From the dark recesses of the attic, I retrieved a couple of file storage boxes labeled “Bill’s Stuff” to search for some tax records.
I didn’t find the tax records; it turned out that I didn’t need them anyway.
What I did find was fragments of my long ago youth, clippings that marked a career in newspapers that began in 1962.
“By William Brown” the bylines read, although no one called me William. The St. Petersburg Times of that day insisted on using given names in bylines; there were no Bills or Bobs or Chucks. (Male Times reporters also wore ties and jackets when many of the other media representatives were wearing sport shirts.)
The clippings were folded and brittle, but as I browsed through them, they took on color and smell and shape. I could remember what things looked like and smelled like and even tasted like (blue sky that went on forever and thunderheads that seemed to portend the end of the world, the soft smell of tropical flowers and the tang of salt air, smoked mullet at Ted Peters and black beans and rice and crusty Cuban bread at the Jockey Club).
For a little while I was a newly minted college graduate setting out on a great adventure. There was my first byline only a few days after I’d started work on a story about a fatal traffic accident at Roosevelt Boulevard and Ninth Street North. I could recall following the police officers and the gurney down the hallway in the emergency room at Mound Park Hospital and watching one of the doctors pull the sheet over the victim’s head.
Welcome to the real world.
The clippings in the stack were eclectic:
Murders and suicides and fires and accidents.
Feuding politicians and ambitious land developers.
A story about the great freeze of 1962, written on an old Smith-Corona portable typewriter by the light of a fire in an orange grove in Pasco County as the growers fought, mostly unsuccessfully, to keep their crop from freezing.
An interview with the creator of the long-running soap opera “The Edge of Night” who mailed in his scripts from his home in Sarasota.
A thoroughbred horse auction in Ocala.
There were columns, too, complete with a photo of a kid who must have been me.
It is perhaps vanity, but even the routine stories still read well.
The clippings ended when I became an editor and didn’t appear again until years later when I began writing a column regularly.
I looked at that pile of clippings and thought: What a grand and glorious adventure it truly was.
But it was my adventure. To anyone else they would just be a pile of old newsprint.
So I picked out a few of them to help stoke the fires of memory. The rest of my long ago youth I put in a black plastic bag and took out to the garbage can.
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
