Progress Edition
“It was twenty years ago today
Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play.”
On this date, two decades ago, the Progress Edition, a special section within that Sunday’s Springfield News-Leader, was published. It is the single thing I am most proud of professionally. It is my “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
I am awe-struck still by the photos (thanks, Dean Curtis), the design and the graphical themes that thread through its 28 pages (full and rightful credit to Jan Peterson), the lead essay by an acclaimed novelist and art critic (I still wonder how I convinced Donald Harington to do it for $300), and consistently outstanding reporting and writing from very nearly the entire newsroom. Kate Marymont gave me, the new guy, and Jan her support for the idea and the trust and backing to see it through. To this day I think about my conversation in Kate’s office when she calmly, pointedly, and firmly told me a sentence in the section likening the town’s tallest structure to a “looming black phallus” would not appear in her newspaper, no matter who wrote it, the centrality of the phrase to the larger enterprise, or how true it might be. She made the right decision. What I can’t believe is my own audacity arguing otherwise and why she didn’t dismiss me on the spot. (In fact, she would be a part of the decision to hire me again for a series of different jobs, including one 800 miles away from her office at 651 North Boonville Avenue. Without her, I would not be where I am today. Thanks, Kate.)
I am struck by a few things when I open up the section.
As with any newspaper from years ago, it’s much bigger than what passes for a broadsheet these days. It’s astonishing. The wide pages, the sprawling spreads, lend it gravity and heft (not to mention the heavier newsprint stock).
The advertising in the 28 pages of this special section exceeds the column inches of an entire quarter’s worth of ads in the current Tallahassee Democrat. Back then, nobody went off the rate card, so all those ads represent some serious doon.
There was something substantial to “the entire newsroom” mentioned above, a score and more of reporters and editors across multiple sections, backed up by a full complement of very talented people on the copy desk and in the photo department. This no longer exists. At all. They’re selling the building, in fact. The $23 million German offset press no longer runs.
Now, on to the self-congratulation. I assure you no one thinks as highly of my writing as I do when I think it’s on point. My essay about my house on North Campbell and Greene County’s decision to buy and raze it is an example. You can read it here. An excerpt:
“Where once there stood a home, there is now bare earth.
“Where once a structure built while Mark Twain was writing, while Queen Victoria was alive and could lend her name adjectivally to the overwrought American architecture of the day, there will soon be a parking lot.
“Where once I and my family worked and ate and slept and loved, there is now nothing, with only photographs to vouchsafe its existence. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it doesn’t keep you dry from the rain.”
It could be fairly criticized as writerly in the worst way, oblique to the point of being obtuse, and difficult for the sake of being difficult. I still like it. In large part this is because I am still very emotionally wrought about the house, its condemnation, and the “Big Yellow Taxi”-ness of it all. At base, I regard this Progress Edition as a high point because of Harington’s essay and my own. To have either of them published in a daily newspaper is, I think, remarkable and wonderful.
As a reporter, an editor, and now a comms jockey, there are plenty of stories and projects I am proud of. Responding to disasters, sticking with a story, eruptions of beautiful writing, lengthy and deep projects of real significance, preparing for arduous debate, conveying tragedies and triumphs during long nights and bad pizza were all gratifying. There is great value and joy in the collaborative effort required for every single weekly and daily paper published with my name as part of its production.
I grew up in Springfield, Missouri. It’s my hometown. When I look at this 20-year-old, frayed and faded copy of an insert in the Sunday paper, I see something worth keeping. Here is a representation of place that is honest and true.
It is beautiful.