Free Wonderful Room by Bryan Woolley Page B

win first place at both district and regional. As a junior I also won second place at the state meet in Austin.)
    About a year after my whipping, Mr. Moore approached me in the school corridor between classes and told me to come to his office immediately. My heart beat a little faster. I thought I had done nothing wrong, but I expected punishment. Why else the summons?
    He offered me the same hard chair and sat down behind his desk. An envelope lay on the green blotter. He gave it to me. “Read this,” he said.
    It was a letter from Ted Raynor, editor of regional news for
The El Paso Times.
Mr. Raynor wanted a stringer correspondent for Fort Davis. He wondered if Mr. Moore might recommend an appropriate person.
    In those days, stringer correspondents were the way city newspapers got news from the little towns in their circulation areas. Typically, a town‧s stringer would be the editor of the local weekly newspaper (Fort Davis had none) or some other citizen in a position to know what was happening in the place.
    The stringer didn‧t have to be a writer. He could just gather the facts of an event, call the
Times
and dictate them to whatever reporter wasn‧t busy at the moment, and the reporter would organize them into a news story of the appropriate length.
    At the end of each month, Mr. Raynor measured the number of column inches of news that the correspondent had contributed during themonth. This was the correspondent‧s “string.” If he had a slow month and produced only 20 inches of news, that month‧s string was 20 inches. In a good month, his string might be 60 inches or more, especially if he covered one of the larger towns in Mr. Raynor‧s territory, such as Carlsbad, N.M. or Pecos, Texas.
    For each inch of his monthly string, the correspondent was paid 15 cents. For each photograph he provided, he received $2. If he provided 30 column inches of news and two photographs, for example, the
Times
sent him a check for $8.50. (The minimum wage then was 75 cents an hour.)
    Of course, I knew none of this at the time.
    “Would you like to do that?” Mr. Moore asked.
    “Yes, sir,” I said.
    “Fine. I‧ll write to Mr. Raynor.”
    In a few days I received a letter from Mr. Raynor, offering me the job. The letter said I would be a “correspondent,” a word that decorated my imagination with images of trench coats and fedoras and mysterious meetings in the rain. Mr. Raynor enclosed a printed sheet in which the newspaper told its stringers what kind of information they were expected to submit: Who, what, when, where, why, how, etc.
    Under separate cover, Mr. Raynor sent about a dozen large yellow envelopes. The address of
The El Paso Times
was printed on them, and in big red letters: RUSH: NEWS DISPATCH. In my mind I pictured an excited editor (Mr. Raynor, probably),waving one of these envelopes and shouting: “A dispatch from Woolley! Stop the presses!”
    In them I was to send Mr. Raynor news stories that weren‧t urgent enough to require a long-distance phone call, plus any accompanying photographs I might offer.
    I brought home an old Underwood typewriter from my mother‧s office at the courthouse (she was the county clerk) and set it on the library table in my bedroom. I placed packets of typing paper and carbon paper on one side of it and the stack of Mr. Raynor‧s envelopes on the other. The Fort Davis Bureau of
The El Paso Times
was open for business.
    But business was slow. In Fort Davis, a village of maybe 800 people in the isolation of the Far West Texas mountains, news was a rare occurrence. The “Fort Davis News” columns in
The Alpine Avalanche
and
The Big Bend Sentinel,
our neighboring towns‧ weeklies, were brief accounts of children‧s birthday parties, meetings of the Study Club and Sunday motor trips of Fort Davis citizens to Valentine and Balmorhea to visit relatives.
    I wrote a vivid account of a chicken-house fire and our volunteer fire department‧s quelling of it and mailed it to