National Newspaper Week (October 1-7) compels me to acknowledge my journalistic catastrophe of fifth grade.
Based on my passion for reading Nashville’s two dailies, Miss Bunch handed me the plum assignment of launching a newspaper for our class.
I joyously composed articles of my own and proofread the contributions of classmates.
Alas, my mechanical ineptitude reared its ugly head and for the life of me, I couldn’t operate the mimeograph! So the project died without its first issue hitting the streets (er, aisles).
(My klutziness didn’t stop there. I couldn’t master the intricacies of a paperclip until junior high. And I didn’t learn to snap my fingers until I was taught by a girl I briefly dated in college. How appropriate! Because just like that – SNAP! – she apparently went into the Witness Protection Program.)
I don’t know that our newspaper would have changed the world, but I can’t help feeling melancholy about “the road not taken.”
Even a small class has its cliques and introverts, so we moved on to sixth grade still blissfully ignorant of many strengths and weaknesses of our peers.
Perhaps a poem or a joke or an opinion published in the ill-fated newspaper would have made us see each other in a different light. Who knows what new lifelong friendships might have been formed?
Maybe a “What I did on my summer vacation” essay would have inspired readers to travel to exotic places or do charitable work.
Considering five decades of classmates’ relocations, spring cleanings and house fires, I have no illusion that abundant copies of the periodical would have remained in existence.
But the few that survived would be such a priceless time capsule – offering contemporary accounts of who actually won the (foggily remembered) big game and preserving a wealth of slang, fads and predictions of which classmate would eventually become Mrs. David Cassidy.
Copyright 2023 Danny Tyree, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.