Small town news for a small town girl
I got my first paycheck from the Clovis Independent. They hired me the summer after high school, and I remember feeling both humbled and haughty (like all recent high school graduates–I was pretty darned important). I didn’t do very much as their news aide, and wrote only two articles I think, but I kept this summer work on my resume as long as I could. I always made room to describe my contribution to “The Bee Swatters,” the summer softball team: “Maintained positive attitude despite zero-win record.”
On this day
I can’t remember what the feature was called, but one of my favorite things to do was to find items for its 5-year, 10-year and I think 50-year “Remember when’s” or “On this day…” I’d go to the Clovis library branch and heave down these giant binded copies of the paper, and get lost flipping through small town history. At the time, I tired of the Clovis “way of life,” but I couldn’t help loving the stories behind the stories of city politics or high school champions. The ads were as fascinating as the news. The price of beef and cans of peas were often just a few cents.
Senior Stars
I also liked proofreading (and typing into the computer) the Senior Star features, where senior citizens narrated their lives with simple profound statements like: “I married my sweetheart at 17 and left Oklahoma,” “I worked there for 43 years,” and “after my husband died.” I’m a sucker for personal histories, and hidden behind my partition, I would shed tears reading them.
As a reader
In high school, I wondered why full-grown adults with all their faculties would bother with the piddly-lives of students. I saw reporters like Jenny McGill (recently laid-off from Coalinga’s shuttered paper) and Denny Boyles (now working for the Bee) taking serious interest in things like what my tennis coach Dick Ramage had to say about our upcoming match. Apparently, I thought, there was enough paper in the world to publish that trivia.
What I never appreciated at the time was how tremendously fact-checked and fair that public service was. It wasn’t out there to upend the political system, or dig through government records to get dirt. Its mission was to document the everyday folksy life of its residents. I read about the elderly man who walked everyday on Shaw and Temperance Ave. I read about the little kid who made friends with the janitor, after it was discovered that his dad was a custodian before he died. I read about my friends and the high school stars winning things like “All-star super student…of the Valley!” Did anyone else save these clippings from the Clovis Independent?
Back to the present
Before I get even more carried away– and believe me, I can– I ask myself: But, do I read it now? No. If its death wasn’t imminent, would I have noticed? Probably not. If I lived in Clovis, I might subscribe if it were cheap enough, but then again, not until I had kids in school. According to Ulrichs periodicals (which I accessed through a library) the Independent had a circulation of 5,000 paid subscriptions in 2007.
Last night, I told a few of my Clovis expatriate friends about the paper, “Who will write about entitled students and athletes?!” I typed, semi-seriously.
And they were all shocked, as anyone can be shocked on IM.
“What?”
“You’re kidding!”
“I was on their police blotter.” They wrote.
“Really?” responded one skeptically, followed by a long pause. “I didn’t see anything about it on their website.”
At any rate, what’s done is done. Good luck Patti, who I think is still the editor of the Clovis Independent. She may not remember, but she was my boss when I was there, and I admired her and her life. What’s next for newspeople? Who knows. Maybe it’s into the blogosphere for all of us. But on this day in history, this week? A small town girl once again shed tears over memories in the Clovis Independent.
