Olio: Leaves from an Editor's Notebook

By Guy M. Townsend

By their very nature, most newspaper columns and editorials are ephemeral. They are often written in haste to meet a deadline, and what excites interest today may elicit only yawns tomorrow or the next day.

This is especially true of community newspapers, whose focus is on matters of interest to a smaller, parochial readership.

This book is a collection of pieces that step outside that mold. The author's broad education (four degrees, including a Ph.D. and a J.D.) and wide range of work experiences (college professor, probation officer, prosecuting attorney, professional magician, novelist, editor, publisher, and grocery-store sackboy, to name a few) have provided him with a unusual perspective from which to observe and comment on the problems and pleasures of being a sentient being on Planet Earth in the twenty-first centuryand on how we got to this point in human history.

Inspired by the example and encouragement of the newspaper editor who gave him his first job in journalism, the author has inflicted upon the readers of several newspapers his reflections on a broad and eclectic range of subjects, from religious and racial intolerance to UFO "sightings" and the beauty of a toad's eye. Throughout it all, the author has been motivated by one unvarying purposeto make his readers think. Not just about last week's school board meeting or next month's municipal elections, but about ideas and issues with a shelf-life longer than that of ripe tomatoes in your grocer's produce department.

Here, then, are half a hundred of those pieces, rescued from dusty newspaper "morgues" and offered to a broader audience than the unsuspecting subscribers to whom they were originally addressed. The author will be pleased if you read them, but he will have failed in his purpose unless reading them makes you think.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 21, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452075006

Guy M. Townsend

Guy Townsend grew up in Marianna, Arkansas, graduating from high school in 1961. After earning a B.A., an M.A. and a Ph.D. in history and teaching for five years at colleges from Florida to South Dakota—with a year-long intermission as a historian in the Louisville office of the Corps of Engineers—Townsend got his first taste of the newspaper business as bureau chief for the Blytheville (Ark.) Courier News. He left the Courier to edit two newspapers in Indiana before returning to the Courier as a staff writer. After a brief stint as associate editor of Practical Horseman Magazine in West Chester, Pennsylvania, he returned to his wife's home state of Indiana and established Brownstone Books, a publishing house devoted to works of mystery-fiction criticism. At age forty Townsend decided to become a prosecuting attorney, so he accepted an appointment as chief probation officer for Indiana's Fifth Judicial Circuit and a month later enrolled in the evening division at Chase College of Law, seventy-five miles away in Highland Heights, Kentucky. He completed the four-year course in three years and then ran for and was elected prosecuting attorney. He later served as deputy prosecutor in two other Indiana circuits and as assistant D.A. in two Tennessee circuits. Finding retirement not to his liking, Townsend returned to the newspaper business in early 2003, when he and his wife purchased the Flemingsburg (Ky.) Gazette. They sold the paper at the end of 2006 and now reside in Berea, Kentucky. In addition to scholarly articles, Townsend has written one novel (To Prove a Villain, 1985), co-written another (Loose Coins, 1998, with Joe L. Hensley), and edited a bibliography (Rex Stout: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1980). He also edited and published The Mystery Fancier, a journal of mystery-fiction criticism, from 1976 to 1992.

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© 2010 Guy M. Townsend. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 10/18/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4520-7500-6 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-7498-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-7499-3 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010913409

Printed in the United States of America

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

To my incredible wife, Jeanne,

who every day gives my life meaning.

Contents

Preface

I. Growing Up

Satchmo and Me …

… and miles to go …

Roots

My Dog Inkie

Pulling on One Oar

Surviving Childhood (Just Barely), Part 1

Surviving Childhood (Just Barely), Part 2

Foreign Friends

Wonder

Hamburgers

Trains

II. Adult Reminiscences

Strangers and Friends

Doin’ Right in Atlanta

Before There Was an Internet …

Remembering an Old Friend

Metheglin: Like a Bud, Only Different

Out of the Mouths of Felons …

To Bike, or Not to Bike …

The Old Raised-Hood Ploy

III. Science, Logic, and Reason

A Carbon-Based Life-Form Reflects on H2O

The Windbag Expounds … on Wind

The Power of Logical Thinking

Common Sense and Crop Circles

Computers I Have Known (and Loathed)

Memory Bank Failure

Reading

Seeing What Isn’t There

IV. Serious Essays

A Christmas Wish

Democracy … or Theocracy?

Religious Rights and the Religious Right

Seen any Flying Pigs?

Pardon Me While I Foam at the Mouth

On Freedom … and Tolerance

A Sunny, Sunday Afternoon

Smallpox

You Consider the Alternative …

To Everything There Is a Season

V. Whimsy

Flying Saucers

If at First You Don’t Succeed …

An American Fable

Lines

Of Hurt Feelings

Writer’s Block

Santa Silas

Toad

Hey, There’s a Reason They’re Called Turkeys

VI. Words

I’m Looking for a Word …

Take His Word for It

Words Matter. Honest!

Words … and Writing Them

Preface

It’s all Hank Haines’ fault.

I know it’s uncharitable of me to place the entire blame on Hank’s shoulders, but facts are facts, and if Hank hadn’t placed that display ad in the classified section of the Memphis Commercial Appeal way back in 1978, none of the pieces in this collection would ever have been written.

ENGLISH LIT?

POL. SCI.?

HISTORY?

LIBERAL ARTS?

The heading leaped out at me as I scanned the Help Wanted section looking for something—anything!—to take the place of the assistant office manager’s position I had taken out of desperation when my last full-time teaching position ended after a dispute with the college’s president over whether I would give passing grades to students who were not doing college-level work.

The ad went on to state that the Blytheville (Ark.) Courier News, a progressive daily newspaper in northeastern Arkansas that actively recruited liberal arts majors for its writing positions, had an opening for a writer to head a new bureau it was opening in Mississippi County’s second county seat. (Yes, Mississippi County has two county seats—Blytheville and Osceola.)

Not until that Sunday morning had I even once considered working in the newspaper business. A couple of years earlier I had begun editing and publishing a small critical journal, and I had of course had several articles published in scholarly publications, but the idea of writing for a newspaper had never occurred to me.

Well, I thought after reading through the ad several times, if the Courier News was crazy enough to prefer liberal arts majors to journalism majors, I was crazy enough to send the paper a letter of application, which I did the following day. And I promptly heard back from Courier News editor Hank Haines, who said he would be in Memphis later in the week and would like to have lunch with me.

We met at a pleasant restaurant in midtown Memphis, where Hank told me he had read and enjoyed a long article I had written about Richard Halliburton for the City of Memphis magazine the previous summer, and he offered me the position on the spot. I was delighted, of course, but there was one problem—the position paid less than I was then earning, and I just couldn’t afford to take a cut in pay. Hank said he would run it past his board, and he let me know a few days later that the board had agreed to match my current salary. I immediately accepted, and thus began an intermittent career in the newspaper business that lasted for nearly three decades (with a sizable interruption for law school and a career as a prosecuting attorney).

That explains how I first came to the newspaper business, but it doesn’t explain any of the pieces in this collection, which are not your typical journalistic fare. That’s the second part of this explanation.

Newspaper articles, especially articles that appear in small daily and weekly newspapers, are ephemeral by nature. Their purpose is to convey to the reader the facts and figures of the news of the day, not to impress the reader with eloquence and stylistic touches (which may, in fact, actually get in the way of the reader’s quick comprehension of the essentials of the news story). In a sense, the golden rule of news reporting is summed up by Sgt. Friday’s Just the facts, ma’am. Not that it hurts for a news story to be well written, mind you—it’s just that good writing is not a news story’s raison d’etre, which is to convey information on the events of the day (or week).

That’s where Hank was different. Hank was in the news business, and he was passionate about keeping his readership informed, even when it meant stepping on some powerful toes. But he wasn’t satisfied with Just the facts. He wanted writers who could not only report the facts but could actually tell the story. That was why he favored liberal arts majors, even though he was a journalism major himself. He figured it was easier to teach the basics of journalism to a broadly educated writer than it was to broadly educate a journalism major. Not, of course, that Hank thought that all journalism majors couldn’t write well—he was himself living proof that some of them could write very well indeed. Nor did he believe that all liberal arts majors would automatically become good journalists. He just believed that they brought something extra to the table that wasn’t taught in journalism classes.

Hank didn’t simply assume that liberal arts hires would automatically soar on their own. He encouraged his reporters to spread their wings, to experiment, to stretch the boundaries of local journalism, by actually paying them extra for writing columns in addition to their reportorial output. He expected the public meetings and the accidents and the crimes to be fully covered, but he also made space available in the paper for his writers to grow and to develop, and he actually paid us extra for doing it. Not a lot extra, to be sure, and some of us would have taken a cut in pay for the opportunity to write a column for the paper, but Hank actually paid us extra for doing it. It was like paying a kid to eat a bowl of ice cream.

And that, finally, is where the pieces in this collection came from. Some were written in those early days at Hank’s paper, others at a couple of weekly papers I went on to edit in Indiana, and the remainder at the weekly newspaper I edited and published in northern Kentucky until I sold it a few years back. They are a mixture—hence the Olio in the collection’s title—of essays, musings, rants, reminiscences, and flights of fancy, sometimes inspired by events in the news, but more often just the result of the urge to write, to put down my thoughts and feelings on paper so that I could share them with my fellow members in the fraternity of literate humans who regard reading and writing as a joy and not a chore.

The words, thoughts, sentiments—and, yes, biases and prejudices—are my own, but none of them would have been written without the trust, encouragement, and friendship of Hank Haines.

Or, to repeat what I said at the beginning, it’s all Hank Haines’ fault.

This one’s for you, Hank.

I. Growing Up

Satchmo and Me …

My maternal grandmother’s name was Minnie Ramer, but we all called her TaTa, owing to her first grandchild’s inability to say grandmother. He could say grand and he could say mother, but when asked to say grandmother he invariably said TaTaTa, which was shortened to TaTa as other grandchildren came along. Before long, everyone in the family, child and grownup alike, referred to her as TaTa, even in public. (It is one of the oddities of human nature that even the silliest pet names are used without the least bit of self-consciousness and totally oblivious to the raised eyebrows and puzzled looks of strangers and new acquaintances—"He called her what?!")

Of my two grandmothers, TaTa was far and away the more grandmotherly. My other grandmother—called, with rigid formality, Mother Anne—hailed from the drill-sergeant wing of the grandmother party. She absolutely knew what was best for every one of us, and she made sure that we all knew it as well—and that we conformed ourselves to her expectations.

TaTa was different. She was sweet and understanding, if sometimes a bit remote. But she had her dark side as well, as I learned to my considerable dismay at about the age of four.

At the rear of my grandmother’s house in those days stood a small garage which my grandmother, not having an automobile, used for storage.

Now, every male child since Cain and Abel has had a fondness for garages, attics, sheds, and storage buildings of every description. There’s no explaining it. It’s just one of those odd, inexplicable facts of life that make no sense at all but are nevertheless quite true, so we just shake our heads, shrug our shoulders, and accept them. (Like pet names.)

Anyway, TaTa, being a member in good standing of the grandmothers’ union, was well aware of the propensity of boys to stick their noses in places where they shouldn’t, and even if she had played hooky from grandmother school on the day that lesson was covered, the fact that I kept leaving the garage door open after my frequent incursions would have tipped her off.

But tipped off—and ticked off as well, if the truth be told—she was, and she laid down the law and placed the garage off limits. Which, of course, only made it more attractive to me. Being a slow learner even back then, I continued to leave behind evidence of my intrusions in the form of a wide-open garage door, until one day I completely exhausted my grandmother’s considerable store of patience and she decided—no doubt with great reluctance (unlike my other grandmother, who would, if similarly tried, have decided with great resolution and probably not a little bit of wicked glee)—to get my attention, so to speak.

Her method was simple, but stunningly effective, and I walked into her trap with the insouciance of the hardened repeat offender. First, a furtive glance around to make sure that the coast was clear (which failed to detect any sign of my grandmother, who I have no doubt was watching my every move from behind the curtains of the kitchen window), then a quick dash up the short gravel drive to the garage door, which even my four-year-old muscles could open without difficulty—and had opened without difficulty many times before.

But this time was different, because this time there was something waiting behind that garage door …

… which puts me in mind of a story I heard Louis Armstrong tell during a performance back in the early ‘sixties.

It seems that when Armstrong was a little boy his family lived in a house without running water, and they got their drinking water from a nearby bayou. One day Armstrong’s mother sent him off with a bucket to fetch some water, but when he got down to the bank he was surprised by a large alligator. He dropped the bucket and ran back up to the house, where he was greeted by his mother, who wanted to know what he was doing coming back without the water.

Armstrong explained to her about the alligator, and when he was finished his mother said, Go back down there and fetch me a bucket of water! That ‘gator’s just as scared of you as you are of him.

To which Armstrong replied, Well in that case, Mamma, that water ain’t fit to drink no how!

… which brings me back to that opening garage door, behind which, right at the level of a four-year-old boy’s eyes, sat the godawfullest ugly scarecrow you ever saw. I get a frisson just thinking about it, well over half a century later.

If you had ever seen TaTa, in her grandmother dress and her grandmother hairdo and her grandmother apron, with that sweet grandmother smile on her gentle grandmother face, you would never have guessed that all that grandmotherliness disguised a mind Machiavelli himself would have envied.

From that day onward I steered clear of that garage. And if I ever mention that Louis Armstrong and I have something in common, rest assured that I’m not referring to my skill as a trumpet player.

 … and miles to go …

I don’t remember much about him, just that he was young, and thin, and black. My family had just moved from a small town in Tennessee to a small town in Arkansas, and we were staying, temporarily, in a large, old, rambling, white frame house with an elderly woman named Sharp and her two sons, who were young adults. I was five years old. And lonely.

There was a large tree in the spacious front yard—an oak, I think it was—and it was there that I met the boy. We played for a time, and probably talked a bit as boys will do, until my mother called me to come in.

I don’t want you playing with that boy, she said to me as I came into the house.

Why not, Momma?

He’s different from us, Guy. He’s a nigra.

That wasn’t much of an answer, but I don’t remember questioning it at the time, even when my next experience with nigras was so markedly different.

While we were still living at the Sharp house my mother got a job that kept her away from the home all day. I believe it was as a clerk in a drug store. At any rate, to take care of me and my younger brother and sister, and to clean the house and cook lunch for the family, she and my father hired a black woman named Annabelle Robinson. Annabelle, we all called her, even my little sister who wasn’t even two at the time.

Annabelle was a gem. She could cook and clean house like a demon, and she wasn’t the least bit hesitant about giving us kids a licking when we needed it. Like the time I almost burned down the garage ….

We loved Annabelle, and I really believe she loved us, too. But the fact was, despite the fact that my parents trusted her completely with their food, their property, and their children, she was still a nigra, and we were white.

This was a thing we all accepted, without giving it any thought. Annabelle’s husband, Tom, had a highly responsible position (for a black man); he was chauffeur for Dr. McClintock (Dr. Mack, we all called him, and he was the quintessential family doctor, the very salt of the earth), and between the two of them Annabelle and Tom probably had an income well above the average for the dwellers of what we unselfconsciously called niggertown.

My father worked for a farm implement dealership as a salesman, and among the other employees of the company were two black men named Mose and Leroy. Leroy was slightly sullen—only slightly, mind you, because in the late ‘forties and early ‘fifties blacks in the South were well aware of the dangers of getting on the wrong side of the white man—but Mose was as kind and friendly and gentle a man as I have ever met. Mista Guy, he always called me, and to my shame I cannot tell