EDITOR’S CORNER
Has it really been 20 years since I edited the “old timer?”
I guess it has.
I’ve said many times the very best thing about this job is all the people I’ve gotten to meet whom I never would have known otherwise.
Twenty years ago this week The Reporter’s “old timer” passed away one week short of his 87th birthday.
Jack Mathena moved to Rockdale in poor health after a lifetime of hard, and constant, work. He spent his last six years with a pencil and a yellow pad recalling that life.
He became a very popular Reporter columnist and I had a relationship with Jack that nobody else did. I was his editor.
Now when I say Jack worked all his life, I can recall only a few of his jobs. In no particular order he ran a mule barn, farmed, operated a cafe, was a constable, built part of the Pan American highway in Mexico, worked in a sawmill, cut timber in Oregon, built runways at Randolph Field, picked cotton, played in a band, drove trucks.
And apparently remembered every minute of it.
My job was to take the literally hundreds of pages he sent me and transform them into something that was readable and, above all, entertaining.
And that’s what Jack was, above all else, entertaining.
There was the time young Jack was heading back home with a team and wagon after picking up some moonshine for his father when he saw a deputy sheriff riding toward him.
Jack, always a quick thinker, disposed of the illegal contraband by drinking it.
“I was fine when I got home but the house and barns were having trouble standing still,” he wrote.
Once he sent in a story that ran about four dozen of those yellow pages and, for the life of me, I could not figure out how to get it into print for the paper.
It was about the time in the 1920s teenaged Jack set out, on horseback, from his East Texas home near Bogota to stay with a relative in Jacksonville.
He had a lot of adventures along the way. It was kind of like Huck Finn without the river.
I got the idea of breaking it into six or eight parts, focusing on his horse trades along the way and including a score card, reminding the readers how he made out in all those trades.
He got to Jacksonville with better livestock than he set out with and with several hundreds of extra dollars extra in tow.
That turned out to be his most popular saga ever in
The Reporter.
I had to think like Jack and I also had to change some of his prose at times. He either never minded, or said he never minded. He pretty much gave me free rein to do what I thought needed to be done.
I got to know Jack well enough to find out there had been a lot of sadness in his life and I believe all his hard work was therapy for him.
So was writing.
People asked me a lot if all the stories Jack recalled and wrote were true. So one time I asked him.
He got that twinkle in his eye and said “oh, 95 percent.” So I asked “what was the other 5 percent?”
And all I got in return was the twinkle.
MIKE BROWN
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.