Writing columns not an easy task
Writing a column, even every other week, is an extremely difficult and painful task. I remember my first experience at it was in college at West Virginia University. I worked for the school newspaper, The Daily Athenaeum, and once I was called upon to write a column. It was excruciating. Everything I wrote seemed to be somehow tedious and boring. I finally managed to finish it and turn it in. I was embarrassed when it actually ran. I remember wondering why I had agreed to do it.
My next column-writing experience was my first actual reporter’s job after I graduated from WVU. I worked at The Daily Courier in Connellsville, which is now owned by the Greensburg Tribune-Review. I also dabbled a little bit writing columns while I was a reporter at the Herald-Standard, whose parent company now now owns this weekly paper. I wrote a few columns and tried to make them humorous and witty. I’m pretty sure they were neither.
After my dad, Jim Moore, started the Greene County Messenger, there were a few times, especially when he was sick, that he would ask me to fill in for him and write his weekly column. Again, the painstaking process would begin. And I realized, once again, how difficult a task it was and respected the fact that he willingly poured so much of his life, family and friends onto the page.
During his 40-some years as a journalist, he must have written thousands of columns.
Before his “TGIF” columns in the Messenger, which were a combination of tales, folklore and humor, sprinkled with the occasional bit of gossip, he wrote different types of columns.
My brother and I ran into a treasure trove of old columns Dad had clipped that spanned 40 years or so. A few columns, called “Skinhead,” dated back to his days in the Marines during the Korean Conflict.
In his early years at the Democrat Messenger, he wrote some sports columns called “Time Out” and later wrote columns that dealt with family life, specifically our family’s life, called “Moore’s Scribbles.”
He also wrote columns in the Observer-Reporter after serving as editor in the Washington office. Following a heart attack, he left the stressful night desk job and came back to their Waynesburg office and wrote columns simply named “Jim Moore.”
Over the years, many of his columns proved embarrassing to me. But, a good writer will write about what they know. So, he considered our family “fair game” when it came time to put the ink to the page.
Stories about my poodle, Snowball, getting the most expensive haircut in the family while he sat on the picnic bench and my mom took scissors to his hair were included, and he documented my leaving home for college in a surprisingly sentimental column. Years later, after I married my husband, Mike, he wrote about the birth of our two sons in his column.
So, when I agreed to try to write some columns with my brother, I knew the difficult task that was ahead.
But the idea of writing a column in a paper my dad started seemed too good to turn down.
So with a lot of sweat and possibly a little luck, I will try to write columns, like Dad, that will both inform and entertain.
Hopefully, my family won’t cringe at the sometimes embarrassing things I’m bound to write.