WE’RE ALMOST to the point where we can say this project is history. Literally.
For the last couple of months, everybody at The Gazette has been in Profile mode. For the uninitiated, Profile is our annual six-part special section, the one that gives Emporia a chance to look back at what it’s done and where it’s going. It’s also our annual newsroom stress-fest as we race to gather six papers worth of stories without neglecting our daily coverage.
This year, we widened our scope a bit. By a factor of 150 or so.
Well, a city doesn’t have a 150th birthday every day. So we’ve been scouring microfilm, poring over old newspaper clippings and getting used to a simple, yet undeniable truth.
Namely, that there’s a lot of history to this place.
OK, so that’s not exactly going to rank among the Top 10 Revelations of All Time (although for those keeping score at home, No. 9 is that any Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas”). But it had to be said. Because much of the time, it’s easy to think of history as an import.
There’s a saying among novelists that adventure is somebody else having a hard time a long way away. As we grow up, most of us get taught a similar definition of history: somebody else having a hard time a long time ago. We get used to thinking of history as the Civil War. Or as the landing of the Mayflower. Or as the time of Shakespeare, or Lincoln, or Julius Caesar.
Any place except here. Any time except now. Anything except living, breathing people.
Right up until you’re brought face-to-face with it.
I’ve always believed in history being the stuff of people — I’m not sure how a journalist can avoid that — but I didn’t really collide with it until my first newspaper job in Garden City. As 1999 approached, the powers that be declared we were going to do a “Millennium” edition: one special section a month throughout the year, each one focused on a different facet of Finney County’s past.
It was excruciating, and not just because the millennium really ended in 2000 (centuries and millennia always start with year one, a fact most people missed during the Great Rollover). It meant a lot of focused work on tight deadlines. I practically lived at the Finney County museum, going cross-eyed from staring at microfilm.
It was exhausting. Frustrating. And one heck of a lot of fun at the same time.
Every day seemed to be a new discovery. I learned about the Fleagle Boys, a band of bank robbers that once terrorized Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado. I talked to veterans about their war stories, read first-hand accounts of towns that had vanished from the map, even saw photos of a lion being rescued from a flooded-out Lee Richardson Zoo.
Garden City had already been my home for about a year when we started. But by the time we were done, it was HOME. I knew that place in a way that I have never known anywhere before or since.
This isn’t on the same kind of scale. Without a lot more time and many more newspapers, there’s no way it could be. But it still deep enough to evoke the same kind of feelings.
I’ve come to look at the city’s redbud trees in a new way after learning about the Lions who planted them.
I’ve come to realize how often Emporia has had to adjust to newcomers and vice versa, after hearing about the struggles of the early Mexican railroad workers.
And I’ve come to treasure our ties to the events larger than ourselves, such as the march that Emporia State University’s students held after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It’s all history. It’s all here. And it’s all worth the discovery.
Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to catch a nap.
Wake me when the 200th anniversary hits, OK?
Scott Rochat’s e-mail address is rochat@emporiagazette.com.