Poets and Poems: Laura Mullen and "After I Was Dead"

November, 2022: It’s just over 53 years since I first walked on the campus at LSU in Baton Rouge as a college freshman. I’m in the school’s bookstore, which is nothing like the one I remember in the Student Union. This one is across the street and operated by Barnes and Noble. And in this day of electronic textbooks, the bookstore more resembles a large department store filled with LSU-brand clothing and merchandise of all shapes, sizes and varieties. 

Still, there are physical books, tucked away on the second floor. Right by the escalator are two shelves of books by faculty authors. And it’s there I find After I was Dead, a poetry collection by Laura Mullen bearing the sticker “faculty author.” 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Christmas Card Lists Tell Stories

My wife and I undertake Christmas cards as something of a team effort, dividing them between us. She handles her family, I handle mine, we generally split friends, and I do the ones meant for work.

About 5 a.m. on a recent morning, I was doing my card list when I realized we had quite a personal history sitting in front of me, in the form of lists. We keep them by years, and the lists go back to 1977. Technically, they go back to 1973, our first Christmas as a married couple, because the 1977 list is based on the first list we did – taken from our wedding invitations.

In 1977, we were living in Houston; she was working for the Houston Chronicle and I was a speechwriter at Shell Oil. Earl Campbell of the University of Texas had just won the Heisman Trophy (it was a big deal; this was Texas); Saturday Night Fever with John Travolta in white disco polyester was just opening; Egypt and Israel were holding their first formal peace talks ever – in Cairo.

And we were spending our first Christmas in a new townhouse that we had moved into in July.  I even remember the street – Arncliffe Drive in northwest Houston.

In 1977, I wrote the Christmas card list on a ruled steno pad. The names were a combination of colleagues at Shell Oil where I worked; family on both sides; and friends.

A lot of our friends in Houston lived in apartments; we were all 20-somethings and few of us had the wherewithal to buy our own homes.

Seeing the family names on the list is what now gives me pause. Most of them have passed away. My parents. My wonderful aunt who lived in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans (and would survive Hurricane Katrina with my mother). An uncle in Alabama. My mother’s next-door neighbor who was her treasured friend; the lady died this year, two months after my mother. My grandmother and aunts in Shreveport. My aunt and godmother. Aunts and uncles of my wife. A lady I worked with at Shell who had once been manager of the Manhattan Chess Club.

I’m not sure what has happened to all of the names on the list, like my favorite journalism teacher at LSU, and many of my work colleagues at Shell (some, I know, have passed away). Friends from church in Houston. Others slipped into the fog of years only to be rediscovered on Facebook, like a couple we met when we worked at the Beaumont Enterprise.

Each name is a story. I took three journalism courses (two in introductory news reporting and one in the history of journalism) and two independent study courses from that professor at LSU. He was an incredible teacher; he taught us how to work amid chaos and noise and meet deadlines by singing in the classroom or doing calisthenics while we feverishly finished assignments. He gave me a B+ on my first assignment, with a note reading “not bad for a cub.” He also weeded out the less serious students by giving automatic Fs for a misspelled word, a factual error, and errors in grammar and punctuation (we lost 70 percent of our class after the first semester).

A few years later, he left LSU, and we lost touch. He’d be in late 80s now.

I look over those names, and I can remember work events, parties, situations, issues. I look at the names of family and see the people who helped shaped me and my own family in uncountable ways.

The names remind me that the past is still with us, always with us.

Photograph: vintage Christmas card via A Parallel Universe. 

I Almost Didn’t Read Faulkner

My introduction to the writing of William Faulkner was indirect. It began in college and almost didn’t survive college.

Way back when, sophomores at LSU were required to take two semesters of English – American or English. The vast majority took English 55 and 56, American literature. English majors were required to take English 51 and 52, English literature, instead. I wasn’t an English major, but I opted for 51 and 52 (likely influenced by what I learned with my high school English teachers). We had small, rather serious classes, compared to the auditoriums overflowing with students taking 55 and 56.

At some point, early in my sophomore year, I became the unofficial English tutor for my fraternity. That meant helping pledges (and actives) prepare for tests, helping explain assignments, and reading papers.

Every sophomore at LSU who took English 56 had to write a paper on “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner. At the fraternity, that meant anywhere from 30 to 40 papers.

I came to hate that story. I came to hate reading about it, and reading a lot of really bad papers about it. One of the worst experiences I had was to see yet another fraternity member standing at the door of my room, paper in hand, smiling hopefully.

I didn’t look at anything with Faulkner’s name on it for more than a decade after college.

In 1983, I enrolled in a master’s program at Washington University in St. Louis, managing to balance one course per semester with work and family. Early on, I took a course called “the Nature of Story.” The required reading list included Faulkner.

I initially clutched, still haunted by reading those papers. Fortunately, the work wasn’t “Barn Burning.” It was The Sound and the Fury. I decided to plow through it, expecting to be gritting my teeth.

It was difficult, confusing, and a work that had to be read slowly and carefully. We had exactly one week to read it, and I think I used the entire week.

I loved it.

“Barn Burning” burnout was over.

I began to read other works by Faulkner. I took about master’s course on the Latin American novel, and discovered the authors that Faulkner had had a powerful influence on – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes (Faulkner is the patron saint of “magic realism”).

I read almost everything written by those authors, and continued to read Faulkner. Last month, I was in New Orleans, and visited the Faulkner Book House in the French Quarter, the building where Faulkner lived for six months in 1925. And there I learned that before he wrote novels, Faulkner considered himself primarily a poet, and had actually published a book of poetry shortly before he moved to New Orleans.

I just finished reading the one novel of his that I had never read before, Soldier’s Pay, his first novel and the one he wrote during those six months in New Orleans. More on that next week, but I can say that it is both a first novel and a definite foreshadowing of what was to come with the novels that transformed American (and world) literature.

This week, I wrote about the Faulkner Book House for Tweetspeak Poetry. Go take a look. If you leave a comment, your name is in the hat for a giveaway of Faulkner’s New Orleans Sketches. 

And, no, the sketches do not include “Barn Burning.” If you want to read it, and I still don’t, you can find it here. (Or you can get hold of the movie “The Long Hot Summer” with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; “Barn Burning” is condensed into one mercifully short scene.)

Poets and Poems: Robert Penn Warren’s “Selected Poems 1923-1975”

The used book store where I spent a fair amount of money in the last 20 years has moved locations, forced to vacate the 19^th century farmhouse to make way for a storage facility. Its future was uncertain, but in the past week it reopened in a storefront two miles to the east.

I’m glad it’s survived, but I’ll miss the old poetry nook, nestled as it was in a small, sloped-ceiling room in the gable above the main door and filled with poets and poems. You have to bend over the make it through the small door leading to the poetry books, and once inside (two people was a major crowd), you couldn’t stand unless bent over. It was easier to sit on the floor, peruse the books and keep an eye on the black cat asleep on the pillow, inspired, no doubt, by T.S. Eliot.

One volume I found in the nook was a first edition of Robert Penn Warren’s Selected Poems 1923-1975, in hardback and priced at $14.50. You pick up a book like this, and experience a flood of memories.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

I knew it had always been true

I know the date, time, and place almost exactly.

Jan. 26, 1973, about 9 p.m., outside a room in a basement lecture hall at LSU in Baton Rouge.

I didn’t do the proverbial “ask Jesus into my heart as my personal savior.” It didn’t go quite that way. It was a silent prayer, but it went more like this: “I’m running into something here that I don’t understand, a standard that I can’t measure up to or even hope to measure up to. In comparison, everything I’ve known and wanted and desired is trash. I don’t know why you want me, but since you do, you’ve got me.”

I can’t explain this, but very quickly everything became brand new. I was not “madly in love with Jesus.” I had no mountain-top emotional experiences. But it was all brand new, and I was now seeing things with new eyes.

No one talked about worship wars, culture wars, politics, or the new building program. The church I started attending wasn’t a conventional church at all – it was a group of people who met on Sundays in a lecture hall in LSU’s law school.

I was introduced to a small Bible study group that met in a house off-campus on Saturday mornings. At my first meeting with them, the discussion was about the design of the tabernacle for the Hebrews during the 40 years in the wilderness.

I even went on what today would be called a short-term mission trip – a beach outreach during spring break at Destin, Florida. I remember having an hour-long conversation with a tourist from Germany.

I didn’t know it at the time, but those very early days of my new-found belief would shape my faith for the next 40 years – the way I thought about faith, the way I tried to live it, the way I understood it. It was never about institutions, denominations, or buildings. I encountered all of those things and more along the way, but I never confused them with the church or my faith.

Perhaps most significantly, I have never had doubts about Jesus, God, or my faith. I’ve had plenty of times, serious times, of asking “Why,” and not understanding, and getting angry. But I’ve never had a “crisis of faith,” although I know people who have. I’ve never gotten caught up in the evolution-versus-creationism debate.

In a very real sense, I have had the gift of faith. (If there is any of me in the main character of Michael Kent in my two novels, it is precisely this gift of faith.)

Last week, we followed David Platt as he jackhammered some of the concrete of American cultural Christianity. We’ve had some time to clear away the rubble and let the dust settle.

To the extent that it’s possible, in Follow Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live, Platt has blasted away the “American cultural” part and is reaching to define what’s left – the “Christianity” part. He’s stripping away what we Americans understand about Jesus, and taking us to what looks like a very different place – the place where Jesus is.

What this is about, Platt says, is taking Jesus at his word. It’s not picking or choosing what we’re most comfortable with, but taking him at his word – his whole word.

And when we do that, we become part of a grand story. “So we go as disciples of Jesus who love his Word and trust his truth,” Platt says. “We got not simply as men and women who at some point decided to make Jesus our personal Lord and Savior, but ultimately as men and women who at every point are devoted to proclaiming Jesus as the universal Lord and Savior. We believe him as his disciples; therefore, we obey him and make disciples.”

That small group Bible study I joined right after finding faith? And that first study about the diagram of the tabernacle in the wilderness? What I remember most about it was the study leader showing how the lines intersected.

The lines took the form of a cross.

As soon as I saw it, I knew it was true. I knew it had always been true.

We’re discussing Follow Me over at The High Calling. Laura Boggess is leading the discussion, and various writers are posting each week. Today’s post is by Sheila LaGrand, and she’s covering chapters 4 and 5..

Related:

Here Come the Radicals. Christianity Today has something of a different take on David Platt, Francis Chan and other leading “radical” Christians.

David Platt Wants You to Get Serious about Following Christ. Christianity Today’s interview with Platt last month.

Last week’s discussion on the book at The High Calling.

Top photograph: the classroom in Lockett Hall, LSU, right outside of which I accepted my new faith in 1973.

Do You Know Where the First Amendment Comes From?

I didn’t learn this in journalism school.

Yes, I have to admit that my undergraduate degree was in journalism. LSU had an official School of Journalism at the time, so my diploma actually reads “Bachelor of Arts in Journalism.” It wasn’t just any B.A. degree, but a B.A. in Journalism. It helped journalism graduates feel superior to the rest of the graduating class who had plain B.A. and B.S. degrees; we needed to feel superior to something. Anything.

I took the perfunctory (and required) history of journalism course, and it was actually interesting and challenging. I had a good teacher, a particularly demanding teacher, and I was so impressed with him and liked him so that I also had two independent study classes with him. One was about the late 19^th century publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, a man named Henry Grady, who coined the phrase and articulated the philosophy of the “New South.” The other study course was about Vice President Spiro Agnew’s speeches attacking journalism and journalists.

The history course was quite detailed, and focused almost entirely on journalism in the United States. So we learned a lot about John Peter Zenger and the American Revolution, the rise of the “penny press” and yellow journalism, and the impact of modernism on journalism (think Walter Lippmann, and “objectivity” and “balance” as guiding principles; much has changed since I was in journalism school).

What we didn’t learn from our journalism history book was where the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution came from, the one that includes freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. Those particular freedoms weren’t originally theorized after the American Revolution. And they didn’t all come from the famous libel trial Zenger found himself involved in. The ideas had been around for a long time.

I learned where they came from in my English literature course, not my history of journalism course. And I learned about it because one of the required readings was a small little paperback called The Areopagitica.

The Areopagitica is a speech by John Milton (yes, the far right fundamentalist wacko who worked for Oliver Cromwell!) (yes, the poet and Puritan intellectual who wrote Paradise Lost). It was a speech addressed to Parliament, and it’s on the importance of liberty for unlicensed printing. It’s a speech in which Milton argued that bad ideas shouldn’t be suppressed; that the only thing that couldn’t effectively counter a bad idea was a good idea; that truth would eventually prevail.

And he was religious. A Christian. His defense of unlicensed printing runs in a straight line through the Zenger libel trial in the 1730s through the American Revolution to the adoption of the First Amendment (and the other nine) half a century later.

I would argue that Milton’s defense of freedom of the press reflected his Christian beliefs, just like the fight to end slavery in Great Britain was led by William Wilberforce and other believing Christians. There’s much to consider there, and much to reflect upon.

I was reminded of The Areopagitica because I started reading Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me by Karen Swallow Prior. Starting next Monday (Jan. 7), Laura Boggess will be leading a discussion of Booked at The High Calling, covering the first three chapters. The discussion continues each Monday through Jan. 29.

Booked is about (surprise) books, but it is also part personal memoir, part discussion. It’s thought-provoking and even funny in parts. But most of all it’s about the importance of books in a life.

I identify with that. Books have been important in my life. So have speeches, with speechwriting having been a large chunk of my professional career. I’ve read a lot of speeches over the course of four working decades, one of them being The Areopagitica. It’s an important work. It had a lot to do with what we know today as journalism, the good and the bad, not to mention publishing in general.

And to think it came from John Milton.

Art Form, with Beer

Done nobody put on a tailgate party

like us LSU fans do a taligate party

and the beer do flow, ma cher, and

the shrimps do boil wit da crawfish

and we tro da potatoes in the pot

wit da crawfish and spill a little beer

for da seasoning but not too much

cuz da beer is brewed to be drunk,

with da ice in galvanized tubs and

if it spills just drink from the tub,

we got da straws, ma cher,

and it don’t matter what kind

of beer cuz it all ends up in da same place

washing down da muffalettas and  

da shrimps and da crawfish (you gotta

suck them crawfish heads, ma cher)

and we boogie to da music and

sometimes forget da football game

and usually don’t even have a ticket

but da real party’s out here, ma cher,

and we Cajuns have done created

ourselfs a tailgate party art form

wit da eternal question: how many

beers does it take to kiss

a baby alligator?

Over at TweetSpeak Poetry, Seth Haines has a poetry prompt – pairing beer or wine with an event. I couldn’t resist.

This poem is also submitted to Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

The Painted Cigar Box

In college, when my pledge class went through the fraternity’s initiation week, we had to carry around a cigar box painted white with the fraternity letters in blue. We were required to put in the box anything an active member told us to put in. One of the things I was given for my box was a copy of Campus Crusade’s “Four Spiritual Laws” booklet.

Technically, actives weren’t supposed to evangelize pledges during initiation week, but I wasn’t going to make a scene. The active member asked me if I knew what the gospel was, and I quickly responded with an answer that shocked him. I could actually articulate the gospel message, thanks to having memorized it when I was in catechism class several years before (I had a reputation for memorization skills).

The active, who was a Christian, didn’t know what to say. He likely expected me to fumble for an answer or look dumb. More to the point, my normal behavior – LSU was known for being a party school – wouldn’t have led anyone to the conclusion that I knew the gospel message.

Two-and-a-half years later, when I had become a Christian, I thought back to initiation week, and realized that my memory skills had outstripped my heart knowledge. And now I that understood what it really meant, I could still articulate the gospel but knew I was an infant when it came to living it.

In The Discipline of Grace, Jerry Bridges gives one of the most complete and succinct explanations of the gospel that I’ve read or heard. More importantly, he points out that the gospel is as important to the believing Christian as it is to the non-Christian.

In many respects, the gospel is not only God’s “good news;” it is also how we are to live our lives. Using Romans 3: 19-26, Bridges cites seven critical elements of the gospel as contained in the Bible passage:

• No one is declared righteous before God by observing the law.
• There is righteousness from God that is apart from the law.
• This righteousness from God is received through faith in Jesus Christ.
• This righteousness is available to everyone on the same basis, because all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
• All who put their faith in Jesus Christ are justified freely by God’s grace.
• This justification is through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
• God presented Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in His blood. 

My articulation of the gospel during initiation week was not quite that full or eloquent, but it did cover most if not all of the key elements.

The cigar box is long gone. But I kept the copy of the Four Spiritual Laws, and if I remember correctly (my memorization skills aren’t what they used to be), it is in a small jewelry box in our basement.

Over at Informing the Reforming, Tim Challies is leading a discussion on The Discipline of Grace. To see what he and others are saying about this chapter of the book, “Preach the Gospel to Yourself,” please visit his site.

He Sent Me a Valentine

I was sitting on top of my world. And it was misery.

Toward the end of my freshman year in college at LSU, I set certain goals, things I would achieve by the time I graduated.

I would be something – something important – on the college newspaper.

I would be elected to the national leadership fraternity.

I would be something big in my fraternity.

I would be named to Who’s Who.

And I would be doing lots of stuff – fraternity parties, dating, activities, football games. And reading great books.

I was going to have it all.

And I did. By the middle of my senior year, I had ticked off everything on the list. Everything. I had been president of my social fraternity my junior year. I was named to the leadership fraternity. Who’s Who. And managing editor of the school paper – the power position, responsible for everything except the editorial page, supervising 30+ reporters, six editors and three photographers.

I was at the pinnacle of my college career. And I was miserable.

I had been trying to fill a hole in my soul with achievements, recognitions, honors and awards. Only after I got did I see how empty and meaningless they were. Everything was turning to ashes.

I buried myself in work at the paper. Work numbed the pain. But it wasn’t enough. I was crashing, and I knew it. Everything I thought was important had turned out not to be.

And then I was sent a valentine. A two-part valentine.

Part 1 was one of my new reporters. She had requested two beats to cover – student government and religion. Religion? What kind of journalist would request religion as a beat? But, hey, no problem – if she wanted religion, she could have it (and no one else asked for it). The news reporting instructor told me she was one of the top four students in his classes, so she got the student government beat as well. She was the one who told me about Part 2.

Part 2 was a speaker coming to campus. Josh McDowell was an evangelist and apologist (Evidence That Demands a Verdict) with Campus Crusade for Christ. For two or three weeks ahead of his arrival, the campus chapter of CCC publicized his upcoming lectures on “Maximum Sex.” Signs all over the campus heralded “Josh is Coming.” Since most students didn’t know who Josh was, this created all kinds of buzz.

For several days, I had been talking with people working on his appearances. And I found myself becoming increasingly intrigued and, possibly, interested. He spoke for three consecutive nights. The first night, prior to his talk, he had dinner at my fraternity house, and several people made sure I was introduced to him. When I was introduced as the managing editor of the paper, his first words to me were memorable.

“Will there be a story in the paper tomorrow?”

I got it. I was a tool to be used. Fine. So this was what all the hoopla was about. Just another salesman. Fine.

He spoke that night to 5,000 people, one of the biggest audiences for a lecture in LSU’s history. I didn’t go. I told everyone I had to work at the paper. Much to my chagrin, it looked like it would have to take the top place on the front page. But then came the news – President Johnson had just died. We went into overdrive to get stories and illustrations done by deadline. The story on Josh McDowell did make the front page – and I had to argue with my copy editors about it. They didn’t want the story in the paper at all.

The next night, President Nixon announced the end to the Vietnam War. Josh got bumped to the bottom half of the front page again. The third lecture made the front page again, but by then it was old news.

Several days later, I was still fuming over the question McDowell had asked at dinner. Friends arranged for me to meet with the campus director of Campus Crusade. So on Jan. 26, 1973, at about 8 p.m., I met him outside the classroom they used for Bible study. We talked for well over an hour (if you want to see a photo of the classroom, you can click here). I learned that scores of people had been praying for me before, during and even after the lectures. I learned a lot more than that, too.

Like what all of this was really about.

At about 9:30, I prayed. It was done.

That night, the director gave me a copy of the Living Bible (I didn’t have one in my apartment and I hadn't read anything from the Bible in six years). He inscribed it with a verse.

Philippians 1:6: He who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.

And, by the way, I ended up marrying Part 1 of the valentine.


To read more posts on faith and love, or what you’re discovering about God’s love for you, please visit Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista. The links will be live Thursday morning.

Photograph: Pete Maravich Assembly Center by LSU sportsNet, LSU Athletic Publications. This is where Josh McDowell spoke in 1973.

A Little LSU Fan

LSU 's football team has an off-day this weekend, and likely looking ahead to next week's game against Alabama. While we were visiting Louisiana last week, we spent a day at the old alma mater, and we hit the bookstore, which does sell a few books mixed in among all the clothes and LSU fan paraphenalia. And guess what we found?

Cameron's father, who attended the University of Missouri, frowned when he saw all the LSU clothes we brought back for our grandson. He'll get over it.

Photograph of Cameron Young by Stephanie Young (Travis Young would never have dreamed of taking it). Used with permission.

What Happened in College

When we were in New Orleans last week, we took one day to head down memory lane and drove up to Baton Rouge to see LSU. I could write volumes on what happened while I was in college, but three things stand out.

First, I started LSU as a freshman in pre-med. I was going to be a doctor, which had been my father’s own career dream until the Great Depression short-circuited any hope of college (he graduated from high school in 1933). I came out of LSU with a degree in journalism, which was a much better fit for my personality and talents even if it would never put me anywhere close to the same socio-economic status as a doctor.

Last week, my wife and I walked though the Journalism Building. It’s radically rehabbed and redesigned form when we had classes there but recognizable enough to identify “This is where I took newspaper and design” and “they was the Law of Journalism class.” What had been the office of the school newspaper (The Reveille) is now a computer lab.

Second, it was in that office of the Reveille where I met Janet, and we were married seven months later. I was the newspaper’s managing editor for my last semester as a senior – responsible for everything except the editorial page. I had four copy editors, three photographers, an arts editor and a sport editor reporting to me, along with 30+ reporters. It was crazy, and I loved it.

I spent long hours in that newspaper office. Within a few weeks of the start of the semester, the campus was hit by a flu epidemic. All of my copy editors got it; my sports editor got it; two of my photographers got it; and several reporters. I was spared, but for weeks, I worked from 11 a.m. to 6 a.m., editing, running my one photographer ragged, writing, laying out all of the pages, cajoling painstaking reporters who were perfectionists about what they wrote (I won’t mention any names but I married one), and then delivering all of the finished copy and photos to the printing office at 2 a.m., waiting around while the typeset was produced, and then pasting up the paper for printing at 6 a.m. We published four days a week.

The third thing had to do with my faith.

Right across the street from the Journalism Building was Lockett Hall, housing faculty offices on the upper floors and large lecture rooms in the basement. Those were the classrooms I took two classes of U.S. history, Louisiana history, Russian history and “Introduction to Fine Arts,” a lecture class complete with slides always held in a darkened room and perfect for taking naps.

In one of those classrooms, on Jan. 26, 1973, about 9 p.m., I was led to Christ by the campus director for Campus Crusade for Christ. In the picture below, I’m sitting in almost exactly the same position I was that night (the seating is a lot newer but similar).

An interesting side note is that when we walked into the classroom last week, there was a pocket-sized copy of the New Testament/Psalms/Proverbs lying on the floor, very close to where I had sat that night. I left it on the desk near the podium.

Who knows, some student journalist might walk in and find it.

The Conspicuous Virtue of Sunburn

Forty years ago today, Earth Day was born, the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and organizer Dennis Hayes. If you were in college at the time, it was a big deal. At LSU in Baton Rouge, where I was a freshman, I remember speeches, how –to demonstrations and information booths (and just possibly bands performing but that might be what I remember and not what really happened). Yet there is one memory that overwhelms all the rest.

I got sunburned.

So did a lot of other people, including many of my professors. In fact, for a short time at least, the Earth Day Sunburn became a way of saying you had been there and so you were environmentally conscious. And you could feel slightly superior to all your pale-faced brethren who did boring and conventional things like go to class. I sported the only sunburn in my fraternity house, in fact. Which sounds slightly oxymoronic.

Even that early in Earth Day and environmentalism history, conspicuous virtue was embedded as a kind of purposeful deliberate rejection of the “conspicuous consumption” of the 1950s and early 1960s. Of course, truth be told, conspicuous consumption – or advertising your wealth and position to the obviously excessive – has always been part of the American, and human, landscape. We used to like people to know we were materially well off, and we can’t remind people too much.

Today, we like people to know we’re virtuous. It’s like letting our neighbors know we’re going to church on Sundays. So we do it conspicuously without the inconvenience of actually going to church and we create a sociological phenomenon. I didn’t invent this idea, by the way. To give credit where credit is due, I first heard about it more than three years ago from the Wall Street Journal. (See “My Goodness! Conspicuous Consumption and the Sustainable Sofa”).

In my self-inflated importance, I convinced my mother to stop using colored toilet paper, because the inks could harm the environment. My father said nothing; what he was probably thinking was “We’re sending him to college to learn about colored toilet paper?”

My career took me in directions far from colored toilet paper – to issues much closer to what the environmental movement was all about. Except I was seemingly in a different place. Like BIG OIL. And BIG CHEMICAL. The bad guys. Evil incarnate. The OTHER.

And yet, something about that sunburn must have stuck. By the time of Earth Day 20 in 1990, I had helped write two speeches that helped change the course of corporate environmental history. The change came about not so much because of my peerless prose (although the speechwriter in me argues otherwise, as all good speechwriters would) as because who gave the speeches – two corporate executives who led their company and their industry in a very different environmental direction.

Today, 40 years after I sat and wandered around LSU’s Parade Ground, listening to speeches and earnest exhortations and believing most of what I heard, I can look back and say, conspicuous virtue or not, that sunburn mattered.

"Wyoming Wind," photograph by Nancy Rosback. Used with Permission.

My First Job - Part 1

I don't know what I was thinking, or what I wasn't thinking, but about three weeks before I graduated from LSU's School of Journalism, I realized I needed a job. I had been too busy being the student newspaper's managing editor to worry about such trifles as future employment. But graduation loomed, and I went looking.

I dropped off resumes and actually interviewed at a couple of television stations in Baton Rouge, and my father suggested I talk to the people at Shell Oil in New Orleans. He did a considerable amount of their printing and mailing work, and I knew most of the people in the PR department from making deliveries and picking up mailing labels. So I did, and actually got to talk with an institution there, a woman named Carolyn Sonnier. Other people might have had better sounding titles, but she ruled PR in New Orleans. There were no openings, but she said she'd send my resume on to headquarters in Houston. (Ten months later, Shell in Houston called; they had a job and the recommendation by Ms. Sonnier clinched it.)

Things were now looking desperate. It wasn't just a job for me; there was this girl I'd met and we had started talking about getting married (we did, almost four months later). One afternoon, as I walked past the bulletin board in the J-School, I saw a job posting. Things being what they were, I took it down. No, I tore it down and hid it in my books so no one else would see it.

It was an opening for a copy editor at the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise, a daily newspaper with three editions (East Texas, Southwest Louisiana and Home). There was also an afternoon paper, the Beaumont Journal, that operated out of the same building but had separate ownership. I called the contact name, the managing editor, and got an interview right away. I should have wondered at the speed at which that happened, but I didn't. I thought he sounded anxious, but I was exceedingly thankful.

My girlfriend/fiancee and I drove over to Beaumont from Baton Rouge, and she waited outside (in the heat) while I did my interview. Downtown Beaumont then looked nothing like downtown Beaumont today. Then, it was still living off the dreams of the 1901 oil gusher at Spindletop, and the dreams had played out about 30 years earlier. Downtown was in serious need of major urban renewal.

I remember three things from my interview.

First was the smell of the place -- like ink and newsprint and glue from paste-up. I never forgot the smell. It's universal to all newspapers, I think. It was the same smell at the Houston Chronicle where my wife worked after we moved there, and the same smell at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Washington Post, and several other newspapers I've visited.

Second was the receptionist. She was likely somewhere in her early to mid-40s. Her jet black hair was teased at least 18 inches above her head (the copy desk would often break out in a stirring rendition of "Stand By Your Man" whenever she was out of earshot). She wore white go-go boots. And a mini-skirt. Always a mini-skirt. Every day a mini-skirt. And she shouldn't have.

The third thing I remember was, after offering me the sumptuous salary of $125 a week, near poverty-level even for the early 1970s, the managing editor walked me to the copy desk to introduce me to the people I would be working with. They were polite. And in their eyes I saw pity.

Yep, another desperate sucker.

But I had a job. Before we drove back to Baton Rouge, I found an apartment, which I always referred to as the posh Northway-Gaylynn Luxury Apartments. There was nothing posh or luxury about them. Their chief selling point was that they were furnished, or mostly furnished. My apartment shared a building with three other units, and sat amidst scores of other identical buildings. Think of the complex as incipient slum. Mine was upstairs. My neighbor was a young woman named Kitt; I remember her last name, too. She worked at a nearby bank, and she was far more respectable than anyone who worked at a newspaper, including me. I remember she had a white Westmoreland terrier. We were both engaged, but I got married first. She was as nice a neighbor as you might find.

I graduated a couple of weeks later and drove to Beaumont the next day, a Sunday. I drove straight to the apartment office to get my key -- and naturally, the office was closed. This was when most places of business, including grocery stores, shopping malls and apartment complexes, closed on Sundays. I had a car packed with stuff, a rented apartment, and no key to open the door. And I had to start work the next day.

After a few hours, I managed to find the handyman for the complex (he often had to work on Sundays; broken air conditioners and hot water heaters didn't care a fig about the Blue Laws). He let me in. I had no key and no food, but I did manage to find an open convenience store.

But life didn't get better than that for an almost 22-year-old soon-to-be a copy editor -- my own place to sleep, some awful food on my stomach, and all of the books I'd brought with me. In fact, after I ate the food (a TV dinner, if I recall correctly), the first thing I did was set up my pine board and cinder block bookshelves. Then I worried about the sheets for the bed.

The next day promptly at 3 p.m., I walked in the door of my first job.

The awakening would be abrupt and rude.