Emporia isn’t home to Jim Lehrer, but he’s comfortable here.
Lehrer, the host of “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS, was the centerpiece of the Friends of the Plains’ annual fundraising dinner and program Friday evening in the Granada Theatre. Proceeds from the event will be used to help support the Center for Great Plains Studies at Emporia State University.
The program, “A Conversation With Jim Lehrer,” was as intimate as a conversation could be among 150 people and one man seated on-stage in a straight-backed chair with wooden arms.
“I didn’t come to make a speech,” he said, after settling into the seat. “I came to talk.”
Before opening the program to questions from the crowd, Lehrer chatted about his Kansas roots — he was born in Wichita — and his childhood connection with Emporia. He came here routinely with his parents, Harry Frederick and Lois Catherine Chapman Lehrer, when they owned and operated the Kansas Central Line bus company.
“My dad drove one bus; my mom drove the other,” Lehrer explained.
Kansas Central came north from the Wichita area and branched to the east and west, with the eastern route winding through smaller towns like Canada, Hillsboro, Marion, Elmdale and Saffordville, before reaching Emporia.
Its bus depot was at Romine’s Drug Store, about a block south of the Granada on Commercial Street, he said.
The company was a small one and, to supplement income from its small passenger list, the buses hauled whatever types of express loads could be arranged: auto parts, blood, movies and, for a time, The Emporia Gazette, through an agreement with William Allen White.
And, though the bus company was short-lived, and Lehrer later moved to Texas, his ties to Kansas have not frayed.
He smiled when he talked about a woman who called him a Jayhawk.
“I stiffened,” he said. “… I’m not exactly a Jayhawk. I’m a sunflower.”
Swearing he was telling the truth, he related his reaction after she prodded for an explanation.
“I’m not particularly proud of it. In front of her I said, ‘Well,’” Lehrer said, before lapsing into a decent baritone voice to sing a full stanza of a popular song from the 1950s. “… She’s my sunflower from the Sunflower state.”
Attitude is not all that Lehrer has kept from Kansas. He described how the Wichita landscape provided inspiration for his 22nd novel, “Oh, Johnny,” which was released on Tuesday.
He had gone to Old Town in Wichita to write three or four years ago and stopped at the Martini Steak House for a meal. From the restaurant, he could see an overpass and an old train station that had been there since his childhood.
“And that’s where my dad used to take my brother and me to go wave at the troops,” Lehrer said. “And I thought, ‘My God, there it is,’ and I started thinking ‘What if?’ and ‘Oh, Johnny’ came from that experience that I hadn’t thought about in years.”
The book that resulted tells the story of Johnny Wrigley, an 18-year-old would-be baseball player whose life is interrupted by military service during World War II. On a troop train ride across the country, Wrigley and the other recruits get off the train to stretch their legs, Lehrer said; Wrigley spots a beautiful young woman and a 20-minute interlude in a little room by the depot affects their lives forever.
Lehrer drew more of Kansas into Wrigley’s search for the young woman, whose last name he does not know, after he returns from the war. Learning that she sings religious music, Wrigley travels a short distance to a small town where “The Messiah” is performed each year.
“Not Lindsborg, of course,” Lehrer said, grinning, “not Bethany College. … All of these experiences flow naturally to me as a writer of fiction.”
Writing fiction was only half of Lehrer’s life plan from the age of 16 or 17. He wanted to be Ernest Hemingway; he wanted to be Ernie Pyle.
“I wanted to be a big-time national journalist,” Lehrer said. “Everything I have done since then was one of those two things.”
Before he could do that, however, he attended junior college, graduated from the journalism school at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and served three years in the Marine Corps. Lehrer worked at a bus station while attending junior college in Victoria, Texas. Part of the job allowed him time at a microphone to announce departures and arrivals from the station.
Switching from his newsman’s voice to a flat, nasal drone, he quickly demonstrated his skill, rattling off names of towns along a long-ago route and, lifting his voice higher and louder, ending the spiel with “All aboard! Don’t forget your baggage, please.”
“If you learn something early and you learn it very well, it is totally irrelevant and you never forget it,” he said, drawing laughter from the crowd.
Mingled with the light-hearted banter, Lehrer touched on serious topics that often were introduced by the audience.
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Jim Lehrer
Jim Lehrer spoke during a fundraising dinner for the ESU Center for Great Plains Studies.
A question about the state of journalism in general and newspapers in particular brought Lehrer to a deeper discussion.
“I think we’ve got a real problem. A very serious problem,” he said.
“First of all, the newspapers have done a really terrible job of telling people why they’re important. We have not done a good job of explaining why we matter.”
Advertising space continues to dwindle and news space follows the trend, leaving smaller newspapers with less information about local issues, like city hall and school boards. He suggested the business needs more solid investigative reporting.
“All I know is I think, I really think, we’re in trouble,” Lehrer said.
Broadcast journalism faces similar problems in its reporting, and he questioned how networks concluded its audiences wanted biased news instead of objective information.
Lehrer pointed out that the audience for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” program is larger than either Jon Stewart’s or Stephen Colbert’s audience and is equal to all the cable news networks combined. Yet networks like Fox and MSNBC continue to broadcast from right- or left-wing perspectives, rather than gathering in larger audiences by objectively reporting the news.
“They’re dividing the country up. … I don’t understand what’s going on here,” he said. “It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
Using a reporter’s interview with “Billy Bob Senator” as an example, he illustrated the ways reporting, analysis and opinion — once separate — have overlapped. When the traditional interview ends now, the camera turns back to the “deep-throated” reporter for comment.
“Then the same deep-throated wa-wa says, ‘I thought he was kind of a jerk,’” Lehrer said.
“…The issue here is I don’t have to use my television job as a way to express myself, and I don’t have to use my fiction as a way to express myself in political ways.”
Despite journalism’s intended value in keeping the public informed, the profession too often has evolved into a culture of entertainment rather than information.
“I tell people, ‘You want to be entertained? Go to the circus,” he said.
He prefers reading about and listening to a variety of ideas and rationales that give a better understanding of a broader picture.
“The more you know about something, the less opinionated you are about it, that’s been my experience,” Lehrer said. “I don’t want to just listen to people I agree with. What the hell kind of fun is that?”
history_nerd (anonymous) says...
This was an insightful and engaging presentation. I'm glad Mr. Lehrer was able to make it into town despite delays and threatening weather!
March 28, 2009 at 10:03 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )