THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 24, 1995 TAG: 9512230041
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
``Find me Christmas,'' my editor said, and sent me out in the snow.
A couple of decades back I was a cub reporter on The Kentucky Post, a daily newspaper in Covington across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. The editor was Vance Trimble, a gruff Pulitzer Prize-winner who was unsparing of his minions. So on Dec. 1 he came up with a crippler of an assignment for me.
All he wanted was a full-length Christmas story every day until the 25th, at which time I was to come up with a blockbuster that would embody the spirit of the season.
The series would be called ``In Search of the Christmas Story,'' and, once started, there was no turning back. I hit the holiday streets. I interviewed tree salesmen, shopkeepers and social workers; I went to orphanages and toy stores, soup kitchens and company parties.
Seven-year-old Bobby Baker lay alone in the isolation ward at Children's Hospital, afflicted with viral pneumonia. The gunmetal gray walls of his room, cheerless and bare, seemed to encase him like a steel coffin. Bobby made a modest Christmas request: He wanted somebody to send him cards.
I wrote about that. And I wrote about Ray Smith of Gratz, 21 miles from Bethlehem, Ky., who lost his right hand to a cornpicker shortly after his wife had undergone a series of brain operations. His once-secure family found themselves strapped, with two young children to feed.
I also wrote about 86-year-old Anna Frost, who lived in the Old Ladies' Home on 75th and Gerrard streets. She made dolls for disadvantaged children. And so it went.
I looked in churches and social service centers, in department stores and nursing homes, bus stations, back alleys and barrooms, in search of the seasonal spirit. I was looking for nothing less than the Christmas story that best expressed the giving heart that holiday season, a story that would demonstrate clearly that there was something beyond the shop windows and the road-sign Santas with products peeking from their packs.
``Got it yet?'' Trimble would growl, peering out at the city room from his glassed-in office.
Not yet, not yet, I'd mutter as I plunked down at my desk beside the unmuffled Associated Press wire machine. Now and then I'd read what the machine provided, and I noted glumly that a donkey in some live manger scene nearby had died from eating Joseph's cloak.
I didn't know it, but Trimble was teaching me my trade. He was insisting on persistence and resourcefulness. He was also insisting on deadlines: ``Got it yet?''
I found an authentic Scrooge and an authentic Santa. But I wasn't saving anything up. That Christmas story could have been any of the ones I was turning in, but I never had a backlog and I was beginning to dread coming up empty. Which I almost did.
An hour before copy had to go out Christmas Eve, I sat in front of the typewriter with nothing in my head, not even visions of sugarplums. In fact I was sick of the whole thing, and if anybody's elf had poked his benign face over my out-box I would have cheerfully killed him.
Then a copy editor dropped an envelope on my desk. It contained a scrawled note and a check - and I knew I had my story.
Got it, got it!
It had been there all the time. I had expected it to be somewhere else, and there it was, right inside the city room. I started making calls.
Little Diana Smith, 12, went to visit dollmaker Anna Frost after she read about her in the paper. She brought fruit and friendship, and other children followed. Readers from all over northern Kentucky sent checks for recovering Ray Smith and his family to the First Farmer's Bank and Trust Co. in Owenton - amounting to thousands of dollars.
Readers sent hospitalized Bobby Baker scores of cards and toys, too. Strung across the room and over the wall facing his bed, the greetings set up a colorful holiday mosaic. Bobby, with one arm taped to an intravenous tube, had become adept at opening mail with his teeth, a plastic car and pocket radio stored safely away beside him.
There were others. I had gone in search of Christmas and it had found me instead. We ran a front-page photo of Bobby and wished everybody a happy holiday.
I certainly had mine, and so did Vance Trimble, bless his hardbitten old editor's heart. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB