Sharing stories

“I think The Bulletin operates on a principle which in the long run is unbeatable. This is that it enters the reader’s home as a guest. Therefore, it should behave as a guest, telling the news rather than shouting it,” William L. McLean, publisher of The Philadelphia Bulletin.

Every family has stories that they share and repeat at family events. The road to these remembrances will often be prompted by now adult siblings saying things like “Hey, remember that time Tommy fell out of the pine tree” or “Remember how the ducks would stop traffic on the road in front of our home every morning as they went across the street to visit the neighbor’s flock of geese.”

As stories tend to, some have grown in the telling. For example, my oldest sister will get rather salty and renew her accusations that as a young boy I intentionally pushed her and her bike into a ditch. As I have for the more than 40 years since the incident occurred, I still assert innocence and that any collision that may have occurred was not the intentional act that she she claims it to be, but was purely the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There are other stories, some happy, some sad. Many of them are apocryphal in nature, based solely on the memories of those involved or whom the story was told to later.

With the inherent skepticism of people who grew up in a newspaper reporter’s household, where if your mother claimed to love you, you should get a corroborating source to confirm it, my children have always taken the stories of my youth with a grain of salt. After all, any evidence or witnesses to these tales, were hundreds of miles and at least a time zone away.

My niece Elsie came to visit this week, with a somewhat sketchy plan to kidnap my daughter and take her to go visit their cousin Jacob who is attending graduate school in Indiana. Jacob is in materials science and is working on improving bowling ball design.

In addition to visiting with us, Elsie also brought a car filled with items from my parent’s house. Since my Mom’s death last year, my sisters and brothers are slowly going through the decades of accumulated stuff in her home.

Among the several boxes of items that my children helped Elsie carry into my house on Sunday evening was one that contained a newspaper delivery box.

“It’s real!” my son exclaimed in amazement. Growing up, my parents subscribed to The Philadelphia Bulletin and were fiercely loyal to it. The Bulletin was an afternoon newspaper that was one of several papers serving the Philadelphia area including where I grew up in southern New Jersey. Changing demographics and corporate business practices that focused on short-term profits versus long term sustainability led to The Bulletin closing its doors. The last issue was January 29, 1982. When he got home from work that day, my dad removed the paper delivery box with the last issue of The Bulletin in its plastic delivery bag inside it, and put it away in our garage along with the rest of his treasures.

I had told my children the story several times over the years and they had a healthy degree of doubt in its veracity. Much like the apostle Thomas in John 20:24-29, they had to see it to believe it. They reacted to similar amazement when from a box labeled “fragile,” I pulled another important relic of my childhood, the heavy metal flashlight that I had the job of holding while my dad would do car repairs in the cold and dark.

I may have gloated for a short period of time in vindication, as my teenage son picked up the flashlight and commented how heavy and cold it was even after having been in the house for several hours and not having the six C-cell batteries it once held.

I have spent much of my life collecting and sharing stories. Just as William L. McLean’s quote above, I feel fortunate to be invited into the homes of The Star News readers to share those stories and hope to do so for years to come.