One of the TV news programs was celebrating its anniversary the other day and several of the anchormen and reporters were reminiscing about their very first day of taping – particularly how nervous they’d been and how many mistakes they’d made while reporting live 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 back in the summer of 1973, when The Goffstown News/Banner-Bulletin Publications (which took me about a week to memorize) hired me, sight unseen, over the telephone. I did have some previous writing experience, but 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. Considering flashbulbs were about the size of light bulbs back then, it’s a wonder I still have corneas.
“You’ll need to send us black-and-white Polaroid photos to go with your articles,” the woman who hired me said during that first phone conversation. “Then just mail it all to us once a week.”
The only Polaroid camera I could afford was something called a Swinger. It was small, almost like a toy, 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 margaritas 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...and the editor didn't catch it.
My next assignment was to photograph the construction of a large greenhouse at a flower and garden center in town. The only way my little camera could capture the full length of the greenhouse on film was if I stood about a half-mile away from the place. The end result made it look like an accessory for 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, so she frequently (much too frequently) was in the news. Back then, everything was written on a typewriter, so I had to physically type out every single letter of her name each time I mentioned it in one of my articles.
I have to admit that ever since the first time I set eyes on Lois Lane on TV when I was a young kid, 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, there I was, covering events like a get-acquainted tea social, a square-dancing demonstration and a junior-high poster contest. Needless to say, the job wasn’t quite as daring and exciting 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 anyway. 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 the shadow wasn’t some mysterious apparition…it was just the edge of my fingertip.
Only because I considered my work to be so terrible did I allow 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.”
Believe me, it wasn't.
But even without being paid for a while (make that a long 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, my persistence did pay off. Over the years, the newspaper’s owners changed hands several times and the editors became progressively more adventurous and generous. As the paper grew, so did the size of my camera (along with my photography skills) until I finally got my wish and covered some really exciting stories. You might say I even fulfilled my dream of being rescued by “Superman” when I got trapped in a forest fire and was rescued by a firefighter who easily could have modeled shirtless for a pin-up calendar.
During other assignments, I also was threatened by a satanic cult, was assigned to take photos of an actual ghost, was roughly shoved aside by one of Senator John Glenn’s bodyguards, was sprayed by a skunk, had a police cruiser accidentally crash into my car, and was hugged a little too hard by a pet boa constrictor.
That I really was beginning to resent Lois Lane…
# # #
Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
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