Getting started

OK, big decision here: I’m starting a blog.

Not exactly a daring exploit, since these days it seems that everyone and his pet canary are writing blogs. I just wasn’t into it, but I’ve been challenged by my daughter to try it. Seems like a lot of things I do these days start that way, with a challenge from my daughter. Something to explore later.

Anyway, back to the blog. I don’t know why the whole phenomenon hasn’t attracted me. It should. Basically blogging is like column writing, and that’s the specific kind of newspaper work I used to do in high school and planned to do as a career when I first stepped on the University of Illinois campus as a freshman in 1963. (Go ahead, do the math, I don’t mind.) I started writing columns – humor columns, basically, observation-of-life pieces – as a sophomore at Lanphier High School in Springfield, IL.

At that time, Springfield had recently instituted a junior high school system and segregated the 7th through 9th graders in the junior highs, so sophomore became the new freshman in high school. I’d been somewhat of a star of my middle school newspaper, so naturally expected to dive right in to the Lanphier paper, but was stopped by The Rule. The one that limited the newspaper staff to juniors and seniors.

Seeing as how I really didn’t have much self-identity beyond “writer” back then, this was just not a situation I could easily accept. So I grabbed the one rope that was available and wrote a couple columns as free-lance submissions. (With cartoon illustrations, even, if I remember correctly!) And here’s where we find a potentially great movie scene if this were a movie script instead of a fledgling blog entry: the teacher who was in charge of the school paper read my columns and not only published them, she asked me to join the staff of the paper right then and there, instead of waiting until the next year. Significant background music, please.

I also wrote columns for the Springfield daily, the Journal-Register. That happened because I worked there. And that happened because my father somehow pulled some string or other to get me the job. I was 15 and had decided it was time to have an independent income, and wanted to work at the newspaper, which wasn’t in any way indicating that it was looking for 15-year old ace reporters. But somehow my father got me hired, and since dad was a crook – and that’s not a euphemism, it’s a fact, but let’s save that for another day – I never asked any questions about his strings.

OK, cue up the music, another scene is coming … I was hired to work for the editorial page editor, a rough-spoken, cigar-chewing, middle-aged guy who epitomized every hard-boiled reporter you’ve ever seen in any movie. Since I don’t remember his name, let’s call him Mac.

Mac was not happy to be handed a dumpy, naive teen-age type and told to give her something to do. And his not happiness was totally obvious, he did nothing to hide it.
With a lot of grumping and cigar gnashing he marched me to the newspaper’s “morgue,” a windowless room filled with old editions saved on rolls and rolls and rolls and more rolls of microfiche. Then he told me to read editions from 100 years earlier, and 50, and 20, and find some delightful little nugget of news from each. In other words, my first professional assignment was to write the daily memory column. OK. Great. I could do that. No problem, boss. I didn’t actually say that, but I must have looked it, because he responded by scowling and looking even more disgusted before he humphed his way out of the room.

He had shown me where the microfiche was stored and how it was catalogued, he had set me up with a chair and a little typing table and a manual typewriter. (Remember, this was circa 1960, waaaaaaay before the days of computer keyboards and all the electronic miracles we now take for granted.) And he gave me a stack of yellowish newsprint to type on. But he didn’t give me a pencil. I had to borrow one from the morgue lady.

Which is why, when he came back a bit later to check on my progress, and found me writing out my first story in longhand on the newsprint, he was astounded. He just stood there, in the doorway of the morgue, staring at me as if I were some slimy thing that had crawled out from under a rock, and asked me what the ___ I was doing. “I’m writing my story.” What was the problem? He had told me to write it, hadn’t he? “And then I’ll type it.” Bzzzz, wrong answer!

Mac then proceeded to inform me, as tersely and with as much irritation as possible, that a real reporter wrote directly on the keyboard and that he wasn’t paying me to take twice as long as necessary to write the memory column and that I was to immediately stop writing it first in longhand, or else. OK, he didn’t say “or else,” but I heard it pretty clearly.

Left alone again in the morgue (not counting the morgue lady, since she’s not part of this scene), I sat there for a minute looking at the typewriter as if it were an alien from the planet Zagroff. Translate thoughts in my head directly through my fingers to a keyboard? What an amazing new idea! Could I do it? I didn’t know, but clearly I would have to try.

And here I am today, pounding away on this (relatively) tiny white plastic Mac keyboard, with keys that click instead of clank when you press them, writing my first blog, with no intermediate step, from brain straight to keyboard. And all thanks to Mac, who hated me but made possible everything that came next.

But that’s enough torture to put you through for one day, let’s just stop here and stick in a “to be continued” for the next blog. If there is one. Which may take another good dose of daughter-challenging. Or some feedback from whoever is actually reading this thing, if anyone. After all, it’s been many centuries since I wrote like this – OK, actually it’s only been a few years, I forgot about the columns in the DI a couple summers ago – but I’ve never written a blog before so I’m feeling a little nervous and self-conscious about the whole venture. And if that isn’t a blatant enough appeal for positive reinforcement, I don’t know what else would qualify.

Let’s end this in the old newspaper way.

- 30 -