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.
Certainty leaves us unwilling to change beliefs when we’re wrong
Liberal NPR, PBS? Why should tax money pay to influence culture?
Was I ‘fat’? ‘Lazy’? My father’s ugly words made me feel shame
Healthy romance features mutual growth, not just ‘take me as I am’
Getting better at all I do is only way to fight ‘imposter syndrome’
If there’s something you must do, income and vocation might clash
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