Travellers' Rest

All too often these days, what little fresh news I have the opportunity to write up on this page winds up being archived in the Controversy section, as this will. Such a recent event was one that did not occur to me personally, but one that affects me directly __the subject is a personal friend__ and indirectly __he is both a student of and a friend to Travellers and Romanies. The gentleman's name is Matt Salo and he feels that his credibility has perhaps (only to those who don't know him) been called into question recently because of an interview that he granted to a reporter and innocent comments that were not just taken out of context but apparently rephrased to incriminate as well.

Matt Salo, a Maryland anthropologist who has studied Travelers and "American gypsies'' for more than two decades, cautioned against stereotyping the group. Travelers who scam, Salo said, are a deviant minority from a generally law-abiding community.
"Every group has its good or bad,'' Salo said.
But Salo said Travelers who commit crimes seem to gravitate toward specific scams, mostly home contracting.

NB: Check out where quotation marks are employed in the above paragraph. There is only one direct quote from Salo in the whole article, and that's the one short sentence: "Every group has its good and bad," to be found in the above paragraph. The rest is the reporter's interpretation of what Matt Salo said, rephrased to lend itself to the thrust (or less kindly, the slant) of his or her story. Note Matt's next two paragraphs of comments to me, on reading the final product:

"The following statement attributed to me was twisted to fit her perspective of the case and does not reflect what I said: 'But Salo said Travelers who commit crimes seem to gravitate toward specific scams, mostly home contracting.'

"I had merely made reference to Travelers favoring certain occupations. She added the interpretation that if those occupations were a scam, then I said they favored certain scams. The contradiction between that and the earlier statements by me which she also quotes are obvious to a careful reader, but then a lot of readers are not careful and the damage is done. More of the same old, same old!"

On a personal note, were it not for my own policy of never giving press interviews (not that an adoring public is lined up waiting to read them), this could easily have happened to me instead of to Matt. Matt has little choice in the matter, though; he has long been associated with the Gypsy Lore Society and has all the proper credentials to be acknowledged as an expert witness for the defense when he feels that anti-Traveller or anti-Gypsy prejudice is a factor in a criminal prosecution. In short, he has a higher public profile; whereas my own lack of the same allows me the privilege of privacy; one might even say, of irresponsibility. To illustrate, some time back the same reporter approached me for an interview on the same matter. I'll just quote the e-mailed request and my reply (which seems eerily prescient until one realizes that all news reports slant their coverage, if only to dramatize it):

At 04:26 PM 12/6/00 -0800, you wrote:
>Howdy. I need your help. I'm Sean Webby, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury
>News, and I'm doing a story about travelers. In light of your feeling that
>travelers seem to be pigeonholed as scam artists, I would like your help
>finding "experts," travelers, sociologists, (you, perhaps) who might talk to
>me about this apparent misconception. I feel as though I have a lopsided
>amount of information and I need some balance.
>
Mr. Webby: [at the time I assumed that Sean Webby was a man]
I am not a spokesman for the Irish Travellers and therefore not in any position to grant interviews. The web site, Travellers' Rest, contains pretty much all I know about my mother's family that would be of interest to Country People and I limit my comments to that site in the interest of maintaining control of the text which may be quoted and the context in which it is set.

I doubt if you have any significant amount of information, Mr. Webby, going by the standard definition of that word. What you probably have is mostly rumor and gossip. It would be nice if, just once, Travellers were given the benefit of the doubt that would accrue to any other ethnic minority. In other words, if you can't show a higher felony conviction rate for our people, don't pigeonhole us by default as a criminal class.