Back in Time (Part 7) 1975

The year 1975 was a pivotal one in my life because it meant the beginning of a newspaper and journalism/mass communication sojourn that was to last on and off for the following 16 years.   During that time I also became a teacher and taught English and journalism, but writing and photography were my earliest and truest skills and avocations.  I immersed myself totally in the world of weekly newspapers in several small towns in North and South Carolina, doing what I loved and not caring a whit about how much money I was making or what kind of apartment I was living in.   Any place I chose became home for a time.  

What pure freedom I abandoned myself to in those years, for as I — formerly shy and withdrawn — became more confident interviewing people and writing about their lives, I saw a whole new inner world open up based on those experiences and the new, deep friendships I was forming, the first ever for me.  Every type of subject and topic for a story or weekly column was fair game for exploration and writing about. 

My knowledge of people and the larger world outside myself grew exponentially.    Being single all those years obviously contributed to that freedom.  I didn’t often revert back to the feelings of depression and loneliness I experienced in my youth because I was suddenly, in the years after college, in love with life, impossible as that might have seemed to me.    As a newspaper reporter and later editor, I got to know, however briefly,  all kinds of people of all ages and backgrounds.  I look back on those years now and can’t believe my luck.  Every day of life was exciting because in newspaper work every day is different.  Not many jobs are like that.

It all began in the spring of 1975 when I applied for a part-time job at a small paper near the city where I took undergraduate courses in journalism to prepare myself for the life of a journalist.  I had been an English major with no prior formal journalism training.  When I was hired, to my great delight and probably surprise (my actual memories of that day elude me), and reported for work, my first assignment was to interview a former vaudeville performer and silent film stand-in actress for the famous movie star Clara Bow.  This amazing woman had decades of memories to share from her days in vaudeville and show business. 

I’ll never forget going to the retirement home where she lived, ironically named Twilight Manor, and interviewing her and taking photographs.  The resulting story, spread over an entire page in the newspaper, was a personal triumph for me because it was my first "real world", job-related published story, and I had been quite nervous.  I wanted to succeed in my new job.

After that story was published with my photos of the gracious lady and my byline staring back from the paper at me, I was hooked.  I went on to write literally hundreds of other feature and news stories, columns and opinion pieces over the years, in addition to taking countless photographs.  That was the marvel of working on a small newspaper — you get to do it all.

I was 24 in 1975.  The world I had entered with that first newspaper job lay before me like an endless road to potential fulfillment and discovery.   Journalism did that for me.  And, isn’t that what a first job is supposed to be all about?   I loved it, and I don’t wish now that anything had been different, although I had some terrible experiences during the ensuring years in that field of work that would alter the course of my life and career. 

Thinking of all this years later on an early Fall day, alone on a bench at my favorite park, I have to smile in amazement.  I have been  blessed to have been able to take many of those "less traveled" roads in life, and I am much the wiser for doing so.

(Note on how the years are chosen:  Very simply, I placed each year of my life going back to earliest childhood on a piece of paper and placed these in a box from which I pulled each entry’s year.)