It's not every day that I get to chat with a Pulitzer Prize winning syndicated columnist, but that's what happened last Monday (which happened to be a day that all classes were cancelled at Winthrop because of the weather.)
So much for my plans of spending a "pajama day" at home all day at my condo!
I got a call (a gentle but persuasive request from Jamie Low, our department's administrative assistant (and go-to woman) to report to work to meet a famous columnist, and "Could you, Larry, somehow rustle up some students to come meet him with you?"
The columnist was 62-year-old Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune, whose work appears in about 150 newspapers every week.
Page, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1989, happened to be in Rock Hill in connection with Mass Communication Week at Winthrop.
The former foreign correspondent in Africa and investigative Task Force reporter for the Chicago Tribune met with me and a handful of faculty and students. (He originally had been scheduled to make two presentations at Winthrop, but those were cancelled because of the snow forcing the university to nix Monday as a work day.)
Mr. Page shared with our small group that it's a peculiar time to be a journalist, what with the layoffs and cutbacks in the newspaper industry and what with all the new, mind boggling, hard-to-keep-up-with communications technology.
"Everything has changed," he said. "I tell my son (age 19), 'this is your century. I'm just walking around in it.'"
While Mr. Page said he appreciates the Web and Google, Net users should be careful: "There's a pyschological thing built in to us that if we see something in print, it must be true. I've been tripped up by Wikapedia."
Notwithstanding it's speed and wonderful aspects, the Web can never replace some of the old tools of journalism, he said.
"It breaks my heart," Page responded when told that the Rock Hill newspaper, for example, is no longer being printed on a press here. (Instead, our press is being dismantled, and our hometown newspaper, The Herald, is now being printed 25 miles away--in Charlotte, N.C.)
"I'm from the generation where when I walk into a newspaper and see an old linotype machine, we will stop and pause as if it were a shrine.
"From those of you from the old school, we had to learn that you couldn't get your degree unless you could read upside down and backwards. There was a tactile experience to newspapers," said Page, author of the 1996 book "Showing My Color: Impolite Essays on Race and Identity."
"It was a special thing and we don't have that now. . . I'm glad to have a 19-year-old Ipod son, cause he can clue me in."
Switching topics, I asked Mr. Page what he thought of Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. Jindal, who is of Indian ancestry (as in, his ancestors are from India), represents what one of my colleagues at Winthrop has termed "the Great Brown Hope" in American politics.
Jindal recently gave the Republican rebuttal to a speech made a few weeks ago to Congress by President Barack Obama.
A lot of the pundits blasted Jindal for not measuring up to expectations and for not delivering a strong enough or sufficiently effective critical punch at Obama and other Democratic leaders.
But not so fast, according to Mr. Page: "Everybody gave him bad reviews, but Bobby Jindal is better than that. He's a good smart guy. He's a guy who represents the future hope of the (GOP) party. He's done a good job as governor. He's a pragamatist."
The Republican Party will make a comeback--in due time, according to Mr. Page.
And, speaking of elephants, what about Gov. Mike Huckabee.
Don't count him out either, Mr. Page said: "His base is the Christian right. I'd say he's half way between Pat Robertson and Rick Warren. He's got some core beliefs but he's also got a broad base."
Glad I didn't spend all day in my PJs last Monday at my condo.
Worth coming to work to talk with Clarence Page.
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