Horsing Around

After I successfully volunteered to be sentenced to membership on the County Commission's citizens advisory committee on school concurrency, I offered my personal e-mail address to any citizens who had suggestions, questions or advice.  Last night I got an e-mail from a blog reader whose question had nothing to do with pending legislation.

It was from a youngster interested in a career in journalism, who asked me what my most famous stories were while I was working newspapers.  I have two, both exhibiting the extremes of human nature.  One was tragic.  The other lent itself to some humor.

While in Tifton, Georgia, I wrote a story about an 18-year-old girl who had been kept prisoner by her mother and momma's boyfriend.  When authorities discovered the girl in her room, chained to a bed and window covered with hog wire, she weighed 40 and 1/2 pounds.  That story was picked up by the Associated Press and Reuters, running worldwide.

The other story occurred right here in Clay County several years back when a man was caught by deputies in the middle of a romantic interlude with a neighbor's horse.  That also ran in foreign newspapers and a friend on vacation in Hawaii called the next day to say she heard Rush Limbaugh talking about it on his radio show.

In the aftermath, I missed deadlines answering all the calls from people wanting to know details that didn't - couldn't - make it into print.  Away from work I became a hermit, unable to go anywhere I might be recognized without being stopped to hear new horse jokes.  In retrospect, I wish I had written them all down, 'cause the folks here at home are pretty imaginative when it comes to their inter-species personal relationships.

Those two stories are some that I share with appropriately aged students who might be thinking about a career as a journalist.  They're examples of the diversity of life reporters get to see close up, the bad and the funny.  As long as acquiring riches isn't a personal goal (some reporters leave to become public school teachers for the pay raise), journalism is a wonderful career choice.