All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

The most striking thing about the race is how loud it is. Ear-splitting, popping engines pull up to the starting line, and you have to yell to be heard above the din. The men, seated on their sputtering vehicles, are outfitted in helmets and boots and in some cases, knee pads and neck braces. This is a small town - about 200 residents - and close to 25 percent of the town will be racing today. Everyone knows everyone, if they're not blood relatives.

The race starts and they circle the baseball diamond on a dirt track, going 50, 60 miles per hour, and the air becomes cloudy with dust. Now your eyes hurt and your ears ring but you can't stop laughing, because the sight of 50 grown men folded into their John Deere lawnmowers and hurtling themselves at top speed through the park is something you've never seen before.

During President-elect Barack Obama's news conference this morning to announce another round of cabinet picks, including Sen. Ken Salazar as his choice for Interior secretary and former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack to lead the Department of Agriculture. Although these news conferences, followed by couple reporter questions, are becoming a near-daily routine, something new happened today: Mr. Obama took a question from our Chicago-based Evening News correspondent Cynthia Bowers for the first time since Election Day. Political Hotsheet took note – and here's precisely what was said.

Bowers: You ran on platform of transparency. How difficult is all this, having to wait to release your inquiry business when the American people expect transparency?

Obama: Well, it, it's a little bit frustrating. Its not gonna be that long, by next week you guys will have the answers to all your questions.

Bowers notes ...

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Cynthia Bowers is a CBS News correspondent based in Chicago.

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For months now Illinois state senator and pastor James Meeks has fought for more funding for Chicago Public Schools. With several hundred thousand students the district is the nation’s third largest. The graduation rate for black and Latino students is generally less than 50 percent and in many schools there aren’t enough textbooks to give one to every student.

Over the years we’ve done stories about CPS, focusing primarily on failure and frustration. But when Rev. Meeks announced his intent to bus a bunch of kids from Chicago to a public school district just to the north, New Trier High School, the story became personal. I have two kids at New Trier this year. The school consists of two campuses, one strictly for freshman, the other for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. There is a football field, track, tennis courts, soccer field, and swimming pool used for PE and for athletics. Helping my kids decided what to take each year is like revisiting my college years. The courses offered include zoology, marine biology, advanced automotives, Hebrew, Chinese, sports and entertainment marketing, sequential art and animation. You get the idea.

What Rev. Meeks wanted to do ...

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Cynthia Bowers is a CBS News correspondent based in Chicago.

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If you’re like me, you’ll be shocked to hear that there are thousands of high-paying jobs out there – and no one qualified to fill them. Even more surprising: They are in the manufacturing sector! America’s manufacturers are screaming to anyone who will listen that their obituary was written too soon.

While it’s true nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost over the past three decades – nearly 3 million just since 2001 – the economic devastation caused by those jobs losses is huge; at the same time the higher paying high skill manufacturing sector has grown 37 percent. Seven million of these workers are nearing retirement, and amazingly, 90 percent of America’s manufacturers say they are short qualified workers.

How can this be?

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Cynthia Bowers is a CBS News correspondent based in Chicago.

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Midwest Teen Sex Show is meant to shock — and I was shocked by the blunt, breezy talk about teenage sex.

The podcast takes a subject most parents aren't real comfortable with and makes it "just another" part of growing up.

The three-to-five minute show tackles masturbation, homosexuality, and even changing in the locker room.

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Cynthia Bowers is a CBS News correspondent based in Chicago.

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Army Reserve Major Jeff Stegman said goodbye to his family on a raw rainy December day just ahead of his deployment to Iraq.

At ages 3 and 1, daughters Annika and Ashley, were far too young to understand the significance of this good-bye, but Jeff’s parents- and wife- knew full well the dangerous year that lay ahead. As we watched Jeff hugged wife Kim one last time and to look at the pictures of her clinging to her handsome husband and sobbing into his shoulder today makes me want to look away, to give them their moment. You may feel the same way.

But these gut-wrenching good-byes are a very real part of sending soldiers off to war. To watch is to more fully understand the sacrifice that is being asked of those serving --and those left behind. The Stegman family’s story is not unique. Four years into this war there are currently more than 40,000 National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers currently serving in Iraq. All have built lives, careers, and families in the civilian world.

Three months into his year-long deployment, Jeff seems to be holding up pretty well---although Kim says sometimes when he calls from Balad, Iraq, she can hear the strain in his voice. That his job is more clerical and less combat doesn’t assuage her fears. He’s stationed about 40 miles north of Baghdad at Camp Anaconda. A place the soldiers call Mortar-itaville, because of the almost daily barrage of incoming mortars...

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Marilyn Gabbard came from a long line of soldiers. She always knew she wanted to serve her country. But as it turns out, what she did best was serve her fellow soldiers.

She enlisted in the Iowa National Guard in 1979 as a private. Right away her superiors, including Command Sergeant Major Doyle Norris, say they saw something special in her. She was, he says, the kind of soldier who comes along once in a career. Everything she did, she did well. Whenever the Guard needed a volunteer, her hand was first in the air.

It was in the Guard that she caught the eye of Ed Gabbard. He was 18 years older and her superior the night the two of them were paired up as partners for a night of pool. They never lost a game. Ed says Marilyn loved pool, cards, fishing, cooking, and her car - a fast sporty Mustang convertible.

But what she loved most were Ed, her step-children, her daughter Melissa and the grand-kids. One of his proudest moments was the day that she was promoted to his rank, Command Sergeant Master - making her the highest ranked enlisted woman in Iowa National Guard history.

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On tonight’s CBS Evening News, Correspondent Cynthia Bowers reports on a small Illinois town where the war in Iraq has left some deep scars.

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Paris, Illinois may have an unlikely name, but everything else about the town of 9,000 -- from the quaint courthouse in the town square to the farmlands all around -- is pure Midwest Americana. That includes the call to serve in our nation’s military. Paris is home to the 1544, a National Guard transportation unit. For years the Guard has been a way for young people to serve their country and pay for a college education.

So when the unit got deployed in late 2003, most folks here in Paris assumed Guard members would “do their year” and come home. But tragedy struck almost immediately. 44 year old Ivory Phipps was killed by a mortar the very day the unit arrived in Iraq. Former Guardsman Aaron Wernz remembers Phipp’s death served as “a real wake-up call.” The unit realized then and there “it was going to be a long year”...

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Correspondent Cynthia Bowers has been preparing a series of reports on how people from Michigan, suffering from a weak economy, are starting their lives over. Below is a preview. -- Ed.

Our two-part series, “Starting Over,” began with a sign spotted along a stretch of interstate in Michigan; one that makes you shake your head and wonder if you’re seeing things. It proclaims “Live and work in Wyoming.” Wyoming? But it turns out the billboard, strategically placed near the hard luck city of Flint, is just one step in an all out blitz to get unemployed workers in Michigan to consider jobs in the Cowboy State -- where only the deer and antelope have time to play, because everyone else is working!

It’s a far different story in the Detroit area. On a cold, snowy October morning we went to a job fair put on by the state of Wyoming. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t what I saw: hundreds of people waiting in a line that stretched for hours. One that included folks from all walks of life, a few in suits, but most in blue collar work clothes --jeans and flannel shirts. When they finally weaved their way inside, they had a minute or so to leave a resume and make an impression on men and women standing in ad-hoc booths with brightly colored signs taped to the wall behind them-- signs touting high paying jobs, mostly in the energy sector.

What hit me the hardest is that this was one single snap-shot, just a tiny fraction, of the number of people so desperate for work they are willing to pick up and move to a state even the Wyoming folks admit, “most Americans know nothing about.”

That included people like Russ and Michelle Cline, who have four school age kids. Russ is one of the tens of thousands of Ford workers recently offered a buy-out. A few weeks ago, his family had to look at the atlas to figure out exactly where Wyoming is. Now they not only know that, they also know the schools out there are first-rate -- thanks to a booming economy -- and yes, they do have youth football! On tonight’s CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, we’ll talk with the Clines about the pros and cons of starting over so far from home.

We’ll also meet a group of white collar workers from GM who never dreamed their heads were on the chopping block. Their skills may be less marketable than their blue collar counterparts.

Over the last few years we’ve heard a lot about lay-offs, but people in Michigan tell us the full extent of their plight is still largely an untold story. We hope our series helps change that.

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