got rolled by the media with lines like

Naples police busted Avigayil on June 13 for selling lemonade without a city permit.

[...]

On June 13, Naples police responded to a complaint from an anonymous neighbor who grumbled about the permit-less lemonade stand on the corner of Sixth Street and 11th Avenue South.

Although the Naples police officer who answered the call was only doing his job, he felt so bad he bought a cup of lemonade. City officials shook their heads in shame. So they waived the permit fee, which was $35.

It sure sounds like she was nearly arrested, doesn't it? Then there's shit like

Many of the other calls have been from people angry with the neighbor, whom the family believes complained about the stand. The caller didn't reveal her name to police, so it isn't confirmed that the neighbor is the woman who placed the call.

Shaw's neighbor has been unavailable for comment despite repeated attempts to reach her this week.

Ms. Shaw plainly knew who called in the complaint if Mr. Murphy's account is true. Ms. Shaw could have corrected this misconception easily. Other, earlier articles like this one reinforce the idea the police came in and closed the shop.

Naples police officers shut down a lemonade stand Avigayil was operating with friends at the end of her driveway on 11th Avenue South on Friday.

I took what was given to me at face value. I should have known better, but these is one of those stories where I jumped to conclusions. Not that the most important point of those conclusions (free enterprise) is incorrect.

As for the city caving in to public pressure, well, there was no pressure. By the time Shaw arrived to pick up a permit, city staffers had decided that the fee would be waived and the stand licensed - all before the first story had appeared on television or in the newspaper.

But it wasn't long before.

"As I was leaving City Hall, I saw a camera crew there interviewing someone," Shaw said. "So I gave them my card, and told them, "I have this little human interest story. . . .' "

The local NBC station broadcast a story on June 17. From there, the story went to the station's Web site, to the Matt Drudge Web site, to the Naples Daily News, to the Associated Press and to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, Fox's Bill O' Reilly, CNN, Rush Limbaugh and radio stations and newspapers around the world.

If I were a journalism, radio/television/film, or history major, this would be a perfect term paper on how a story develops and how the impact of the Internet and today's vastly quickened news cycle can grossly distort an event.

By her count, Shaw has done more than 40 interviews with radio stations across the country. Though the city had waived the permit fee before anyone outside of 11th Avenue S in Naples had ever heard of Avigayil, donations started pouring in. Shaw said she has started a college fund that has "a few hundred dollars."

[...]

"I bet there are lots of kids in lots of neighborhoods throughout this town (and certainly elsewhere) who would enjoy having free donations for their college education," wrote neighbor Susan Weising in a guest commentary for the Naples Daily News. "Has anyone bothered to check out the facts on whether our now-famous family has any issues with nearby neighbors?"

[...]

"All these sympathetic letters about Avigayil breaking the law make me sick," wrote Frank Johnson of nearby Bonita Springs. "Let's have all these vehement advocates of lemonade stands, tree houses, ramshackle fruit stalls and Girl Scout cookie booths . . . come out from under their rocks and see a row of these on their streets! And then, watch out "crabby neighbors!' "

Uglier and uglier. But they have a point. The false impressions of the initial media blast ("Cops shut down little girl's lemonade stand...") were enough to effectively kill the chances the story would get the proper objectivity news demands.

While there are four neighborhood children who work the stand regularly, most of the attention, and promotion, has fallen on Avigayil. She went on Letterman, has given countless interviews and is now going to be the national representative for the Kids Only! Sunny Day Play Lemonade Stand ($24.99), a plastic, ready-to-operate lemonade stand. The boxes will soon carry Avigayil's photo.

"It's been a wild ride, and Avi might just get college paid for out of it," Shaw said.

© St. Petersburg Times

I'm glad there are people generous enough to donate to a little girl's future. But if they did it under false pretenses, then there's a problem. There is something to be said about the way Ms. Shaw has represented this event. This article may have came out on July 17, well after the media blitz occured, but I'd say there is a duty to correct deliberate (or lackadaisical) misreporting for any news organization that takes it's mission of truthful news delivery seriously.

Posted by Drizzten at September 11, 2003 11:46 PM