This is Marideth Sisco for These Ozarks Hills. Well, here we are again at the waning of the year, the tilt of the planet’s northern hemisphere toward the dark, the cold, so much of the hemisphere’s green life mowed down by the scythe that is the season. It’s my favorite time of year, oddly. And this time, even those feelings of sadness and loss that this season often stirs up has a bit of a sweet edge to it for me.
You see, in just a few days I will be saying goodbye to a friend. And unlike most farewells, I’m happy about this one — not for the loss, but for the cause of the leaving. And herein lies the story.
Unlike many an old friend of mine in recent years, she is not leaving the planet. She is merely leaving the Ozarks. I’m bummed about it, but also really tickled for her. I think I’ve probably told you a part of this story before, but here’s the rest of it, as Paul Harvey would say.
You see, back in the years when I was a journalist — a good 20 years ago and perhaps as much as 30 — I happened be asked to give a talk at a local middle school, on Career Day, about my job as a journalist. Well, I loved my job and everything about it. And I must have waxed eloquently that day about the honor and ethics and the life of a reporter — and things like journalistic integrity, and how it’s one of the very few jobs actually protected by the Constitution. And I certainly mentioned the sheer joy of getting paid for being irrepressibly nosey, not to mention the thrill of tracking down an elusive tale, or as Linda Ellerbee put it, “the challenge of finding out something you aren’t supposed to know about so you can run and tell everybody.”
It’s a sobering thought that mere words could land so hard as to leave an indelible mark on some young person, and realizing that I had possibly, and unintentionally persuaded this one to decide my career was the very thing they were cut out for. And without me having a clue about any of that, she set off, over the course of her growing and learning years, to follow in my none too reliable footsteps.
It was a wise person who once said that a person doesn’t learn anything of any consequence by doing everything right. Boy, has that been the case for me. Casting a look back on my own path so full of embarrassing errors, bad choices and general cluelessness, I would probably have tried to warn her off if I’d known. But I didn’t—until she came back home to raise her daughter and told me so.
She had grown up, went to J-school, worked her way into a job as a foreign correspondent, had a child, escaped from harrowing circumstances, and in short, soon surpassed anything I had ever done or attempted. When she told me about all this some years later, I was stunned to find a little bit of all this had been my fault — that I had been one of her early influences, and, in fact, she considered me an inspiration.
Good grief! Well of course I was humbled and flattered at any notion that my influence had any bearing at all on her plans, much less her successes. And this is certainly not me taking any credit for any of her laudable accomplishments. Did you know that just this year one of her stories about the music and musicians at McClurg Store was picked up and published by the New York Times? Yep. She’s that good.
In fact, my old and equally talented friend Frank Shipe, who put in several years at the San Francisco Chronicle and moved on to write for Rolling Stone magazine before retiring and returning to his Ozarks home mentioned her to me once and asked if I knew of her and how talented she was.
“I don’t know how we managed to get hold of her,” he said. “I’m glad she’s here, and I enjoy everything she does, but we really don’t deserve her. I’m sorry, but she’s just too good for this place. She needs to be on a national desk. She needs to go to the big time.”
This last week he lamented with me upon hearing that she was, in fact, headed to that very place — the big time. “Sometimes I just hate to be right,” he said.
Well, you’ve heard the news, and you know by now that I’m speaking of KSMU News Director Jennifer Moore, who is departing next week for parts east to take up the reins as Features Editor for WGBH-Boston, the huge NPR/PBS outlet in Boston, Mass. — creator of NOVA and all manner of other fine journalistic efforts.
What a kick in the head. Barring the fact that my influence in her career path is long ago, far away and miniscule in scope, I am so proud of her I could just pop. I’ll miss her terribly and am sad to see her go. But she has things to do, things of consequence. I’m happy and proud to watch from the sidelines. We’ll stay in touch, and she will shine as always, and make us all proud. I’ve probably embarrassed her by all this effusiveness, but heck, she’s a gem, and this might be my only chance to say so.
So we’ll give her a nice sendoff, sing her praises a little, and perhaps some day, after she has done everything she’s capable of doing and followed all her dreams, I expect that like these two old news hounds, Frank and me, she may end up back in These Ozarks Hills, back to her roots, where, as Jimmy Carter once said on his return to Plains, “nobody has an accent.”
Until then, I’m proud to join her family, her colleagues and her multitude of fans in wishing her all the good health, good work, good news and good times she so richly deserves. I can’t hardly wait to see what she does next.
Happy trails, kiddo. Go show ‘em how it’s done.
