Wolfgang von Skeptik

IN PRAISE OF CERTAIN FORGETFULNESS

I COVERED MY FIRST election in 1958, three years before I was 21 and old enough to vote. I was stringing for a weekly newspaper called The Fountain Citizen, which served about 12,000 families in Fountain City, Tennessee, an unincorporated locale that had sprung up along U.S. Highway 441 immediately north of Knoxville. I don’t remember much about Fountain City’s history – it may have once been distinctly separate from Knoxville – but by 1958 it was already on its way to becoming a textbook example of urban sprawl, buyer-beware used-car lots included, though it was by no means all incipient slum. It included a big public park with a small lake containing the man-made fountain that had given the area its name, the lake surrounded by well-manicured flower beds and a broad flat expanse of regularly barbered grass all shaded by substantial oaks. There was an old-fashioned square gazebo-type band-stand where politicians often spoke – indeed I had covered my first-ever political event there earlier that same year, a Fourth of July address by Sen. Estes Kefauver that ended in a drenching thunderstorm – and there were wooden picnic tables, painted forest green, set throughout the park as well. A few miles away was the county’s biggest high school, Central, red brick Ivy League architecture on a similarly landscaped hillside tract that looked more like the campus of some small New England college than the star property of a county board of education in Appalachia. But even then Fountain City’s southern boundary was indiscernible among the visually cluttered streets of the business districts and the mostly neat attractive residential neighborhoods it shared with the real municipality that would later gobble it up by annexation. Though in 1958 Fountain City’s political identity remained distinct: because of its population and geographical area, it had a substantial block of seats on the County Court, the equivalent of a county council, the elected members of which were called Squires. Local elections were thus important affairs, often hotly contested, and the man and wife who owned the little paper, who were also respectively its publisher/photographer and its editor (and whose names I have long since forgotten), were paying me 25 cents an inch to report on the outcome.

There is a small karmic irony here, though two decades would pass before I discovered it. At the time Fountain City claimed to be the largest unincorporated urbanized area in the United States – a title that would later pass to Federal Way, Washington: another textbook realm of urban sprawl, a place – by whatever strange and often perverse karma it is that governs my journalism career – I would cover for six years.

I do not remember anything at all of what was at stake locally there in Knox County in the 1958 election. I suspect Sen. Kefauver was up for another term – else why would he have braved the sweltering July heat and its jungle-oppressive humidity to speak to folks in Fountain Park (where I stood atop the green sawbuck picnic table closest to the bandstand and photographed him with the paper’s Rolleicord VB held upside-down above my head so I could frame him in its waist-level viewfinder). But at this distance of nearly 50 years I have no recollection of what else might have been on that November ballot The Fountain Citizen deemed important enough to assign me to cover. Nor have I any clippings to consult: all those were destroyed in the 1983 fire. But whatever the paper’s motive was, I stayed at its office much later than usual that election night, and shortly before the polls closed, I left to catch the Knoxville Transit Lines Number 3 Fountain City bus to Gay Street and a short walk to the Knox County Court House – traveling by KTL because my father deemed me “too irresponsible” to entrust with either of the family automobiles. Once inside the turn-of-the-century red brick courthouse I went to the room designated County Election Headquarters, found a seat in the press section and waited, clipboard in hand, for the night’s story to unfold.

The election headquarters was a biggish room in hues of jailhouse green lit by incandescent lights, naked bulbs in large round dingy yellow reflectors that dangled from the ceiling. The space was organized like a science classroom or a numbers parlor. It contained ranks of tables and folding chairs, and above a raised oaken platform at the far end of the room was a green blackboard painted like a scoreboard with a permanent white grid to display election results. The blackboard and platform occupied one entire wall. The air was dense with cigarette and cigar smoke, the ringing of telephones was incessant and the noise level was only slightly less than that of a football crowd: clerks took polling-place results over telephones and totaled them on hand-crank adding machines and shouted the names and numbers to the men at the blackboard, who then chalked the figures in the proper columns under the correct names. Onlooking partisans of the various candidates cheered or jeered appropriately and then went back to conversing amongst one another – people who were often social friends even as they were political adversaries. This was in the era of paper ballots and ballot-boxes – unless my memory is defective I did not see a voting machine until after I returned to New York City in 1965 – and in any case there were neither dimpled chads to seduce vindictively partisan attorneys nor dangling chads to confuse the tally, and the overall atmosphere was robustly festive: not the faintest trace of distrust or dissonance.

There were many working newsmen present and I was indescribably proud to be among their number. I remember thinking at one point “this is how I will spend the rest of my life, doing work like this,” but I am sorry to say after all these years I can no longer name all the men who were my colleagues that night. The Associated Press man in Knoxville in those days was Esker Thompson, and he was probably there, and maybe Julian Granger from The Knoxville News-Sentinel, but what I remember most vividly was how as the hours passed, Ralph Griffith of The Knoxville Journal began hammering out his story on a gray-cased Smith-Corona portable at the desk next to mine, writing what in those days was known as “running copy” – reporting the election results as they were revealed, handing takes to a waiting copy-boy who dashed four blocks up Gay Street to The Journal Building to make the midnight deadline of the One Star, the first of the morning’s run of five editions. I knew Griffith because I too worked at The Journal, stringing for that paper also, covering sports: $5 per game for writing football, $2.50 a game for phoning in basketball, $5 per meet for writing track. But this story tonight would be my eventual ticket into hard news, and five years later – after three years in the Regular Army and another year at The Journal as a full-time sportswriter – the election-story clip from The Fountain Citizen was one of the work samples that in 1963 helped land me a combination sports and hard-news job on The Oak Ridger, a smaller daily in the nearby town of Oak Ridge, home of the atom bomb.

I stayed at election headquarters until the KTL buses began running again at 6 a.m., then took the 3 Fountain City back to The Citizen. I had a key to the office and let myself in, then banged out my story: the typewriter at the desk I used was an ancient Royal Upright, probably made no later than 1930. The paper hit the street on Thursdays. My deadline was eight hours distant: 2 o’clock Wednesday afternoon, which meant there was no pressure at all, and I wrote steadily, carefully, deliberately, double-checking the vote totals and the spellings of all the candidates’ names. I remember my story ran four or five double-spaced takes – a “take” was an 8½xll” sheet of copy paper – and I finished just as the editor arrived at 9 a.m. I waited while she edited my work, standing by in case she had any questions or objections. She didn't; she was very pleased – enough pleased she put my byline on the story. Then I went home and slept most of the day.

Some may think it disgustingly shallow of me I have forgotten the issues in that first election I covered, but the fact of the matter is I have reported on dozens of elections and have special recollections of pivotal local issues in only perhaps two of them. Moreover, I think my forgetfulness is evidence of how blessed we Americans were in the years after World War Two and even at the height of the Cold War. It is a forgetfulness that speaks especially well of the kind of nation I was born into and was privileged to live in for most of my life: its elections, however hotly contested they were at the time, soon became woven into a broader tapestry of democratic process in which forgiveness and unity were the overriding values – not a bit like what happened in Florida in 2000 and nothing at all like what is happening all over America now, as if the very concept of United States is somehow coming permanently unraveled. While I know there was genuine electoral mayhem in the U.S. during the 19th Century, today’s reports of pre-election violence (two summaries of which are linked here and here), are without precedent in my lifetime. And I cannot but wonder – with considerable trepidation – if the facts reported here perhaps also explain the rationale by which the bitter ethos of electoral violence has come to haunt our homeland once again. As I have said before: verily, I fear for the Republic.

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Enjoy the weekend. Go hunting or target-shooting if you can; it may be the last weekend we will ever know in which we are able to express our Second Amendment rights without fear and paranoia.

Posted by Loren at October 29, 2004 05:47 AM