GENESIS
How DID all this get started? I've been asked why I do what I do'. Here's how it began.
There is nothing wrong with keeping a diary. I tried it when I was a kid, and quickly found it to be a record largely of weather conditions for the days, months and years, plus notes about incidents which had been forgotten and rightfully so. Those sections of diaries which endure and mean something worthwhile for the writer or others were. Thatt finished my diary keeping. I started calling it a ”Journal.”
As a journal it held a hint of being done daily and part of it was to keep a record of want I did, where I went, who I met, what we talked about and, most important, what I understood and thought and what I did about those things as they took place. Some people, especially those living along coastal areas, often take a nautical and call their Journal: a “Log” and make “entries” in their official Log Book as a duty of the one who is in charge and obligated to do so. Before too long you hope a new crew member will be told to take over the task.
I missed that nautical tangent which is an at-sea diary. and went from journal keeping to writing “articles”as they were called it in those days. I admired such successful writers of that time such as O .O.MacIntyre who wrote a syndicated week-days only “column” titled “Day By Day.”
I found myself gathering a stack of such writings - usually one sheet of single-spaced typewritten pages. I remember I made a cardboard binder out of an old cardboard suit box to hold what called ”My Nine Hundred Days.- Part I” .The makeshift binder closed with a string and it got stuffed in a drawer or another, larger box because because I had no file cabinet at the time. The idea was to put them aside in lots of three hundred with the avowed intent of taking one month off between each set. That hiatus never caught on, however. I was hooked, for sure.
Imagine my elation when I found the local weekly paper would use one now and
then - usually around holidays .A national church paper bought one called “Scrapbooks As Textbooks” paid me five dollars. Then, two others, as well. I keep a “scalp list” so eyer so often that list would encourage me to even up the tally of items given away and those which kept a tally to show me how many were the source of real money.. I made good use of my writing experience when I took off for the University in 1939. There I took on pen ames because I had two short stories in one magaine one month and they didn't want the same name every month thereafter eiuther. I have used six such nom de plumes over the years for various reasons. I left the University too start writing copy for WSVA, Harrisonburg ,Va.- commercial copy, program material, and PR releases. Ithen tookla ten year turn at writing sales brochures, installation and operating manuals for a major air-conditioning and heating manufacturer , as well as more PR work,.and a series of Incentive Travel scripts for reintroduction. I loved all of it, but the job moved to Hartford,Ct. and I chose not to go with it. I was welcomed back to WSVA-AM-FM-TV writing copy again and some on air work on talk shows. and I retired at age sixty-two to write.- which I'm still doing. During my earlier stay of eighteen years, I did, for several years , a five-minute thing for week-end use titled TOPIC which I recorded each Friday.. A newspaper editor who heard those programs, asked me to do an “under the cartoon “ editorial feature column in his weekly paper The Shenandoah “Herald”:which I did for three years. .During those years I sold to the “Post” in DC, the Dow-Jones weekly “National Observer”- may it rest in journalistic peace, and in other papers.
I have made use of them in teaching Sunday School, as well - first with teenagers, then with adults for forty-three years.. I have been encouraged along the way by some fine individuals and I promise to tell you about them another day.
A.L.M. April 2, 2004 [c729wds]
