{"id":37365,"date":"2019-06-07T17:36:07","date_gmt":"2019-06-07T17:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=37365"},"modified":"2019-06-07T17:37:59","modified_gmt":"2019-06-07T17:37:59","slug":"time-of-my-life-part-35-this-was-one-memorable-encounter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=37365","title":{"rendered":"Time of My Life, Part 35: This was one memorable encounter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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News of the Beaumont Enterprise building heading to the “For Sale” block brings back a flood of memories of great times there and many memorable encounters I experienced while toiling in the Golden Triangle of Texas.<\/p>\n

I want to share one of them here. It takes a bit to explain, so bear with me.<\/p>\n

I was walking across the newsroom one day, heading for the third-floor elevator. I noticed a gentleman standing next to desk occupied by our newsroom secretary, the legendary Marie Richard, who was on the phone at that moment. I walked past the gentleman, then did a bit of a double-take.<\/p>\n

I stood by the elevator, pushed the call button and waited. I then leaned around the corner, got Marie’s attention and whispered — apparently in a “stage whisper”<\/em> sort of voice — “Is that Jim Lehrer?”,\u00a0<\/em>the longtime co-host of the MacNeil\/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS.<\/p>\n

Marie shrugged silently, but then the man standing at her desk said, “Yes. It is.”<\/p>\n

Oh, brother. I was, um, a bit embarrassed. I walked to Marie’s desk, extended my hand and introduced myself to one of the great broadcast journalists of his era.<\/p>\n

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Lehrer then began to tell me why he was standing in the Beaumont Enterprise newsroom. He needed to go the newspaper library, he said, to do research on a book he was writing about when he lived for a time in Beaumont as a youngster.<\/p>\n

We walked back to the library and spent the better part of the next hour or so talking about this and\/or that. I learned that Lehrer attended middle school and then French High School in Beaumont, that his father drove a bus (either Greyhound or Trailways, I cannot remember) and that Beaumont was one of many stops the Lehrer family made when young Jim was coming of age.<\/p>\n

We hit it off well \u2026 I believe.<\/p>\n

He wrote the book. I believe it was a memoir titled “A Bus of My Own,”<\/em> published in 1992.<\/p>\n

Lehrer returned the next year to be the keynote speaker at the Press Club of Southeast Texas annual luncheon. We shook hands at that event, too.<\/p>\n

And, yes. Jim Lehrer remembered this chump editorialist who embarrassed himself at the elevator.<\/p>\n\n

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News of the Beaumont Enterprise building heading to the “For Sale” block brings back a flood of memories of great times there and many memorable encounters I experienced while toiling in the Golden Triangle of Texas. I want to share one of them here. It takes a bit to explain, so bear with me. I … Continue reading Time of My Life, Part 35: This was one memorable encounter<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[568,1936,8676,8675,3532],"class_list":["post-37365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-news","tag-beaumont-enterprise","tag-golden-triangle","tag-jim-lehrer","tag-macneil-lehrer-newshour","tag-pbs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37365"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37369,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37365\/revisions\/37369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}