Up in the Skye: Why I do this

By Phil Cobb | October 10, 2024 |

For National Newspaper Week, I thought it might be an opportunity to explain why I chose — and continue to choose — to work in newspapers.

It isn’t because it’s easy. It is not. It isn’t for the money. This job doesn’t come with a golden parachute. It isn’t for the notoriety. I still meet new people nearly every day. And it isn’t because I’m particularly good at it. I get by with a little help from my editing coworkers. Nope. I do this work because I have always felt called to tell stories. Whether with a camera, the printed word or my fabulously long-winded ability to chit-chat, I simply love telling a good tale.

I have been incredibly lucky in securing so early in life, my top-of-list, primary hope and end goal position here as managing editor of The Forum. It is the culmination of what I have always wanted to do.

From carrying a little black-and-blue 110 camera as a youngster in the 1980s — Yes, I still have it. Find me some film! — to editing the yearbook for a couple of years at Holden High School, I have always known I would document life.

I started small — rocks, bugs, the eyes of younger siblings. I still recall a photo of a quarter on the ground that shone with the very light of heaven, a fact of which I am still certain, on that dusty ol’ Duffy Road in Hutchinson, Kansas.

Riding Honda 50s up and down small slopes and gravel roads, I always had a jacket pocket for that camera and it went with me everywhere. While my first attempts at wildlife photography involved cats and one particularly mean German Shepherd, I found squirrels and rabbits particularly intriguing. They required quiet, so I learned to listen for the right moment to capture their lustrous, soft fur. My 110 didn’t always do very well, but I was pleased as punch when those pictures, developed after a week of anxious waiting (THANKS MOM!) finally hit my hand. Shuffling through them again and again, I’d find the best place for them on the wall, or my sister’s bed! My layout and design game was strong back in those days. Placement was key. What would she see first? The praying mantis holding onto the screen door, or the ladybug closeup that was actually kind of cute? It mattered. Sometimes, I’d hide one under her pillow, so when she pulled it out, I’d know about it from the other side of the house! OK, maybe I only tried that once. It was a particularly creepy spider. (I’m still no fan of those furry ones … wait … ANY of them!)

Then she would go yelling for Mom and we’d talk about it. We talked all of the time. It’s one of the greatest memories I share with my sister and my mom. We talked a lot. Sometimes my mom and I would spell words, sentences, even entire conversations just for fun! Also, my little brother wouldn’t be able to keep up and know what we were discussing.

Letters and words, pictures and people, from a young age, I knew they were important. My parents kept a library in every house we ever had. Even now, they still have the dining room turned into a library with floor-to-ceiling bookcases I remember being installed when we lived in Oklahoma.

Mom, who as an AT&T telephone operator always had to have a book to keep her company between connecting calls, painted the bookcases a dark, navy blue and filled them with books of all kinds, from horror and suspense — Stephen King and Dean Koontz — to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to even a blue copy of The Urantia Book and other spiritual and philosophical titles. While I didn’t make use of every one, I could lie for a long time on the brown carpet and read the titles all the way up to the ceiling before deciding which was next to take up space in my head.

Of course, our most used book was a big gray dictionary. I cannot, nay, I WILL NOT recall how many times I was told “Go look it up,” when asking what a word meant. I’d bet a dollar right now, that book is still there on the shelf today. But those shelves overflow today, just as much as they did in the early 1990s in Oklahoma. I attribute my love of language to my mother.

Since the house moved with us to Missouri in 1994 — though it felt like several years before it arrived while we survived in a tent and a small shed on the new property, but that’s an entirely different yarn — those same shelves were once again loaded with novels, cookbooks, Reader’s Digest and National Geographic magazines.

OH the photos! I sat for what felt like hours pulling them off the shelf (and unsticking them from others above and below), perusing the pages and organizing them by date. Then if they didn’t fit back onto the shelves in order, I’d rearrange by some other metric to make them fit. “These are all about Africa! They’ll stack here best.” Sure, I was a preteen at that point. Who knows what I was thinking, I sure can’t recollect now.

In middle school and high school, I began taking photos of people I didn’t know. Holden wasn’t (and as far as I am aware, still isn’t) a huge school, but there were certainly people I didn’t know. Once I started, I was hooked. I did it for myself, then with a 35mm Canon Rebel. Through a couple of classes I was able to learn how to develop film and photos. Thanks James! However, once my junior year came around, and I was trying to make sure the yearbook staff had photos of all the important events — both sporting and science — I found organization was key. My old red Jostens calendar book went everywhere with me. I still have it, though during those years it eventually became fitted and designed with clippings of the friends and people I knew in town from the Holden Image-Progress newspaper, just one more early journalistic prodding that set me on the path to journalism. (Side note: Those books are also full of magazine cutouts of famous people Skye’s teenage mind thought were Da Bomb! Yes, I’m old.)

To make a (TL;DR) column, just slightly longer, it was in those early years of my life, that I found what I love to do: take photos of people and then tell people what those photos mean and why they’re important – facts. At Truman State University, (I know I’m not a Bearcat … sad.) I found that telling someone’s story and using a Canon Digital Elph (Yep, I’m pretty sure that’s how it was spelled.) to show pieces of it, is just as important as reading one in a book off a shelf. In fact, I find it even more intriguing. I’ve read biographies, and thought, “Why aren’t I reading about Fred down the street? He’s had an interesting life!”

So that’s it. That’s why I do it. Everyone’s life is interesting, with similarities, differences and quirks, and I like to showcase that. Thankfully, the Maryville Forum and Maryville community has afforded me the opportunity to do it for seven years now. After spending 11 years working at other newspapers and a design hub throughout the state, I’m so pleased to be able to tell the tales of northwest Missouri.

While I’m not at all averse to asking the tough questions when needed and holding power accountable, two incredibly necessary skills for journalists these days, the world isn’t always about that. Sometimes you just want to read about how Fred down the street pulled a kid out of the road at just the right minute and an 18-wheeler didn’t squash him. Or how a farming community gathered to bring in a harvest for a family who had lost a loved one. Those stories are important too. Someday, way in the future after I’m dead, maybe someone will look back and find a piece I wrote and it will mean something to them. Maybe not. But I’m going to keep at it, because it’s my calling.

Skye Pournazari is the Managing Editor of The Maryville Forum.