Recalling fond memories of early career in newspapers

I was going to take a break from writing columns, especially when I realized how long I have been writing them, perhaps enough to insulate my office walls.

Many years ago, with a new graduate degree in philosophy and no job in sight, I turned to working for a newspaper. I got the job with no newspaper experience but only because the publisher graduated from the same college I had done.

I loved to write but knew nothing about newspapers. But I thought I knew from my studies what the philosopher Kierkegaard wrote about the dangers of newspaper work: “But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up.” Not actually a ringing endorsement for the profession I was about to enter.

My managing editor showed no mercy on my fancy degree but threw me out to see if I could survive as an editor and later special assignment reporter.

In those early days, there was one big table around which gathered a motley crew of editors who went to war each day getting out a paper to meet the deadline. I can still envision them all, some smoking cigars or cigarettes (being a philosophy graduate, I smoked a pipe), and drinking far too much coffee.

Strange, but I remember those days fondly. After the paper was put to bed, we relaxed, told stories, smoked, and got ready for the next day. We literally built a community dependent on one another to survive a deadline, pitching in to help each other, and laughing a great deal. I think I learned more about life there than in any school I attended.

When I paid a visit a few years ago to my old newspaper, I realized the wisdom that you can’t go home again. There was no big table in the room, no clicking typewriters, or editors screaming at reporters to get stories in before deadline. It was very quiet, more like a tomb than a newsroom.

But as I looked around the room the memories of editors and reporters scurrying around, the click of typewriter keys, the phones ringing, and the smoke from cigars and cigarettes floating above gave me pause to wonder about time itself, what was past and present and future. It was the same lesson I learned later in teaching — that online classes may be needed from time to time but nothing beats in-person relationships formed in the classroom.

Marcel Proust, a French novelist who wrote among other books, “Remembrance of Things Past,” wrote these words that return to me as tokens of truth: “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

I cannot return to days of old which are long ago because I am not the same person I once was. Or, as I often thought, life is not what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you. And I choose to remember those early days fondly, with good memories of friends and stories told of defeat and courage and kindnesses.

So much for the break from writing columns. But these memories of things and people past remain within, where the only time is the eternal now.

John C. Morgan is a teacher and writer who began as a newspaper editor. His weekly columns appear here and in other publications.