Bloggin' right along

Omigosh, I just discovered an actual comment on my blogsite. It’s pretty obvious I’m a new citizen of Blog USA since it never occurred to me until last night to check the site. A lot of friends were kind enough to respond via email, though, to my request for feedback, and it appears there is an acceptable amount of “OK, come on, what happened next?”
So, let’s go …

As we begin a new episode of “I Was a Teenaged Journalist,” we see a grumpy, cigar-toting editorial page editor stalking away from the newspaper’s morgue while our adolescent heroine looks on in confused consternation. Poor heroine!

Well, not really, because Mac’s grumpy insistence that I learn – immediately – to write directly via keyboard was a great blessing. And so was his next strategy. He got rid of me as fast as possible! He handed me off to the Wayne Allen, entertainment and Sunday editor. I’d hate to see a replay of that conversation.

Mac: I gotta gid rid of that girl, she’s about as useless as a one-legged bar stool.
Wayne: Come on, Mac, she can’t be that bad.
Mac: Oh yeah? Well you take her then.
Wayne: Me? What would I do with her?
Mac: You must have something nobody else wants to do.

And he did. Of course I don’t really know if no one else wanted to do it, but it didn’t matter because I kind of liked it. OK, truth: I liked it a lot. “It” being that I became the TV log writer. THE TV log writer, as in the only one at that newspaper. Pretty cooooool, huh?

Oh, wait, I forgot, some of you might not even know what a TV log was, in this day of pointing remote controls at TV screens to see schedules for hundreds of channels. In 1961, when there were only a handful of channels, newspapers could publish a schedule, or “log,” of all the available shows in one small section of one page once a week. And include radio offerings, too!

So my job was to watch all the upcoming TV shows and write descriptions of them for the log. WRONG! Actually, only half-wrong. I did write descriptions, but they were generally one-line distillations of the longer descriptions provided by the network. For example, “A fish salesman discovers that his partner has been embezzling the company’s funds and reports his suspicions to police, but then murders the partner in a fit of anger and leaves clues that indicate the man was killed by a creature with scales and gills” might become “Giant fish swallows man hunted by police.” OK, OK, it’s just an example!

Wayne probably didn’t want me any more than Mac, but he was a kind, soft-spoken man who was willing to give me a chance, and I continued in that job until after high school graduation. But wait, there’s more! Remember I said that Wayne was also Sunday editor? When the paper decided to add a school page to the Sunday edition, he appointed me as correspondent for my high school, and I became a columnist again. Later the news desk paid me to write a few free-lance news articles. Now that was an education! I don’t remember the subject of my first news story, but I do remember that by the time it had been edited and published I didn’t recognize it. I definitely learned news writing the old-fashioned way, i.e., the hard way. Sink or swim, so to speak. (But watch out for giant man-eating fish.)

Which was part of my problem when I took my first, and only journalism class during my first semester at University of Illinois. The instructor was teaching journalism theory and I figured I was above all that, being already a pro and all and having small but quite spendable paychecks to prove it. So I showed him. I dropped the class and at the same time dropped my plan to major in journalism. Looking back (and dragging all of you along with me) I can see that it would have been better if I’d attended a journalism trade school rather than an academic institution.

(But maybe it’s just as well that I didn’t know about such places at the time, because I don’t think journalism was a good fit for me. By the time I enrolled at U of I in September 1963, I had already learned about and become mightily attracted to the Bahá'í Faith. And the most basic, bedrock principle of that religion is Bahá'u'lláh’s teaching about unity, at every level of human interaction. And one of the Bahá'í system’s biggest safeguards of unity is the law against backbiting and gossip. AND it seems to me that about 90% of what passes for news these days is just that, backbiting and gossip. I’m sure many professional Bahá'í journalists have found ways to pursue their calling without violating their principles in this regard, however, and would love to hear how they’ve managed it.)

I expect the academic nature of my first journalism class was only part of my inability to continue toward my goal. The larger part was probably that I didn’t come from the kind of family that focused on setting and reaching goals. Well, that’s not exactly true. My father had plenty of goals, just not the kind I wanted to pursue, and his means of achieving them were problematic also. And while the prevailing image of Jewish families assumes a high level of respect for education -- you know, the old “my son, the doctor” story – that certainly wasn’t true of my immediate family.

But that’s another story.

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