In March of 2009, I was living in St. Louis, Missouri and was a new member of a social media site that my eldest child had recommended for me. “Dad,” Lisa said to me, “If you want to know what your (youngest) kids are doing, you have to join Facebook.” I was already on a site called “MySpace,” but was unaware that it had become dated. I was not someone who often communicated with others on public sites, and seldom logged on. But I took my daughter’s suggestion to heart and joined what I facetiously call “Crackbook.” Earlier in 2009, my friend Paula Nicewanger called me to announce her recession-era plunge into ownership of a newspaper, the Eastside Voice. Her partnership with three other women, including the two current co-owners, Ethel Winslow, and Judy Crawford, sounded exciting to me, and I volunteered to help her in any way that I could. Having recently been forced into retirement from an assistant Creative Director position with a May Department Stores company, I found my skills languishing and offered them to Paula and the ladies: layout, design, photography, and oh: I could write, a little.
I found a feature on Facebook that may not have been available on MySpace. People could write screeds and publish them on their pages, with the hope that others would read them. One could also “tag” specific people. “Tagging” — which is not the same action as in the game my 5-3/4-year-old granddaughter forces me to play on my front lawn — was a way of notifying others about your posts. As I scrolled through the language-challenged posts of others on “Crackbook,” I had the bright idea to make posts of my own. I sat down to write, posted those writings, and went to Florida for a three-week vacation at the home of a good friend. On my return home, I pressed “play” on my answering machine — yeah, that long ago — and was surprised to hear Paula Nicewanger’s voice, many times. “We’ve published all of ‘Fight Club!’ We need some more columns!” I may have, on hearing that, flopped onto my back.
“Fight Club” was my multi-part post about the five fights I’ve had in my life, all of which were unavoidable, and ultimately, full of clownish grappling. Unlike the film from which the posts stole the name, the only rule in my club was, “Run faster, next time.” But my friend Paula, a new user of Facebook, thought that I was submitting the screeds for publication. And those posts contained profanity, and when I recovered from my faint and called her, I pointed that out. “Don’t worry,” she replied. “We cleaned it up. When can you send some more columns?”
Facebook has a feature called “Memories,” which shows your previous posts over the years. The week of March 11th, 2024 featured the anniversary of my first post and tag: Fight Club. I can only imagine the grumbling that must have come from beneath the breath of the editor, Ethel Winslow as she worked to make those first four columns conform to a family-friendly format, but I was soon adopted into the family as a “foreign correspondent,” writing for an Indianapolis audience from St. Louis. We had some growing pains, of course. I would write until I decided to stop, then send in the column. One day, I did a word count and asked Paula how many words I was to use. I told her that the last column I had sent had 600 words. Paula said, “That’s good.”
It has been good, for at least 15 years. Thanks, ladies.
cjon3acd@att.net