A columnist’s life
At the end of a recent telephone interview with a college student who had the misfortune of being assigned to write a story on me, the student asked the dreaded key-to-success question. While I’m not generally in the business of giving career advice, these were my simple suggestions for anyone who might want to be a newspaper columnist: Be curious about everything, read a lot, listen to others and write a lot.
Last Saturday in this column, I profiled Karr Shannon, who wrote columns seven days a week for the Arkansas Democrat from December 1944 until August 1971. His son, Dr. Robert F. Shannon, composed a fascinating biographical sketch for a collection of columns, Karr Shannon’s Best, published in 1973. I was pleased to learn that Karr Shannon was indeed curious about everything, visited with lots of people, read a great deal, wrote a great deal and thought about everything.
The job of a newspaper columnist is quite different from the jobs of those with eight-hour workdays. It’s not necessarily difficult; it’s just different. I like to tell people it’s an “all the time” profession since one is always thinking about the next column and searching for ideas. It’s sort of like being governor. There are no work days and off days. You always are what you are, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. When we quit working from home and return to our normal lives, I will go back to wondering what the young reporters out in the newsroom think of me—the old guy who comes in at odd hours, shuts the door to write and sometimes disappears for days at a time.
“To a casual observer, Karr’s activities may have seemed anything but routine,” Robert Shannon wrote. “He seemed to come and go as he pleased, to peck out columns at his own pace by his own time clock and to spend a great percentage of his time just doing what he damned well pleased. Such observation would be understandable, but underneath the casual look there was a routine. He awoke early, always read the Arkansas Gazette thoroughly, then ate, readied for work, left home between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. and walked two blocks to the streetcar line (later the bus line).
“He would arrive at the Democrat around 8 a.m., check his mail, answer letters, do research, visit with colleagues, write some, make or answer phone calls, proof his column, attend to whatever other business he had, read several more newspapers and magazines, look in on the AP office, go up and chat with the boys in the composing room, then sometime between mid-morning and noon he would depart for his rounds.”
That consisted of walking around downtown Little Rock while, according to his son, “dropping in on friends at their offices, stopping by the lobby of the Marion Hotel, visiting at City Hall or the county courthouse; if a political campaign were in progress, he’d go by the various headquarters (not the show ones, the real backstage ones); watching some construction project, browsing in the Little Rock Public Library, visiting the Arkansas History Commission and finally making the rounds at the state Capitol. He especially liked to spend time at the Capitol.”
The columnist typically would return to the newspaper during the afternoon, read more mail and other newspapers from across the state, finish his column for the next day, and then get home between 4:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. His son said he would do additional reading or writing, eat supper, watch a bit of television, read and write some more, take a hot bath about 9:30 p.m. and go to bed.
“Frequently he’d have trouble going to sleep, especially if struggling with an idea, and he might get up and write or read or just fret,” Robert Shannon wrote. “Ideas would come to him at unexpected times, so he carried a notebook to jot these in and usually kept it close to his bed at night.”
The son said his father read both Little Rock newspapers, the St. Louis newspapers, weekly magazines and other periodicals. Robert Shannon wrote that his father’s most-used books were “in addition to the Bible, reference works—encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, law books, standard history books (especially Dallas T. Herndon’s two-volume history of Arkansas) and Roget’s Thesaurus. His reading appetite was so large that no listing could be complete.”
Robert Shannon said writing was therapy for his father, “his method for crystalizing and clarifying his thoughts, and it was his best medium of exchange. He wrote profusely. In addition to his columns, he wrote hundreds of feature articles, most of which got into print either in the Democrat or in other periodicals. But he wrote a number of such articles that brought only rejection slips.”
Karr Shannon was the author of five books, was a prolific letter-writer and even wrote letters to his children while they were still living at home. Robert Shannon said that ideas would come to his father “in floods at times, and he might write several columns in one afternoon or many columns over a period of several days. Most of the time he was able to produce at a steady pace, but he always kept a reserve supply of columns for the rare dry spells when he couldn’t think of anything to write about.
“Work came easiest to him when he was on a special project or crusade. Then he’d pore over his resource materials and write in a highly efficient manner bordering on euphoria. When a certain theme was preoccupying him, and when he was clicking, writing was one of his greatest pleasures.”