A Thousand Words
By Jock Lauterer
Getting to meet and interview the luminaries of our times is one of the perks of being a journalist. Val Lauder should know; during her long tenure at the Chicago Daily News, the retired UNC journalism professor interviewed the likes of Frank Sinatra and General Dwight Eisenhower (seen here during a 1947 event). It’s all recorded in a new book, The Back Page, released this summer by Amazon.com. Val describes the book as “my experiences – adventures – at a great American newspaper. This is not an academic kind of account of journalism at an earlier time. There’s a lot of humor in the pages, smiles, chuckles, laughter.†She describes the book’s genesis: “A couple of summers ago I was not scheduled to teach Summer School, and the idea sort of … came to me of writing about my experiences at the Chicago Daily News, the historical figures I met, and the celebrities … [during] a century of great events. … I was aware as I wrote that I was sharing with readers another time. We had typewriters. Telephones … some of them the old-fashioned, upright telephones sometimes called ‘candlestick’ telephones. Glue pots on the desks. … It was only when Tom Bowers [retired UNC J-School senior associate dean] read the manuscript and emailed me about it … that I realized I had documented a time that has been lost, that the people who [now] work in cubicles with computers and carry cell phones … have no awareness of that time or how we reacted to breaking news stories.†As Steve Reiss, enterprise editor of The Washington Post, put it in his comment on the back of the book: “And best of all, it captures why anyone would work in these dirty, loud rooms with a deadline always hanging over your head: because it’s so much damn fun.†The book is available at Amazon.com
A THOUSAND WORDS
Do you have an important old photo that you value? Email your photo to jock@email.unc.edu and include the story behind the picture. Because every picture tells a story. And its worth? A thousand words.
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