I was hired to fix the Bolivar Commercial. I was a brash 24-year-old managing editor brought in to shake up a very bad small daily newspaper in Cleveland, Miss. I made some enemies in the building, but I fixed that newspaper, at least for the time.
Nobody in the newspaper was happy to have an outsider come in and change what they had been doing for years. The head of the composing department hated me, because he had been accustomed to telling editors that the things they wanted couldn’t be done.
I called his bluff and used his own equipment to show his people how to do what I wanted. He seethed with anger, because he didn’t want things to change. But he knew he had lost when I shot a film positive and stripped it into a page negative and double-burned a plate to produce the reversed caption I wanted on my first day there. He hated me — and he was angry the entire time I was there — but he didn’t lie again about what couldn’t be done.
We don’t know how to love until we learn to set our egos aside
THE McELROY ZOO: Meet Oliver, the furball who taught me to love cats
Every addiction is heart’s effort to fill inner hole that requires love
Have you finished your tax return? That’s a ‘do-it-yourself mugging’
The time is rapidly coming when I’m quitting Facebook for good
Who’s the hero of Chick-fil-A wars? Rachel set an example for all of us
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’
When love finally dies, it’s like a fever breaks and the pain is gone