Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Welcome to the publisher’s journal.
The hardest part about starting this twice-weekly feature wasn’t deciding what to put in it, but what to call it.
I thought about calling it a blog, but the target audience is not the world online.
I thought about calling it a log, like the captain’s log that James T. Kirk kept on Star Trek. But again, I’m not wanting to talk to the universe – just the people who read this newspaper.
I thought about calling it a diary. But I’m not sharing my inner-most thoughts and secrets. You’re going to have to pay way more than this newspaper costs for that.
And then I remembered my junior high school English teacher, Aileen Siewert. She required her students keep a journal. I don’t know why she called it a journal. I thought it sounded regal.
She didn’t care what we wrote about in our journals, she just wanted us to write about something.
“You mean like a diary?” I remember somebody asking. “No,” she said. She didn’t want us to get too personal. She wanted us to tell her what we were doing, what we cared about, what we wondered about.
“I’m going to read them all,” she said.
I doubted that, until she started talking to me about what she read in my journals, including that time I compiled spring training baseball statistics.
“This is not math class,” she said. “I want you to write.”
I looked her up about 20 years after I graduated high school and wrote a story about her. She was long retired by then. She said she loved teaching. She said she made her students keep the journals because she liked getting to know them. She said she remembered me. “You were a very mannerly young man,” she said.
It’s true. I was mannerly in 1974.
Most of my classmates despised journaling. I said I did, too, but I was lying. I loved keeping that journal.
Mostly I wrote about baseball in those days. This journal will include some baseball, too, but not all the time.
I’ll write about what I’m doing, what I care about, what I wonder about.
I’ll write about why transparent, limited government is important.
I’ll write about some colorful characters I have known.
I’ll probably write about regional history.
And I’ll write about things that inspire me, make me laugh and make me cry … like baseball.
I know what you’re thinking: “There’s no crying in baseball.” Ha. Jimmy Dugan was lying. There’s a lot of crying in baseball. Just ask any fan of the Texas Rangers.
David Stevens is publisher of Clovis Media Inc. Email him at:
