Newspaper Days – Cinderella

In my last Newspaper Days blog, titled The Pecking Order, I wrote about a U.S. senator who paid us a visit when he was making a run for the presidency. While we didn’t hear from candidates for the highest office in the land every four years, local politicians did seek me out. But usually only at election time.

Being a small town newspaper publisher sometimes means you make enemies in high places, even if they are just local high places. Especially if you have a reputation for stepping on toes that need stepped on or reporting when some politician’s hand was caught in the cookie jar, or under his secretary’s skirt. Yeah, I was that kind of newspaper publisher. So it was no surprise to me that, for the most part, people in local and county government avoided me whenever possible.

Except for election time. I once wrote an editorial in my newspaper about how I sometimes felt like Cinderella wearing her glass slipper to the ball. Because even though the office of the accounting business that our mayor owned was next door to my newspaper, he seldom spoke a word to me, and if he saw me coming, he was always too busy to talk. Depending on what I had written in that week’s editorial, sometimes he ignored me completely.

In the same editorial, I said that more than one town councilman or county supervisor went the other way in the grocery store when they saw me coming down the aisle toward them with my cart, and the school superintendent refused to ever take my telephone calls.

All except during election years. During the last couple of months before the election, they all wanted to take me to dinner, invite me to lunch, or just drop by to chat. And, of course, those chats always revolved around what a good job they were doing and how my newspaper should support them in their bid for reelection. As I said in the editorial, I might be Cinderella right now, but come midnight on Election Day, I knew I would once again be the stepchild nobody wanted anything to do with.

But as I wrote back then, that was only a few weeks every two years and I could handle their pompous asses that long. The rest of the year, they left me alone, which gave me more time to concentrate on being a thorn in their sides. Or a pain in their posteriors.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Be sure to enter our latest  Free Drawing. This week’s prize is an audiobook of undone, the first book in my buddy Jason Deas’ Burt Bigsley mystery series. To enter, all you have to do is click on this Free Drawing link or the tab at the top of this page and enter your name (first and last) in the comments section at the bottom of that page (not this one). Only one entry per person per drawing please, and you must enter with your real name. To prevent spam or multiple entries, the names of cartoon or movie characters are not allowed. The winner will be drawn Sunday evening.

Thought For The Day – Sophomania is the delusion of your intellectual superiority to others. Pfffft. “Delusion.”