THE SIDETRACKED REPORTER [R, 1-7-21]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

THE SIDETRACKED REPORTER  [R, 1-7-21]

[Warning: there’s no point or moral to this column, no spiritual justification. It’s just a self-indulgent piece of my personal story.]

I have often said that my desire to be a newspaper reporter came from listening to The Big Story show on radio. That makes sense, because internet research points out that The Big Story debuted on radio April 2, 1947, right after we had moved from Indianapolis to the little farm [“Five acres and independence…”] three miles outside Oakland City, on March 21, and continued to 1955, when I left high school. It was also on TV from 1949 to 1958, but I don’t recall ever seeing it on TV. We had no car and no TV. Radio was our contact with the outside world.

But I may have given radio and The Big Story too much of the credit for my journalistic ambitions. Some goes to The Evansville Courier.

I’m a little surprised now that my parents used money for a newspaper subscription. We had so little money, and a newspaper could be considered a luxury, especially since you could get news from the radio. On top of that, living in the country, the newspaper came by mail, and so was always a day late. Even more, Daddy could not read, except with a bright light and a big magnifying glass, so his reading was reserved for things like instructions for assembling the brooder house. But Mother was a literate person, and older sister Mary V was a consummate reader, although she preferred books. For whatever reason, we had a newspaper subscription.

I think I was the main beneficiary of the daily newspaper, because I was able to keep up with baseball talk on the school bus and playground by reading the sports pages. On the school bus, I could contribute the stats of my beloved Reds, a love bequeathed to me by Grandma Mac, against those bandied about by the Cardinals fans on the bus. The Cardinals were major in southern Indiana because of the reach of Harry Caray on KMOX radio out of St. Louis.

Keeping up with the news in general, though, seemed to be a part of my life from an early age. I recently discovered my old report cards. My grades were always best in social studies, and my Indy teachers—grades 1 through 4—commented on how much I seemed to know about current affairs. That, of course, makes sense for a newspaper reporter, too.

I think it was from the newspaper baseball pages that my love of lists comes; I pored over the batting and pitching statistics lists that the paper printed. Since I could not count on the newspapers staying around long--because newspapers were useful for many things on a farm, such as starting fires in the stoves--I made my own paper and pencil lists for later research.

And, of course, the newspaper was important because of a feature you couldn’t get on the radio, “the funny pages…”

I have written, including in The Strange Calling, that one of the reasons my friends and I went to church was because it was the quickest way to get the news of our comic strip hero, “The Phantom.” There were only 3 or 4 of us in Mary Louise Hopkins’ Sunday School class, but we would hurry down to our corner of the basement at Forsythe Methodist Church [named after an early preacher there] after “opening exercises,” before Mary Louise managed to get down the narrow stairs, to find out from John Kennedy [not the one who was president] what was happening with The Phantom.

John’s bachelor uncle, Jim, lived in town, where he didn’t have to wait for newspaper delivery. With the right change, he could buy one out of a box right there on Main Street. He came to breakfast each Sunday morning to his sister’s house in the country, with the newspaper, and nephew John was able to make a quick read of “The Phantom” before leaving for Sunday School, where he breathlessly passed the Phantom news along to the rest of us. That led to quick and endless futuring by our “committee,” anticipating what might happen next to The Phantom and his adversaries, even continuing on the school bus the next morning.

Also, unconsciously, I think I wanted to be a reporter so that I would not be left out. If you’re covering the news, you are part of what’s going on, you are on the inside. It was important to me to be included. Because I didn’t want to be left out, I didn’t want anyone else to be left out, either. From my earliest writing, I wanted to tell the stories of those who could not tell their stories for themselves.

I don’t regret the detour that took me away from a career in journalism. I had a good time as a preacher. I got to be part of an inclusive story, and I got to tell that story

I do appreciate, though, that journalistic goal that kept me going through my teen years. It gave me focus, and a love of words.

John Robert McFarland