Tabula rasa?

By Tim Henney
Reader Contributor

John McPhee of The New Yorker is one of America’s most gifted and celebrated authors, journalists and columnists. Just writing about him makes me nervous, because although he and I were both born in 1931, I am one of America’s least gifted and celebrated authors, journalists and columnists. 

I don’t understand the cultural bias, because I have edited a kids’ summer camp newspaper, a college newspaper, a civic club bulletin, a military newspaper, a factory newspaper and several corporate house organs, most of which are defunct even though I edited them in New York just like The New Yorker articles by John McPhee. 

John McPhee has written many famous books, and for decades has been a Princeton journalism professor. I have never written a book but once taught a journalism course at Pace University in New York (few have heard of Pace). A decade after retiring from the corporate world in 1986, I taught a course at Utah State University (few have heard of USU, either). 

Inasmuch as all men are created equal, according to Thomas Jefferson, it seems to me that such social/professional disparities ought not favor John McPhee so blatantly. Nor should the fact that he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and is a Princeton grad. I was Spring Sing chairman at Long Beach State, known for beach volleyball when I was there in the early 1950s.

As noted, John McPhee and I are both journalists and both approaching 95. We are equals. So why is he famous and I’m not? The New Yorker being The New Yorker, a recent McFee essay about unanticipated personal experiences is titled “Tabula Rasa.” According to Google, that means “no preconceived ideas or goals, a clean slate.” 

Well, the following will be a North Idaho version of a John McPhee New Yorker column. But it will not be titled “Tabula Rasa,” because no one knows what that is. Before I checked Google, I assumed tabula rasa was some kind of Greek salad or fusion food, maybe something Aristotle and his pals tucked into. More fittingly, the following comments about two of my own unanticipated personal victories are titled “Undeserved Achievements.” 

During the summers in the early 1940s, I was a camper at Camp O-ongo in California’s San Bernardino Mountains. A decade later, 1949-’50, I was cabin counselor, then tennis instructor. The co-ed camp was not church sponsored, but co-owner “Mother Preston” was a closet Baptist and had snuck a batch of pious songs into the songbook. O-ongo was a singing camp and she made sure we campers sang “I Come To The Garden” and “This Is My Father’s World” as vigorously as we did “We’re On The Upward Trail,” “Clementine” and “Waltzing Matilda.” 

In 1951, with the Korean War in full flower, I found myself in uniform in Albany, Ga., assigned to a USAF base newspaper. I joined the downtown Byne Memorial Baptist Church because that’s where Albany’s prettiest Georgia peaches hung out. 

Unanticipated by me or anyone else, I did two wonderful things there. First, I told my squadron buddies about the Georgia peaches at church and they started attending. And, as the peaches applauded from rickety wooden stands under the lights, we Air Force quasi-Baptist jocks won the city’s slow-pitch night softball league. 

Second, thanks to repeated summers of Mother Preston’s efforts to keep us from perdition, as a newbie in the church choir I belted out classics such as “The Old Rugged Cross” with the fervor of a budding Billy Graham. As actor Richard Gere sang in the musical Chicago, “ya gotta razzle dazzle ’em.” And I did. 

Truth was, I’d never spent much time in Sunday school or church. To me, Palm Sunday was something peculiar to Palm Springs. Yet, in gratitude for my righteous presence, gullible elders elected me president and choir leader of the BYU — not the university owned by Mormons, but the more hallowed (especially in Dixie), Baptist Youth Union. Before you could say “rubber baby buggy bumpers,” the fetching Peggy — a local peach who had piqued my original interest in Byne Memorial — started winking at me between hymns.

Having mastered political maneuvering as a pseudo-Georgia Baptist and home again in SoCal as editor of the Long Beach State campus newspaper, I took the art of deception to new heights. With fellow staffers, I attended the annual meeting of the California Intercollegiate Press Association in Sacramento. When we entered the enormous convention auditorium, the loudspeaker was pleading for nominees for CIPA president. Savvy student politicos from a member West Coast college — call it Cal Poly — had convinced the several hundred campus journalists and voters present that only the Cal Poly candidate had the wherewithal to be elected. It was a done deal.

But they hadn’t counted on my new pal, the sports editor from Long Beach State. Conveniently, as things turned out, I was on crutches recovering from a skiing accident a week earlier at, of all places, snowy mile-high Camp O-ongo. I had also served three recent years as an Air Force journalist during the Korean War. The sports editor, sitting next to me, asked, “OK if I toss in your name so these guys don’t get away with capturing the convention so easily?” 

Seeing no possibility of affecting the vote, I said, “Sure, we don’t know anyone here — go ahead.” 

So he said over the live mic that I edited the 49er at LBSC and was a Korean War vet. He forgot, however, to mention that I had spent the war dating pretty Georgia peaches and, not incidentally, had torn up a knee skiing at Camp O-ongo the week before. The loudspeaker then asked me to approach the stage where the lone candidate sat grinning with confidence. 

As I hobbled down the aisle on crutches, possibly emphasizing the limp just a little, the auditorium erupted in applause. The answer to their prayers! Not just a common campus editor but an authentic war hero! 

And even though I had no idea what the California Intercollegiate Press Association was or was supposed to do, I won the presidency in a landslide. Razzle dazzle ’em! Tabula rasa!

Tim Henney is a nonagenarian who, starting in 1951, edited an Air Force base newspaper in Georgia, a college newspaper in California and corporate publications in New York before retiring in 1986 as director of public relations of the original AT&T, parent company of the former Bell Telephone System, the world’s largest corporation at the time.