The Times, they aren't a changin' ...

 

Thanksgiving Day this year was a quiet one for our family. Stayed home. No drama, good food and fellowship. This long holiday weekend, too, has been one to stay inside and be productive. Have been looking over old boxes, cleaning out old files. Found this piece I wrote 40 years ago. It appeared as an unsigned “Editorial Comment,” which by most traditions in the newspaper business means it was supposed to reflect the opinion of the paper, not that of an individual writer or columnist. The owners published few editorials of their own. They wanted to avoid controversy that might annoy readers and advertisers. Small town. Didn’t bother me. I didn’t like writing editorials very much because I was, and perhaps still am, too vain to write anonymous pieces, worth reading or not.

About 20 minutes before deadline, at the last minute, the owners this time decided a little word about the holiday would be a nice touch to fill a hole on the front page. The press would roll in fifteen minutes or so. “Make it short, I need it now,” Larry Smith said as he walked by my desk. Blunt. Owned the paper with this wife, Alma. Great story teller, could write like the Dickens, himself. Made good the old fashioned way by marrying the boss’s daughter.

Forty years ago. I now read this today, and it could have been written last week… 

 

 

 

I bought another book...

 

 

Sometimes I pull out one of my old typewriters I frequently use to write a little nonsense. One of my favorites is this portable 1940s vintage Smith-Corona Clipper I picked up at an antique shop in Bristol (NH) a few years ago for thirty-five dollars. Belonged to a retired school teacher. The keys work, fingers work, all is good...I use a word processor for the more serious stuff. Reason is obvious.

 

Paul Scott Mowrer (1887-1971) won the Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence in 1928, the first Pulitzer awarded in that category. He wrote six plays, many books, and spent 24 years in Europe covering wars and directing news abroad for the Chicago Daily News, later returning to Chicago in 1934, to become chief editorial writer for the paper, then editor from 1935 to 1944. 

At heart he was a poet. Retiring to New Hampshire in 1949, he was the state's first Poet Laureate, holding that office from 1968 until his death. His poetry, one might say was "traditionalist." Of the  "modernist" poets popular today, he writes, they "are willfully obscure." Their dominance has "led most literate people to conclude that 'poetry' is something  they cannot understand, and would not like if they could...an art that has failed to strike roots into some sort of popular favor is an art self doomed." Amen to that. - Quotations from a profile by Robert Kinerk, NH Union Leader, July 14, 1987.