Encouraged by my cousins, we took our son to the Marshall County Fair.
We ducked out of the brilliant sunshine and sweltering heat, to observe the prize-winning sheep, pigs, cows and horses. Wafts of sweet-smelling hay and manure and the crackling announcement that the pie-eating contest was about to begin, took me back to my days as a cub reporter at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News.
I covered education, a beat that was slow during the summer. So I got the coveted county fair assignment that year. I went to the fairgrounds each day that week, instructed to find not one but two stories for the next morning's newspaper.
By Saturday, my ingenuity and creativity tapped, I ended up at the tobacco-spitting contest. "Thwack," was the first word of the story I filed that afternoon. The sound had come from the fair queen, who had chosen to participate in the event. The story made the AP wire and was picked up by some of the biggest newspapers in the country, including the Philadelphia Inquirer.
"I had reinforced the hillbilly image of West Virginia and set the state back ages," an Inquirer reader and West Virginia native wrote to my editor in complaint. To this day, I have kept that story.
No comments:
Post a Comment