Jim Bradshaw: From 50 comic books to 50 years

One of the unexpected packages that came in my holiday mail was a box containing a little plaque proclaiming me a member of the 50 Year Club of the Louisiana Press Association.
It’s made up of members who have been writing and publishing stuff for a half-century, which I am a bit astonished to discover includes me. I always thought of it as a group of old geezers — who certainly are much older than me.
But, on reflection, it’s true that I have the 50-year tenure needed for inclusion in the club, actually more than that, depending on when you start counting. The LPA count began when I first sat down in 1966 at an already well-used Olivetti in the Lafayette Advertiser newsroom. But before that I was editor of The Vermilion at (then) USL, and before that of The Clarion, my high school paper.
And if you want to really reach back, the first thing I got paid for writing was when I was 10 years old. That was a little poem: “My dog is a silly thing, it loves to sleep all day, but when it’s time to go to bed, it wants to romp and play.” I sent it to Dog World magazine and not only did they publish it, they paid me $5. Five dollars! That was a fortune to a kid in the 1950s.
On the basis of purchasing power, that five-dollar check might have been the best one I’ve ever received. In those days five dollars would buy 50 comic books, or 25 comics and 25 Tootsie Rolls. What more could a boy dream of? Right then and there I decided that writing was the job for me.
I had to work at it, though. Despite my initial success as a prodigy poet, I found out quickly enough that I was not destined to be a Longfellow, or even a Bennet Cerf, whose comical rhymes I wish I wrote.
Realizing, that I was no poet, I thought seriously about fiction, and tried to mimic Hemingway, then Steinbeck, even Erle Stanley Gardner.
Nothing worked. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to write believable dialog.
I thought I was in trouble when one of my freshman English professors asked me to stay after class. I wasn’t. It turned out that he wanted to submit one of my essays for publication in a journal for young writers.
He suggested that I was pretty good at that, so I immediately began to try to imitate essayists like E.B. White of the New Yorker magazine. I couldn’t do it, of course, but he remains one of my writing idols. The other is Winston Churchill, who was a master of the language both as a speaker and as a writer.
I have photographs of each of them on the wall above my desk and look at them when I need inspiration. They look back at me and say, “You still can’t write like we did.”
And I look back at them and say, “That’s OK. I’m still writing. You’re long gone.” Now I have a plaque to prove it.
It wasn’t until fairly recently that I realized how lucky I have been. I’ve never wanted to do anything except to write, and I have been fortunate enough that I have never had to do anything else. Not everyone can say they’ve spent a lifetime doing only the work that they most enjoy.
Another part of that good luck is that I have spent most of these many years studying and writing about a place I consider special, and possibly preserving some bits of it.
A lot has changed — to me, to the profession, and to the place — over the first 50-plus years of my career. But I still consider myself lucky, and I’m anxious to see what the next 50 will be like.
Old geezers? Get real.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.