Newspaper Days, Part 2: you can’t run from the past, so embrace the best of it

This is another story from the vault of my past, which I am continually opening in these  pandemic days when I seem to have much more than the normal amount of time for self-reflection.  Maybe too much, I don’t know.

Here I’m digging way back to 1978, which found me at at small-town newspaper working harder than I ever had in my life,  and for peanuts, but what did I care?  It paid the rent.  I was 27.   It was the crazy Seventies, and I was  loving everything  about  newspaper work because it was what I really wanted  to do.

My reporting beat was the county school board,  but I had great freedom and latitude to choose and write features stories on  just about any topic I wanted.  My editor always approved my ideas, but often I  didn’t even have to go to him for an okay.  Being a liberal arts major in college, and a naturally inquisitive and curious person, the sky was just about the limit.

I interviewed countless people who had stories to tell about their lives, work and experiences.  There was always a story “hook,” we called it, around which a particular  story or interview revolved.  The person, organization or business had an unusual news or feature-worthy anglers tell that not only made it fun for me to go out and get the story, but interesting reading for our subscribers and readers.  In a small town, people tend to know a lot of other people in the  community, so most stories  I did had almost a guaranteed readership.  Also, I got to know, even if just for a brief moment in time, some pretty remarkable individuals whose stories would have gone untold if I had not heard and wrote about them.

My first published feature story at a prior newspaper job was about a charming and dear 90-year old lady who resided in a nursing home.  She had been a flapper dancer in the 1920s,  and was a stand-in for the silent film star, Clara Bow.  You can imagine the stories she had to tell.

I recall a lot about the  small town I’m remembering  tonight,  and it’s newspaper.  The feature stories I wrote interested me greatly.     There was fascinating gentleman who was a miller and still operated a grist mill in  the country on a small creek.  I have been interested in grist mills  since I was a child and that I interview and  story were like a dream come true.  I took a lot of photos to go with and he full-page article in the newspaper.  Another time I interviewed a local historian about an infamous  duel that occurred in the county in the mid 19h century.  Another time I wrote  about a Greek couple who were closing on heir family’s restaurant after almost 50 years.  That was a memorable occasion.  I have such good memories of that interview in the restaurant.  Not long after I arrived at the newspaper I interviewed a man whose passion was restoring antique cars.  I could go on.  I still have many clippings of those favorite stories.

There are a number of reasons I’m finally  writing about that long ago work experience.  It lasted less than two years,  and what brought it to an end was a strange and perhaps inevitable confluence of events:  a company that was in a fiercely competitive race for local news dominance with an upstart, maverick, competing weekly paper resulting in impossible  work demands of me; a doomed relationship that I seemed fated to have, but got totally in over my head before I fully knew what was happening; and finally the near loss of two of my closest friends, who ai had begun my newspaper career with four years earlier.  I left the job and a period of deep depression followed, which I’ve written about previously.

I would say I reached the pinnacle of my success as a newspaper writer during that time,  only to see everything crash and burn.  So even though I haven’t been back to that town in 40 years, and seriously doubt I ever will, I refuse to let personal tragedy destroy the many good memories I have of the  place and the people I  worked with.  Everyone has problems.  I just got in the midst of one too many.  It’s a chapter in my life that I’ve never been able to close and walk away from, as awful as the time afterward was.  I relive the pain of that time period sometimes as flashbacks and  often in recurring dreams.  Since it’s all a distinct part of who I am today, I choose neither to bury it for good (as if I ever could), nor wallow in the harrowing memories of a  depressive episode  that seemed to offer no way out.

The following feature story written in 1978, is a perfect example of 1) my lifelong interest in oral history and telling and preserving in print the stories of an older generation before they are gone, and 2) a confirmation of the rich and invaluable experiences I had despite the dark cloud of memories that only temporarily put out the light I wanted to shine in others’ lives.  Writers, no matter what kind, have a unique opportunity to illuminate small corners of the world for others..

 

She Knows Hard Work

She’s worked in the fields a good part of her life, has raised 13 children, and still picks the banjo occasionally.

At 85, Arrie Reynolds speaks from the perspective of one who has calmly weathered difficult times and hard work.  She graces  her words with the wisdom of a lifetime’s acquaintance with the countryside where she grew up, and the people who have lived there all their lives.

Her father continued to share crop and rent farmland after the family came to this area when she was 11.

“I was raised up on a farm and plowed many a mule,” she laughed.  “We always worked cotton and corn.  People’s forgotten about the old farmin’ ways.  They’ll never know how  to plow a mule.  It wasn’t as hard as hoeing.” Mrs. Reynolds recalls picking as much as 300 pounds of cotton in a day,  and says if she was young  enough she’d be farming today.

During the Hoover years, before the Great Depression, the going price was 40 cents for 100 pounds of cotton.  But if the cotton was particularly thick,  it would go for only about 25 cents per 100

pounds.  “Five dollars then would go farther than $30 now,” she said.

Mrs. Reynolds has a large clan of grandchildren, great-grands, and great-great-grands, which, in addition to her children, number 154.  “All them great-grands get to quarreling over me to see  who can get closest,” she laughed again.  A friend sitting nearby added, “You’ve always been a baby spoiler.”

Married at 14, Mrs. Reynolds worked for a short time in a mill, but said, “I didn’t like the mill.  I wanted to get back to the farm.”

The nearest town was quite large in her recollection.  “There were dirt streets and a big fountain where they’d water the mules and keep the horses  in the back lots.”

Going to town, she remembered, meant starting out early, and “you’d be doing good if you got back by 4.  It was a slow ride.”  Visits were made to town “to trade” for items the farm couldn’t provide.  For Mrs. Reynolds, “the good old days were better than now.”

She explained, “You could cook a pot of green peas and pone or cornbread and have fresh milk.  There wasn’t so much of this knick-knack foolishness — candy, soda and the like.  Now if you offer someone a biscuit, they might bite off a bit and throw it to be dogs.  We’d eat what we had and was healthy as bucks.”

Mrs. Reynolds has never been in the hospital and has only been to the doctor four times.  She has a cataract in one eye, but says it’s stopped.  “I’m not worried about it.  If you just set your heart and mind on God and put your faith in Him, he can heal your body.”

She can’t even remember missing a Sunday church service, and regularly attends the small, white-frame Pentecostal Holiness church a short distance from where she lives.  There “You can feel the power of the Lord,” she says.

An accomplished banjo player, she’s known this instrument since she was six years old, and regularly played until about two years ago when her hands “started to cramp on me and I had to quit.”  She played the banjo and sang songs at church revivals.

She can also play the fiddle, an instrument her father and brother were quite good at.  When she was young she played for square dancers and cloggers.  “Not that dancin’ they have nowadays on television,” she affirmed.

“I’m just plumb outdone at the young folks in this day and time,” she said.  “It looks to me like they’re gettin’ worse and worse.  There’s hope if they’ll quit their meanness and make their way to the Lord.”

These days Mrs. Reynolds has plenty of visitors and enjoys their company when she’s not resting or reading her Bible.  Concerning visits from the great grandchildren and great-great grands, she says, “I’m glad to see ‘em come and glad to see ‘em go.”

She gets up early each morning about 6:30 or 7 and usually fixes her own breakfast — biscuits and honey, fried ham and red-eye gravy.

As she sat on her porch and picked her banjo, faltering yet clear notes punctuated the late afternoon stillness.  An easy smile quickly  animated her expressions as she gazed out over the yard, no doubt thinking of lively times when her fingers flew across that five-string banjo.

Arrie Reynolds