Their lives would make a good script for a Hollywood movie.
A woman wields a chainsaw; a man lives with a ghost; an old-timer delivers the U.S. mail on horseback; a Shetland sheep dog hitches rides on a bull named Blackjack; a regal old-timer shines shoes for 90 years, a retired railroader catches rattlesnakes for summer sport.
The list goes on and on.
It all started when I was on my way to the movie theater.
I met a friend walking up the street.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To work,” he said.
“Work where?” I inquired.
“Newspaper,” he replied. “Walk up there with me.”
Five minutes later I’m standing in the newsroom where a managing editor swaggers up and down the aisles of reporters like Genghis Kahn. “Are you the new kid?” he barked in my direction.
“Yep,” I stammered. “I guess so.”
“Then grab a camera and follow that siren.”
“Gotcha, Chief!”
“Don’t call me Chief.”
“Okay, Chief.”
—
A few days later, the editor sent me out on an assignment he wanted to run in the Sunday edition. I was to go out and find a track walker. The man in question supposedly had been walking the tracks for at least 30 years. His job: keep debris off the tracks and make sure the rails were not disturbed.
“That is a real barn-burner of a story,” the editor remarked as I left the building.
It was a great idea. But how was I going to find an old trackwalker who could be anywhere along the railway system that stretched for at least 20 miles in Fayette County.
I had a plan.
One day I’d walk in one direction. The next day I’d go the other.
Bingo! I was bound to bump into the vigilant trackwalker as he traipsed along the rails.
Only I did not know the trackwalker plied his skills in the next county—Summers to be exact.
I had no idea where I was going or how far away it was.
I thought the assignment was within walking distance, though.
But after two and a half days of hoofing the crossties, I trekked back to the newspaper—without the story. Big mistake!
You are not supposed to go back to the newsroom without the story you were sent after. If you fail to get that story, you’re expected to return with a better story, or at least one with comparable merit.
When I tried to explain to the editor that I’d worn out a pair of wingtips and had to leave them at a local shoe repair shop to be half-soled, he was not the least bit sympathetic. And he did not seem to be enamored with any of my lame excuses.
“What do you think we’re paying you for, you idiot!” he shrieked, his jugular vein bulging under his ear like a water balloon in the shade of cobalt. “Did you not think of driving your car down to the railway station and asking dispatchers about the man you were looking for?”
He had me there.
“You said he was a trackwalker, not a truck driver,” I blurted, wiping tiny drops of spittle from my forehead which had spewed from the oppressor’s frothing esophagus. “If you wanted me to drive…” That’s as far as I got with that logic. The man abruptly wheeled around and sped out the newsroom as others gaped at my obvious mortification.
A female reporter with a semester of journalism at WVU under her belt buried her face in the afternoon edition and pretended not to notice the outburst.
About that time a veteran sportswriter with the gray eyes of a sharpshooter ambled over to me and said: “Don’t worry about it, kid. We all make mistakes. We’re all learning at the same rate. Some of us just started earlier, that’s all.”
The next day I walked into the newsroom and who do you think was sitting in a chair beside my desk and an old L.C. Smith typewriter?
You probably guessed the trackwalker, right?
No sir.
It was the sportswriter. “Let me show you how we do things around here,” he began. And that was my first lesson in journalism.
—
Top o’ the morning!