(gad vide om Line Knutzon er spøgelsesforfatter på denne her:)
The following is an excerpt from “Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other Musings.”
My father, Claude Burgundy, was a natural born News Anchor, as was his
father and his father before him. Of course there was no television or
radio station in Haggleworth, Iowa. Instead, every Friday night he would
set up a desk in the Tight Manhole, an Irish bar where the mine workers
drank and sang songs of misery. The oil company paid him to report on
all the charitable and civic-minded projects they had in the works as
well as hard-hitting news stories happening in Haggleworth. Because of
his honest face and gifted speaking voice, men and women would come in
from all the other bars in Haggleworth—the Dirty Chute, the Mine Shaft,
the Rear End, the Suspect Opening, the Black Orifice, the Poop Chute,
too many to list here—all to listen to The Shell Oil Burgundy Hour. In Haggleworth it was the most popular show on Fridays at ten P.M. for years. It consistently beat out Dragnet
and Ernie Kovacs in the local ratings. He would report high school
sports scores, weddings, divorces, births, who was diddling who, but
mostly good news about the oil company and their interests. I would come
and watch from the front row and be transfixed by his smooth delivery
and sharp tailoring.
One day, the fire that continued to burn under Haggleworth leaped over
into tunnel 8, the most profitable tunnel in the whole coal operation.
Unlike the fire that occasionally shot up from the earth and burned cars
or dogs, this fire was getting in the way of profit and had to be
contained. Men were sent down into the shaft to try and stop the fire,
but it was no use. Eleven men died. The whole town was in a somber mood
when my father got up to deliver the news. “Good evening, I’m Claude
Burgundy and this is how I see it.” (That’s how he started every Burgundy Hour.)
The bar was quieter than usual as they hung on every word. “Today, the
Shell Oil Company of Iowa announced a new plan to bring multicolored
blinking lights to downtown Haggleworth for the upcoming holiday
season.” On a day when eleven miners had burned to death, and husbands
and fathers of people sitting in that bar had died, the Christmas-light
story was the lead. A woman in the back shouted something at my father.
Another man called him a coward. He just sat there, taking insult after
insult as he bravely continued on with a story about a precocious little
dog that wore a hat around town that everyone loved. He reported a
story about a planned two-hole golf course. There was an in-depth
interview with a woman who had won second place at the state fair for
her lemon bars. It was great news and slowly people began to smile. When
he got to his sign-off (“And that’s what happened this week in
Haggleworth”) they were sad to see him go and could hardly wait for the
next week’s news.
In a candid moment as we were walking home that night I asked my old man
why he didn’t talk about the eleven men who had died or the culpability
of the oil company or the environmental impact of this new deadly fire
or the emotional damage many deaths could have on a small community like
ours or even the plain fact that without tunnel 8 most of the town
would be out of work. “Ron, sometimes people don’t want the truth. They
just want the news.” I’ll never forget these sage words from my father.
Up until that point I made no distinction between “truth” and “news.” I
had thought they were one and the same! I was a boy of course and the
world was just a kaleidoscope of butterscotch candies and rum cookies. I
didn’t understand the reason for news until that day.
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