My journalism career was short-lived but rather exciting. I had no formal training in the craft beyond re-reading my dog-eared Strunk & White and a sheet of instructions provided by my editor on how to write news stories.
The paper was a small-town rag that was under new ownership, and that new owner took the bold step of going from a weekly to a daily publishing schedule. This meant adding staff and making serious efforts to get material to fill pages. Besides me, they also hired a young woman, fresh out of Syracuse University. and a couple of housewives who jumped at the chance to work for peanuts and get a by-line.
Besides our reporting duties, we were assigned a weekly column on a subject of our own choosing. That turned out to be the best part of the part-time gig, but it also led to my departure after an all-too-brief tenure.
Most of my time was spent covering village and town meetings, which proved to be a real test of my observation and comprehension abilities. Staying awake was the challenge, but there were rare flashes of excitement that had me scribbling barely legible notes in my Official Brenda Starr Reporter's Note Pad. Like the time when someone suggested the speed limit sign indicating the end of the 25 MPH section and the start of the 55 zone be moved to the top of a downhill stretch instead of at the bottom, in order to save wear on brakes. "Oh, no," blurted the Town Supervisor, "We take in a lot of money from speeding tickets on that little bit of road!"
Even as green as I was, I knew better than to include that exchange in my report. But I didn't know better than to get mixed up in The Great Christmas Ball Flap. At a later meeting, a Main Street merchant from one of the small towns in my bailiwick asked the Board for some money to buy a dozen enormous Christmas ornaments to hang from the lamp posts during the holiday season. He brought a catalog along to show the Board which decorations he had in mind, which were slightly smaller than a Volkswagen and costing in the neighborhood of $150 each. The Supervisor took a few seconds to do the math before gasping something that sounded like "$1800!" and suggesting the requesting merchant ask the public for donations.
On my way home from that meeting I composed a column in my head and banged it out on my SCM Electric before going to bed. I said decorating Main Street was a great idea, but there were plenty of talented people in that town who could whip up better pieces for a few dollars, and the town could display them with a sense of pride the overpriced molded balls couldn't give. Well, you'd have thought I had suggested the Volunteer Firemen's Annual Barbecue switch from chicken and pork to kittens and puppies by the reaction to that column. My editor got irate calls from some Main Street business owners demanding my head on a pike. The guy who pitched the Board at the meeting was threatening a lawsuit after his customers thumbed through the catalog, laughed at the prices and balked at kicking in any spare change for the Main Street Christmas Decoration Project Fund, as the collection jar was labeled.
My editor, a soft spoken gentleman who didn't like making waves, asked me to write another column in an effort to pat down the ruffled feathers in the Merchants Association. I opened my piece by praising the civic spirit of the decoration proponents, but then made the mistake of trying to gently and respectfully explain why my idea of locally-crafted wares was a winner. That was it. The paper's owner/publisher called and ended what undoubtedly would have been a stellar, serial-Pulitzer-winning life as a fearless investigative reporter, a cross between Seymour Hersh and Mike Royko.
Fortunately for me, all this happened before the Internet Revolution, so there won't be any record of my work available to mouse-clickers. I did keep a scrap book of my clippings, but mercifully that got tossed long ago during change-of-residence triage. What I did retain were a couple friendships that endure to this day with people who parlayed their small-town-news adventure into what are known as "positions" rather than "jobs." Plus, the young S.U. journalism grad I served with sold me her 1950s-era German Zeiss Ikon, which lit a spark that led to my interest in photography and old cameras. And I still remember those "how-to" instructions I was handed when I signed on, and they've served me well over the decades.
Oh, and those Christmas balls? They scraped up the $1800 and hung those huge plastic things from the street lights, only to discover they were way too large for the scale of the streetscape. There was one further indignity. This drama took place during the 1973-74 Oil Embargo and to save energy the towns killed the street lights. By 4:30 PM, when it got dark, the big globs were all but invisible.
That was quite an enlightening post!
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