Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,22
hi-fi set you could imagine using spare parts swiped from the radio lab and a chassis they made out of tin cans, forks, and a serving tray from the canteen. “Most surprising thing was, when we turned it on, it worked. We can pick up Casey Kasem on WABC from New York. How do you like that?” he wrote. And so on.
As happy as I always was to receive Tim’s letters, that semester I was also beginning to discover my own aptitudes. At the urging of Sister Mary Margaret I had joined the staff of the school newspaper, The Beacon. The first article I ever wrote was an interview with Maddy, the school cook I helped in the kitchen. Maddy was an amazingly cheerful fifty-year-old black woman who had come to work for the nuns when she was just a teenager. I titled the piece “Silent Heroes: Maddy Simms, Thirty-three Years at SHA and Still Smiling.”
My article struck everyone as being supremely principled and humane—which, as I remember, hadn’t been my intention at all, but I welcomed the praise just the same. Girls I had never spoken to, juniors and seniors, stopped me in the hallway to thank me for my bravery in exposing the hypocrisies and racial injustices occurring right here at SHA—injustices that, as far as I was concerned, were basic facts of life and had never needed exposing to anybody. But no matter. I clipped the article and set it aside, with the idea that I would add it to my scrapbook for Tim as soon as I found the time.
Because after the success of my first article, I became extremely busy with the newspaper. The editor, Kim Cortney, appointed me as special features editor, which basically meant that I was called upon to write anything, anytime. I began to spend all my free periods in the newspaper office, a cramped four-desk room in a hallway near the gym. I learned how to write a proper lead and how to estimate column length for a mock-up. I also learned that we girls from the newspaper club had a surprising degree of freedom on campus. We could come and go pretty much as we pleased. All you had to do was say, “Got a deadline, Sister,” wave a piece of paper in the air, and they’d let you pass.
“So good to see you mixing with the other girls,” Principal Evelyn said, nodding smugly as she stood watch outside her office door.
One Friday at the end of the semester, the newspaper club was excused from class to attend, unchaperoned, a daylong Scholastic Press Association conference at Louisiana State University. Since becoming a boarder at Sacred Heart I’d rarely left the school, so I was thrilled to be invited. I rode with Kim, who had her own car, a racy, sky-blue Capri with white bucket seats. As she drove she sang along to “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” puffing on a cigarette and blowing the smoke out a crack in her window. I watched from the backseat, awestruck by her cool. On the last chorus she threw her arm out, belting the song melodramatically with the other girls in the car until I had to laugh aloud.
Arriving at LSU, the club veterans took a few minutes to preen before leaving the car. I borrowed a lipstick and brush and did the same. “Boys,” Kim said, checking herself in the mirror of her compact, “don’t really care about how well you can write a lead. What they care about … are your lips. How do I look?”
We spent the day in workshop sessions moderated by passionate LSU journalism students and bearded young professors. They quoted John Locke, Alexander Hamilton, and Hunter S. Thompson, talking about the sacred power of the word, and the beauty of simple, honest prose, and the journalist’s moral duty to uphold the freedom of the press. After the conference was over, we ended the day at an Italian restaurant near LSU’s campus with a bunch of boys from the Cathedral High School paper. We all tumbled into the padded red booths, fired with a newfound sense of self-importance as newspaper writers. Who’d ever thought that what we were doing was so crucial to the well-being of civilization? Who’d ever thought something as simple as words on paper could change the world? Looking around the table at my classmates that evening under the glow of a low-hanging lamp, I imagined I could see in them, like an aura burning