Don't Get Blinded By the Pumpkin

Several years ago, I don’t recall how many, I was sitting in my home office in Las Vegas, minding my own business, when an email dropped from some academic in Florida.

No, that’s not an oxymoron. Me, minding my own business.

Since I don’t hear much from Ivory Tower types, I opened that email faster than a U.S. Marine digging into his mashed potatoes at chow time.

The missive was from Professor So-and-So from Someplace, Fla. And he had a request — one I couldn’t refuse.

He was a journalism professor working on a book or paper about daily journalists. But he sought something different than any tips on making deadline. 

He wanted me to tell him a story about a vital professional lesson I’d learned somewhere along the way.

It didn’t have to be life-changing, he said, just something I’d come across that perhaps changed the way I did my job or saw the world around me. To help me with my consideration, he sent along a lesson essay submitted by another journalist, just to give me an idea of what he was looking for.

Of course, I assured him, I’d think of something.

And you know, if I did send him something, I can’t remember what it was.

Not for the life of me.

But what I do recall is the life-lesson-leaned sent by that fellow journalist whose name I also cannot recall. 

When I read her email, I was stunned by its elegant simplicity. It was a modern day parable, written in such a poignant way I felt as though I, too, shared in the experience. 

The letter had such a profound effect on me that I have related it to numerous friends over beers, to students in my classes, to anyone who will listen. 

And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to retell it here.

The essay author was now working in the Big Leagues — the Wall Street Journal or maybe the Washington Post.

But years before, she had labored in obscurity at a small weekly in rural Maine, perhaps her first job in the business.

Small dailies and weeklies, unlike larger metropolitan newspapers, are a different breed of journalistic animal altogether. Reporters cover traffic jams, they write up wedding announcements, go to public meeting after public meeting after public meeting.

And they cover county fairs.

A few years ago, on a lark, I spent six weeks writing stories for the Chilcat Valley News, a weekly paper in Haines, Alaska. and I think I worked as hard as I ever had at any newspaper.

If you want to read a wonderful piece of fiction that captures this seemingly mundane but satisfying calling, read The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. 

She nails the life.

Well, our young heroine soon met an older colleague, a photographer, who’d been at the paper for awhile. Both were from the Big City and he felt no compunction about criticizing the assignments he was given.

It was all so small-town, so hokey. He couldn’t wait to get to some metropolitan daily where he could engage in some real photojournalism. 

One day, the two were assigned to go out to the county fair to interview and photograph a farmer who’d won an award for growing the largest pumpkin.

The pair did their job. The reporter quickly forgot about the story amid the blur of other assignments. But for the photographer, it became some existential insult to his professional lot in life.

He wouldn’t let it go, always bitching about that farmer and his pumpkin.

A year or so later, when the photographer finally landed another job, the staff gave him a going-away gift, as newspapers often do: A mock front page of the paper with — you guessed it — a huge photograph of the farmer and pumpkin.

Both reporter and photographer soon went on their own ways but kept in touch through the occasional email or holiday card.

Years passed. The photographer eventually retired. And then one day, the reporter heard from her old colleague.

He had a story he wanted to tell her.

He’d gone up into his attic some time before, looking for this or that. And suddenly he saw something that made him sit down and become emotional.

He’d spotted that old mock front-page. And when he looked at it, he saw something that had eluded him all those years ago when he placed the farmer and his pumpkin in his camera’s viewfinder.

This time, he didn’t see anything embarrassing or beneath him, something that wasn’t worth his time. He saw a working-class man with dirt in his fingernails, whose unflinching gaze met the camera, holding a prized possession, something he made out of nothing, coaxed from the earth.

This time, he saw an overlooked hero. 

He saw a man’s unvarnished pride in his life and his passion. 

And the photographer felt ashamed for how he had long belittled and complained about those rural folks in that Maine community. He apologized to the reporter for having been such an arrogant fool back in the day. 

Maybe it was his way of apologizing to that farmer, no doubt now long gone.

And so the reporter wrote about the photographer and his hard-earned lesson.

And, in a way, it had also been a lesson for her and for all working journalists and, well, for just about everybody else.

The takeaway:

Don’t Get Blinded by the Pumpkin.

I now realize that I learned that same lesson long ago, but in my own way.

Because I have spent my career paying attention to the pumpkin.

When I arrived in Kansas City as a cocky young East Coast journalist, I didn’t belittle the rural Kansas farmers who spent their days baling hay and milking cows.

Instead, I read Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres to appreciate the fact that while the landscape may be two-dimensional, the lives of these agrarian folk who worked it were anything but, that it could be literally Shakespearean in their humor and tragedy.

Years later, I was given an assignment to attend a meeting at a Van Nuys senior center where LAPD would answer questions from local retirees about a series of recent break-ins in their neighborhood. 

As I left the office, a fellow reporter called out to me, as if mocking my assignment:

"Have fun at the old folks home!"

Later I sat among the aged with their walkers and canes and oxygen tubes -- this cast-aside element of our society -- I saw how they listened to the details of the crimes.

And it was one of abject eyes-wide-open fear. 

I knew I had to tell their story, to capture that terror.

That's when I met Grace Salerno, who’d lived in the same house for 42 years. She’d moved in right after she and her husband, Joseph, had gotten married and together they'd raised two daughters there.

Now the girls were gone and Joseph was dead and Grace lay in the same bed where they’d had all those late-night talks about successes and failures and what to the about the kids, where they laughed and whispered.

And now she felt only fear. 

She was terrified — in her own bed, in the house that for so many years had been her psychological fortress.

“These are supposed to be our golden years," Grace said. "What they are is more like rusty tin.”

Those sentiments broke my heart. 

I rushed back to the office to write a story that ended up on the front page.

Somehow, I still take pride in that piece. For seeing that story.

Over the years, I have gone to old folks homes, high schools, homeless shelters and county fairs, always looking for that farmer and his pumpkin, to perhaps offer him a little dignity that he wouldn’t get otherwise.

Boring?

Hardly.

I’ve always said, “There are no boring stories, only boring reporters.”

So here’s to the farmer and here’s to his pumpkin.

We have a lot to learn from both.