The students file in and suddenly some remember the day’s assignment: Bring in a favorite song lyric, something with magic in the way words work together.

Out come the phones and they search, trying to remember that song that took them by surprise the other night, the one that really spoke to them.

I start the class, news writing for new and traditional media, by putting Pete Seeger up on the screens scattered around my University of North Dakota classroom.

Old Devil Time, I’m gonna fight you now

Old Devil Time, you tried to bring me down

When I’m feelin’ low, my lovers gather round

To help me rise and fight you one more time.

The students clearly have no idea who this old man is, or was. It’s possible — even likely — that they’ve heard some of his iconic and oft-covered anthems, like “We Shall Overcome” and “Turn, Turn, Turn!” But the origins of that music is as remote to them as Seeger’s history of social activism, which led to an indictment for Contempt of Congress in 1961 when he refused to answer questions about his political affiliations. A lengthy prison sentence was dropped on a technicality and Seeger went on to a long career of writing and singing progressive folks songs.

He wrote “Old Devil Time” in 1971. The gobots must have been listening in on class, because the day after Facebook dished up a memory on my news feed of Seeger singing “Forever Young” with a chorus of children at a concert for Amnesty International. He died soon after at age 94.

Old devil fear, you with your icy hands

Old devil fear, you tried to freeze me out.

But when I’m afraid, my lovers gather ‘round

To help me rise and fight you one more time.

Writing that transcends time and platform

For several years now, I’ve devoted time in this class at the University of North Dakota to this exploration of song lyrics, plus favorite lines of poetry and faith verses — anything that might help the students see the potential in metaphor, personification, the use of telling detail or other literary touches that could add a little punch or sparkle to their writing.

I admit to them at the outset that my music playlist bears no resemblance to theirs. If they’re unaware of Gershwin and Porter, indifferent to James Taylor and Judy Collins, I doubt I could identify a single artist in the current Top 10.

This semester’s group responded especially well to the exercise. They kept me busy for a night looking up artists and songs I’d never heard of before.

Abigail offered a line from “Could Have Been Me” by the Struts:

Don’t want to live as an untold story.

She explained: “I believe this lyric means two different things for different ages. For the old, not wanting people to forget them and fear that their life wasn’t a story worth telling. For the young, not wanting to live like a story that isn’t worth telling, to live a forgettable life. It resonates with me, because I myself fear not living a life worth telling, or living a life that is forgettable by those I will come to care for or care for already.”

From Caroline came a few lines from “Happiness is a Butterfly,” by Lana Del Rey:

Happiness is a butterfly

Try to catch it like every night

It escapes from my hands into moonlight.

Malachi gave me a Drake rap titled “Last name ever, First name Greatest.”

Like a sprained ankle, boy, I ain’t nothin’ to play with.

I’m not big on rap music or a lot of the music my students brought in. But I would not say it’s bad. Fifty years ago, my history graduate school advisor, preparing to teach a course on the 1960s, asked me to provide him with some of my music from that time. I gave him Dylan and some others. A few days later, he gave it all back. “Chuck,” he said, “this is crap.”

He was a great teacher, but not too tolerant when it came to pop culture that had passed him by.

The meaning in the message

Alivia, another of my students, suggested I listen to “Burn Burn Burn” by Zach Bryan and “Stacks” by Bon Iver, which includes the line,

Everything that happens is from now on

And this:

The fountain in the front yard is rusted out

All my love was down

In a frozen ground

What does the lyric mean to her? The song “is about living in the present and taking things as they come,” she said. “This is important to me as I am a deep over thinker.”

I’m thinking that’s a problem for me, too.

This example of detail and perspective is from “Things That Matter” by Jameson Rodgers, recited by student Grace:

Things I wanted that I don’t have 

I’ve learned to let ‘em all go  

‘Cause of things that mean the most 

Is waking up with the woman I love 

Talking to the man above  

Sipping coffee from my favorite cup  

Slowing down in the country  

Going hunting with my old man 

Hugging mama while I still can.

Gabrielle offered this image from “Who Am I?” by Bazzi:

I’m so tired of feelin’ paper-thin

Like I could tear at anytime

Trapped inside of the brain I’m in

Please get me out of my mind.

From Max, a few lines from Zach Bryan’s “Birmingham”:

I’ve been working here like a slavin’ mule,

Sucking the Earth of dry crude

Looking for a way out of it all.

Angela quoted Noah Kahan, who in his “Everywhere, Everything,” may have borrowed a line from Ben Franklin:

I wanna love you ‘til we’re food for the worms to eat

‘til our fingers decompose

keep my hand in yours.

And Maria, bless her, cited lines from the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” – but from a striking (and new to me) Grammy-nominated arrangement by Cody Fry:

Eleanor Rigby, picks up the rice

In the church where a wedding has been

Lives in a dream

Waits at the window, wearing the face

That she keeps in a jar by the door

Who is it for?

All the lonely people

Where do they all come from?

All the lonely people

Where do they all belong?

Where, indeed? The lines haunted me back when it was first released in 1966, and even more now today.

Universal stories

But let’s end the lesson where it began, with Pete:

No storm, no fire can ever beat us down

No wind that blows but carries us further on

And you who fear, O lovers gather round

And we will rise and sing it one more time.

* * *

Chuck Haga was a reporter at the Grand Forks Herald and Minneapolis Star Tribune. He now teaches part-time at the University of North Dakota and writes a column for the Herald.

The post A veteran newsman teaches writing through music appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]E[/dc]very year, or as often as I can, I go into the northern Minnesota woods, usually alone now, seeking tranquility and time to brood and reflect.

And I write while I’m there, among the pines, at a campfire or by the lake. If it rains or the wind howls, I retreat to a graceful lodge built of giant logs and furnished with a great stone fireplace, with history on the walls and, if I’m lucky, a place for me at an old oak roll top desk.

I have always hesitated to call myself a writer. I was for most of my adult life a newspaperman. I might call myself a reporter, maybe a staff writer when I wore a tie and talked with governors and such, and for a couple stretches a columnist. Now, at 72, I teach news writing part-time to university students, and I write a weekly newspaper column.

“Who is your audience?” I ask the students, telling them they should know that before they begin typing. “Who are you writing for? What do you want to say, and how should you say it?” As practice, I give them each a thank-you note, an envelope and a postage stamp, an exercise I found in a Nieman Storyboard years ago. (Each semester, I have to tell a couple students how to address their letter and where to put the stamp. It’s their first time.)

[caption id="attachment_166146" align="alignright" width="315"] Chuck Haga at his campsite in Itasca State Park, northern Minnesota[/caption]

Turning the notebook inward

When I write in the woods, it’s different than my journalism — usually personal, reflective, a post or series of posts on Facebook. My audience is friends — longtime, beloved and often distant friends, and hundreds of digital “friends” whose paths crossed mine along the way. I fret about those musings coming off as overly self-indulgent, but my friends, including “friends,” tend to respond nicely.

When I turned 70 two years ago, I wrote monthly from camp in Minnesota’s Itasca State Park from May into November, calling the series of posts “Camping at 70” and saying I wanted to see if, at that age, I still could sleep on the ground and get up in the morning. (I confess it’s getting harder.) I wrote about 5 a.m. breakfasts with blue jays overhead and chipmunks at my feet, the contents of my book bag, sightings of bears and moonlight serenades by owls, struggles with lanterns and air mattresses — and the constant, conflicting pull of peaceful isolation against a sometimes overwhelming sense of aloneness.

“A campfire is best enjoyed with company,” I wrote one night that summer, pecking the words out on my smart phone as I sat, alone, by my fire, “so you and someone you like and trust can stare into it, feed it, talk or sit quietly and remember. Alone, I tend to miss certain people too much.”

In late September that year, I borrowed from E.B. White’s "Essays" to convey why I kept coming back to this campground with its lodge and lakes, its ferns and centuries-old pines — more than 50 years now — and asked readers far and near to indulge me. From White:

"The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays."

Or personal columns, perhaps. Or long Facebook posts from the woods.

Three months earlier, I had written this:

“Aloneness is different from lonesomeness. I thrive on aloneness, taking time to see and listen, remember and think. Up to a point. Aloneness can slide easily into the other, which can lead to boredom or depression.”

Also in my book bag that summer was Sylvain Tesson’s “The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Siberian Taiga.” Now there’s a fellow who appreciated solitude. At one point in his yearlong aloneness, Tesson describes snowshoeing through the forest in April, setting up his tent on a rocky overlook, laying down a mattress of dwarf pine branches and building a fire. The fire sends sparks “shooting into the sky,” glittering “with a last brilliance before melting into the stars.” Tesson:

“Nothing is as good as solitude. The only thing I need to make me perfectly happy is someone to whom I could explain this.“

Itasca’s campgrounds in high summer are more suburban neighborhood than Siberian taiga, of course, with kids running and dogs chasing and RVs nearly as long as a city block providing music and energy for campground block parties. I may retire to an infrequently visited trail. But sometimes the other campers give me something to think — and write — about.

Lily and "Santa"

Earlier this August, I wrote about meeting Lily, 4, who was camping with her family. Twice as I passed by, the little girl smiled and waved at me, said her name and asked me mine. She appeared to be alone — Mom must have been inside the camper — so I just smiled, told her she should check with Mommy or Daddy before talking to me, and walked on.

I love it when little kids smile at me, I wrote later, but it can be an ugly world. I hate it that sweet kids must be taught to be careful, but I accept that they do.

The third time I passed, Lily again smiled and waved to me, but this time she called to her mother, told her “the big man” was back, which made me a bit nervous. But Mom came out, looked me over and smiled.

“She wanted to know your name,” she said.

I explained why I had been standoffish, and Mom nodded. She understood.

Again, Lily asked me for my name.

I had a hunch, I wrote later — it has happened before — so I asked her if she could guess my name.

"Santa?"

"That's right!" I said, patting my belly and fluffing my white beard.

I finished the little story later and shared it on Facebook.

“With Mom watching and listening, we talked about reindeer and snow, I asked Lily if she's been good and she said she has, and I told her to have Mommy help her write a letter to me at the North Pole in a couple months. I believe she will.

“We said goodbye. I went down to the lake and listened to loons and wished for a long, safe and happy life for Lily, for all the Lilys.”

The post A retired newspaper man finds a new writing voice in the solitude of wilderness appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]A[/dc]fter 40-some years of practicing journalism, I decided there was much I still had to learn about the craft. So I became a teacher. Any of you who have gone from reporting and writing to talking about reporting and writing will agree that makes perfect sense. And yes, “If only I had understood this better back then …”

Six years ago, I took on a teaching job at the University of North Dakota, where I had first encountered inverted pyramids, “nut grafs” and the AP Stylebook in the late 1960s. What had been the Department of Journalism then is now the Department of Communication, and the curriculum leans more to public relations, advertising and communication theory than to news reporting, writing and editing.

Still, I am surprised and a little disappointed each semester when students in my news writing classes introduce themselves and say they’re majoring in marketing, management, aviation, air traffic management, Spanish, English, geography, computer science, wildlife biology, engineering or public health, to cite examples from the current semester. Few have any interest in the news business, including those who have declared a communications major.

OK, I tell them. So let’s concentrate on writing. If I can help you learn to write a sentence with clarity, substance and maybe a little style, that will help you enormously no matter what profession you may choose. (A professor in our business school told me that a frequent lament from returning business graduates is, “I wish I had learned to write better.”) And, I tell my students, along the way I’ll try to persuade you that as citizens you really ought to pay attention to the news and appreciate how it is reported, verified and written by news professionals.

The foundation of effective writing

About clarity.

It would be presumptuous of me to suggest much if any of the writing guidance I offer students today is original. I’ve had many fine teachers over the years — E.B. White, William Zinser and Roy Peter Clark, for example — and colleagues and competitors to admire and emulate, including Larry Batson at the Star Tribune and Jacqui Banaszynski wherever she happened to be. They have taught me about concrete nouns, active verbs, telling details, one idea to a sentence, tone and voice, and the enduring importance of story.

And this: “Clarity is the goal. Simplicity is the way to achieve it.”

I believe it was the late Charles McDowell, then a political writer and columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, who offered that wisdom during a seminar for city editors at the American Press Institute in Reston, Va., in the mid-1980s.

Simplicity does not mean simplemindedness or “dumbing down” to a third grade level. What Charlie meant by “simple” was writing that relies on clear statements of fact, sincere and natural, free of deceit or pretentiousness. Simplicity can be elegant and eloquent – and understood.

Think about times you’ve been out riding in unfamiliar country and you stop and ask for directions. The local you ask may give you what he believes are perfect directions, but he has the advantage of “seeing” the route in his mind. The more complex his directions, chances are they’re less likely to get you where you want to go.

News writing often fails the same way. You know what you meant to say – it was clear in your head – but the reader can’t read your mind. That disconnect is what leads us to write sentences that don’t say exactly what we mean: “Walking down Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building impresses visitors to New York.” I’ve forgotten where I heard this sentence, allegedly part of a story about an explosion and fire at a Minnesota prison: “One prisoner was thrown from his cell by the explosion in his pajamas.” Maybe it happened that way – and part of me wants to believe it -- but I don’t think so.

Jargon and what we used to call “journalese” also lead to failures of communication. We employ jargon (especially in police, education and other beats) because we’ve heard it enough from sources that we start thinking and writing in their language. “Revenue enhancements” for taxes? And journalese … writing sentences that nobody would ever speak: “My sister Thursday unveiled her plans to wed.” Congratulations, I think.

Students and beginning journalists tend to use big, unusual words, hoping to impress but more often irritating editors — and distracting readers. By all means, use metaphor and other literary devices in your writing, but to clarify meaning, not just to show off.

One of the early assignments I give students is to write a thank-you note to someone. I give them each a note, envelope and postage stamp. I don’t read the notes, but I have to advise a few students how to address their letters and where the stamp goes, as this is a first for some.

My purpose is to get them to focus on clarity through simplicity: Think about audience, message and tone before you write anything. To whom are you writing? What do you want to say? And how do you want to say it so your message is understood?

It’s an idea I borrowed, not to say stole, from a post on Nieman Storyboard. Feel free to use it.

The post In good writing, clarity is job one appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]I[/dc] fall to pieces every time I hear a recording of Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” or “Sweet Dreams” — or “I Fall to Pieces” — and it’s not just because of the depth and sweetness and catch in Patsy’s voice.

It’s those things, of course. But it’s also the words — how the words work together to project heartache, longing, regret and that elusive thing called truth.

The wonderful Ken Burns series, “Country Music,” now playing on PBS, has me thinking about lyrics, the songwriters who compose them and the artists who sing them home. One episode recalled the definition of country music offered in the 1950s by songwriter Harlan Howard: “Three chords and the truth.”

Country music has long suffered more disdainful analysis. Play a country song backwards, they say, and a guy gets his job back, then his house back, his wife returns to him and even his dog trots home. But country’s best lyrics, like the best of pop and more recent musical genres, offer sound lessons in the broader craft of writing.

Sweet dreams of you
Things I know can't come true
Why can't I forget the past
Start loving someone new
Instead of having sweet dreams about you

Those are Don Gibson’s words, by the way. Harlan Howard gave us the lyrics to “I Fall to Pieces,” and we can thank Willie Nelson for …

Oh, crazy
For thinking that my love could hold you
I’m crazy for trying
And crazy for crying
And I’m crazy for loving you

[dc small]F[/dc]or the past several years, I’ve been using song lyrics and other bits of familiar language in college classes on writing for the media. I don’t recall where I found the idea, but I’m sure many teachers of writing have used a similar approach to inspire students by showing them the magic and beauty, the rhythm, pace and measured pauses of “writing” in their daily lives.

Each semester, I ask students to bring to class a favorite song lyric, a favorite poem, a treasured verse of faith — a line or two that has stayed with them, not only because of what it said, but because of how it said it. The response hasn’t always been enthusiastic, which bums me out because I take it as failure on my part (I could write a country song about it if I knew three chords), but usually a few students take the assignment to heart.

My music playlist bears no resemblance to theirs, of course. I share lyrics from Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Buffet, from Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, from Pete Seeger and the Beatles:

All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends
I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I’ve loved them all

And they have come back to me with lines from Green Day and OK Go and rappers, bands and singers I know nothing of, but whom I can appreciate for how their words resonate. One introduced me to country’s Kacey Musgraves …

Just hoe your own row and raise your own babies
Smoke your own smoke and grow your own daisies
Mend your own fences and own your own crazy
Mind your own biscuits and life will be gravy

"Own your own crazy." I love it.

I recite a bit of Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, Robert Frost and John McCrae …

In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

… and from one of the most searing expressions of grief and loss I’ve ever read, W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” …

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My moon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

They respond with the poetry of Warsan Shire, Rupi Kaur, Ally Layne, Sierra DeMulder …

This moment is a hallelujah. This moment
is your permission slip to finally open that love
letter you’ve been hiding from yourself,
the one you wrote when you were little
when you still danced like a sparkler at dusk.

I assure students at my public university that I am not being evangelical except in service to language when I urge them to look for metaphor and simile and story in the Talmud, the Koran, the Bible: Psalm 91 and the Beatitudes from Matthew. Read out loud and savor Saint Paul’s epiphany on love in I Corinthians 13:

And now abideth faith, hope, love: these three, but the greatest of these is love.

They have, in turn, shared some of their favorite verses, including one who offered a profound lesson in economy, from John 11:35:

Jesus wept.

[dc small]W[/dc]ith his documentary, Ken Burns reminds us that the heart of good country music is storytelling. Honest storytelling. “Life,” Loretta Lynn says in one episode, explaining her songwriting. “I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it.” You see it in the words, the stories, of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, the songwriting couple who gave us “Love Hurts” and several of the Everly Brothers’ most memorable tunes, including “All I Have To Do Is Dream”…

I can make you mine, taste your lips of wine
Anytime night or day
Only trouble is, gee whiz
I'm dreamin' my life away.

The post The story in the music — and the music in how the story is written appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[caption id="attachment_150520" align="alignright" width="250"] Chuck Haga with his reading partner and story muse, granddaughter Emma. Haga says they have both aged since this picture was taken, but that Emma wears it better.[/caption]

EDITOR'S NOTE: Metrics aside, the true test of a good story is that it evokes other stories. That's what happened when I asked veteran storyteller Chuck Haga to write a "Why's This So Good" essay about a story by James Eli Shiffer, an editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Shiffer's piece, based on a trove of old photos, wove threads of research and emotion to create a tapestry of the too-short life of a lovely, and much-loved, little girl. Haga said Shiffer's story reminded him of a piece he had done five years earlier, for the Grand Forks Herald, based on a three-paragraph obituary and a similar trove of photographs that came his way.

Haga has long been someone I follow to study how to blend honest reporting with honest emotion. He had a storied career at the Grand Forks Herald and Star Tribune, and now teaches and mentors lucky students at the University of North Dakota.

In honor of our belief that stories beget stories, we are reprinting Haga's story below, with permission. Pair his piece side-by-side with Shiffer's provides a great lesson in the power of curiosity, the quest for answers and the truth that compelling stories are wherever you look.

REMEMBERING LLOYD

Salvaged photographs and other pieces of family history fill out the story of a child of the Red River Valley: Farm boy, veteran, construction worker, son, brother.

By Chuck Haga
Grand Forks Herald
November 11, 2012

[dc]B[/dc]UXTON, N.D. - Lloyd Domier died 17 years ago. A brief obituary notice in the newspaper said he was born near Buxton in 1928, served in the Army and worked in construction.

And that was that: a life in three paragraphs.

He was part of a large family, with six brothers and four sisters. But Lloyd never married, the family has largely died off or scattered, and only a few older residents of this Traill County town recall the Domiers. Like members of previous generations, Lloyd was quietly fading into the unremembered past.

Then the pictures came.

A man in Florida, taking out his trash one day this fall, spotted a bundle of photographs in his apartment complex Dumpster. Curious, he fished them out. In faded images and scrawled notes, they hinted at a multigenerational story, the story of a family.

Many of the pictures had notations that made reference to the little town of Buxton in northeast North Dakota. The man who found the photos had been born in North Dakota, and his father had grown up in Prosper, a small town near Fargo. So, he shipped the photos, more than a hundred of them, to his father in Louisville, Ky.

"I have had them for a while but really do not have any personal interest in them," Loren Waa wrote recently to the newspaper in Grand Forks, knowing the city was not far from Buxton. "It seemed to me that they would be better off in your hands than mine."

In Buxton, Duane Bjerke, 84, visiting with friends over coffee at the Cenex station, looked at the photos, one by one. He paused as he studied the smiling face of a boy, a boy from another time.

"That's me," he said.

"I was raised on a farm 4½ miles west of here," Bjerke said. "The Domiers were on a farm 3½ miles west. Lloyd ran with the same crowd I did, but he kept mostly to himself. He worked for a construction outfit for many years. They built elevators. Pretty much the whole family worked for that company."

Bjerke smiled as he remembered one of Lloyd's brothers.

"I was a police officer here for 10 years," he said. "Lloyd's brother, Douglas, was a little wild, and I had to talk to him a few times.

"He became a minister. He was back here once and he thanked me. He credited me with steering him in the right direction."

Another man in for coffee called for Doug Thompson, the Cenex manager. "Don't you have an address for Douglas Domier out in California?"

The family still had a financial interest in the cooperative, and Thompson quickly found an address.

"I have a phone number, too," he said, "but I don't know how current that is."

[dc small]R[/dc]emembering

"Of the brothers, he (Lloyd) was the closest to me," the Rev. Douglas Domier said last week from San Juan Capistrano, Calif., where he lives.

"He was an older brother who really encouraged me to continue with my schooling," Douglas said. "He invested in me, personally and financially and every other way, to encourage me to finish school and go to college."

The photos, he said, may have been tossed by an ailing elderly relative in Florida, or by someone caring for her.

"Yes, I would very much like to have them," he said.

The photos include old-time images of a chubby-cheeked boy and a baby girl: Douglas and Lloyd's father and mother. Their maternal grandparents are dressed in their Sunday best for a formal portrait, and their paternal grandfather poses as a young man with five brothers.

A reprint of a studio portrait taken about 1900 shows a proud elderly couple, also dressed for the moment: Lloyd's paternal great-grandparents, Henrik and Kari Domier. With the photo is a copy of the passenger list from the Norway-Heritage Line's Fauma, the three-masted sailing ship that brought them to America in 1867.

Newer images show a young Lloyd at work on a farm, posing with two brothers, and sitting on the fender of a 1940s-era car with a toddler, a nephew perhaps, in his lap. Snapshots barely an inch square, taken in the early 1950s, show a young man in uniform, sitting with a girl on a park bench, and standing jauntily outside a café in Frankfurt, Germany. "A German café that most of the guys go to from this outfit," he wrote on the back.

In another, he is bending over a stream, about to splash water on his face. "Cleaning up a little," he wrote. Another shows him in uniform and reclining on a bed, maybe in a barracks. "This is my room," he wrote, and probably sent the little photo home to his mother.

There are letters, too, though spelling clearly was not Lloyd's strength.

"Dear Ma Just a line to tell you not to right to me here I will leave here party soon. Lloyd."

On Jan. 29, 1952, he wrote a little more.

"Dear Mom and Pop I got your letter yesterday but I sat down last night and tried to write a letter but I could not think of anything to write about so I gave it up."

He wrote that it was good to hear they were well "and that the roads are still open" back in North Dakota. He was a farmer's son.

He told about the weather there in Germany, too, how there was snow on the ground but it was melting and would probably be gone by the end of the day.

"Well, that is about all I have to write about now. Tell all the kids hello from me and grandma too, and tell Douglas I will write him a letter real soon."

[dc small]S[/dc]o close

"I was in the first grade when my brother was called into the service during the Korean War," Douglas said. "I remember sitting on a swing that morning outside the school, crying, thinking I had lost my brother. I was already so close to him, and I thought I would never see him again."

People thought Lloyd resembled the actor Humphrey Bogart, both in appearance and in the way he moved, a confident but not arrogant stride.

"I loved to watch him," Douglas said.

Though he never married, Lloyd appears to have been a popular uncle and big brother. In several of the old photographs, he is holding a youngster. Maybe because of the age difference, about 15 years, and maybe because of his own disappointments, he felt a special responsibility for Douglas.

"He was a guy who was pushing ahead, working hard, always looking to the day that his ship would come in," Douglas said. "But he also was looking back and wishing he had made some better decisions to get ahead in life.

"The first time he hired me — I was about 15 then — he talked to me: 'I have never backed up to anyone in my life to pick up a paycheck. I've always taken my paycheck and looked in their eyes.' And he wanted me to do the same."

Lloyd was a construction foreman with a crew, building grain elevators. "We worked like animals, 14 to 16 hours a day, and he always tried to finish a job before other crews," Douglas said. "We were paid by the hour, but it was a thing of honor to him.

"We were a very poor family, kind of the lower class out there by Buxton. That bothered Lloyd a lot."

Douglas said he didn't always hold to the straight and narrow as a teenager. "I had started alcohol, chasing around," he said. But Lloyd persuaded him to study hard at school, work hard at his job and plan for college.

"In 1960, I was a few weeks into my first year at Mayville State. Lloyd came home from work with a 1958 Ford Fairlane. ‘I want you to have a good car to drive to and from school,' he said. He also took me down to the bank and started an account so I'd have money for gas and things.

"And he said, 'But I tell you, you little S-O-B, if you spend my money on booze and women, I'll …' Well, it worked."

Douglas graduated from Mayville (N.D.) State University and went on to earn advanced degrees. He entered a seminary, was ordained and spent 20 years as a missionary in Guatemala, Ecuador and Costa Rica. At 70, he continues to work with Spanish-speaking ministries in the southwest United States.

"If he had not encouraged me to continue my studies, pushed me to hold onto my values and try for a better life, I probably would have continued on in the beer-drinking construction industry.

"I became his hero. But I did it basically for him. I am greatly indebted to my brother."

[dc small]A[/dc]nother photo

In his mid-40s, Lloyd was working at a construction site one day when he fell 25 feet to a concrete surface, Douglas said. The fall damaged his spinal column, and he was in pain most of the rest of his life.

In the packet of photographs that help to explain who he was, where he came from and who he became, there is a picture of Lloyd lying in a hospital bed, probably just after the accident.

He died on May 8, 1995, in Union Hospital in Mayville, at the age of 66.

He was buried in Immanuel Cemetery, rural Buxton.

He is remembered.

The post Stories that beget stories appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]A[/dc]t first glance, it might seem an unlikely story from a veteran investigative reporter.  But it was those investigative instincts and skills that James Eli Shiffer used to report and write the sweet, sad life story of Janet Lee Dahl, who died 60 years ago at the age of 10.

Now an editor supervising news coverage of Minneapolis and St. Paul for the Star Tribune, Shiffer wrote about Janet in a spare style that at times soars, maybe because of its simplicity. No tinkling pianos or crying violins in the background here, but honest, telling detail and the searcher-reporter’s gently caring heart. “The Heart is an Instrument” is what Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Madeleine Blais titled a collection of her feature stories years ago. And Shiffer here employs heart along with his data, research and other hard investigative skills to show us why we should care about this one little girl so long gone.

He also, in telling us how he came to know about Janet and her story, offers a lesson in the unobtrusive use of first person.

His interest in Janet’s story began, he explains in the first of several “how I did this” bits woven into the narrative, when his daughter gave him “Talking Pictures,” a book of vintage photographs. One chapter in the photo book was all about Janet, and as he looked through the 15 snapshots taken by Janet’s mother, Gertrude, it became clear that something was wrong.

“The photos show Gertrude’s worries about Janet,” Shiffer told me when I called to ask about his story, which ran June 30 in the Star Tribune. “Then you see a photo of her in the hospital and it’s not clear why. … The documentation is at once incredibly moving and on the other hand baffling.

“Then comes the picture of her in her coffin. Just devastating. Any parent, this is your worst fear, losing a child.”

[dc small]I[/dc]n three of the photo captions, he saw references to Abbott Hospital, and he wondered if it could be the venerable Minneapolis institution. “The possible Minnesota connection triggered my investigative reflex,” he said. “I love research. I get into a research reverie where I can’t stop looking, wracking my brain about where to find information and how to get to the people who remember. If they aren’t around, how do I get to the records?”

He also has a passion for historical research, and in 2016 the University of Minnesota Press published “The King of Skid Row,” his book on people of the old Skid Row in Minneapolis.

Now, he was looking at photographs more than a half-century old that hinted at a compelling human story. He contacted the photo book’s curator, who pointed him to a man who collected vintage photos at flea markets and had found an album containing Gertrude Dahl’s snaps of her daughter. The collector told Shiffer how he had flipped through the album, thinking he might sell some of the individual photos, until he reached the album’s end, and he wept. “That confirmed to me that the photos had a unique power,” Shiffer said.

The collector agreed to send the photos, and Shiffer and his daughter laid them out on a kitchen table in chronological order. “I didn’t know there were so many,” he said. “We got to see her as a baby, see other relatives, her parents. I was able to really learn a lot about the places she had gone, how her face and body changed as she grew up. Most of the pictures are from 1955 to 1959. I’m assuming Gertrude got a new camera in 1955. Those are the first photos where you start to see Janet in the hospital, getting x-rays.”

At first, he saw Janet’s story as a magazine piece. “I wrote a 5,000-word version. I knew the Star Tribune wouldn’t publish that, but I had to get it out.” After a few tries at starting his story with Janet, his initial editor — aka: his wife — suggested a more general lead that marked the cultural shift from printed to digital collections of family photos, the physical albums’ usual fate — the landfill — and the serendipitous discovery of this collection.

“It was, ‘Why am I reading about this?’ and she was right,” Shiffer said. “It was this transformation of something precious into something worthless. So that was the jumping off point. These pictures were found and the transformation never happened. They still were precious.”

Thus, he begins in the second person, how in a house fire you would rescue loved ones and pets and then the family photos because they are “irreplaceable.” But generations pass and in many cases they become pictures of strangers and eventually get tossed. That could have happened to Janet’s photos, he wrote, but a series of people who came upon the album “felt a deep connection to Janet Lee through those haunting images.”

And here he switches to first person: "I am the latest one."

[dc small]T[/dc]he writing was an experiment, he said. “I’m at a stage of my career that I wanted to stretch out a little more. First person allows you to speculate. We would never do that in a conventional news story, but here— as long as I was honest and transparent about it — I could share my speculation. It was very liberating.”

He cut his initial draft in half, and “the story got a lot better with trimming,” he said. Did his work editing other journalists play a role there? “Absolutely,” he said. “I’ve always thought being an editor makes a writer better. You look at your own writing differently, more critically.”

The simplicity, the quiet unfolding of the story, sets the tone throughout. “That is a benefit of a newspaper career because we are really beaten into getting the story down to the basics,” Shiffer said. “There is no sin in journalism that is more beaten down than overwriting. Cutting this story, I lost a lot of flowery language I might have felt I could use in a longer piece. Sometimes a little bit goes a long way.“

[caption id="attachment_150450" align="alignright" width="225"] James Eli Shiffer[/caption]

At every stage, he drew on his experience as an investigative reporter: making lists of people he wanted to reach, documents he wanted to find, facts he needed to know, facts he wanted to know.

“Every great writer is a great reporter,” he said. “You trust your reporting to drive the story. It’s not about finding the best adjectives. It’s telling the feel of the wind on your face that shows you were there, noticing and counting, using all your senses in the reporting, making sure there’s something in your notebook.”

His knowledge of court records and other official document depositories led him to Janet’s 60-year-old death certificate and an autopsy report. “That was the toughest thing,” he said. “I knew the death certificate would be available, but the autopsy report … I didn’t expect to find that. But I called the medical examiner’s office and they said, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve got it.’ My heart pounded as I ran from my office to the ME’s office to see the thing. … That was so satisfying, to finally learn what had happened and to understand why her mother had built this photo record of her short life.”

He also found his way to an elderly couple, who were neighbors of Janet’s parents after the girl died. The Dahls had lived into their 90s, and Shiffer said it was “reassuring” to learn from the neighbors that the grieving parents had not been totally defined by the loss. “You would think a couple who had a child pretty late in life, in their 40s, to lose that child — that kind of trauma would sink a lot of people. But they didn’t give up. They lived their lives. I found that very sweet.”

To finish the story, of course, he had to visit the Minneapolis cemetery where Janet was buried, close to her parents, in a place where she had spent a good part of her childhood. “It wasn’t just the grave,” he said. “It was that she could see her final resting place from her window. She knew that place. It was a part of her childhood landscape.”

Standing there, remembering the photo that showed Janet in that precise spot, surveying the landscape, was overwhelming. His description leads into the simple, powerful ending to the story.

[dc small]R[/dc]eader reaction was powerful, too. Since the story ran, Shiffer has heard from more people who knew Janet or her parents, childhood friends and former neighbors. There is talk of a memorial service.

“You don’t know what to expect when you put a story out there these days,” he said. “We are in such a polarized era. I worried that some people might find it morbid or invasive. But the emotional reaction has been very reassuring. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a reaction like this to a story I’ve written. I think it helps make people understand why we’re here. Journalism has many roles, and one of them is to tell a story that tugs at your heart.”

For all that, he wasn’t able to answer all the questions he had.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever find out how her photos ended up in a flea market stall in Southern California,” he said. “But because they did, we are all the keeper of Janet now.”

The post Haunting old photos — and happenstance — launch a search for answers appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.