Posts
My father's newspaper—a small Midwestern weekly—was put to bed Wednesday night and "on the stands" Thursday morning. It did not have a section of classified ads. If it had had, I might have spent my high school summers helping people put their words in order so they could sell a lawnmower or a used washing machine.
Instead, my summer job was always to help Art, the editor, compile the news items from the tiny towns in the orbit of our own tiny town (population, then and now, 2500 souls). Pittsburg, Yeoman, Plymouth, Radnor and others I have long forgotten. Each of these hamlets relied on our newspaper to get the word out. Neighbours down the road needed, or at least wanted, to keep up with local doings, and apparently the telephone, with its gossip-friendly party lines, lacked the gravitas of the newspaper. Once the news was set in the Linotype's lead, then inked, and transferred to blank newsprint, it became real. It could be clipped and put into a scrapbook to show others: Look! See our names in the paper! We were here. We mattered.
I imagine those scrapbooks being proudly shown to children and then grandchildren. But by the time the compilers of the scrapbooks died, no one was around to care. Scattered by the four winds to cities prized for anonymous living opportunities, the progeny had been pulling up roots, not pining for the past.
Clean out grandma's house! What shall I do with all these photo albums? No one knows who these people are. Yellowed scraps of carefully scissored newsprint attest to a certain kind of modest life, yet no one wants to claim them. Not one of the children/grandchildren/great-grands wants to box up these albums and deposit them (unexamined) on their own basement shelves.
Clean it all out! Where does it go? To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump. This is the final disposition of my hard work at a make-work summer job.
I hated that work. Is any torture more exquisitely designed for an introvert than to have to cold-call one rural correspondent after another and ask for the local news? Picture me: snobbishly above it all and yet wholly inadequate for the task. One by one I call the numbers Art has given me. Mrs. Waymire in Yeoman. This is (me) from the Delphi Citizen calling to ask if you have any local news to report for this week's paper.
And then I speed-write the doings of that community. Richard and Earline Perry of Chicago visited his parents, Wayne and Betty Perry, over the weekend. Their children, Lisa and Billy, enjoyed playing with their cousins, Joe and Tina-Marie Collins, the children of Harold and Bobby Collins. Bobby Collins is the daughter of Wayne and Betty Perry. New paragraph.
Richard Eikenberry was at home with the flu for five days but is feeling better now. New paragraph.
Little Janelle Crowder has a new baby sister, Ranelle, born July 3 at St. Elizabeth's hospital in Lafayette. The proud parents are Jo-Etta and George Crowder.
All my hard work. All the fortitude it took me to make those phone calls. And the words, like the newsmakers themselves, have returned to dust.
No comments:
Post a Comment