By Hollis Wormsby
For the Birmingham Times
Many years ago, I briefly served as the Interim Editor of the Birmingham Times under the leadership of Dr. Jessie Lewis. The paper was going through some challenges at the time, and was less than a step away from the doors being closed permanently, when Dr. Lewis stepped in to stabilize the ship. There was no money to pay an editor at the time, so for a year I served in that capacity on a mostly voluntary basis. While I didn’t earn any real money, I learned a lot of life lessons.
One of the complaints about the Times during this period was that we had errors on our front page. So, when I took over I made a big deal that I was going to put out an edition with no errors on the front page and set that as the new standard for the paper. We produced the paper in house in those days, on an old printing press that still sits in the back of the Times building. We had a film process for creating copy, where you type the copy into a machine that created a wet – almost film like substance – that you then pasted to storyboards. Now, if you made errors in creating your original copy, you had to take a razor blade and cut out a section of the copy and then print a new section and paste it into the space on the storyboard. It was no easy task.
I want to say on the second edition I put out as Interim Editor we met the zero errors on the front page standard, and I was very proud of myself, and could not wait to tell Dr. Lewis. However, when I went into Dr. Lewis’ office he had a pile of the copy that we had placed in the garbage as we tried to reach perfection. He told me that the goal of a perfect front page was honorable, but that it had to be balanced with the cost of putting out the paper. He further noted, and this is something I have remembered ever since, that businesses don’t go under a dollar at a time, they go under two, three cents at a time. It is all of the little expenses that you don’t manage, that add up to the big expense you cannot handle and that ultimately puts you out of business.
I think about that when I see what is going on with the youth in our community. When my generation were children people kept a very tight rein on us. They didn’t wait on the big thing to happen, they tried to manage the small things so that the big things never occurred. When your child brings home an F for a final grade, he or she has been bringing home failing assignments for the whole grade period, you just didn’t react until the big thing, the failing grade, could not be ignored.
If we want to strengthen our community, it begins with strengthening our expectations for our children. I can not claim to be an example of what good parenting is, in fact if I could I would not be motivated to write this column. But another Lewis, the late James Lewis, also told me years ago that if he only put out the paper when his behavior was beyond reproach, the Times would have shut its doors years ago. But I really want to stress in this case, that I am thinking about this problem because I too am facing it. I am in no way trying to suggest, that I have this all figured out and am just sharing with you to help you. I am trying to figure out how to do better myself, and am just sharing with you what I have learned so far.
A lot of us no longer teach our children to say sir and ma’am. This may seem innocent enough, but it is the beginning of not respecting authority. Our children are not our friends, and they do not need us to be their friends. A priest that I respect once told me that if my children liked me, I wasn’t doing my job. So, every time you see your child act in a less than respectful manner you have to step up and say that is not acceptable. You cannot wait until you get the call that says they have disrespected a teacher or the principal. It is the two to three cent behavior you have to intervene in before it gets there.
One of the biggest failures I have had with my own children is instilling in them the responsibility to earn what you want in life. It was my intent to have all these incentives in place and have a system where what you got depended on what you were willing to do, but somehow over the years that did not happen. The reason this is important is because independence is a state of mind. When my elders demanded that I earn anything I wanted as a child, they instilled in me the principle that if I wanted something I needed to find a way to earn it. Because I learned this young I still know it now, and vice versa. If we do not teach our children the meaning of self-reliance by our daily expectations of them, then I believe we are taking the first steps in making them dependent adults.
Having children relatively late in life, my only real goal for them is to be able to go to my grave knowing that I have helped equip them with the tools to take care of themselves. It will be nice if I also have some assets to pass on, but in my mind the greatest gifts my family ever gave me was the values they instilled in me along the way. With those values I have been able to build a life that allows me to take care of myself and those I care for. It is so important that these values be passed on to the current generation.
Or at least that’s the way I see it.
Hollis Wormsby has served as a featured columnist for the Birmingham Times for more than 28 years. He is the former host of Talkback on 98.7 KISS FM and of Real Talk on WAGG AM. If you would like to comment on this column you can go to Facebook.com/holliswormsby or email him at hjwormsby@aol.com.
