The other day my wife sat reading a newspaper clipping that she’d cut out to save and read later. It was a letter to the editor that had appeared here in the Independent a few weeks ago. Written by two state senators in true bipartisan fashion, one a republican and one a democrat, it dealt with carbon capture and storage. It’s a topic which garners attention in North Dakota, and we have our feelings on the matter, however they won’t be stated here because they are immaterial to the point.
The point is that she’d clipped it, and now was holding it in her hand to reread three weeks later. It could have been three months later, or three years later, or three decades later. Yes, documents can be saved on a computer to reread later, too, but to the older, untrained computer user it seems daunting and doesn’t happen.
My parents were habitual column clippers of stories that caught their eye for one reason or another. Dad filled scrapbooks with articles printed in World War II. After he and Mom had passed we were too eager to clean up their affairs, and at an auction sale someone bought those particular albums. I wish I had them back to read the history they recount.
Last Saturday we drove to Enderlin to visit the museum and deliver some pictures to place in their collection. Myrene Peterson greeted us and graciously shared her time in discussion and showing various items. Yep, those items happened to have been history rendered in the printed word. It is only of late that such a heavy dependence on the digital word has entered our consciences.
It seems that favorite clippings from newspapers are obituaries. One thick scrapbook in the museum was made up entirely of obituaries collected and organized into family groups and indexed as well. The creator of this collection had been collecting them for a good long time and maybe had help gathering them. The volume represented somewhat of a 100 year family history.
And how about those Indies and other local baseball teams, has there ever been a locally written history of those teams? Some players rose to professional status, but many great players remained here to play as amateurs. I have been in the Independent office where I saw old copies of the paper stacked on shelves. Someone with the goal of collecting information about teams and games played through the years would find them a valuable resource. The next step: compile your findings into book form which pent-up demand would gladly buy and read. Where else but
history found in the pages of the local papers makes a book possible.
Sometimes while waiting for my wife at West Acres, I will open a book to read. If you walk from one end of the mall to the other, you’ll likely not see many doing that. Their noses are pointed at fleeting images appearing on the small screens of their smart phones. Maureen Dowd, an opinion columnist for the New York Times, recently wrote a fitting column titled “Attention Men, Books Are Sexy.” Since it was a bit of an eye-catcher, there was nothing left to do but read on.
She quoted an expert who said men are reading less and that women make up 80 percent of fiction sales. Since I write from the perspective of an old English teacher I related wholeheartedly to the following line: The value of the humanities has been degraded. We don’t hear enough about how novels, sweeping over landscapes, personalities, ideas, events can open perspectives and discipline the mind.
We spend time in the North Dakota State University archive library in Fargo. If you ask one of the librarians about a certain topic, there’s a good chance they can find a file or a box of files containing information you asked for. Those files contain many letters and newspaper clippings.
My wife is a West River girl, i.e. born and raised on the west side of the Missouri River, who lately is collecting history of the country schools in Grant County. Maybe it’s history for a small audience, but some have expressed interest in reading her book in narrative form when completed. A fire one time in the past destroyed most of the official records, so she must do most of her digging in old weekly newspapers. Admittedly she finds these papers recorded in filmstrip form at the North Dakota Historical Society, and then, when she requests them are sent to the NDSU archives where she can read them. We make that concession to digitization.
Some day, people will want to read stories about the recent deaths and property damage caused by the tornado. I saw some of it first hand, but I’m old and will forget. Someone wisely said that journalism is the first rough draft of history. Years down the road, a newspaper clipping about the event might be found in a drawer where people in the future will find it and read with interest.
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