Tuesday, October 23, 2018

I WANTED TO DANGLE BY MY TOENAILS ABOVE A RIVER OF HUNGRY ALLIGATORS



One of the TV news programs was celebrating its anniversary the other day, and several of the anchormen and reporters were reminiscing about their first day on the job - how nervous they’d been, and how many mistakes they’d made while reporting on some of their stories.  As I listened, I found myself thinking back to my first year as a correspondent for a weekly newspaper.

It was the summer of 1973, when what is now called Neighborhood News was then known as The Goffstown News/Banner-Bulletin Publications (which took me about a week to memorize).  

I was hired, sight unseen, over the telephone.  I didn’t have much writing experience, other than a few articles in my high-school newspaper, and I knew so little about photography, I once nearly blinded myself when I accidentally held the camera backwards and shot off the flash directly into my eyes.  Flash bulbs were about the size of light bulbs back then, so it’s a wonder I still have corneas.

“You’ll need to send us black-and-white Polaroid photos with your articles,” the woman who hired me said during that first phone conversation. “Then just mail us all of your stuff once a week.”

The only Polaroid camera I could afford was something called a Swinger.  It was small and took only wallet-sized photos that had to immediately be coated with a formaldehyde-smelling sealer to prevent the picture from fading away.  And after the photos were coated, they had a tendency to curl up as they dried, so I had to flatten them with a book.

My very first assignment was to interview a woman whose handcrafted ceramic stein had won a blue ribbon at a New England ceramics show.  Not only did the off-center, shaky photos I took make her stein look as if she’d downed about 12 martinis before she’d made it, when I sent it to the paper, I accidentally wrote on the caption, “Her first-prize stain” instead of stein.

My next assignment was to photograph the construction of three large greenhouses at a flower and garden center in town.  In order for my little camera to capture the full length of the greenhouses on film, I had to stand about a half-mile away from the place.  The end result was something that looked as if it had come with Barbie’s Dream House. 

At the time, the newspaper covered only “nice” news.  If some local official was caught betting the town’s funds on Galloping Gertie in the fifth race at Rockingham Park, my editor didn’t want to hear about it.  But if little Suzy Perkins won the potato-sack race at the grammar school’s annual field day, well, it was front-page news.

And I had a lot of trouble learning how to spell the name Margaretta Schneiderheinze, who was a prominent figure in the Order of the Eastern Star and its charitable work in the community, so she frequently (too frequently) was in the news.

Ever since I was a kid, from the first time I set eyes on Lois Lane on TV, I dreamed of being a reporter just like her. I pictured myself going on dangerous, exciting assignments where I’d end up dangling by my toenails from a cliff directly above a river full of hungry alligators and being rescued by Superman just in the nick of time. 

Instead, here I was, covering things like a get-acquainted tea social, a square-dancing demonstration and a poster contest.  Needless to say, the job wasn’t quite as daring as I’d imagined it would be.  Poor Superman would have been yawning into his cape.

And, as the weeks progressed, my photography became worse instead of better. But to my surprise (and ultimate embarrassment), no matter how terrible my photos were, the paper always printed them.  I had so many dark ones published, people began to think I specialized in silhouettes.  And there often was an unusual shadow in one corner of my photos.  It took me a while to figure out that the shadow wasn’t some mysterious apparition…it was just the edge of my finger in front of the lens.

Because I considered my work to be so terrible, I allowed three months to pass without getting a paycheck before I finally gathered the courage to mention it to someone at the newspaper.  Thus began a long series of, “Your check’s in the mail.”

But even without being paid for a while, I still stuck with the job because I knew it probably would be the closet I’d ever get to fulfilling my dream of becoming another Lois Lane.

As it turned out, over the years, as the newspaper’s owners changed hands a few times and the editors became progressively more adventurous, I finally got my wish and covered some really exciting stories.  In the process, I got trapped in a forest fire and was rescued by a firefighter who easily could have modeled shirtless for a  pin-up calendar. I was threatened by a satanic cult, assigned to take photos of a genuine ghostly spirit, was roughly shoved aside by one of Senator John Glenn’s bodyguards, and was hugged a little too hard by a boa constrictor.

You know, now that I look back, maybe covering those get-acquainted tea socials wasn’t quite so bad after all.

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