THE BIG STORY [W, 2-16-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—THE BIG STORY [W, 2-16-25]

 

[More of my February self-indulgent personal memories, using my birth month as an excuse…]

I liked newspapers for as long as I can remember, which is about four years of age. They had stories that you didn’t have to know how to read to enjoy. Comic strips. There was progression from one panel to the next. Some, like Henry, didn’t even use thought/language balloons. I could see stories, before I could read, long before TV.

There was radio, of course, which I also loved for the stories. You didn’t need to read to enjoy them, either. But radio shows in those days were only “same time, same station.” If you missed an episode of The Lone Ranger or Red Ryder, you simply missed it.

The newspaper was constant, though. Even if my mother told me to get my nose out of the newspaper and run to the store, I could pick the newspaper up later.

Because I started looking at newspapers and listening to the radio for the stories, I began to understand that news itself was narrative. That was probably why my grade school teachers mentioned in their notes to my parents how much I seemed to know about current affairs. I listened to news broadcasts because I found stories everywhere.

I have often said that my interest in becoming a newspaper reporter stemmed from listening to The Big Story radio show, which is mostly true, but I want to give credit to The Indianapolis Times, too, the evening paper when I lived in Indianapolis from age 4 to 10. That was where I got to see the stories of The Phantom and Alley Oop and Joe Palooka and Henry, the kid who had only one hair on his head.

The Big Story radio show ran almost exactly through the years of my youth in Oakland City, 1947-1955. I wanted to go to college, but I knew I might not get to. No money. In those days, though, you didn’t have to be a college grad to get a job on a newspaper. I decided that with or without college, I would be a newspaper man.

So I got on the staff of Oak Barks, our high school newspaper, and worked my way up to Editor. I went around piously intoning that Thomas Jefferson had said that if he had to choose between government and newspapers, he would take newspapers. I figured no one could argue with Thomas Jefferson, so no one could argue with my vocational choice.

In the summer of 1955, I stumbled into admission at IU even without money, and I became a journalism major. But when I was 14, I had promised God I’d be a preacher if “He” saved my sister’s life, and He did. I had not kept my bargain. The guilt of my unfulfilled deal caught up with me the summer after my frosh year. I went back for my sophomore year as a pre-theology major. Of course, the godless state university had no such thing as a pre-theo curriculum, so I became a history major. History is all stories.

I was so disappointed that I had to be a preacher. I had looked forward, so much, for so long, to telling stories, in newspapers. Now, as a preacher, I’d have to give that up. I’d have to write long, boring sermons about whether God exists, and were there really miracles, and why you’d go to hell if you smoked cigarettes.

Even as a history major, though, I did not give up my love affair with newspapers. I took all the history courses that allowed me to read stuff by newspaper guys, especially the muckrakers, like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and the two volumes of The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.

But that very autumn of my sophomore year, Dallas Browning, the District Supt of the Evansville District of The Indiana Conference of the Methodist Church, appointed me to preach every Sunday at the three churches on the Chrisney circuit. A new sermon, every Sunday. I did not know how to write sermons, and I had no time to write sermons. So I told stories.

People seemed to get more out of stories than they did sermons, so I just kept on doing what I had thought I would do as a newspaper man, telling stories, speaking truth to power, like Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens.

Every week, I got to tell The Big Story.

 

John Robert McFarland