Monuments to Life, Not Death

A living room with a view -- of the cemetery. (Cyril Burns photo)

Not very many kids came trick-or-treating at our house.

To a young child, logic never prevailed. My sisters and I never realized it was because there was a gas station on one side of our house, a dentist on the other, an alley in the back and a highway across the front.

We didn't exactly live in a residential area.

That would have made great sense when trying to figure out why there were few knocks on our door each Oct. 31. But what made the most sense to our young minds was what we saw out the kitchen window every time we did the dishes -- the cemetery.

We thought kids were afraid to come to our house across the highway from Mount Horeb (Wis.) Union Cemetery, but we couldn't imagine what was so frightening about the place. It wasn't full of dead people, as our friend liked to point out. It was full of people who used to live.

My parents subtly introduced us to life solely by taking us on walks through the cemetery. There was the teen-age boy who was the first person buried in the cemetery in the 1800s; it wasn't uncommon for kids that young to die of diseases that are easily cured now, Mom said. There was another teen-age boy who died of a heart attack playing basketball; from that we learned that life is full of the unexpected -- good or bad.

Sometimes our parents or baby sitter would stop at the graves of people they knew and tell us something about them. Not every single one, of course, but it gave me the feeling that to every headstone there was a name, to every name there was a life.

But they weren't always deep, introspective walks through the cemetery. On the contrary. The place was a great playground. Plastic flowers everywhere, rabbits and gophers tearing up the ground. And in case you're curious, granite tombstones are a lot easier to climb than marble ones. It sounds disrespectful, but I think I would rather have children climbing all over my gravestone than adults weeping over it.

We never noticed the cemetery. It was just always part of the background, the piece of land between our house and the Johnsons'. We just took it for granted that it was there, which sometimes got in the way of decorum.

There was that fall day when I was in our driveway and I heard a sound like a shotgun. I thought it was either a car backfiring or these neighbor boys of ours hunting for rabbits in the cemetery. So I screamed, "Ugh, you got me," as loud as I could as I feigned death upon the family car.

My sister turned ashen and informed me there was a military funeral across the road. We bolted into the house as fast as we could and later found out from my father, one of the American Legion military shooters, that nothing noticeably odd had happened at the funeral.

Embarrassing, yes, but I chalk it up to the foolish days of  youth. I was 25 at the time.

Seeing funerals going on was odd. Granted, funerals aren't generally an invitation-only affair, but it still seemed strange having such a private event going on across the road.

When most people look out their kitchen windows, they see children riding by on bicycles or mail carriers traipsing up the sidewalk. Not  us; even if we didn't mean to, we'd still see the most grief-stricken moments of people's lives. Seeing this usually came with a hint of guilt, even if it was an accidental glance. It was like stealing a moment of their privacy, but they didn't know it.

Friends visiting after school would stare out the window at people visiting the graves. This is where I would get a little testy.

Look who's there, they'd say.

It's none of our business, I'd respond, and find us something else to do.

On vacation in Europe years later, my companions were spooked by the cemetery right under our hotel window in Salzburg, Austria. I thought it was great, especially when we checked it out the next day and found out Mozart's family was buried there. On a New York vacation, my friends and I did just about everything we wanted to do except see graveyards. Some people thought it was morbid to even connsider that as part of a vacation.

Cemeteries are not like notches on a stick, counting off who has died. They are not to be feared. They are monuments to life.

This post originally appeared as an essay in the Des Moines Register.

The ghost is across the street from the cemetery: During this summer's drought the outline of the family house that was razed seven years ago returned.

Wanted: Town Character

Barney and Andy had to deal with Otis, the town drunk, but they did so with neighborly kindness.

I miss Santa

I don’t mean the guy who busts into your house and brings you a few things from your Wish List each December.

The Santa I miss certainly had a white beard, dressed in red and had a pointy red cap.

He also walked the streets of my town all summer long, in shorts with red and white striped socks, while also making appearances at just about any public event that took place here. He cut quite the figure at the Lions Club bingo tent at the local carnival and his red hat could be seen popping out of the crowd at a school concert. Someone started a Facebook page dedicated to him.

But as quickly and randomly as the man everyone in town called Santa arrived, he also disappeared.

And no one I know seems to know where Santa went.

I miss Santa.

Santa was the latest in a not-very-long line of people you could best describe as Town Characters. I say it’s not a long line, because Santa’s predecessors held their titles for an awful long time. And it always seems when one went away, another magically showed up. It was as if somewhere, unknown to the rest of the world, there was a job board for Town Characters and it announced when and where there were openings.

We have an opening now in my town.

Every town and city has not just the local “characters” but people who are consistently there – in the background, on the street corners. What movies get wrong with extras is having different people in the backgrounds; they should have the same people there in the background, just like they often are in everyday life. Some are indeed characters, others might have drinking issues that label them so tactlessly as the town drunk. Others might be people with physical or mental disabilities that put them on a different path than most. But they are there, always there and part of the community, too.

When I lived in Des Moines, there were three: I called them Running Man, who was often seen running down the street in jeans and long-sleeved shirts; Waving Man, who stood on street corners and waved at everyone who drove by; and Box Man, who wandered the city always carrying a box.

On a recent trip back to Des Moines, I was pleased to see that Waving Man is still there, waving away at those who drive by. Many of my friends refer to him as “Mr. Happy,” and also delight in seeing him day in and day out.

Box Man wasn’t so much a character, it turns out, as a man with a mission. A friend of mine saw him at a baseball game and chatted with him. Turns out Box Man spent a lot of his spare time in search of cans and bottles, taking advantage of Iowa’s 5-cent deposit law. He made as much as $3,000 a year, just returning cans and bottles. My friend wanted to write a story about him; Box Man didn’t want the IRS on his case and politely declined.

Sometimes all it takes is a conversation with the Town Characters and you might find out there is a story there. I bumped into Santa at a garage sale and found out he had been an antiques dealer, and he was able to point out to the garage sale host that the candlesticks she was selling were more valuable than the dollar she was asking for. He also told the story of needing a heart operation a few years back and how upset he was that the doctors were going to have to trim his beard.

“I need the beard,” he said he told his doctors. “The kids call me Santa.” But alas, they shaved the beard anyway. It grew back and Santa was back in business.

It’s probably easier to be a Town Character in a small town, particularly one such as mine that sort of welcomes eccentrics more than many other small towns.

But it’s not a special tolerance that likely makes a small town a better place for those who walk a different path; it’s just that in the small town, we might know who these people are and what their stories are.

I thought of this the other day as I was out for a morning walk. I encountered Benny, who I often see walking the streets and roads of my town. Benny’s not that much older than me, and I believe he was seriously injured in a car accident years ago when I lived away. He’s not a town character so much as a recognizable figure to anyone who lives here.

On the bike path, Benny came toward me flashing a cross and saying, repeatedly, “She said see me in heaven. She said see me in heaven.”

In a bigger city or another place, I might have been a little afraid and avoided him. Instead, I looked closer at the cross Benny showed me, made from twigs glued to a piece of metal. He turned it over, and there was a thermometer.

Benny pointed to the sky. “She said see me in heaven,” he said, shook my hand and waved as he walked away.

Benny’s just a guy around town, looking forward to seeing someone someday in heaven. For now, I’m looking forward to meeting the next Town Character, whoever he or she may be.

And in this town, it’s a pretty good gig. You might even get your own Facebook page.

Leave This Iowa Girl A-Lo-Lone

Des Moines cartoonist Brian Duffy sums up how many feel about the media beating Olympian Lolo Jones has taken.

 Dear Rest of the World:

How many times do you have to be told? Do NOT mess with Iowans.

Another season, another smackdown of Iowa. You’re not sure what I’m talking about? First there was University of Iowa professor Stephen Bloom’s stereotype-laden hackjob for the Atlantic magazine. Now, for the latest, just check out the coverage of Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones.

Now, you could make an argument that none of this “let’s hate her ’cause she’s beautiful” coverage has anything to do with Iowa. But that’s where you would be wrong. Lolo is a Des Moines native, who as a high schooler worked at the bagel shop up the street from me and is way faster on the track than she ever was at that bagel shop. She is also the most beloved Iowan since Andy Williams and taking a swipe at her is like taking a swipe at the whole state. Iowans in the social media world have gone as berserk over this as the national sports media has.

And what a swipe it has been. Over the weekend, the New York Times’ Jere Longman wrote a piece questioning Lolo’s worth in relation to her athletic achievements. She sold out, Longman said, because of how she talked about her own personal story and because she cashed in on her looks with a few racy magazine photos. Somehow, in Longman’s world, Jones should have said no to the offers that came her way and let her hurdling speak for itself.

You can make an argument that the Olympic hurdler has, indeed done this. That Outside cover earlier this year made me cringe, mostly because it was so unnecessary and it’s a freaking ugly dress. Telling your life story to strangers and the world? I’d say I don’t understand why people do that, but here I am writing a blog.

This is how the celebrity machine works, and Lolo Jones is just the first in a long line of athletes, actors, singers, dancers to have done that, not to mention victims of heinous crimes that get national attention and eventually TV movies of the week. Discretion is just not part of our culture.

I’ve long been uncomfortable with the way female athletes are portrayed in the media. They have a tendency to think that skin sells, at the same time feeling as if they have the right to show their fit bodies. They do, but it just perpetuates the kind of coverage that never seems to end. They have the power to change it, but, being female athletes, probably need the money.

Holding up Lolo Jones as the poster girl for doing this is frightfully unfair. It’s like slamming Justin Bieber for being a part of the machine that throws out fresh-faced boys – and products with their face on them -- to be devoured by screaming girls. Lolo is just the latest in a long line the same way the Bieber is in a long, long line of teen idols. It’s the nature of the business.

I wish more female athletes would put their foot down about this; I wish Lolo Jones had said “no” to Outside magazine. The rest? If you follow her on Twitter, you know she is an outgoing, funny person who puts her life out there and, like many in social media perhaps overshares – and did this well before most of the world even knew her name.  

It’s a long, long line of female athletes who have opted for the “looks sell” route and somehow have never come under the radar of the New York Times for doing so.

High jumper Amy Acuff, swimmer Amanda Beard and beach volleyball player Gabrielle Reece have all been on the cover of Playboy. Softball star Jennie Finch turned down Playboy but said yes to Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. Soccer darling Abby Wambach graced the cover of ESPN magazine’s annual Body Issue, the same annual collection of nudes that is part of the criticism against Lolo Jones. For the record, ESPN also features men, including NFL players Adrian Peterson and Rob Gronkowski, and I have heard few complaints about that.

Want to buy a house? Call Suzy.

And here in Wisconsin, runner Suzy Favor Hamilton has been cashing on her looks and personal story for almost 20 years and no one seems to think that’s a bad thing. The three-time Olympic distance runner even had a swimsuit calendar of her own in 1997 – three years before she fell during an Olympic 1,500-meter race, a fall she later said was deliberate because she knew she couldn’t win. Along the way Favor talked about her depression and eating disorders and her brother’s suicide, which of course the media lapped up. These days, she is a motivational speaker.

Suzy Favor Hamilton also sells real estate in Madison, Wis., but has in fact made a career out of being Suzy Favor Hamilton. And what’s wrong with that?

Yet Lolo Jones is somehow held up as the one woman in the world who has chosen to do this heinous thing. Go figure.

Many other media outlets are coming to Lolo’s defense or at least presenting a fair look at the rivalry among the U.S. women hurdlers and the role played in that rivalry by the attention paid to Lolo Jones. The snarky sports website Deadspin has taken to calling her, with a virtual tongue in a virtual cheek, “mortal enemy of the New York Times Lolo Jones.”

Lolo Jones has really done nothing to create any enemies, and that’s part of what Iowans love so much about her. There’s always a sense of pride when the rest of the world is paying attention to one of their own because Iowa is a big small town bordered by two big rivers.

Iowans like it when people like one of them.  But it might get ugly when people don’t. Just make sure you never, ever mess with Andy Williams.

Lolo Jones greets the hometown fans at the Drake Relays in Des Moines.

Sisters Don't Have to Do It For Themselves

Winning together has to be much more fun than trying to outdo the other. (Getty Images photo)

Sometimes with sports, you wish some statistics could be frozen in time.

The Miami Dolphins’ perfect 1972 season that included a Super Bowl title would be one, because so many people hate the team that has come closest to breaking it, the New England Patriots. Babe Ruth’s beloved home run record was a ghost that haunted Roger Maris and Henry Aaron. Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova’s rivalry was so splendid that it would have been perfect had it stopped when they were tied in head-to-head victories, but it did not.

And over the weekend, another set of stats emerged to create a bit of perfection. When Serena Williams won Wimbledon, she tied her sister Venus for a fifth title there and the two of them then went out and won their fifth doubles championship on the hallowed lawn of southwest London.

It’s as it should be, evenly divvied up for a pair of sisters whose achievements don’t seem to be all that appreciated by the culture that has watched them grow up and dominate their sport, yet manage to be close and loving siblings.

Oh, the public grasps that they win tennis trophies and are great at what they do. But the notion of two sisters rising and dominating at the same time is seen more as a curiosity or a bit of trivia than the magnificent achievement it truly is. Maybe they’ve just been around so long we take it for granted.

Think about it. What if Tiger Woods had to mow down his own brother to win any of his championships? What if LeBron James had his brother willing to take a charge as he went in for a monster dunk? Would Leon and Michael Spinks ever gone on to boxing glory if they had to fight each other? The lifelong feud between sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine includes one winning an Oscar over the other or one being chosen for a role over the other, but that’s not truly a one-on-one competition.

Yet eight times when Venus or Serena sought a Grand Slam championship, the pinnacle of her sport, she had to vanquish her sister who was standing over on the other side of the net.

This is beyond my comprehension. I am one of four girls born in successive years. Because of the way the birthdays fell, my younger sister was actually two grades behind me in school but I was never in high school without at least one sister always there. Same thing for Girl Scouts, band, camp, school plays, any sport, pretty much any activity. These days, we even share friends.

I have the most in common with my sister who is 14 months older than me. We share similar interests, have chosen a somewhat similar line of work and look enough alike to have been mistaken for each other. If we were to play cribbage, backgammon or even H-O-R-S-E, I would want to kick her ass to Sunday (I am, after all, the younger.) But if there was something she wanted more than anything in the world and I was the one who stood in her way, I would absolutely crumble.

Our parents raised us as this little cluster. They sort of had no choice, but it’s how they did it that resonates with me. Gifts were games all four of us could play. If one girl had a friend over, we all got to invite a friend over. Once when we were little, one of my sisters found a dollar at the local bowling alley. My father took it up to the counter, got change and gave each of us a quarter to play pinball.

I suspect the Williams sisters were raised much the same way – that family, your sister(s) are what come first. Maybe the reason their combined success and strong relationship are taken for granted is because of a wee bit of sexism; girls and women aren’t so tough as to hate each other, of course they’d be friendly rivals.

Because of that patronizing view, the sisters’ parents don’t get near the credit they deserve. Earl Woods was seen as a wise mentor to his successful son; Richard Williams and Oracene Price have always been perceived as a little odd. Granted, Richard Williams has said and done a few goofy things and it is always a treat to see what Oracene’s hair is going to look like, but the proof of their success as parents is right there for the world to see.

Two sisters. A whole heap of trophies. Victories over each other. Victories teamed up with the other. And a whole lot of love.

Serena lost in the first round of the French Open earlier this summer. Venus lost in the first round of Wimbledon. Their days of head-to-head competition may be over, and that’s probably a relief for their parents.

But the two are headed off to London soon in search of a third gold medal in women’s doubles. Commercialism and fierce competition have always been part of the Olympics, yet the ideal of the Games is something much higher-minded – that of building something greater through the experience and not just the victories.

It’s a lesson the Williams family has been teaching us all for a long time.

All for one and one for all, right down to the clothes we wore.

Bracing For a Whole New World

Playing for a school team, and winning the school's first-ever trophy for girls' basketball.

(This post originally appeared as an opinion piece in the Wisconsin State Journal.)

For those who care about women’s athletics, there has been much to celebrate about the 40^th anniversary of the passage of Title IX.

Luminaries and legends have gathered together throughout the U.S. Sports Illustrated and ESPN dedicated coverage to the events of June 1972. That’s when Congress passed a law mandating that institutions that received federal funding had to offer equal opportunities to males and females. That opened the door for interscholastic athletics for girls and women.

For me, the effects of it were monumental. I played sports and became a sports writer, traveling the U.S. covering many events that wouldn’t have even existed without Title IX. Dreams I didn’t even know I had came true because of Title IX.

I am far from alone in that regard; any woman who is over 40 and has played sports likely feels that way. Yet as Title IX has seeped into my consciousness again in recent months, I’ve come to realize how the timing of it could not have been any more perfect for who I was and how I would grow up to look at the world.

Title IX passed when I was finishing fifth grade; it more or less went into effect the following year. Somewhere between sixth and seventh grade came the news that there was going to be a girls’ basketball team at our local high school.

This news was beyond big for me. I inherited a love of basketball from my mother, who didn’t play for a school team but loved the sport nonetheless. My friends and I, in the dresses we were required to wear to school back then, shot baskets at recess. I’m proud that the first activism in my life was to pass around a petition in about third or fourth grade to ask that the girls get the gym before school, too, because the boys would never let us play. We got Tuesdays.

So the news that one day my friends and I would be able to be on a school basketball team was the most joyous thing we could imagine.

Unfortunately, at about the same time, I was diagnosed with scoliosis. The curvature of my spine was severe enough that surgery was a possibility, but a brace was another option. Even this lesser option, this clunky brace, would clearly impact my life.

“Can I still play basketball?” I asked the doctor. He said I could be out of the brace an hour a day, so that would work for a basketball game. There was really nothing stopping me from playing with it on, either, except hurting someone else who might ram into me. This amazing opportunity to play basketball was out there in my future and by god, I was not going to miss out.

So in the weeks leading up to seventh grade I was fitted for the brace – a leather ‘girdle’ with two metal bars in the back and one metal bar in the front that all screwed together with a piece that went around my neck. The day I got the brace was the day Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes tennis match; the two will always be merged in my mind.

In seventh grade, when you’re just starting your tortuous teen years, going to school wearing something like that should have been horrific, and believe me it was no picnic.

But I could play basketball. I might have been encased in metal from hips to chin, but I could still play basketball. As awful as this was, it didn’t take away the thing I loved most back then, and that was basketball and sports.

I continued to wear that brace in high school when I got to finally be on a team. Sometimes I practiced with it on, I always took it off for games. I could whip in and out of the thing like Houdini escaping his chains, maybe even quicker. Doctors said I couldn't do gymnastics so I spent that portion of gym class off in a corner shooting baskets instead.

I don’t think much about my brace when I think of my teenage years; in fact when I see pictures from back then they are kind of jarring to me.

But I’ve come to realize that by being able to play sports at a time when I needed them, I gained not just opportunity but a way to look at life. Wearing that brace stunk, but it didn’t take away what I loved most. It was a wonderful lesson to carry with me into adulthood, through a crippling bout of the neurological illness Guillain-Barre Syndrome, through an adventure with breast cancer, through family trauma. These weren’t fun, but I knew they didn’t take away everything.

So I thank Title IX for the chance it gave me to play sports. But it also gave me the chance to learn how to recognize and cling to what is good. And that has been the gift of a lifetime.

Turning Into Dad, and That's Not So Bad

A happy man, even with his daughter trying to crush him.

The funky cowlick that makes a center part look like a hockey stick has always been there. The clomping rhythm of my feet going up the stairs came a little later. The desire to never have to leave my town, though, is pretty much the thing that cinched it.

At an age when most women worry about turning into their mother, I have turned into my father.

It’s not a bad thing, it’s just a strange thing to realize. For starters, my dad wasn’t what you would call a regular guy. While most dads might yell at their kids for not going to sleep at night, my dad had his own way of taking care of the problem. He’d sneak around the back of the house, go onto the deck, quietly open a screen, pop his head into the bedroom I shared with my two sisters, growl and make his dentures go in and out. That pretty much scared us into submission.

My dad was also someone who noticed the little things around him; it’s what made him a superb photographer, which was his profession. He’d make us stop what we were doing to look at a particularly beautiful sunset or listen to a chirp that made it clear a certain bird was back for the spring.

And it was the little things in which my dad took the greatest joy. Like the little town in which he was born and the little town where he and my mom settled and where I was raised, the same town I live in today. He knew everyone and they knew him, a facet of his personality but also the nature of his business of shooting weddings, families, babies and high school seniors.  He had his morning coffee crew at the local diner and his Lions Club bingo tent to man.

He never wanted to leave this place. After he served his time in Korea, he rarely crossed the state line of Wisconsin ever again. “I already saw the world,” he told me once, and he was just happy to be home. Still, I lived in Iowa for 21 years and maybe one visit would have been nice. But, I’d tell my friends, my dad’s head might explode if he crossed the Wisconsin border.

His reticence to leave home became a joke in the family. My mom wisely gave up after a while and just started going places without him. When my sister got married in Atlanta, he had no choice but to go. One of my siblings was there with a camera to snap a picture of my dad in the car the moment the family crossed the border from Wisconsin into Illinois.

Years ago, it was a joke. Now, I get it. What a wonderful thing to feel that where you are is the best place in the world. For years, my head could never get around that because it’s a big old world out there and I wanted to see it. But in a world where people are constantly on the go and always thinking the grass is greener somewhere else, my dad was utterly content with where he was. What a lucky man.

I’m starting to get that, and this is where I’m becoming my dad: I never want to leave this place. I’m having a hard time planning a summer vacation because I just kind of like hanging around here. I have a well-stamped passport and I wonder if it’s ever going to get stamped again. I’m content; I love where I live.

I was somewhat helped in this regard by having two consecutive summers of health issues that kept me home from work a lot. It’s during that time I discovered that my little town is a completely different place during the day than it is at night. Where the streets are relatively quiet after 6 p.m., they bustle during the day. Because I was home so much I began spending time at a local coffee shop. Now I have my own coffee crew and rarely get to read my newspaper there because I see so many people I know.

Where in the evenings the businesses are closed and Main Street is quiet, during the day I can walk down the street and wave at all the business owners through their shop windows – to Mary Jane, to Karla, to Peg, to Donna, to Henri, to Mo, to Rebecca, to Julie, to John.

Once I had to go back to work five days a week, I suddenly did not want to. I realized, like my dad had so many years ago, that this was the place that brought me comfort and I didn’t want to leave it.

.

But you have to make a living, so I make the 25-mile trek each day, down Main Street in my car instead of on foot, through the five roundabouts that make up the eastern exit out of this town. When I work a regular day shift, it’s a trek where sneezes mark my departure and my arrival. I’m one of those people who sneezes at the sun, and to leave town facing east in the morning and to return facing west in the evening creates an interesting driving challenge in a town with five roundabouts.

I see the sneezes as the bookmarks to note when I leave and when I return, but they’re not really necessary. Because all I need to know to make me smile is that I am home, and I have my dad to thank for that.

A beautiful place. Who would ever want to leave?

For a Good Time, Try the Morgue

In this 1937 photo about hard times at Christmas, editors clearly didn't think the happy kid on the right fit in. The lines drawn on the photo show that he was cropped and retouched out of the picture, and that the two kids in the middle were the ones to focus on.

There’s nothing like a good morgue.

Oh, I don’t mean the kind where it’s cold and clammy and toes have tags on them. It’s a dated newspaper term for what is now politely called “the library,” but a good morgue is as much of an adventure as the one in “Night Shift” was.

Long before there was the Internet to give us random things to stumble upon, there were newspaper morgues. Looking for some routine background on a prominent woman you are interviewing? You just might find some clippings from the 1960s that report the death of her first husband, written in the euphemistic manner of the time but leaving little doubt it was quite the scandal. Looking for a generic Christmas photo? You just might find a shot of grubby-looking kids from decades ago, made to look as pathetic as possible by the sensationalistic photographer who took the photo.

Looking for a copy of a photograph shot by your dad, a freelancer for the local daily? You just might find your parents’ 1957 engagement announcement.

Nowadays, this is all digital. A couple clicks of the computer can land you a photograph or story that’s been published since about 1990. Other archival services can give bring newspapers from as far back as the 19^th century to your computer (or perhaps later in older parts of the world), although you pretty much have to know what you are looking for.

But a good, thorough newspaper morgue might just include most of the photographs that had been published in the paper for almost a century. Many are in the shiny black and white that was the hallmark of news photos for many decades. A good morgue might include envelope after envelope of clippings that were saved according to topic and neatly filed away. There also might be celebrity files, movie files, TV show files, school files, church files.

A 1951 photo about hypnotism.

Newspapers varied on what they kept and, sometimes, how they kept it. One newspaper I worked at kept everything, even promotional and news photos that never ran in the paper. Legend has it when Lee Harvey Oswald was named as the suspect in JFK’s murder, the paper was one of the few to publish his mugshot because someone had saved one that had come across the wire service when Oswald had been arrested in New Orleans the previous August.

The random things that were in the files of that newspaper were matched only by the random method in which they were organized. If you wanted to find the file for Cher, you had to look under “A.” You know, for “Allman, Cher,” because she had been married to Gregg Allman for all of three years. If you needed a photo of Julius Erving, you had to look in the “J” file. You know, for “J, Dr.”

Tom Jones lives in the old files, dancing with Lulu.

The need for space and, let’s face it, shrinking staffs have seriously impacted what many papers do in this realm these days. Sometime in the 1980s, the paper I now work for transferred most of its images to the Wisconsin Historical Society but also threw away tons of negatives. One day about five years ago I asked a grizzled veteran photographer where I might find images or negatives from the Milwaukee Brewers’ 1982 World Series. He started to tell me what happened, then walked away in tears.

Yet there is still some superb randomness in what is left in our files at the paper. While the files of old stuff at other papers were amusing on their own, it occurred to me that because this is where I grew up, my family might be among the old stuff in my own newsroom.

My father was a freelance photographer in the 1960s for The Capital Times, the paper I came to Wisconsin to work for. I looked through the files to see if maybe I could find a photo or two shot by him, or at least a clipping of an article for which he had done the photography.

Engagement photo.

There were no traces of the photos he had shot, but I found a goldmine nonetheless. Even large daily newspapers used to print much more social, family and military news than they do now, and because of this I found a few surprises.

A decade before my father shot photos for the Madison newspaper, his picture was in it as prom king of his high school. His first photo credit in the paper was likely the one of my mother, which ran with their engagement announcement in 1957.

There were other clippings – of my dad and uncles going to and thankfully returning from war. There was a photo of an uncle on trip to Scotland, wearing a kilt even though we aren’t Scottish. Other clippings told sadder stories of my family, such as one about my cousin who was missing in action in Vietnam and the memorial service held for him nine years later.

One topic can lead to another until you realize you could get lost for days in a place like this. And at least with this kind of morgue, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Once there was an engagement, clearly, the paper had to update its files.