One Lucky Girl

My mother would have celebrated her 90th birthday this coming Saturday. I could write hundreds of tributes to her, but one of her best efforts dealt with my career. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a nurse--the result of too many young Dr. Kildare day dreams. After volunteering at Maury Regional Hospital for a year, nursing didn't seem like such a great job for me. That fall, I was asked to be a reporter for the weekly happenings at Culleoka High School for the Columbia Daily Herald.  I was hooked. Didn't know how I was going to do it, but journalism was my goal. 
When I graduated high school, it wasn't acceptable for young girls in my family to work retail, so Mom called the wife of Herald publisher, Sam Kennedy. All she did was ask if they would be hiring anyone for vacation relief. Mom and Betty had been Sunday School buddies in Culleoka when they were girls.

My bosses, Jim Finney and Dick Hines at the
Columbia Daily Herald

To say I had a "stage mom" wouldn't be quite accurate, but she wasn't going to leave anything to chance if it involved her offspring.  I loved  the job...every nerve racking, stressful second of it. A Pentax camera was shoved in my hand, and I was told to click that button, and this button, and shoot. This was before automatic cameras, and I'd never heard of an F-Stop. I would drop off my film in the dark room and say "Marvin, pray for this; it's probably over exposed." Also taking Polaroid shots of extra-long rattlesnakes people brought by the office was in my job description. It was a fantastic education because I worked in every department of the paper except the press room and paste up. 
That fall, the same people who hired me at the Herald collaborated with the Dean of Students at Columbia State Community College and thought I'd make an okay editor of the Columbia State Open Door newspaper. The Dean of Students said my only objective was "get it out on a regular basis. The people at the Herald will help you."  Those dear people at the Herald were already aware of what I knew and the vast amount of what I didn't know. They were my guardian angels.

The young and very inexperienced editor
during an interview at CSCC .

In the fall of 1971 my best friend and I transferred to MTSU to finish our degrees. The second semester of that year, journalism became a full major under the Department of Mass Communications. I was in the second class to graduate from the new school under the direction of Ed Kimbrell, a young reporter hired away from the Louisville Courier Journal. To say he was a guiding force in my life would be an understatement. Plus, I had a huge crush on him and would have listened to him recite the dictionary. However, I was called to work on a professional level with him as an assistant to earn my "work-study" scholarship at MTSU. Four days a week I ran errands, typed, and anything else his secretary didn't want to do at 8:00 a.m. 
By being in his office, I learned he was working on convincing Channel 2, then WSIX, to hire a news department intern on a semester-by-semester basis. It was a year-long lobbying effort on my part to convince Dr. Kimbrell that I would be the best representative for MTSU's brand new Mass Communications Department. There was a rival at the MTSU radio station, but in the end, the internship was mine. Today's world would assume I was doing non-secretarial duties to earn the job, but this was 1970, and I just worshiped him from afar.

True to my word, I gave the Mass
Communications Department good PR.

The station hired me as a full-time Capitol Hill reporter, but my TV career was short-lived. The pay was low (minimum wage for the first year and a half), and at that time WNGE Channel 2 didn't promote their news. When I asked why our anchor team didn't have their pictures on the sides of buses, the general manager, a former engineer for the station, told me they didn't promote things people didn't like. The future wasn't bright, and I was offered the position of press secretary to a congressional candidate which paid a lot better.
That being said, a kid from Culleoka had made it to the 30th TV market in the U. S., and my dream had come true. 
Times have changed so much that my mother's gesture wouldn't see the light of day. However, at that time and in that place, it introduced me to the world and gave me experiences I'll never forget. Luck doesn't begin to describe it.
Thanks Mom.