Columbus Monthly / November 2011 / Elvis Costello and Steve Jobs

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Elvis Costello and Steve Jobs

Elvis Costello made a longer than expected stop in Columbus on his Revolver Tour thanks to a mysterious beeping bag. The singer was among the passengers on an early October flight from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Port Columbus who were detained for about four hours as police, firefighters, TSA officials and the FBI investigated the noise (it turned out to be an alarm clock, the Dispatch reported). Costello took the delay in stride, says Sarah Thompson, a New York resident who was on the flight. He sat on a patch of grass, chatted with other passengers and talked on his phone. “He didn’t act like a diva at all,” Thompson says. Costello was supposed to pass briefly through Columbus on his way to a concert in Huntington, West Virginia, later that night. He made it to the show, the last gig of the tour, just 20 minutes before he was scheduled to begin. “He really got over it and just went on with the show and had a great time,” says Angela Jones, marketing director for the Marshall Artists Series, which sponsored the concert.

The death of Steve Jobs hit Nancy Kramer harder than most people in Columbus. After all, without Jobs, Kramer’s company, Resource Interactive, the renowned Columbus-based digital marketing agency, might never have gotten started. In 1981, Apple became Resource’s first client, and Kramer worked closely with Jobs until he was forced out of Apple in 1985. She told Insider in mid October about those early heady days: dancing with Jobs at a beach party in Acapulco, promoting the Apple II computer and its successors, watching Jobs push employees to meet his high standards. She said she never had any encounters with Jobs’s infamous perfectionism, but many people she worked for at Apple did. When asked to elaborate, she decided to keep the stories to herself. “They’re too R-rated,” she says with a laugh.

Ohio State’s Kiplinger Program has a new leader: Doug Haddix, the former projects editor for the Dispatch. Haddix, who started in October, replaced Debra Jasper, who left the public affairs journalism fellowship in August. Founded in 1972, the Kiplinger program stood out for a long time as one of the few journalism fellowships in the country in which mid-career journalists could earn graduate degrees. OSU eliminated degrees about eight years ago and made more changes this year, moving it from the John Glenn Institute to University Communications and reducing on-campus training from six months to one week. Meanwhile, Jasper, a former Columbus bureau chief for the Cincinnati Enquirer, has launched a new company focused on social media, Mindset Digital, with former Kiplinger associate director Betsy Hubbard.

Indy Car driver Graham Rahal—the son of Bobby Rahal, former Indy 500 winner and head of Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing—recently received some attention from Cosmopolitan. The women’s magazine selected Graham, who graduated from New Albany High School in 2007, as its hottest bachelor for Indiana. (He currently lives in Indianapolis.) When asked about his favorite head-turning outfit during an interview with the magazine, he said, “A tight dress always gets my attention,” and he thinks it is “sexy” when girls go commando.