Record’s newest reporter
is hardly new to journalism

By CLARA GERMANI

Staff writer

For the past year, I’ve been a fly on the wall reading the Marion County Record from my home in Southern California.

Subscribing by mail to the print edition, I’ve been charmed by the realities of small-town life that remind me of my rural childhood, and I’ve been impressed by the professional spunk of the Record staff.

I subscribed, like a whole lot of people around the United States, in the first place because I was astonished and upset to hear about the law enforcement attack on the Record’s First Amendment rights. And I wanted to support editor Eric Meyer’s resolve to speak truth to power.

So last month, when Meyer wrote about his staff shortage and said he’d like to lure a reporter, “at least temporarily, from the bright lights of the big city to experience journalism and community up close and personal,” I wrote to him: “Hire me! (Temporarily).”

I’ve had a bright-lights, big-city journalism career, starting at a small Los Angeles wire service covering courts and a metro paper covering cops, then as a domestic and foreign correspondent and editor at national newspapers.

I reported from Alaska to Patagonia, Haiti to Siberia; in armed conflict, in natural disaster, and in search of understanding people and the issues they deal with.

I interviewed presidents, farmers, ministers, scientists, innovators, and whoever would answer a door when I knocked.

What interested me most was what made these people happy, where they got their moral backbone, and what books were on their bedside table.

I was susceptible to Meyer’s bait because I was raised in a farm town carved out of the California desert by Colorado River irrigation.

I can get a lump in my throat remembering the summer perfume of the alfalfa fields. My husband’s father, born and raised near Bern, Kansas, would tell us stories of hardscrabble farm life — but always shot through with hope (like the social hijinks of shivarees).

In my reporting career, every encounter with new landscapes, new people, new insights made me chug. (And the journalist-husband I’m temporarily abandoning for this assignment likes it when I chug. “You’re smiling,” he said when I told him I’d be “commuting” to Marion off and on over coming months until Eric can replenish his staff.)

I left full-time newspaper work a year ago, glad for the certainty of retirement income that would allow me to pursue wild hare writing ideas, to serve on the board of a Denver nonprofit that runs a summer camp I attended as a kid, and to volunteer in a California wilderness park with trailheads I can walk to from my home.

Oh, and my border collie-retriever pup liked me being more available, and I think my 20-something artist daughter similarly liked that I’ve had time for impromptu drives to see her in the splendor of rural Montana.

I’ve ticked every journalism career box I aspired to. So, it says something special about the Record and Marion that I’ve added it to my list, coming here to volunteer.

I’m excited to meet you Kansans and tell your stories in ways that will help or even entertain.

I’m also excited, in an on-the-edge-of-my-seat way, about finding a place to stay. If you know of a room for rent or an inexpensive furnished apartment for June through October, do reach out at clara@marioncountyrecord.com.

And please, please talk to me if you see me trying to figure things out – from bierocks to hail stones.