Old newspaper clippings provide reminders

This post was first published in the Wilson Times July 27, 2019.

My wife and I have been going through boxes and throwing away things that we once thought we’d like to keep forever, or at least a year. Among these boxes are several boxes I brought home from my career as a newspaper editor, going back to 1975. In 34 years as a newspaper editor, I wrote something like 1,700 columns and close to 9,000 editorials.

These are not exact numbers, just approximations of the number of editions the newspapers I edited had published and my usual writing schedule. I’m sure I took some days off (but I often wrote editorials and columns in advance so as not to burden someone else with having to do my work while I was away).

My wife suggested that I should save the columns and other items that dealt with our children and our home life, so that our children might recall their younger days. Two of our children were born while I worked for newspapers. Our youngest child was 29, the oldest 37, when my newspaper career ended. My wife thought compiling these personal memories in some printed form, such as a book, would be an excellent gift to our children.

So I’ve been pulling musty clippings of columns from dusty file folders and deciding whether my topics were anything our children would care about. The jury is still out on that question. Whether anyone else ever reads these articles, my tedious exercise in separating wheat from chaff has been eye-opening to me.

I discovered I wrote a good number of columns of a personal matter, such as the surprising joy of seeing our children learn to read, learn to drive a car (scary!), welcoming children into “adult” conversations, seeing children move out of the house and become independent (sort of), and so on. I tried to write columns that were not strictly personal but would find an audience with people who could identify with my experiences. Comments from friends and strangers indicate that some of those columns resonated with other families.

In my review process, I discovered that I often used my columns to explain newspaper issues to our readers. As editor, I was the final arbiter of what news went into the paper. I wrote about how we made news decisions (a daily meeting of editors discussed the importance of our available news articles). I wrote about anonymous callers and letter writers who would criticize or threaten me and the newspaper, often because they didn’t understand what we were trying to do, and sometimes because they just had their facts flat wrong.

Good example: An angry woman called to say I was a racist because we didn’t run an appropriate photo of the new Miss America because she was black. I told her I was sure no racial discrimination was involved in Miss America coverage, but she insisted that we ran a large photo of white Miss America on the front page in color but ran a small, black and white photo of the black Miss America a year later. I told her I honestly couldn’t remember how we ran the previous year’s photo but I would check. I flipped through the bound volume of newspapers and found out the caller had it all wrong. We had run a two-column photo of the black Miss America, the same size as the white Miss America got. Both photos were in color.

She wouldn’t give me her name or phone number, so I couldn’t prove to her that she was wrong. I had to settle for writing a polite column, which she probably didn’t read. But I got it off my chest.

When the newspaper changed its policy and began endorsing political candidates, I wrote many columns explaining the decision and reminding readers that an endorsement is just one entity’s opinion. Other opinions are valid and can be published in the paper as guest columns or letters to the editor.

I’ve also gone through about 30 years of calendars I had kept as editor and as a nonprofit manager. They brought back a few memories, but mostly they proved that I couldn’t read my own scribbling done while hurriedly writing down an event or appointment. No point in keeping any of those calendars. At first, I was disappointed that I had made no notation when my parents died, my siblings died, my children married, and other life events occurred.

Then I realized these were calendars — appointment reminders — not diaries. No need to keep any old calendars.