by Lafcadio De La Foret

Created on: July 08, 2008

Cathode Ray Days Diary

Growing up, Mom always told me if I couldn't say anything nice about someone, don't say anything at all. Maybe it was natural then that I went into journalism.

Yes, I fought in the Great Media Revolution my son, right from the start, almost. You may think it was a long time ago, but not so ancient a time that I can't remember some of the details. For those were times of great change in the world, and in the business of gathering and telling people The News.

During my watch, thirty years man and boy, the pictures changed from scratchy stills, burned in to newsrooms on the Associated Press photo wire; changed from black and white film to colour, then to video tape. The words of the television news business changed too - from reciting formal newspaperese on television (then, an imitation of newspapers which was considered to be real reporting), to the conversational. And, changed again from impersonal, straightforward facts, to ego-centred Me journalism.

Those were dark days at the start and not only because film shaded events in black and white only, and not because any of the first newsrooms I worked in were in the bowels of the building and had no windows. No, dark because there was a war coming on, both overseas and at home. Wars to test the conscience of the country and the young fodder needed for it.

So from the mid west into the Deep South of the United States I travelled on a Greyhound bus in the spring of 1963, filled with anxiety and naivet, teenage certainty and awkwardness. It is remembered present day as a fractured series of incidents, each vivid enough to permanently brand my memory. I trespassed on the reality of the times that included segregation, lawlessness, good cooking and characters central casting never heard of, but wished they had.

In May of 1963, the original sentence was to be served working in the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation corrugated container factory in West Monroe, Louisiana. The summer would be spent earning enough money to return to college.

For a 19 year old, just drummed out of the U.S. Marine Corps officer and a gentleman flight school (MARCAD), before my unreliable kidneys ever got into the air, this was an adventure on a different road. For a confirmed observer of people, this was a chance to see a world I had tasted only briefly with a hasty school trip to Atlanta. So what if I hadn't had a chance to fly jets and kill people in the great Vietnam War, I would instead pilot words and influence people.

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