I’m one of those people who keep things long after I’ve ceased to need them. For instance, my raw material for stories has long been the daily newspapers that come into the office from all corners of New England. I pore over the
Maine Sunday Telegram, the
Providence Journal; the
Hartford Courant; the
Cape Cod Times the
Burlington Free Press; and others. I keep scissors handy, and whenever I find a story that sparks my curiosity to know more, I clip it and put it into a folder to look at later.
The other day I picked up some of those folders and found wonderful clips — from the 1980s. They make for fine nostalgia reading now, but I wonder why I never tossed them after, say, a decade or so. After all, the papers keep coming, day after day.
My office is legendary around
Yankee for being, well, a tad cluttered. I always think I’ll regret tossing something out. Sometimes my obsession with holding onto stuff proves productive. For instance: A few years ago I was working late. The offices were dark and quiet. I found a shoebox of clippings I hadn’t seen for some years. I pulled it out. There on top was a story on child prodigies that I’d plucked from
Parade years before.
The story profiled children from around the country with extraordinary intellectual gifts. One was a 12-year-old girl from Aroostook County, Maine, an isolated, distant pocket of New England. In the story the child, Daphne Brinkerhoff, tells the reporter that by the time she graduates from college she expects to win the Nobel Prize — perhaps in science, perhaps in literature. I looked at her words, which I’d highlighted in yellow nine years earlier, and wondered, what happened to Daphne?
I found Daphne living in Portland, Maine. Her life hadn’t turned out the way everyone had expected. The story
Yankee published,
“What Ever Happened to Daphne?” got a lot of attention from school groups, and whenever colleagues chided me on my boxes of papers that continued to clutter the space, I smiled and handed them my Daphne story.
Then, of course, I held onto things even more tightly — a cycle that leads, I suppose, to those stories we read about from time to time, where some old man or woman is found in a house with barely enough room to turn around, and every corner is crammed with newspapers from generations past.
Now everyone says that print is on its way out, that within a generation, we’ll get all our news from online newspapers. No more newsprint hands. No need for scissors. Every office everywhere neat as a pin. Just computer screens glowing in semi-dark rooms. What, I wonder, will keepers like me have to keep?
_________________________
Yankee editor Mel Allen is the author of
A Coach’s Letter to His Son.
Mel Allen
Mel Allen is the fifth editor of Yankee Magazine since its beginning in 1935. His first byline in Yankee appeared in 1977 and he joined the staff in 1979 as a senior editor. Eventually he became executive editor and in the summer of 2006 became editor. During his career he has edited and written for every section of the magazine, including home, food, and travel, while his pursuit of long form story telling has always been vital to his mission as well. He has raced a sled dog team, crawled into the dens of black bears, fished with the legendary Ted Williams, profiled astronaut Alan Shephard, and stood beneath a battleship before it was launched. He also once helped author Stephen King round up his pigs for market, but that story is for another day. Mel taught fourth grade in Maine for three years and believes that his education as a writer began when he had to hold the attention of 29 children through months of Maine winters. He learned you had to grab their attention and hold it. After 12 years teaching magazine writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he now teaches in the MFA creative nonfiction program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Like all editors, his greatest joy is finding new talent and bringing their work to light.
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