“I thought she might write a column for teens, interest them and their parents in the newspaper. It would certainly give her something to focus on and make her a little spending money. Plus, it would be fun to have her around the newsroom,” I said in my not-so-subtle sales pitch.
“It would be great to have her here,” Iris Jo said. “She needs something to do, and I’ve always thought she was one of those girls who had special gifts to develop. If there's anything I can do to help, let me know.”
When I brought the idea up, however, Katy was immediately cool to it. She had a career path in mind that involved going to beauty school and opening her own shop.
“I am not a brain,” she said in that tone of voice she used when I first met her on the loading dock. “You feel sorry for me, don’t you? You’re just trying to be nice.”
As she went on, I could tell she wanted me to talk her into it.
“Katy, I love having you around, so I have to admit that I am trying to be nice. But I also have been watching you for weeks now. You’re plugged into everything in town.”
I picked up the end of the long, beaded necklace she wore. “You would bring down the stodgy factor of The News-Item considerably. You are the ideal combination of local person and fresh voice. We’d pay you, of course. Not much, but enough to help you buy some of that gum to quit smoking.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said and dashed out the door, whether in excitement or anger I could not tell. The next day she was back with a sample column and a notebook with a list of ideas.
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt anything if we gave it a try,” she said. Her journalism career had begun.
The staff was friendly to her. I worried Alex might be too friendly, his twenty-two years to her sixteen. Katy hung around the newsroom all the time, even when she had already turned in her column or finished a story.
In only a couple of weeks, she decorated her cubicle in her own way, including an old typewriter she bought on a clearance table at the Holey Moley, a thrift shop lamp, and a small picture of Matt. She had an oversized homemade ceramic mug filled with an assortment of pens and pencils in wild colors, and she always had tape and scissors nearby. She was constantly cutting something out of a magazine or one of the city papers and tacking it to her bulletin board.
“That's my idea file,” she said.
Tom turned out to be a great writing teacher. He sat patiently with her, showing her when to use active verbs and how to improve transitions in her thoughts. Eavesdropping the first time or two, I was afraid he would hurt her feelings or that she would snap at him and hurt his. To the contrary, she lit up when he went through her copy, asking questions and making changes with enthusiasm.
One day she stood up, gave him a big hug, and said, “Thank you so much.” In my nearly two decades in the newsroom, I don’t recall ever seeing a reporter hug an editor for a job well done. Tom and I both nearly fell out. He even started taking a little more care with his appearance, as though maybe he was not at the boring end of his career after all.
When school opened, Katy's devotion to the paper increased. She got the school bus to drop her off right out front most days. I found myself watching for her and worried if she did not show up on schedule.
“You can’t believe how hot that bus is,” she said nearly every day. “It's unbearable.” Her clothes were wet with sweat.
“The A/C doesn’t work?” Tom asked.
“A/C?” she shrieked, rolling her eyes. “Like those buses have air-conditioning. What dream world do you live in? The driver told us today it was 119 degrees on our bus. We ought to do an exposé or something on that.”
With that pronouncement, she wandered over to the Coke machine, and Tom and I looked at each other. That conversation led to Alex, Tom, Tammy, and I each riding a different bus every afternoon for a week and recording the temperatures, interviewing the driver and students. The results were shocking and made for good news stories and editorials. That coverage led parents to organize a community meeting, demanding the school board come up with a plan to phase in air-conditioned buses over the next three years.
Katy's new column and access to the paper gave her a sort of celebrity status among her classmates, which she fully exploited. “Why don’t we start a school society feature?” she asked one day at a staff meeting. “You know, with party pictures and gossip about what kids are doing.”
She also told me we needed to add a teen advisory board, similar to the community business group.
“Those downtown people made something happen,” she said. “Let's try something with kids. Maybe we can come up with some real news.” She walked off, laughing, sounding oddly like bossy Aunt Helen.
I turned Katy loose on the teen project with a “yes” and fifty dollars. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in on meetings of a diverse group of kids whose interests ranged from bow hunting deer to the latest video games. The ideas flew, and Katy was a strict leader, keeping everyone from talking at once. Those ideas turned into features that students wrote and got five bucks each for.
“Could I sell some advertising?” one student asked. “You know, a booster page.”
I looked over at Tammy, who often sat in on the meetings. She shrugged.
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll pay you a commission on whatever you sell.”
The decision annoyed Lee Roy when I mentioned it later. “What do you mean? Kids selling advertising? This isn’t a game, Lois.”
He mumbled under his breath as he left.
Katy added something the paper needed, a young, enthusiastic spark. When she helped Alex look through records, still digging for the elusive fact that would complete the development story, she was excited about any pattern she came up with. When she painted the death names on the front window, she added hearts and flowers and made them look special. When one of her interviews turned out to be especially good, she would burst into the building. “Listen to this, everyone. Listen to what I’ve got.”
On her seventeenth birthday, she got her mother to bring her by the newspaper before school. “Happy birthday to me,” she said, bursting into the newsroom with a box of doughnuts. “In honor of the occasion, free doughnuts with sprinkles!”
And off she went.
Occasionally I would see Iris Jo at Katy's desk or vice versa, the two visiting and sometimes laughing. You could almost feel the healing taking place.
14
Business owner Tommy Carter hopes to hear a peep
out of you. Tommy credits the Green Forward program
with saving his hardware store and is giving away free
chicks as a thank-you. “Old customers are coming back,
and we’re seeing dozens of new ones,” he said. “If y’all
come in this week, I’ll give you a free gift.”
—The Green News-Item
An uneasy thought nagged at me.
The year was flying by, and arrangements needed to be made to sell the paper.
At first I put it off, using one excuse or another, ranging from the country club incident to the downtown festival plans to prep football coverage, which I had learned was extremely important to Green readers.
Then my banker, Duke Brazil, brought it up at one of our regular lunch meetings. “What are you thinking, Lois?” he asked. “How can the bank help you with this?’
I had put it off as long as I could.
The paper was making a decent profit, although we were not blowing the roof off. Still, it would probably be a fairly hot property, especially with one of the chains in the area. I had originally planned to put it on the market by the middle of the year, getting everything lined up for an end-of-year takeover. Now I was staring at the fourth quarter and had done nothing.
“I suppose I need to get a business broker or run an ad in a magazine, like the one that brought Ed down to Green, but I’m just not sure,” I said. “There's always so much going on, and I can’t seem to focus on this. I know I need to.”
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“Are you having second thoughts?” Duke asked. “Because from the looks of things, you can pay on your line of credit and easily keep the paper, if you want to. I’d be happy to sit down with you and go over any of those numbers.”
That, however, opened a door I was not about to walk through.
“No, of course not,” I said. “I definitely plan to sell the paper. I just am not sure how I want to proceed. I want to get the best price I can, and I need to keep this quiet. I don’t think it would be good for the staff or the town if they knew the paper was about to go on the block again.”
I knew, too, that the sale of the paper would mean I had to make another big decision—what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
After lunch I immediately got on the phone with Marti. “Let's take a few days off and take a little vacation,” I said. “I need a break.”
We decided I would drive up to Ohio, stopping to see my brothers and spending a few days at Marti's place. We’d shop, eat at our favorite restaurants, and go to a new spa that a former reporter had opened. If a manicure and pedicure with my best friend didn’t help me feel better, nothing would.
My friends in Green thought the vacation was a great idea. “You’ve been working too hard,” Iris Jo said. “We can hold down the fort.” “Check out the antiques up there,” Rose said. “See what the prices are doing.”
“You’re chewing on something in that brain of yours, aren’t you?” Aunt Helen asked. “Does this have to do with the sale of the paper?” Okay, maybe Helen didn’t think the vacation was a great idea.
Ed's death was on my mind, too. Only a year earlier, he had been excited about moving to Green, making plans he would never have the opportunity to keep.
The unknown loomed, waiting to grab me around the throat. I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, restless and unable to go back to sleep. I snapped at people at work, including Katy when she turned her column in late.
“I’m s-o-r-r-y,” she said, drawing the word out to about four syllables. “It won’t happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t,” I said, and hurried back to my office.
The next afternoon, she stuck her head in and asked if I had a minute. “Are you mad at me?” she asked. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Oh, no, Katy,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I just have a lot on my mind. I need to make some business decisions and to take care of a few things.”
“Oh, you mean about selling the paper.”
“What? What do you mean? Of course not. Business things.”
“Everyone says you’re trying to decide who to sell the paper to. That you had a year to get rid of it, and it's time.”
In some way her remark made me love my little paper all the more. Rumors and speculation were the fuel that kept things going at newspapers across the country, and The News-Item was no different.
I looked Katy straight in the eyes and wondered how much to say. “I miss my friend Ed” were the words that came out. “This was supposed to be his paper, not mine. He was the one who was meant to move down here and do all these cool things and fight the battles and meet all of you and eat all those doughnuts.”
Katy perched on the edge of a cabinet near the door, the place she usually chose to sit when she came to see me. “Maybe you should go see Pastor Jean. She's smart. She's usually pretty open-minded. I talk to her a lot.”
She turned to walk out, and I fidgeted with papers on my desk.
“Lois?”
I looked up.
“You’ll do the right thing.”
After that conversation, I practically flew out of town, desperate to catch my breath, regain perspective, and reconnect with old friends and family. I packed up and left two days early, figuring I could stay a little longer, spoiling my nephews and niece. A book on tape did not keep my attention. My thoughts rolled. I finally pulled out a notebook and put it in the passenger seat, jotting to-do's for the next three or four months.
As the list took shape, a calmer feeling came. This I was good at—planning and setting goals. The right buyer was out there somewhere, ready for me to unload the paper. For a minute I thought about using one of The News-Item's “three lines for three dollars” classified ads and laughed to myself.
Visiting cleared my mind. My noisy family told funny old stories, ones that we retold every time we were together. My brothers and their wives took me out to eat and listened to the highlights of life in Green. “You can’t believe how hot and humid it is in the summer,” I said. “I don’t know how anyone can live there all their life.”
The Dayton leg of the trip was bittersweet. Marti invited a lot of the old gang over to her place to play Scrabble, and I showed them a few editions of The News-Item.
“Look, here are young Katy's columns. She's good, don’t you think?”
“I’m a fan of Katy's already,” Marti said. “You’ve talked about her nonstop these past few months. I think we’ll all be working for her one day.”
I pulled out a funny story we had run about a policeman barking on the police radio. “No one would confess,” I said, “and no one would rat on the guy. So, the entire department got written up. Only in Green.” My former colleagues passed the story around. “You’ll never believe where we got the tip. My elderly friend Helen called it in. One of her ‘old lady friends,’ as she calls them, listens to the scanner all day and all night. She called Helen to tell her someone was barking incessantly. Helen didn’t believe her but promised to give me a call.”
“You have got to be kidding,” the Dayton cops reporter said. “Let me see that.”
“When I mentioned it at the paper, one of the staff had heard it too. It turned into a great story. Look at those quotes. The police chief actually says, ‘I had told them before they could not bark on the radio.’”
Everyone laughed.
“It's like I never left,” I told Marti when our friends cleared out. “I honestly think I could walk in tomorrow, sit down at the city desk and people would think I had been on vacation for a few days.”
Marti and her new boyfriend, Gary, took me out to eat. I liked the guy in spite of myself. He was funny, loved to read, and seemed to be a deep thinker without being pompous. He “felt the call to be a minister” in his late twenties, after a few years as an engineer.
“I kept thinking about spending the rest of my life in an office and how I wanted to use my time and energy,” he said. “It was like something was nibbling at my soul, just wouldn’t leave me alone. Then I took some kids to youth camp. I watched them learn about Christ. It's hard to describe, but something tugged at my heart. I knew I had to learn more and do something with it. Eventually I realized God was calling me to be a pastor.”
He reached out and grabbed Marti's hand, held onto it. “But don’t get me wrong; I sure don’t think God wants everyone to be a preacher. I mean, if we were all preachers, who would we preach to?”
“Good point,” I said, toasting him with my water glass.
“I really like the work Marti does,” he said, squeezing her hand. “I think everybody has these fantastic gifts, and they’re supposed to use them in ways that make them happy and that help the world be a better place. Like Marti. You, too, Lois. That's a big deal what you do. Telling stories. Keeping people informed.”
He stopped and laughed again. “I’m preaching, aren’t I? And I promised Marti I wouldn’t do that.”
Marti was crazy about him, and I figured I’d be back in Dayton within a year for a wedding. “You’re probably not going to make our Mediterranean cruise when we turn forty, are you?” I asked her. “You’d better start using some of that new prayer power to help me find a man. Make up for abandoning me.”
“Will do, sister. Will do.”
As my visit wound down, I debated whether to go into the Post newsroom. “Most of the people who matter to me were at your party,” I told Marti. “But I might work there again one day and need to stay connected.”
In the end, the pull was too great. I stopped by late in the morning, right before people headed to lunch and before things got too hectic. I signed in at the front counter and stepped in the door to the sound of ringing phones and the police radio. One of the many TV sets blared. A scorched smell immediately told me the coffee pot was empty but no one had bothered to turn it off. The commotion momentarily overcame me.
The first person I saw was managing editor Diane, sitting in Ed's office. She jumped up and ran out to shake my hand. “Lois, how in the world are you? How's life down South?”
“Hey, Diane, good to see you. Things are good. How about with you?”
“Oh, busy as always. You know the drill. When you coming back to straighten out that city desk?”
A pang of regret ran straight through me. I could be sitting in her office. I could be running this newsroom. I pasted a smile on my face.
“Not sure, but don’t forget about me,” I said, wandering off while she was still talking.
Just when I was about to scoot out, Zach caught my eye and asked me if I had time for him to buy me a bite to eat. “I heard you were in town, and I need to talk to you.”
I almost turned him down, but was curious and still had a little of that feeling that he was the boss. “You buying? Then, sure I have time for lunch,” I said, wondering why I had come by the paper at all.
Predictably, we walked down the street to Buddy's and had a plate lunch. I did not feel nearly as nostalgic as I expected, and, after living in North Louisiana for nearly a year, the food didn’t taste as good either. Near the end of the meal, Zach laid his napkin on the table and leaned over toward me, propped up on his elbows. “So, you’ve just about done your time down in Lose-iana, haven’t you?” he asked, emphasizing the first syllable, as though making a joke.
“Yep, can’t believe it. Been there almost a year. Time has gone so fast.”
“You ready to come back to a real newspaper?”
“Well, last time I checked, my staff thought The News-Item was a real newspaper,” I said, the veins in my forehead feeling as though they might explode. “It's actually a very real newspaper, and we’re making money, too.” Immediately I wished I did not sound so defensive.
Gone to Green (Green (Abingdon Press)) Page 12
