No Longer a Single Day: A Different Kind of Christmas Story

It’s Christmas time again.

That statement infers the experience of Christmas in previous years, of course, and the characteristic of the holiday being observed once per year on December 25. As we grow older, Christmas Day evokes memories of Christmas past; not the ghost from the Charles Dickens story, but the sensory experiences that our brains associate with the calendar date December 25 and the various places we spent that time, across time.

It’s a natural process that helps us make sense of the passage of time – or, in this case, the passage of Christmases – and it’s primarily built upon changes we have noticed. Across time, the people with whom we interact are different, the toys the kids got this year are so much different than the ones you got at that age, the foods we have for Christmas dinner are different, and so forth.

I present this explanation to set up another explanation: How Christmas stopped being a day in late December for me and instead became a daily celebration more amazing than I could have imagined as a child, or even just a few years ago. To do this, I’ll start with a Christmas memory of my own.

In 1972, in a housing subdivision on the east end of Sweetwater, Tennessee, Christmas Day arrived for a family of five living in a wood-frame house, situated about midway on a hillside populated with a circle of homes that marked the end of the subdivision. A modestly decorated Christmas tree stood in one corner of the living room with a high pile of wrapped gift boxes underneath, and three young boys, each sitting cross-legged on the floor, waiting patiently to be handed one of those boxes in turn.

One of those kids was a 7-year-old rape victim, beginning what would become four decades of mind-torturing silence about the attack. For me, Christmas Day that year was less about Jesus or a turkey dinner or opening Christmas presents as it was about finding psychological refuge in all of those things so that I didn’t have to feel alone, vulnerable, and loathsome for just one day.

The day did not disappoint in that regard; it was a fabulous Christmas, all told, with me and my brothers feeling on top of the world with our new toys. We each got several things we had asked Santa Claus to bring, but the one gift I absolutely loved was a battery-operated robot that walked and featured a “video” screen (actually see-through plastic that encased a mechanical wheel of preset space-related images) in its chest. Given that my mom and dad were hosiery mill workers at the time, that robot must have set them back a few hours of pay.

But I didn’t get to play with that robot for very long. Just weeks later, the robot and everything else were gone in an instant. The flames spread so rapidly that had we been home at the time, instead of just up the street visiting one of our neighbors, I would not be sitting here writing this essay today.

When you’ve lost everything – your sense of safety, self-worth, peace, trust of others, innocence, toys, books, records, clothes, and everything else you possessed – before your eighth birthday, you are standing on a dangerous, dark roadway that relatively few ever survive for long.

For many years, I didn’t think I would survive it, either. There were days I didn’t want to survive to the next, and I doubt anyone around me at any point in time realized it.

And that brings me to this Christmas Day, in 2015. It’s my first Christmas Day as a resident of Missouri, as a college instructor, as a media researcher in a doctoral program, and as a lot of other statuses I could have never imagined 43 years ago.

It is this daily wonder and amazement at all that I find myself within now, and what I had to somehow survive to get here, that brought another sort of realization, one that refutes the notion that Christmas comes once per year on December 25.

Instead, Christmas has, for me, become a daily experience of experiences I wouldn’t trade for anything. At the top of that list is waking up every day knowing I am the father of one Ryan Britt in Arlington, Texas. Like his father, he has proven to possess resilience against the worst life can bring.

Being where I am now, I can hardly wait to see where he goes. That is going to be a thousand times more exciting than unwrapping that toy robot in 1972.

So, how to describe or maybe give a name to this Christmas gift that is opened each and every day? A number of words or phrases could be considered, among them, “personal redemption,” “wisdom from determination,” or maybe even “attained peace.”

But I’ve drawn upon my collegiate literature studies background to come up with what I think is the most fitting name: The Perpetual Gift of Being There, an intentional reference to the Jerzy Kosinski novel “Being There” and the film of the same name that starred Peter Sellers’ in his last role. In essence, it’s all about finding yourself doing the most extraordinary things in the most unlikely of circumstances, and somehow making it all make sense to everyone else.

That’s what I hope to do in the years to come with regard to how we use media content to shape our perceptions of time, space, and memory.

Speaking of time perceptions, the Missouri School of Journalism was founded in 1908, a full 63 years before Tyler State College, the predecessor to the University of Texas at Tyler, even existed.

Four years ago, I was marking my first Christmas after having taken a leap of faith in returning to college for one last shot at finishing a bachelor’s degree. That was at UT Tyler, and at that point in time, I wasn’t even thinking about entering a graduate school program anywhere.

But that was when The Perpetual Gift of Being There started appearing in my life.  Less than 17 months later, on May 10, 2013, I was degree-less no more and, although an exhaustive records search has not been conducted, there were faculty members in the Department of Literature and Languages who thought I may be the first UT Tyler graduate from that department to be accepted into the graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, where I spent the next two years earning a master’s degree.

I can say with more certainty that I am probably the first English or journalism student at UT Tyler to teach and perform research work at the Missouri School of Journalism. There may soon be a day when you can do an online search for “Terry Britt and media theory,” “Terry Britt and neuroscience,” or “Terry Britt and memory studies,” and get several pages of results.

There once was a day when I thought the only thing with which my name would be associated would be something like “funeral services at 2 p.m.” and strong doubt that anyone aside from my parents and my younger brothers would bother to show up.

So, this Christmas Day, by all means please celebrate as you wish, attend a service, ring your church bells and, if you are fortunate enough to have the following, savor your Christmas dinner, open your gifts, and hug and kiss the people you love.

But if there is anything I could wish for you for Christmas, it would be to wake up as I will and realize that the extraordinary and the priceless are not restricted to experiences and memories that are but once a year. Believe me, it’s an awesome gift.

Blessings to each of you,

Terry L. Britt

PhD Student/Graduate Instructor

Missouri School of Journalism

University of Missouri

#thefuturedrbritt

#mediatimespacememory

A Short List About A Long Career

In looking back over the 29 years I’ve spent in newspapers, I realize just how many highs and lows I’ve experienced in getting where I am now.  So, for your general interest or need for a good laugh, I’ve compiled a short list of “bests” and “worsts” from my time in the print wars.

Best thing that ever happened to me: Getting hired as a summer “sports correspondent” at age 14 for the now-defunct Tri-County Observer in Madisonville, Tenn.  As noted in a previous post on this blog, the unexpected opportunity probably saved my life at that time.

Worst thing that ever happened to me:  Actually, it’s a tie between the phone calls I got on Dec. 8, 1999, and March 15, 2005 – informing me that my father and mother, respectively, had died.

Best once-in-a-lifetime journalism assignment:  Covering the Canton (TX) High School Band in Ireland during the week of St. Patrick’s Day in March 1999.  Anyone who was on that trip still remembers it fondly and why not?  Even better, I managed to get a live story back to Canton for that week’s issue of the Canton Herald, thanks to the assistance of the Irish Times online division office.  The fact that I was forced by my employer to use personal vacation time to take the trip was the one thing that kept it from being perfect.

Best workplace:  The University of Texas at Tyler Patriot Talon.  That’s right, a college newspaper takes the prize for best place I’ve ever worked.  That’s a reflection of the top-notch young journalists I got to know there and a newsroom equipped like one should be, or it’s a damn sad comment on the professional publications for which I’ve worked.  Or both.

Worst workplace:  Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal in Tupelo, MIss.  Only 15 months after being hired as sports department copy desk editor, I was shown the door via the lawsuit-dodging, vague statement of “We feel you don’t fit into our future plans.”  My biggest regret is ever thinking this publication and its hapless management fit into mine.

Most life-changing experience:  Being on the staff of the Desoto Times in Hernando, Miss., chiefly because of two people there who helped me turn things around – professionally and personally – after four years of feeling like Merle Haggard’s verse about a snowball headed for hell.  I worked there just six months because my position was cut unexpectedly, but I cannot think of six months that meant more in getting me back on the right track.

Worst thing I’ve ever been subjected to as a journalist:  Being forced to wear this at a public event….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most surreal moments:  Interviewing bluegrass music legends Bill Monroe and Jimmy Davis, walking down the hallway of Martins Mill High School with Laura Bush, being in the same (albeit large) room with Walter Cronkite, and standing on a walkway looking out over the Cliffs of Moher on the west coast of Ireland.

Best time I ever had keeping an insane work schedule:  In the fall and winter of 2000-2001, I had a moonlighting gig as Dallas-Fort Worth correspondent for a national high school sports website.  I was still putting in about 45 hours per week at my regular newspaper, but trotting off to the Metroplex on Thursday evenings and Saturday afternoons to cover Class 4A and Class 5A football games, along with other sports like volleyball, cross country, soccer, and basketball.  It marked the first time any of my work started to appear online.  It also gave me personal experience in the infamous dot-com bust about that time, as the company operating the website failed to find venture capitalist funding to keep me and other journalists on its payroll after January 2001.  But was it ever fun while it lasted.

Worst realization at the end of the day:  Thinking about how many fry cooks and grocery store shelf stockers were making a higher hourly wage.

Best realization at the end of the day:  How many family scrapbooks would include “By Terry Britt” in their pages.

Austin Awaits

(reprinted with permission of Van Zandt News)

Is “goodbye” harder to say the second time around?

Maybe it depends on the circumstance, but it is a question I once thought I would never have to consider regarding my life in Van Zandt County, Texas.

For those readers who don’t know my professional background, I spent seven years here from 1994-2001, before taking a sports reporter position with the Denton Record-Chronicle.

At the time, I reasonably thought I would never be back in Van Zandt County as a reporter. But like so many others in all walks of life, I learned the grandest plans do not always come to fruition.

So, after bouncing around the south central United States for several years, looking for the perfect newspaper job that never quite materialized, fortune would have it that I came back to Van Zandt Newspapers in November 2007.

In the nearly six years that have gone by, I have to say the experience has been even better than before. A vast number of people around the county were happy to see my byline again, and took time to say so in person.

And just like the time before, the people, places and subjects of my reporting work here were varied and unique, sometimes controversial, but always providing an enriching experience for a writer.

So here I am writing a farewell column again. This time, though, the reason for departing Van Zandt Newspapers is one I could have never imagined until recently.

You see, for the past two years, I’ve been leading a double life, trotting off to Tyler most weekdays and transforming into a superior-level college student.

I did not get to finish a college degree I started immediately after high school many years ago. I thought it was a distant dream I would never realize.

It takes courage to make any dream come true, and in the summer of 2011, I took the necessary leap of faith and enrolled full-time at the University of Texas at Tyler.

No part of what transpired since then was easy – but nothing good ever is.

I never thought much about doing anything beyond finishing a bachelor’s degree until I started to realize how much I loved doing research and academic writing.

I started to check into graduate school programs last year. I took the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) in November – the absolute hardest test I have taken in my life – and scored high enough that I was suddenly getting contacted by schools across the country.

Before this year, I never thought much about places like Boston University, Syracuse, Michigan, Northwestern and Indiana.

No, Harvard, Columbia and Stanford were not on the list. Try as you might, you can’t make everyone fall in love with you.

But the University of Texas at Austin’s Graduate School of Journalism was on the list, and Austin will be my new home starting next week.

Dreams can change very suddenly and unexpectedly, much like life in general. Over the years, I’ve learned it is a good idea to accept that and let it take you to greater things.

I may not be around in person or in the local newspapers anymore, but I hope you will be hearing a lot about me in the years to come.

If you would like to keep up with what I am doing on the way to a PhD, send me a Facebook request or follow my blog at www.terrybritt.wordpress.com.

Take care, and may God bless each of you.

Why I’ve Adopted Satchel Paige’s Sixth Rule

“When you look back, you know how long you’ve been going and that just might stop you from going any farther.  And with me, there was an awful lot to look back on.  So I didn’t.”

–     from Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever by Satchel Paige

 

If there has been anyone in modern times who exemplified greatness in the face of overwhelming obstacles, it was baseball legend Leroy “Satchel” Paige.  Perhaps the greatest pitcher in the game’s history, Paige had to spend most of his professional career outside the major leagues simply because he was a black man playing in baseball’s shameful era of segregation.

The excerpt above from Paige’s autobiography refers to the sixth, and most famous, of his six rules for staying young – a set of sayings that, in the same book, Paige admitted was not his own invention but ascribed to him by an east coast sportswriter – and the only one of the six, Paige stated, that he truly followed in his life: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

I’ve never been a baseball pitcher and never will be one.  No one has ever refused me the use of a restroom or the booking of a hotel room because they didn’t like my skin color.  Yet I can relate quite well to Paige’s sixth rule and the reasoning behind it, so much so that I’ve adopted it as a personal motto and Paige has become my role model of personal philosophy in dealing with life’s twists and turns, good and bad.  Much of what follows deals with some very horrific experiences I have never talked about publicly, until now.  The reason I am finally opening up about so much has to do with where I stand in life now, and where a lot of other people, especially children and teens, need to see they can eventually reach as well.

For those who know me, friends and people I’ve worked with in some capacity over the course of a 30-year journalism career, or those who have met me and have carried the notion that I am a well-adjusted, confident man who benefited from a solid upbringing, all I can say is, “Wow, did I ever have you completely fooled.”

Instead, what you have known to this point was a man who lived most of his childhood and adult life with one foot constantly dangling off the cliff of oblivion and self-destruction.  I had one thing going for me as a child, and that was an above-average intellect – and even that was a double-edged sword considering the incessant bullying I suffered at school, from the time I entered into the first grade to my high school graduation in 1983.

But there was worse I endured and much of it before I had made it out of elementary school.

When I was 6 years old, I was sexually assaulted in the home of a neighbor on our block, with my mother and two younger brothers in the living room, totally unaware of what was taking place.  I was terrified and crying as we went home immediately and then I heard what I never expected to hear, but did not dare protest against it:  My mother pleaded with me to say nothing to anyone about the incident, else my father would find out and probably do something horrible to the man responsible, his family, and who knew who else.

I said I would keep quiet about it, pretend it never happened, and I understood why.  Even at that age, I was perceptive enough to see the beginnings of my father’s physical and psychological plummet.  I knew he had a bad temper and a very protective stance when it came to his family.  In all probability, it would have led a rage-fueled killing spree and probably suicide if I told the police, who would have to tell him, or told anyone else, for that matter.  So I went through the rest of my childhood and teen years with a very dark knowledge and horrid self-image throughout, but I said nothing.

My father died in December 1999.  He never did learn what had happened to me.

I did not then and have never blamed my mother for asking for my silence about the incident.  She could not have borne it any more easily than I did, but the alternative might have been unthinkable.  Yet I cannot help but think the guilt, coupled by so much family hardship in the three years that followed, led to another incident that just about shattered me mentally and emotionally as a child.

I don’t know what happened to the man responsible, but I hope his parents got him the psychological help he obviously needed and that he never did anything like this again.  Being 6 years old, I didn’t think about the broader implications of keeping silent, only that the sooner I could forget about it all, the better off I would be.  Of course, I never forgot it, and I was in my 30s before I finally told a psychological counselor about it.  Somehow, I managed to cope with it as best as I could.

It was less than a year after that incident that we were suddenly homeless.  This time, being at a neighbor’s house turned out to be a life-saving blessing as my mother was rushed to her friend’s window to see that our home was totally engulfed in flames.  In an instant, everything we had but the family car and the clothes we were wearing was gone.

We slept on couches and fold-out beds at my grandparents’ house for a while, and then lived in a double-bed motel room that my parents managed to get on a cut rate out of the owner’s sympathy.  Finally, after the insurance money came in and our replacement home was being built on the same lot, we lived for months in a small three-room rental trailer in the local RV park.

Shortly after that, my father ruptured his side at his weekend job and never worked again, suffering a complete nervous breakdown six months after the emergency surgery.  We very nearly lost the home we just had rebuilt; I woke up very early one morning with a feeling that something was wrong and walked into the living room to find my mom in tears with two men from a mortgage company threatening to foreclose on the spot if she didn’t cut them a check for several hundred dollars, which she didn’t have.  Something was worked out at the last minute – I don’t know exactly what – but I basically lost count during this time how often the refrigerator was nearly empty, or how often I overheard my mom on the phone, begging a local grocery for bread and milk on store credit.

None of this, however, was worse on me than the day I walked into the kitchen just in time to see my mom swallowing the entire contents of a pill bottle.  She told me to leave her alone, that she was going back to her bedroom to sleep, but I wouldn’t let her.  I don’t know where my dad was at that moment, but as soon he pulled the car into the driveway, I was out there to let him know what had happened.

We barely got her to the local emergency room on time.  She underwent a stomach pump and spent several days in the hospital.  When she did finally come home (actually, to my grandparents’ home), it was like she was in another existence.

It was three weeks before she didn’t have to ask someone else who I was.

There were some pretty horrible things said to me and about me by classmates who had little knowledge of few, if any, of the circumstances.  It didn’t get much better as I grew older, and by the time I had started high school, I was a depression-laden mess who had stopped caring about classwork or doing much of anything else.  I didn’t want to be around anyone, at school or at home, and put up with going to church only because I was forced to go.

I don’t know if I would be writing this today had it not been for an unexpected opportunity given to me near the end of my freshman year in high school.  I had picked up a summer job as the official scorer for the local men’s softball league, and the sports editor of one of the local newspapers caught word of that through a mutual acquaintance.  It led to the start of my newspaper journalism career – at the age of 14 – and it probably saved my life, to be honest.

It was not a cure-all, though, and years later, while in college, I started a heavy drinking habit out of self-loathing more than anything.  Fortunately, I had some friends and journalism colleagues who saw what was happening and intervened.  But ongoing social and psychological struggles, and a lack of money, led me to becoming a college dropout after three-and-a-half years of coursework in which I never performed to my potential.

I drifted around to a few minimum-wage jobs for a time, spent a couple of years in retail computer and software sales, got into a short-lived marriage with the only silver lining being the birth of my only son, Ryan, and fell headlong into bankruptcy.  Nothing was going right for me and it looked like nothing ever would.

There was one saving grace:  I never stopped believing in myself as a writer and journalist.

In researching baseball history and learning about the life and legend that was Satchel Paige, I began to understand the power of belief in self.  Here was a man who endured the worst treatment from other people on an almost-daily basis, but still carried so much confidence in his ability on the mound that he would often put on a show by calling in his outfielders to sit on the infield grass while he struck out the side.  Other times, he would amaze crowds by throwing his warmup pitches over a chewing gum wrapper placed somewhere on home plate.

Perhaps the best lesson I’ve taken from studying Paige is this:  No matter how hard others try to break you, demean you, and no matter what they say about you, the best response is to do what you do best; just go to the mound and keep throwing – hard, precise, and utterly unhittable.

For the past 20 years, that’s exactly what I did, all on the heels of one of the most hurtful things ever said to me, and it was by my now ex-wife and ex-mother-in-law:  “You need to grow up and get a real job, because you will turn out to be nothing working in newspapers.  In fact, you are deluded by grandeur.”

I never forgot those words, but not in the way they thought I should remember them.

While it is true I’ve never made much money since then and moved around a lot, I changed for the better.  I got back to what I knew I did best and kept getting better at it.  I started winning press association awards and built up a fairly impressive portfolio of articles that included interviews with some well-known people in one circle or another, as well as those who deserved a lot better than they received in life.  In 2002, I won an award for a sports feature story in a competition that spanned six states, and I topped two other finalists who both worked for a newspaper nearly five times larger in circulation.

There was just one thing that was always missing.

One of my favorite Satchel Paige stories is his rendition in Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever of having abandoned the 1937 Negro National League season in favor of being a hired gun charged with winning the Dominican championship for a baseball team sponsored by a dictator, Rafael Trujillo:

“But by the seventh inning we were a run behind and you could see Trujillo lining up his army.  They began to look like a firing squad.

In the last of the seventh, we scored two runs and went ahead, six to five.

You never saw Ol’ Satch throw harder after that. I shut them out the last two innings and we’d won.

I hustled back to our hotel and the next morning we blowed out of there in a hurry.

We never did see Trujillo again.  I ain’t sorry.”

Even when you feel like you’ve gotten into more than you bargained for, a little self-belief can make it turn out well.  That summarized my big leap back to college two years ago to finally finish the bachelor’s degree that eluded me more than 20 years earlier.  There were times I felt frustrated and tired, and times I openly wondered if I had bitten off more than I could chew with a 55-minute commute each way and having to continue to work in another county as a newspaper reporter.

But this was a different me, and it started to show quickly — in everything from homework to exams to research papers and projects.  Before the successful end in May of this year (2013), I had accepted membership in three national honor societies, earned one of the university’s major scholarships, finished runner-up for a regional fellowship award, and tallied a 3.8 grade point average for 52 credit hours over four semesters.

I also smacked it out of the park on the GRE in November and suddenly started getting contacted by graduate school journalism programs across the country.  A few of those included Northwestern, Boston University, Syracuse, Indiana, Michigan, Alabama, North Texas, Texas Tech, University of Chicago and the one I eventually chose, the University of Texas at Austin.

If I am “deluded by grandeur,” then all I can say at this point is there are a hell of a lot of people in the academic world suffering from the same delusion about Terry L. Britt.

One person who certainly didn’t see me as “deluded” was Dr. Catherine Ross at the University of Texas at Tyler (my new alma mater), who saw so much potential in me as a future college professor that she gave me teaching assistant duties through an independent study course in my final semester as an undergraduate.  It wasn’t a journalism course, either; it was British literature.  By all indications, I shined like the Texas sun in July.

“Let me tell you, it takes a lot of courage to set foot on a university campus after that many years,” she told me one day, “and accomplish what you have going up against people half your age.  That is one reason why you should become a college professor.”

By that point, though, courage was something I did not lack, not after about 40 years of relying on courage just to wake up every day.

Satchel Paige was 42 years old before he finally got a chance to pitch for a major league baseball club.  That was in 1948, and all he did was go 6-1 and help the Cleveland Indians win the World Series championship that year.  I’m 47 now, and I guess you could say I’m finally getting my chance at the academic major leagues, going for a master’s degree and then a doctorate.

That’s not too bad of an opportunity for a guy who was far more likely to put a loaded revolver to his head before his 16th birthday.

My biggest concerns now are finding a reasonably priced apartment in Austin and a part-time job that can co-exist with graduate studies.

That’s ok, though.  I’ve been through far worse.

The real reason I have opened up publicly about my experiences — good and bad — is this:  I know you are out there, the boys and girls who endure so much hurt every day, at school and online, from those who don’t like the way you look or the way you dress.  The same goes for everyone, children and adults, who is suffering physical abuse or sexual abuse, or live daily with the mental and emotional darkness of depression

No one deserves any of this.  You didn’t ask for it and you didn’t have it coming.  Horrible and destructive experiences are hard to forget, but you don’t have to let them rule you for the rest of your life – and I am living proof of it.  I am not extraordinary.  I don’t have superhero powers and I don’t have a cast-iron heart.  I’ve made mistakes and have done things I regret, much like anyone else.  But I can tell you this much:  There is something stronger within you, a force that will carry you to the greatness and fulfillment of the person you truly are, regardless of the darkness and hurt that has battered you in life.  If you are willing to look, you will soon find someone to help you see that.

Once you realize what I say is true, I suggest you adopt the sixth rule of a man who spent a lifetime proving how well he could throw a baseball regardless of what life’s injustices threw at him.  Don’t look back; it is an awful habit, and one that I’ve given up for good.

And I ain’t sorry.

How a Guy Named Curt Turned My Life Around

It has taken a week for me to be composed enough to write this.

The unexpected death of a friend is difficult.  When that friend was also a former co-worker, professional colleague, and mentor, the loss feels even greater.

I probably would not be the reporter, column writer, and incoming college graduate student that I am today if not for my extreme good fortune in knowing a man named Curtis P. Middleton.

The time from 2005 through 2007 was not a good chapter in my personal or professional life.  My mother (and, in truth, best friend) had suddenly died in her sleep from a blood clot.  My career as a newspaper sports editor/reporter/copy editor was spiraling earthward, it seemed.  I felt like I was just going through the motions in just about every aspect of life.  In November 2006, I was stuck in North Mississippi, unemployed for the first time in 14 years, and I didn’t know where I was going to go for another job.

That is when I met Curt, one of two people during that time period who changed my life for the better.  A few months earlier, he had taken the reins as editor of the DeSoto Times, a three-per-week newspaper in Hernando, Miss., just a short drive south of Memphis.  He needed a news reporter to round out the staff at that time, and I felt I had enough prior news writing experience to fit the bill.

Curt was a big man with a voice that demanded your attention, and he did not sugar-coat his thoughts and feelings about much.  Curt was not impressed with my previously published articles I had submitted with my resume.  Fortunately, he was impressed with me, and felt I had enough writing talent and potential to be offered the position.

In the weeks that followed, I got more constructive criticism and editorial guidance for news reporting and writing than I had received in the previous 16 years combined.  Curt Middleton the editor expected, and if you couldn’t deliver the first time, he would waste little time in showing you what he needed to see on the second attempt.

But he also possessed a great personality and friendly demeanor that made the work seem not so difficult most days.  Like me, he had traveled around quite a bit in his newspaper career, and it wasn’t long before we were sharing stories of towns, publications, stories we wrote, people we interviewed, and former colleagues.

Of that time we worked together at the Times, I can tell you two things Curt thought I did remarkably well.  One was column writing.  As one of three news reporters on the staff, we were each given the assignment of writing a weekly column to go on the editorial page.  It could be about anything; it just had to be well-written and engaging.  Curt loved my columns, or as he put it to one of the other reporters one day, “Terry’s columns just have a certain style and a voice that draw you in.”

The other thing Curt thought I was a master at doing is making coffee.  I didn’t think it was anything special, personally speaking, until one morning in the newsroom when I just had to have some java to get going on deadline.

I didn’t realize Curt had helped himself to a mugful of it a short time later.  A few minutes passed and the next thing I know, Curt walks out of his office and demands, “Who made this coffee?”  I turned and answered.

He walked over, stood near my desk, and stated emphatically to a full newsroom, “I have an announcement to make.  Do you see this man sitting right here?” he said, pointing at me. “This is the only person in this newsroom allowed to make coffee if I am drinking any of it.  It’s perfect.”

Although I wasn’t anywhere close to perfect as a news writer, I think he and I both saw how much better I had become in just a few months from the beginning.  That was good for Curt, as I kept in mind one of the first things he told me and the rest of the staff a few days after I had joined the staff:  “I don’t want you to give me your best.  I do want you to give me your better.  If you hand in your best, I’ve got nothing to look forward to as far as seeing improvement each time.”

He also taught me the value of brevity in news writing.  We each had to come up with five news articles for each edition — a load to be sure, and one I didn’t always meet — but as Curt reminded us, “I’m not looking for a novella with each one. Ten to twelve column inches works fine for me.”  One of his newsroom proverbs is what I now refer to as the “drawn breath test.”  “If I can’t read your story lead aloud without having to draw another breath,” he said, “it’s too long.  Rewrite it.”

Unfortunately, the time I got under Curt’s watchful eye was cut short.  I was laid off just six months into the job when things didn’t go as well as expected in advertising revenue.  The ownership demanded that an editorial position be sacrificed, and I fell to the “last one in, first one out” methodology.  However, Curt stayed in touch with me, and Facebook kept us connected as friends after I returned to Texas late in 2007.

Facebook being what it is, you can generally determine who is reading your posts and offering a little token of encouragement or good cheer.  When it came to just about anything I achieved or accomplished during the past five years, I could just about count on one of the people clicking the “like” button to be Curt.  At times, he would leave a comment as well.

For as much as I owed him in the short time we worked together, it was nothing compared to the impact he made with a comment on my longest post — an essay, actually — in late December 2010, from a hotel room in Memphis after I had just spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day stranded hundreds of miles from home with a disabled car.

Distraught about the situation and admitting openly that my newspaper career felt like a complete disaster, Curt encouraged me to branch out as he had done as a freelance writer.  One way to do that, he noted, would be to get on with a local school district as a substitute teacher and write while in class.

The next month, I became a substitute teacher for two local school districts while holding my job at Van Zandt Newspapers.  It didn’t lead to a lot of freelance writing, but it did lead to something bigger:  Returning to college to finally finish a bachelor’s degree.

Had Curt never suggested becoming a substitute teacher, I probably would not have realized how much I missed the academic environment and the joy of sharing knowledge with others.  Two years and a lot of toil and expense later, I have not only have a Bachelor of Arts in English, but am heading into one of the nation’s premier journalism graduate schools at the University of Texas at Austin.

And that’s why it hurt so damn much when I checked Facebook on June 22 to find that Curt had suffered a heart attack earlier in the week and died in a hospital a short time earlier that morning.

Less than a month after his comment that would change my life for the better, Curt lost his son, U.S. Marines Sgt. Jason Amores, who was killed in action in Afghanistan.

Curt Middleton’s final “like” on one of my Facebook posts was of a photograph of me and my only son, Ryan Britt, together on Father’s Day.

The Art of Playing Catch-Up

Image via Wikipedia

As much as I love technology, computers, and cool gadgets, I readily admit that I have never been, in tech terms, an “early adopter” of new products.

I’ve never had the personal budget for it.  I am working on a long-term solution to address that longstanding issue, but I’m not likely to change my buying habits that much in future. About the most cutting edge I can say I’ve been recently with purchases has been with a new quad-core desktop PC with Windows 7 — and that came about two months after Windows 7 systems hit retail shelves.

“New” generally carries quite a price tag.  It can also mean buggy, disappointing, or short-lived, as consumers have learned over the years (Windows Vista or HD-DVD, anyone?)

As I have discovered over the years, patience can be a money-saving virtue when it comes to personal technology and home electronics.  Often, you discover the older item can meet your needs quite adequately, perform tasks very well, and, in some cases such as desktop PCs, can be upgraded or expanded with little pain or expense.

So it was last weekend that I finally acquired something I had truly longed for in the last couple of years, a smartphone.  Thanks to a little legwork and searching in a very non-traditional outlet (a local resale shop), I scored a Palm Treo 680 in perfect working order for just $50, with a car charger.  A trip to Fry’s Electronics the next evening for a wall charger and sync cable was another $30, making the total investment thus far a mere $80.

Not bad at all, even for an experienced last-generation technology shopper.

I’m really pleased with it on several fronts. First, the Palm Treo sports something I’ve never had on any cell phone I’ve had (work or personal), a full QWERTY keyboard.  It isn’t a roomy keyboard, I’ll grant you, but it is a vast improvement for composing text messages or short notes versus a standard alphanumeric keypad, even one with that so-called predictive text mode.  This is a fact that starts to hit home when you have never been much of a text-messaging guy, then find yourself in a relationship with a girlfriend who texts a lot.

Second, the phone is giving me a so-far pleasant revisit with the old Palm OS.  I first became acquainted with this PDA-centric operating system back in 2000 when I purchased a Handspring Visor (again, a rare case of me buying something rather current in tech terms).  I thought it was a greatly efficient, compact OS back then and this version (aka Palm OS Garnet) is much the same.  Dated though it might be, it is still a heavily supported operating system, both with commercial and freeware programs.  I’ve already found and installed a few awesome freeware apps onto the phone.

I have to say I’ve also been impressed with the sound quality on phone calls and with the built-in voice recorder, a great plus when you are a journalist often needing to record a quick interview on the spot.  The camera on the back of the phone is nothing to shout about, but not a concern for me, anyway.  About the only negatives I’ve found has been short battery life — previous reviews were spot on about that and made purchase of an AC charger a must — and the proprietary jack that makes an adapter necessary if I want to use standard mini-headphones with it.

Overall, though, I think I’ve found a smartphone that will yield quite a long time of solid service for me, and for less money than a lot of new basic messaging phones.  Sadly, it is starting to sound like Palm may not be with us much longer despite what is, by most accounts since it was first announced, a fantastic smartphone operating system known as webOS.

Age doesn’t necessarily diminish usefulness or relevance.  I remind myself of that every time I look into a mirror, too.

Guy, get real!

One of the most boneheaded moves ever by a college football team took place last week, and it wasn’t on a football field, but rather the entire campus.

On the morning of Feb. 25, students at Texas A&M University at Commerce who wanted to get their free copy of The East Texan, the campus-published daily newspaper, could not find one on campus. The newspapers were all gone, allegedly taken out of their racks by members of the TAMU-C football team.

It just so happened that the lead story on the front page of that issue concerned the arrest of two of the football players on drug charges.

Bad and embarrassing for the football program as that might have been, even more negative attention came the university’s way by the theft of the newspapers and the subsequent comments from head football coach Guy Morriss when campus police interviewed him after finding videotape showing football players removing the newspapers that morning.

According to the police report, Morriss stated, “I’m proud of my players for doing that. This was the best team-building exercise we have ever done.”

Regardless of how you feel about the media or newspapers in general, this act and Morriss’ apparent sanctioning of it should disturb you to your very core. After all, we’re talking about Commerce, Texas, here, not Chongqing, China. Newspapers, even collegiate ones, have the right to publish arrests made by the taxpayer-funded police departments.

Worse yet, Morriss’ words come dangerously close to implicating that he was the genius behind an act of intentional censorship. According to the same police report, referenced by The East Texan in a report published March 1, his use of derisive remarks such as “that crap” in referring to the The East Texan and its report on the arrests is not exactly scoring him many innocence points.

But to me, a newspaper journalist for 27 years and a former college newspaper reporter and editor, Morriss’ little attitude display in the police investigation just proves something I’ve known for a long time: There are people within every university who regard the collegiate newspaper as nothing more than a student-produced fansheet.

The moment these young men and women have to run a story that doesn’t play the cheerleader for the university or any of its programs (drug arrests, parking issues, yet another tuition hike, etc.) they are branded as some band of traitors to their school. I speak from experience. A lot of other former campus newspapers reporters and editors probably could, too.

Apparently, Morriss is one with no understanding or appreciation for what goes into producing a campus daily newspaper. The East Texan’s March 1 article stated that Morriss asked how taking a publication that is free to Texas A&M-Commerce students could be considered theft. It was explained to him that the newspaper publishes a statement in each edition that the first copy is free to students, and every one after that costs 25 cents.

How or if The East Texan ever receives payment for extra copies is irrelevant here. Those responsible for taking all of the Feb. 25 editions distributed on campus did not do so because they needed floor covering to paint the inside of a house. They did it to prevent other students at the university from seeing an article about an arrest of two football players, and that is an act which is in violation of the First Amendment.

I’ve got a bit more news for Coach Morriss and those involved in the act: It may be a free publication, but I guarantee you it isn’t published for free. The printing press company that cranks out that newspaper isn’t doing so out of the goodness of its employees’ hearts. Oh, and let’s not forget the advertisers in that Feb. 25 edition — some of whom may be financial supporters of the football program — who are probably really ticked off about their paid ads not being seen that day by about 10,000 students, staff and faculty members.

Again going back to the March 1 report in The East Texan, in a meeting with Texas A&M-Commerce President Dan Jones regarding possible disciplinary action for the football players involved in the incident, Jones stated that Morriss said they would suffer the consequences as a team.

Well, I’ve got a unique and educational suggestion to offer.

All of the football players involved in the taking of the newspapers, and Morriss himself, should be given the task of producing one edition of The East Texan.

Perhaps only then, they will all have a better understanding of and appreciation for what the publication’s staff and student-reporters endure several times a week throughout each fall and spring semester, all while carrying a class load to get a college degree and, hopefully, a decent job after college.

Maybe they will learn another important lesson: Headlines are not always going to be happy ones, but the best thing you can do is keep yourself out of them.

Back From Hiatus

Well, it has been awhile, although I didn’t really plan it that way.

Posting here kind of fell by the wayside since early August — I imagine it happens to a lot of bloggers whose activity is not directly connected with their job — and weeks turned into months, six of them.  After a high school football season in which providing local newspaper coverage became much more grueling than necessary, November elections followed and then came the whole holiday song-and-dance.  January came and went with sub-freezing weather except for one week, which featured a tornado running through the county.

Now, here we are in February, the weather here in East Texas still bobbing up and down the thermostat and local primary elections around the corner in four weeks.  It’s not the election year I thought it was going to be around here.  In Van Zandt County, Texas, there will be only two local office elections in November because that matches the total number of people running as a Democrat.  I can’t remember a local election year in 27 years of newspaper journalism in which nearly all the suspense would be gone by April (the time for any run-off elections).

On the other hand, I’m very happy because I am looking forward to Valentine’s Day less than two weeks away.  That is something of a drastic change for me, but that is the result of a very lovely young woman walking up to me at a local winery and inviting to me sit and chat with her.  Destiny or dumb luck?  It matters not to me.  I’m too busy basking in what has been three months (and counting) of truly being enriched by the love, affection and caring of another, and returning it in kind.

There is more to life than press deadlines and politics.

Thank God for that.

The Great Train Rescue

I had gotten word there was trouble on the tracks about 4:30 p.m. Monday.

Eight miles east of the office, near downtown Edgewood, Texas, an Amtrak train had just suddenly lost all power and rolled to a stop. I took off in that direction, camera in hand, to get what would probably be a front page story for one of our weeklies.

As I approached the area of the track where the train was sitting, I could see they were unloading the passengers and waving them along to a waiting school bus. I got out and snapped a few photos of people walking along the edge of the track, then started looking around for somebody who looked like an Amtrak official to find out what had happened.

But then I saw something that told me it was time to stop being a reporter and start being a kind volunteer.

It was a woman lugging a suitcase that nearly reached her stomach in height, obviously in some discomfort from the nearly 100-degree heat outside and the slight incline she had to navigate toward the bus.

So I pulled my camera to my side and asked if I could carry her bag. The grateful smile was all the answer I needed. Along with her husband and another man who was ambling toward the school bus, we all found a small bit of shade on the other side of the street and talked for a few minutes about what had happened.

When the engines lost power, everything – including the air conditioning in the coach cars – was gone as well, leaving the passengers stranded in what must have started to feel like a pre-heating oven.

And then I found out I was standing with just three of 208 passengers who were suddenly stranded, trying to make their way from the tracks and hoping it wouldn’t be long before they could climb into something air conditioned on wheels again.

That’s when I really forgot about the camera hanging from my neck and the notepad and pen in my left hand.

For the next 45 minutes, I got immersed in carrying luggage, helping people down a steep and potentially treacherous rock grade and asking if medical assistance was needed. On the other side of the tracks, Edgewood police officers and volunteer firefighters were doing the same.

Vans from two churches in Mineola, about 25 miles away, pulled up to the scene with volunteer drivers helping some of the passengers get to the local high school, where an emergency shelter and triage was being set up. I spoke briefly to a young woman, a college student, as she made her way to one of these vans after I helped her down off the railroad grade.

She said she was a journalism student at Northwestern (La.) State.

“God bless ya, or should I say God help ya?” I asked.

She just smiled and replied, “Yeah, I know.”

I went back onto the grade to help others with luggage or footing until I finally saw most of the people had departed to the high school or were being taken care of by others on the scene. They did get the power back online in the train and moved it a little further down the track, but Amtrak officials had already made arrangements to get the passengers to the Dallas station by coach buses.

All told, it might not have been rated a dramatic and traumatic scene, but it could have been very quickly. As the chief of police put it in our conversation a bit later in the evening, “We did all right for local boys.”

They did more than all right. They were brilliant and inspiring in their teamwork and dedication in keeping the scene under control and the passengers as safe as possible. Of the 208 out there on a murderously hot afternoon, only two required immediate medical attention, one for a minor foot injury and the other for heat exhaustion complicated by diabetes.

By 7:15 p.m., they were all on air-conditioned coach buses, feeling better after water, Gatorade and snacks brought to them by the American Red Cross, and finally heading west again.

Of all the mysterious reasons as to why I continue to work in newspaper journalism, I suppose it’s the Errol Flynn-style adventures that occasionally crop up, never knowing one day to the next what situation I’m going to find myself in with nothing but my trusty blade – uh, I mean camera – to get me through.

In this instance, I don’t have any dramatic photos to publish, and the story I’ll write probably won’t win any Texas Press Association awards.

I don’t think anyone will notice – not me, anyway, and certainly not any of the people Monday afternoon near downtown Edgewood who were just glad to have a hand to hold onto or to take their bag for them.

Immediately after this latest adventure, the swashbuckling Terry Britt rode off to cover back-to-back school board meetings in two different cities. You can reach him at terrybritt@hotmail.com.

Standing in for Gulliver

Remember the Texas Department of Tourism slogan? “Texas: It’s like a whole other country.”

If that’s true, then I’ve recently returned home from about four years of working in foreign lands.

To be honest, I never intended to find myself in places like Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. Although I was born and raised in eastern Tennessee and attended college in Memphis, the state of Texas has been (and felt more like) my home for the greater part of the last two decades, for a number of reasons.

But after leaving Van Zandt Newspapers in 2001, and having short stays with a couple of small dailies in the state, I went eastward again and landed in central Arkansas.

I had passed through the state numerous times but never set up residence in it. Once I did begin the next chapter of my career in Searcy (about 45 minutes north of Little Rock), I found an experience that was both good and bad – good outside the office, bad inside it.

I persevered through a rather negative work atmosphere to enjoy a couple of years of nice, appreciative people (not unlike Van Zandt County), beautiful scenery, and some fun assignments.

In retrospect, I probably should have counted the blessings I had there and not counted my yearly earnings. It was the latter, though, that tempted me to set sail again, moving on the lure of a higher paying position with a larger daily in Mississippi.

Going further east, though, was when everything started going south.

I never had an employment problem in my life until I moved to Mississippi, but I suppose the rules of work ethics and effort that hold fast in other states do not apply there. Then again, I now have a fuller understanding of why that state ranks last or damn near it in just about every socioeconomic category in the United States.

Maybe I just didn’t fit in there, though I certainly tried to be a good team player at two different publications. Maybe the people in charge of me felt that way, too, and that was their reason for unceremoniously sending me off to the sea of job searching twice in six months.

Weary and growing ever frustrated (not to mention seeing my bank account dwindling), I turned my steady boat of journalistic talent and experience toward Memphis. Surely this, my second home, the place of my collegiate alma mater and parents’ last years, would offer me the shelter of a fair wage in a stable position and an appreciative, sensible publisher.

About five months later, I realized the print journalism seas had sent me on yet another wrong turn. That was when I decided to make a phone call and put a six-year voyage out of its misery before I wound up doing the same to myself.

On an employment journey that took me to six different cities in four different states, I saw a lot of things and learned quite a bit about myself, the newspaper industry and people in general. There was much I will always remember fondly and much I would just as soon forget.

The one thing I found most in the newsrooms? A lot of people I don’t want to become in 15 to 20 years.

The good people I worked with in those places will know whom I’m talking about, and I’ll leave it at that.

Sometimes, the only way to know where home lies is to be gone awhile. Fortunately, an opportunity to come back to Van Zandt Newspapers, and Texas, opened just when I needed it most. If it were the closing passage in a modern retelling of a certain literary character’s travels, it might read something like this:

“And so, disenchanted with recent unfair twists of economic fate, and beleaguered from daily worries with Lilliputians, Brobdingnags, pompous editors and computer crashes five minutes before deadline, the young writer crossed the great river and set sail westward again, guided by the great Lone Star. He yearned to be back in the great land he once knew, where people were friendly, cattle grazed as far as the eye could see, and where high school football really meant something. It was not a perfect place, but he now knew beyond any doubt it was home, and that made it a far greater place than any amongst his many voyages.”

Well, it sure as hell beats sitting at a desk in Tupelo.

Terry Britt is an avid reader of classic literature and reluctant southern newspaper explorer. You can reach him at terrybritt@hotmail.com.