Article archive / September 1, 2011
Originally published: . Volume 3, No. 1. Source pages: 2.
I come from a newspaper family. At seven I “stuffed papers,” which is how small, rural weeklies at that time often got the second section of the newspaper into the middle of the first section, perhaps just not with child labor. I worked in the “back shop” where lead was melted for the “Linotype,” producing the mold, the “type slug,” for printing. After technology came along to use photographic images of type, I worked in “paste-up,” putting news, photos, or ads on the page. As a teenager I was a photographer and was often sent scurrying around town to find something, anything, to shoot to fill a page right before deadline. I loved it all.
And I especially loved the newspaper “talk.”
Our family dinner table was a think tank of talk about human behavior, community life, the role of the newspaper, the public’s right to know, and, when my father got lucky, about some injustice or somebody’s attempt to hide the truth from the community. It was, for the poor, rural parish in north Louisiana, an oasis.
Journalism students from Centenary, Northwestern and LSUS were always dropping in to the after dinner conversation to hang on to every word. And I did too.
It was a small step for me to go off into the “big blue world” (as my dad called it–all the way to Baton Rouge!) and seek out some new words, and eventually some of my own, in psychology, another noble profession in its search for truth, its similar requirement for self- awareness and social conscience. The words grew and changed as I learned from my adopted doctor fathers and doctor mothers, and I fell in love again, this time with the ideals of psychology, and the unique position we are in for making the world a better place.
My father died his natural death in March 2009 and my mother followed (having stuck around on this earth for him because he was, in truth, a big baby.) And in June that year Act 251 happened. I was shocked (and ashamed for us) by what I saw in our community, and I found that the problems were more important and went deeper than 251. We needed a community newspaper as much as any group anywhere, maybe even more, because we should set a higher bar.
While dealing with my father’s possessions my brother and I discovered one of dad’s many safe deposit boxes. The only thing in this old, obscure box was a cassette tape from 1976. My father had recorded a phone conversation between him and me. I was just starting graduate school at LSU. He was pulling together an election edition of The Coushatta Citizen. We talked about the community, the local and state elections, who was a “good egg” and who couldn’t be trusted and why, and especially, that I should come home, because after all, I needed to vote, didn’t I? I should come home because of my roots, he said. Well, maybe just come home because he missed me, he admitted.
Sometime in 1976 my father had wrapped up this tape recording in a piece of brown paper bag and scrawled across the top of it, “1976: Julie – Forget Me Not.”
This wasn’t the only event that called me to the work of the Times, there were even stranger ones that might cause Jung to raise an eyebrow. But this one required an answer. I won’t forget you.
The Psychology Times was approved last month as an Active Associate Member of the Louisiana Press Association. (I grew up with the press association!) I’m honored. I’ve enjoyed this work tremendously.
Newspapering, like psychology, is a noble profession.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.