the editor talks with you

One of the best things about growing up for my sister Betty and me was that our home had no TV or radio. Without the distraction of electronics, our mother read to us nightly before we went to sleep. It was a life-changing experience. My sister became an actress. I became a writer, editor, publisher and entrepreneur. We lived with my grandparents in a back bedroom. Our father was away in college and we needed an inexpensive place to live. My mother worked for my grandfather in exchange for room and board. He threw in a few dollars for such luxuries as new shoes for growing kids and something to put in the church collection plate each Sunday.’ My grandmother hired a teenaged girl to help her around the house. I’ve long since forgotten her name but she would read to us, too. She helped us master the alphabet, write our names and make out words in books. Soon both of us were reading.

Why this was important, I see now, is that it shaped our thinking, our career goals and what we did in our lives. Caught up in the drama of the stories we heard and read, my sister aspired to become the next Joanne Woodward. Joanne was a local girl who won an Academy Award for her performance as a complex character with multiple personalities. My love was the storytelling, the choices of words, the shadings of meaning and how great writers evoked scenes in your mind more vivid than any movie maker could. My journalist wife and I became editors and owners of a publishing company.

Our parents made many sacrifices for us. When people tell you the biggest investment you’ll ever make is your home, tell them that’s nonsense. Your children are your most costly investment. And unlike a home, you can’t sell them to live in luxurious retirement Working for my grandfather, our mother guarded the few dollars he paid her and bought all 12 volumes of Olive Beaupre Miller’s “My Book House.” It is a wonderful, hardbound collection of fables, fairy tales, poems, Mother Goose rhymes and heroic adventure stories that fired our imaginations. I memorized Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman” and William Brighty Rands’ “The Peddler’s Caravan” that opens this way:

‘I wish I lived in a caravan with a horse to drive like a peddler man. Where he comes from nobody knows or where he goes to, but on he goes.’

Those kinds of images, formed as a child, stay with you the rest of your life.

Our journeys as journalists have taken us to hundreds of cities. towns and other countries. We have met and interviewed US Presidents and other heads of state, movie, stage and TV celebrities, famous artists, writers and photographers and ordinary folks like us. The more profound observations often came from the latter. Our greatest adventure has been as entrepreneurs. There is nothing like the freedom and responsibility of running one’s own business. You work for a tyrant but love what you do. We highly recommend it.

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