When I was a young journalism student at Wichita State University, I knew there was one man who had my back, someone I regarded above all others in that institution – Les Anderson.
I was in between wrapping up a book review for one of my blogs and bantering with a reporter friend on facebook when I glanced to the side and saw the message: “The world was a better place thanks to Les. Rest in peace.”
Please no!
The next morning I was alone, pacing around the children’s’ room of Life Church where I was to help with KidzChurch that Sunday. I’m glad I arrived early so I could take time to compose myself because all I could think of was Les.
It was around 8 a.m. I called my friend Roz.
“Please tell me it’s not true,” I said, hardly able to get the words out.
“I know, that’s what I thought,” she said with sleep in her voice.
Less than a month ago, the Elliott School of Communication at WSU had established an endowment fund for Les and held a banquet for him – quite an honor for someone who at that time was still alive. A Friends of Les webpage was launched on facebook. Several of Les’s friends did a double take upon seeing the page and expressed relief upon finding out it wasn’t a eulogy.
I hoped a similar mistake had occurred this time. Perhaps the news media had gotten it wrong. Maybe the reports of his death were premature and he survived the heart attack.
“It feels like a big gaping hole in my world,” Roz said, expressing almost verbatim the words circling my mind.
gaping hole
Good things will happen
I got to know Les Anderson in the fall of 1992 when I was enrolled in Media Writing 301, the class he team taught with Dan Close, one of his former students. Although I got a B in the class, I was actually a lousy writer until the following semester when I took Les’s Beat Reporting class.
Initially, I got scores in the 80 percent range on stories I handed in for class. By the end of the semester I was turning in 99 percent work. I handed in a story about a ballet dancer, which was also published in the campus newspaper, the Sunflower. Les gave my story an excellent grade, but marked it down a bit because I wrote “compliment” when I meant “complement.”
I’ll never forget the difference now. “Compliment” means to give praise. “Complement” is used to describe two or more items joining together to create a better overall effect.
Les spurred students to use precise grammar and punctuation. He helped transform aspiring journalists into good writers by demanding clarity and the telling detail. By sending students out to chase down stories, he gave them the freedom to hone their reporting skills.
Nearly every year, the Ringling Brothers/Barnum & Bailey Circus would come to town and Les would send his Beat Reporting students out to the Kansas Coliseum to find and interview a circus worker and write a feature story on that person. Some uptight circus official told me I would have to leave. Reporters wanting to interview circus personnel would have to go through public relations, fill out a form and receive official clearance before an interview could be granted.
One of my classmates, a young woman who went on to become a stellar journalist, was in tears as two officious management lackeys escorted her outside the gate. Fortunately for me, I was able to sneak past the bullies and talk to a woman who designed costumes for the performers. She was married to a trapeze artist from Russia. I was more afraid of not scoring the story and getting a bad grade from Les than anything those jerks could do to me.
I was extremely neurotic and fearful that I would not find the success I craved, which reminds of something somebody said at the candle light vigil outside Elliott Hall Sunday night. This graduate student recalled Les telling him, “Don’t take yourself too seriously.”
One day I walked crestfallen into Les’s office. My friend Chris Strunk and I had written an important article for the Sunflower and I was afraid I had inadvertently written something inaccurate in the story.
“I’m such a goddamn loser,” I said, dejectedly.
“Oh Jeff,” Les said, perturbed.
He told me it wasn’t a big deal and talked me off the ledge. Later, I found I hadn’t made a mistake after all. At the end of the semester, Les told me, “You’re such an intense, high energy guy and my goal is to get you calmed down.” I’ve been working to help him achieve that goal ever since.
Les told me I needed to get experience writing for publications other than the Sunflower. He connected me -- as he did for many other students – to jobs writing for little publications around the Wichita metropolitan areas. He was a reference for me when I got internships with small-town newspapers.
It all paid off for me when I received a scholarship from the Society of Professional Journalists in 1994. With the award, I received two tickets to SPJ’s Gridiron show at Wichita’s Century II in which local media personalities performed in satirical skits to raise money for journalism scholarship.
Again, I was sitting in Les’s office in the old Wilner Auditorium -- home to the communication department before Elliott Hall was built. I told Les how I was taking a girl, now long forgotten, to the show.
“Best week of your life, Jeff,” he replied. “I told you, ‘Keep hanging in there and good things will happen.’”
Lucky guy
In the past few years, I’ve been thinking how I would feel sorry for students who come in after Les retires. I sure didn’t expect we would lose him so soon. If I did, I would have paid him a visit and told him everything he was to me.
I am convinced that the reason he got so much out of his students is that they wanted to please him. In contrast to the popular image of the dark, angst-filled reporter, Les was easy going and down to earth. This past year, he was awarded at a banquet and a scholarship was established in his name, quite an accomplishment for someone who, at that time, was still alive. He was named one of the distinguished alumni by Fort Hays State University where he received his bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1970. (He earned his master’s degree in English from the University of Missouri in 1971.)
Although I never told him in person as effusively as I would have wished to, I did once send Les a letter, thanking him. The semester project for his Advanced Reporting class was a story with side bars, profiling a small town. I chose the town of Leon, Kan., population 707. While researching and conducting interviews, I talked to my elderly grandparents and learned things about their young lives that I’ll cherish forever. They have since passed on and I thanked Les for giving me the opportunity to learn such enriching things about…myself, really.
While I didn’t see him in person, I did call him. I felt a little guilty as I was calling to ask a favor. Again. I asked if he had a few minutes. He was about to sit down to dinner so I said I’d call back, but he insisted that I tell him what I was calling about.
It turned into a short conversation, and I told him how happy I was to be writing for Adam Knapp at the Andover American weekly newspaper. http://www.andoveramerican.com/I told him I’d tried living conventionally, but writing stories was all I ever really wanted to do.
“Well, you’re good at it,” he said.
I had a great teacher.
When I was getting ready to attend the national SPJ conference in Nashville back in ’94, someone tipped me off to a University of Kansas journalism professor looking to split the cost of a hotel room with someone. I gave Dr. KU Journalism Professor a call and he brusquely said, “Who gave you my name”?
I wanted to say, “What’s the matter? Are you ashamed of your name?” I guess he took himself too seriously.
Well Douchebag got his way. I don’t remember his name.
Nobody will. I bet you a million dollars nobody ever launched a facebook page filled with people happy to say they were his friends. The Friends of Les page was launched a couple of months ago when Les could still see it.
I have known people who have taught for 40 years -- yet lack in their deepest selves – that sense of decency and goodness that Les embodied to the core. I used to talk about him to my mother.
“Mom, I really want to be like that guy, Les Anderson,” I’d say. “He has a great family, he’s in church every Sunday and he’s an asset to his community.”
Over the years, I’ve tried to help Les reach his goal of getting me calmed down. I have conquered most of the demons that haunted my life, I married the best little woman ever and I have a couple of bright kids who are going to kick the ass out of this old world.
I’m respecting myself a little better these days, and Les would appreciate that. He certainly had self-confidence, starting his own community newspaper – the Ark Valley Newshttp://www.arkvalleynews.com/web/isite.dll?985991279873 -- from scratch and printing news that held the powerful accountable even though it might occasionally lead to awkwardness with someone he saw at the local gas station or in his Sunday school class. And he even sold ads. Les was all over that community.
A man of his talents could have started a chain of newspapers and become a corporate whore. Instead he stayed true to his principles and chose to be a nice guy. He ran his small town weekly paper and allowed a few students to cut their journalistic teeth, writing for it.
They’re everywhere. So is Les.
When Adam refuses to deviate from proper grammar and punctuation, even when texting; when I refuse to place a comma before the word “and” because it is not AP style; when Stephen King (not the horror writer, just a lucky guy who got to write for the Ark Valley News) dispenses sage advice on the craft of writing – Les is there.
Then, there’s Chris, who bought the paper from Les a few years ago.
What a great gang!
When I started college, I thought maybe I’d want to become a school teacher. But writing and reporting held, for me, a thrill I couldn’t pass by. I thought it might be a good way to take in life experience. Kind of like that guy I met that day with Ringling Brothers/Barnum & Bailey Circus. He got out of a Texas prison one day and ran off with the circus the next.
“If you want a life, you have to get a life,” he said.
I’m a lucky guy. At a young age, deep down, I knew myself and I followed my own path. Writing has given me the life of kings, and Les Anderson facilitated that.
I kept telling myself I would stop by and visit my favorite journalism professor. Just let me become more successful first. It never occurred to me that les might be happy just to see me. Don’t be like me. Don’t let vanity and insecurity cut you off from meaningful human connection – the kind you won’t find on lamebook. If there are people you value in life, keep them with you.
And remember: keep hanging in there and good things will happen.
