"I Want to be a News Reporter"

"I Want to be a News Reporter" by Carla Greene and illustrations by Frances Eckhart; Children's Press, 1958A family friend dropped off a children's book titled "I Want to be a News Reporter" that left me both laughing and wincing. It's an unintentionally hilarious story from 1958 that was part of an educational book series designed to 1) encourage reading at a beginning level and 2) help plant the seed in kids minds about the many exciting careers in their futures.

The book came from a local school library, and I can see why they figured it had served its time. The text and illustrations are dated in a bad way, and what passed for excitement back in 1958 would drive a kid back to the videogame or Club Penguin in about ... 3 seconds. 

Case in point is this exchange between Don, an impressionable kid, and Uncle Jack, a reporter at the City News:

Don came to a newsstand.

He read the big, bold letters.

NEW MAN-MADE MOON CIRCLES THE EARTH

"Oh boy!" said Don. "I wonder if Uncle Jack wrote that story?"

(next page, and shift in time)

"Did you write about the new man-made moon, Uncle Jack?" asked Don.

"No, Don. I just write our city news. Come to the zoo with me. I have to get a story there for the newspaper."

And thus begins a short adventure involving a fire engine and a harbor fire that distract them from their original assignment before they get back on track to the zoo and the climax: children in Don's class win a contest to name an elephant.

Wow! All that excitement jammed into 32 pages using 176 different vocabulary words! I don't want to sound jaded, and understand beginning-level books need to have simple concepts but kids these days are too sophisticated to fall for that kind of bunk.

What's sad is the illustrations of the City News newsroom aren't too different from some of the stuff I saw at The Fresno Bee and Tulare Advance-Register, where I worked as a copy person and reporter-editor in the early to mid-1980s. Things like manual typewriters, paste, erasers with brushes and journalists who wore fedoras. Not to sound old but when I started as a reporter in Tulare, we had to take notes on manual typewriters, a new skill for me. It was like stepping into a time warp back then, much like "I Want to be a News Reporter" is today.