Newspapers shaped life, marriage

We all know that newspapers, like many businesses, are facing rough times.

Reduced revenue and rising costs mean budgets have to be slashed and tough decisions made. Some even wonder if newspapers will survive. Loyalty ranges from "I can't start the morning without it" to "I never even look at a newspaper."

Newspapers have been important to me as long as I can remember. Like many who were kids 30-40 years ago, I knew newspapers as something my dad picked up in our driveway when he came home from work. He read it before supper, and my mom did the same after the dishes were done.

Except for checking the school-lunch menus and admiring photos of friends in our small-town weekly, I didn't pay much attention to newspapers until in the mid-1970s two events collided: Watergate and a high-school research project.

Watergate, of course, made journalism sexy. Around the same time, researching an English paper on the history of journalism, I learned that newspapers often had been censored and regulated and feared by the folks who ran things - folks who didn't want us everyday people to know the truth.

I'd always wanted to be a writer, so majoring in journalism was an easy choice. I joined the staff of the college paper, although I was so intimidated by the hip older and experienced students that I almost left on my first day. Glad I didn't, though. I stuck it out and became

editor-in-chief. I'm especially proud of both winning a national award for excellence and getting hate mail for running a front-page photo of the homecoming queen - the first time a black woman had won the title. The

student-government president and I skirmished, but I later learned that's what politicians and journalists are supposed to do.

And those intimidating older students? Well, one of them now is my husband, but that comes much later.

After graduation, I applied to big-city dailies but ended up back in my hometown with two other college graduates in the same situation.

We did it all: School board meetings, police reports, weddings. I struggled with writing about government budgets I didn't understand. I nearly got fired when I didn't include all the facts in a story on a jail escapee. ("But you never asked me if the guy took any hostages," the sheriff said later, grinning. I wanted to kick him.)

Little did I dream that newspapers would figure so prominently in my own eventual marriage - and my life.

Come back next week for the rest of the story.

Cathy Wood is a freelance writer living in the Shoals. For more from her, visit TimesDaily.com.