My journalism career got off to a rocky start. It was 1958, and I was a college junior. I’d taken a job editing our weekly newspaper at Park College in Missouri. When I returned to school in the fall, we decided our first editorial of the year should come to grips with widespread rumors circulating about rapidly eroding trustee and faculty support for our college president.
It was difficult to uncover the facts of the case, but we seemed to catch a break. This was the year of The Long, Hot Summer, a popular film starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and the surname of the man whose presidency appeared to be careening toward its end was Long. So, we headlined our rumor-based editorial “A Hot Long Summer.” Lacking facts, we found a headline that conveyed undergraduate irreverence, which was fashionable even in the 1950s.
When the editorial appeared, President Long called the assistant editor and me into his office and greeted us with a chilly smile and a brief observation.
“I believe,” he said, “those adjectives are usually reversed.”
That was the closest he came to complaining about our editorial, and I believe we conveyed our embarrassment with silence, smiles and nods.
I don’t remember other details of the awkward conversation that followed, but it left me feeling we would need more facts in hand the next time we published something like that.
Dr. Long soon left his presidency, and a few months later I retired as editor, returning to journalism many years later as a cautious, part-time local columnist in Ohio. In the meantime, I began to pay close attention to Henry David Thoreau’s Journal.
By the 1960s I had left Park College with a degree in science and was doing graduate work in English, writing about “Science and the Development of Thoreau’s Art.” The science-versus-art tension in Thoreau’s journal writing was what Andrea Wulf had in mind as recently as 2017, when she wrote in The Atlantic: “The journal illustrates his almost daily balancing act between recording scrupulous observations of nature and expressing sheer joy at the beauty of it all.”
My own journal got its start in 1969-70, when the Danforth Foundation gave me a chance to take courses in Afro-American studies at Yale. I was teaching by then at Denison University, and my colleague and mentor, Tony Stoneburner, encouraged me to buy a notebook for capturing some of the rich complexity of our year in New Haven. I settled into habitual journal-keeping.
In 1977, when I was helping a historian teach a seminar on art and commerce at the amazing Newberry Library in Chicago, The Journals of Lewis and Clark became my obsession If Thoreau was drawn toward 19th century science by his deep love for the natural world, Lewis and Clark were pushed toward their “scrupulous observations of nature” by President Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to know everything he could about the land between St. Louis and the Pacific Ocean.
By the winter of 1979-80, I published “Lewis and Clark Probe the Heart of Darkness” in The American Scholar. My article explored Lewis and Clark’s journal entries about Indigenous people, including their policies in negotiating with tribal societies as their expedition moved toward the Pacific.
The expedition was a military operation, but Lewis and Clark’s ways of understanding Indigenous people, especially those thoughts recorded in their journals before they became confused by troubling encounters with tribal groups on the Pacific Coast, seemed surprisingly enlightened, even “scientific.”
If more Americans had been reading The Journals of Lewis and Clark, their thinking might have helped us avoid the genocide that became such a shameful part of our history.
But journals, like scholarly articles, are not often widely read.
When I returned to journalism with my column in the Ohio Granville Sentinel, 44 years after my retirement from the Park College Stylus, I was looking for readers. Although I continued writing in my journal, my entries were often preliminary stabs at ideas for columns.
The reactions of my readers were what gave me my kicks.
When I retired from teaching at Denison and taught part-time for a few years at Dartmouth College, I began to write columns occasionally for the Valley News, and after I re-retired from teaching at Dartmouth, the email responses from Valley News readers were even more appealing.
Maybe folks in New England aren’t quick to embrace newcomers, as they say, but quite a few seem willing to correspond with one.
Stoneburner, who spent many summers in Maine and inspired me to start my journal, is a fine correspondent. He is widely known for beautifully inscribed, news-filled postcards.
Now in his mid-90s, he has kept a journal for more than 70 years.
His notebooks take up 36 feet of shelf space. After 52 years, mine barely reach 2 feet.
I know the stats about Tony’s journal because he recently gave his notebooks to the Denison University Archives, and some of his students, colleagues and friends plan to celebrate him and his gift with a Zoom conference on journals as literature. I hope to participate.
Knowing Tony, I imagine his journal to be a treasury informed by decades of his correspondence with poets and artists.
The journals I know best, including my own, are influenced most by science, and because Tony reads as widely as anyone I’ve known, I’ll hazard a confident guess that science is an important part of the journal he’s been shaping for so long.
The finest journalism, I’ve decided in this time of a pandemic, achieves that balance too.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.