My Early Quest To Be A Writer
By James Donahue
I fondly remember how my parents read to me when I was a child. There was a special collection of Olive Beaupre Miller’s Bookhouse Books that were filled with beautiful color illustrations, poems and stories for children of all ages packed in the household bookcase along with numerous other books. Among my favorites stories were Little Black Sambo and The Little Engine That Could. I spent a lot of time fingering my way through those books, looking at the art and wishing that I could read the stories.
My course was set for life after I got into school and began learning to read from the Dick and Jane books in the First Grade. Also that year, we began learning to print the letters we were reading. By the time I reached the Second Grade, I was both reading and writing, although on a primitive level. I remember that our teachers encouraged us to take books home from little library collections in our classrooms.
There was a spare room in our house where my parents stored things they rarely used, or didn’t use at all. Among them were an old typewriter and a very large microphone. Both would be antiques today. I remember pretending that I was a radio news broadcaster. I would take the daily newspaper to that room and read the day’s news stories aloud into that old microphone, even though it was never hooked to anything. In those days it was all pretend.
One day someone from the high school newspaper came to our elementary classroom and announced they were looking for people to write weekly reports of events going on in each classroom in the school. I volunteered and got the job. It was my first assignment as a news writer. By the time I was in high school I was not only writing for the student newspaper but also the school annual.
When I was in about the eighth grade, my sister, Andrea, gave me a small bound and calendar-marked book marked “diary” as a Christmas gift. It was the best gift anyone could have given me. I could hardly wait for New Year’s Day, when I could begin writing on the first page of that dairy. I started keeping daily records of everything going on around me from that day on. It was not long before I found the small pages in the book to be too small to hold all that I had to write about and I graduated to spiral notebooks. Once I had unlimited space, my writing covered pages. I tried short stories and poetry. One of the poems I wrote during those years was later published by a college literary magazine at Central Michigan University.
One day, during about my junior or senior year, I was surprised when my friend, James Frayer (another James), landed a job writing sports stories from high school events for the town’s weekly newspaper, the Harbor Beach Times. It was a job I would have given my eye teeth to have. I waited quietly until Frayer got tired of the pace and quit the job. Then I rushed in to ask for and seize the job he gave up.
The newspaper was located in the basement of the bank building on the main corner of town. You had to walk down concrete steps behind a steel railing to get to the front door. Inside you entered a small news and business room with desks, telephones and typewriters. Behind that was a large room containing a hot lead lino-type machine, a hot lead casting machine for creating ads from special mats, a flat-bed printing press, and tables filled with metal flats for holding columns of cast type. This was my first look at the world of newspaper publishing.
The editor and publisher of the paper, David Meisner, was the son of the man who owned and operated the newspaper for many years. His father had passed on, but his mother still lived in a large brick house on First Street, directly behind the newspaper office.
Sports writing was never something that interested me, and the newspaper’s experiment with Frayer had apparently gone so poorly that Dave was ready to abandon the idea of having an untrained high school kid attempt to write about sports events. Instead, Dave changed his tack, and trained me to just write news stories. For a weekly newspaper in a small town of some 2,000 people, that mostly involved local gossip stuff, obituaries, and stories about coming social events. Learning to write about things like that came relatively easily for me.
My first story about a real news event was gained at the expense of my mother. I met her in town that day and noticed that our car had some dents and scratches on one side. She said she had driven that morning to Port Huron and accidentally ran off the road into a ditch. She was very embarrassed about the whole thing. I got all of the facts and wrote the story, much to her chagrin. Most newspapers wouldn’t have given an event that small an inch of space. But our weekly paper was hot for a news story, and my story got published.
Dave introduced me to the lino-type machine, taught me how to set hot led type, and make lead castings. I also learned how to set type, got involved in the world of type fonts, and editing by reading the lead type columns from upside down and backwards as it used to be done in those days. He had a large four-by-five speed graphic press camera that took large flat sheets of film mounted in flats or boxed-devices that slid into the rear part of the camera. Each flat held two sheets of film. When we used the camera we carried a large satchel over our shoulder that was filled with additional film containers plus an abundance of flash bulbs. That was how we shot news photos in those days.
The newspaper’s darkroom was located in the basement of the Meisner house. Once I began using the camera, Dave showed me the way in the house through the back door, through the kitchen, and into the basement. He taught me how to use chemicals to develop film, use the enlarger and make eight by ten-inch black and white prints. We then rolled the wet prints face down on glossy metallic plates, carried them up to the kitchen, and dried them on the electric range.
Dave was a small operator but he liked to talk big. He apparently saw in me the potential for becoming a good newsman. One day he offered to send me to journalism school if I would promise to come back to Harbor Beach and work for him. Somehow, even then, I knew that was a blind offer. I could not see myself trapped at that little operation and declined his offer.
By James Donahue
I fondly remember how my parents read to me when I was a child. There was a special collection of Olive Beaupre Miller’s Bookhouse Books that were filled with beautiful color illustrations, poems and stories for children of all ages packed in the household bookcase along with numerous other books. Among my favorites stories were Little Black Sambo and The Little Engine That Could. I spent a lot of time fingering my way through those books, looking at the art and wishing that I could read the stories.
My course was set for life after I got into school and began learning to read from the Dick and Jane books in the First Grade. Also that year, we began learning to print the letters we were reading. By the time I reached the Second Grade, I was both reading and writing, although on a primitive level. I remember that our teachers encouraged us to take books home from little library collections in our classrooms.
There was a spare room in our house where my parents stored things they rarely used, or didn’t use at all. Among them were an old typewriter and a very large microphone. Both would be antiques today. I remember pretending that I was a radio news broadcaster. I would take the daily newspaper to that room and read the day’s news stories aloud into that old microphone, even though it was never hooked to anything. In those days it was all pretend.
One day someone from the high school newspaper came to our elementary classroom and announced they were looking for people to write weekly reports of events going on in each classroom in the school. I volunteered and got the job. It was my first assignment as a news writer. By the time I was in high school I was not only writing for the student newspaper but also the school annual.
When I was in about the eighth grade, my sister, Andrea, gave me a small bound and calendar-marked book marked “diary” as a Christmas gift. It was the best gift anyone could have given me. I could hardly wait for New Year’s Day, when I could begin writing on the first page of that dairy. I started keeping daily records of everything going on around me from that day on. It was not long before I found the small pages in the book to be too small to hold all that I had to write about and I graduated to spiral notebooks. Once I had unlimited space, my writing covered pages. I tried short stories and poetry. One of the poems I wrote during those years was later published by a college literary magazine at Central Michigan University.
One day, during about my junior or senior year, I was surprised when my friend, James Frayer (another James), landed a job writing sports stories from high school events for the town’s weekly newspaper, the Harbor Beach Times. It was a job I would have given my eye teeth to have. I waited quietly until Frayer got tired of the pace and quit the job. Then I rushed in to ask for and seize the job he gave up.
The newspaper was located in the basement of the bank building on the main corner of town. You had to walk down concrete steps behind a steel railing to get to the front door. Inside you entered a small news and business room with desks, telephones and typewriters. Behind that was a large room containing a hot lead lino-type machine, a hot lead casting machine for creating ads from special mats, a flat-bed printing press, and tables filled with metal flats for holding columns of cast type. This was my first look at the world of newspaper publishing.
The editor and publisher of the paper, David Meisner, was the son of the man who owned and operated the newspaper for many years. His father had passed on, but his mother still lived in a large brick house on First Street, directly behind the newspaper office.
Sports writing was never something that interested me, and the newspaper’s experiment with Frayer had apparently gone so poorly that Dave was ready to abandon the idea of having an untrained high school kid attempt to write about sports events. Instead, Dave changed his tack, and trained me to just write news stories. For a weekly newspaper in a small town of some 2,000 people, that mostly involved local gossip stuff, obituaries, and stories about coming social events. Learning to write about things like that came relatively easily for me.
My first story about a real news event was gained at the expense of my mother. I met her in town that day and noticed that our car had some dents and scratches on one side. She said she had driven that morning to Port Huron and accidentally ran off the road into a ditch. She was very embarrassed about the whole thing. I got all of the facts and wrote the story, much to her chagrin. Most newspapers wouldn’t have given an event that small an inch of space. But our weekly paper was hot for a news story, and my story got published.
Dave introduced me to the lino-type machine, taught me how to set hot led type, and make lead castings. I also learned how to set type, got involved in the world of type fonts, and editing by reading the lead type columns from upside down and backwards as it used to be done in those days. He had a large four-by-five speed graphic press camera that took large flat sheets of film mounted in flats or boxed-devices that slid into the rear part of the camera. Each flat held two sheets of film. When we used the camera we carried a large satchel over our shoulder that was filled with additional film containers plus an abundance of flash bulbs. That was how we shot news photos in those days.
The newspaper’s darkroom was located in the basement of the Meisner house. Once I began using the camera, Dave showed me the way in the house through the back door, through the kitchen, and into the basement. He taught me how to use chemicals to develop film, use the enlarger and make eight by ten-inch black and white prints. We then rolled the wet prints face down on glossy metallic plates, carried them up to the kitchen, and dried them on the electric range.
Dave was a small operator but he liked to talk big. He apparently saw in me the potential for becoming a good newsman. One day he offered to send me to journalism school if I would promise to come back to Harbor Beach and work for him. Somehow, even then, I knew that was a blind offer. I could not see myself trapped at that little operation and declined his offer.