When I worked as an editor for small, community newspapers, I encountered some quirky people. They came in all shapes and sizes and some could be a bit ornery. Others were simply annoying.
At one paper, I used to deal with an older farmer who would come in periodically with a potato which he claimed bore the likeness of various famous people. One such spud I remember apparently looked for all the world like Richard Nixon. I couldn’t see it. The farmer thought I should take a picture and put it in the paper. I think maybe I did do that once and that just encouraged him. Eventually he’d be back with another potato which looked like another celebrity except that it didn’t.
When the potato angle was obviously going nowhere, he started on other peculiar things. My memory is shaky here but I think he had a squirrel which he had trained to do something. Anyway, this publicity hound spent a lot of time barking up the wrong tree and eventually went away – or ran out of amazing potatoes and squirrels.
One woman was relentless in pestering me for publicity for her cause and she drove me crazy. I used to speak to local groups now and then about getting publicity and I would tell them to please choose non-abrasive people to be the ones to approach newspaper editors as we are just folks too. Anyway, this woman couldn’t be satisfied no matter how much coverage I gave her. It was never the right kind or there was simply not enough of it.
One day at a gathering, I began chatting with a younger woman who was head of this particular cause and I saw my opportunity to do a bit of complaining. I spewed quite a torrent of frustration about the woman who had been hounding me and the young woman listened intently as I spoke. Then I said, “Who is she, anyway?” I didn’t mean what was her name because I already knew that but I wanted to know what her position with the organization was.
“She’s my mother,” said the young woman, with a slight grin. “Yeah, she can be a handful.”
Fifty other people in the room and I was there for 10 minutes. Who did I choose to unload to? The mother of the organization’s main person.
The older woman stopped contacting me after that which made me feel even worse than if she’d called me every day. Well, almost worse.
It’s a mystery to me how my foot often ends up in my mouth, more than the law of averages, I would think. That’s probably why, as the years went by, I became more careful about broadcasting my opinions in public settings, except, of course, for in the hundreds of editorials I wrote over time as that was my job. The worst that might happen in response to my babbling would be a nasty letter to the editor. I never minded receiving and reprinting most of those letters as it always seemed like the readers’ opinions provided some useful balance at whatever paper I was working for at the time.
And many of them probably came from mothers and fathers. Maybe even their daughters.
©2011 Jim Hagarty
