Publisher’s Perspective

Chad Koenen

Every once in a while I have a person ask me how I got into the newspaper industry.

One would think I could come up with an aha moment in which the clouds opened up, the stars all aligned and inspiration struck to lead me into the journalism profession. Unfortunately, no such event happened and I have yet to come up with a great story to captivate the people who ask this simple, yet interesting question.

The truth is I simply needed a major, and after three years in college, I had an advisor tell me that I should just find something I am good at and give that a chance (I changed my major at least three times in three years). I ended up taking a journalism class that provided us a choice, either turn in one story each week we wrote for our college newspaper, or write two stories a week for class. I’ve never been one to go over and above what’s needed and being paid enough money to buy a few beers for writing a story for our college newspaper was too appealing to turn down. 

So while my story of getting into journalism is rather boring, I do enjoy hearing about teachers reading articles directly from the newspaper to students in their classroom. Every once in a while I have students share with me that their teacher is reading stories out of a local newspaper or the Star Tribune, which is a great way to share with students about some of the events that are happening in their own community. 

One of my favorite memories of being in high school was Thursday’s in John Tauber’s English class (of course that name means little to most of you since I graduated high school from Wheaton). Every Thursday, armed with a copy of the Star Tribune, Mr. Tauber would start his class by reading the News of the Weird. 

The weekly feature in the Star Tribune was exactly as it sounded, a collection of strange news stories from across the world. Our teacher typically added his own two cents after each story, which included things like a monkey who got loose in a crowded Spirit Halloween in Plano, Texas right before Halloween. The monkey was on a leash, but became scared by animatronics and escaped to swing from the rafters as kids and people tried to catch the primate. Police were called and, after being offered a cookie, the monkey was re-leashed and returned to its owner, with no humans or monkeys harmed.

Or a story about a man in Bihar, India who faked his own death and began taking part in his own funeral that his friends and family were attending. He reportedly said “I wanted to witness it myself and see how much respect and affection people give me.” Reactions varied from shock to confusion to relief, but Lal was able to calm things down by throwing a feast for the attendees.

Another “weird” story I recently came across detailed a man from Utah who wanted to give his 1991 Geo Metro a proper send off by dropping the first place pumpkin in the Utah Giant Pumpkin Festival that weighed 1,917 pounds from 14 stories up. The pumpkin landed on the vehicle to give it a memorable send-off. 

Typically after reading these unusual stories, Mr. Tauber would read a few stories from the actual news in the newspaper as we discussed the current events of our state. 

  Even though News of the Weird may have been one of the more memorable parts of Mr. Tauber’s class, it was a far distant second memory to the lengthy lessons we received on hunting and the importance of wildlife management. 

I’m not a hunter, nor do I pretend to be one either. In fact, there is probably a reason we don’t own a gun in our household as I have an uncanny knack of being accident prone in some of the most odd and unique ways imaginable. After all, I tore my meniscus in my right knee during my senior year of high school by falling out of bed and developed a bakers cyst from jumping on a lily pad from a dock just the other summer.

Growing up my family moved around a bit as a kid and on my first day of school as a sophomore in Wheaton, a classmate of mine who would go on to become a good friend named Buddha looked me square in the eyes as we walked into Mr. Tauber’s room and said “I don’t want to do anything today, watch this and just play along.”

We moved to Wheaton about a week before deer hunting season when I was a sophomore and what transpired was Buddha asking our English teacher about the importance of letting smaller bucks go for another year. That simple question led to a 45 minute, mostly one-sided discussion, about unwritten rules in deer hunting. We never picked up a book, nor did we discuss anything that had to do with the English language that day, but man did I learn a lot about hunting. Buddha later explained that Mr. Tauber had a fondness for hunting and could talk for long periods of time about the subject, as opposed to teaching English in class. The end result was a man sharing his love for the outdoors and a group of students who could take a period off from learning from a textbook in order to gain a few life skills (or for a number of people catch up on gossip). 

While most of the class was talking in small groups, Mr. Tauber was almost unfazed by the amount of time he spent discussing deer hunting as the only thing that could stop his talk was the bell to let out class. 

As the students started piling out of the classroom Mr. Tauber looked straight at Buddha and with a laugh said “Hey I know what you did, knock it off we have to get ready for a test,” almost acknowledging he was tricked into talking about hunting once again. This was not the first time that an entire class period was devoted to hunting in his class, especially during the deer hunting season. 

While there is a lot we can learn from books and online, simply picking up a newspaper and reading the contents inside can open a whole new world of information and conversational pieces. We can also learn a lot from just visiting with one another about the important things in our lives, as opposed to concentrating on simply learning our A, B, Cs and 1, 2, 3s. 

So while we may have not always learned what we should have in Mr. Tauber’s class, and I suspect students today can relate in their own way to this experience, there is more to life than simply right or wrong. There are some gray areas involving deer hunting and some kids who want to get out of learning for a day. These are the moments people will remember when they get to be old like me and what they can share with future generations of youth, even if that involves a few “weird” stories from the newspaper.