Growing up, my family began every day under the radio’s spell—Bob Edwards on Morning Edition, Ed at Joy 105.5, Charlie on WZID. These magicians charmed their way into our home and made themselves a part of the family. Back as far as I can remember, I wanted to be like them, and I practiced the incantations: delivering weather reports into a Fisher Price cassette recorder, announcing upcoming songs for the mix-tape I’d stitched together so tightly it contained no dead air.
So, when I discovered my college had a radio station, I forgot all about sensible careers, about teaching or marketing, about real salaries and job security. Penury and instability were small sacrifices if I could apprentice under an FM necromancer.
By junior year I could see the dream progressing—I’d been hired to read the morning news, delivering four reports between 7:00 and 9:00 But between semesters the morning show host, a student, left to spend the spring in Washington DC. To fill the slot, the college hired an adult, and that adult would stay on through the summer and into the years ahead.
Remember when we learn in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that Hagrid has been expelled from Hogwarts and his wand snapped? That was the moment I learned the morning show would be produced by adults. SNAP. The apprenticeship was finished, just as it reached its most crucial step.
This move was not a shocker. The Internet was exploding, and our station had begun to stream online. Thus, the stakes for a polished, embarrassment-free sound were high. Someone might actually be listening! The station gave the college public relations department opportunities that students, with their knack for straying and blurting, didn’t complement. So, while the night shifts still showcased our oddball humor and wrong-button tendencies, the sterling slot, the morning show, was given to an adult who could present the college to the community—particularly the broader community—with consistency and maturity.
***
Somehow this memory of my radio dreams has me remembering Wilbur and Orville Wright. Their experience in inventing the airplane greatly contrasted with Samuel Pierpont Langley’s own attempts, as told beautifully in David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers. As early as 1896, Langley, an astronomer and secretary of the Smithsonian, had drawn significant funding and attention for his flying projects. But his high-profile attempts led to scrutiny and criticism, reaching a climax in 1903 when his last aerodrome, a project costing almost $70,000, plummeted into the Potomac River in front of reporters and skeptics. Wilbur Wright once noted that Langely’s “moral courage” led him “to subject himself to the ridicule of the public and the apologies of his friends,” but such moral courage was not enough in the face of such publicity and failure. It ruined Langely. McCullough asserts he “never got over the defeat and humiliation.”
Take as a contrast Orville Wright’s perspective when things went awry at Kitty Hawk, a perspective that relishes the flexibility their private enterprise afforded them: “Flying machine market has been very unsteady the past two days…. These fluctuations would have produced a panic, I think, in Wall Street, but in this quiet place it only put us to thinking and figuring a little.” Even in 1901, when new designs for their gliders failed, revealing that all their calculations were wrong, they did not suffer any embarrassment, only temporary, private discouragement. They returned to Dayton in peace, where they built a wind tunnel and rewrote all the air flow tables and calculations. Had Langley known what the Wrights did, given the scrutiny he lived under, could he have brushed off his setbacks the way they did?
Such peace for the Wrights was not wholly luck. The brothers declined offers from patrons to give them salaries. Their independence and privacy were key. The Wrights knew the best way to grow, the best place to take risks, was before friendly eyes.
***
I visited Kitty Hawk last spring, and, though the monument is a simple park, I was inspired by the stones that mark their first flights’ landing spots. Looking north from where the Wright Flyer left its runner’s rails I could see where the first four flights touched down. The first is amusingly close—120 feet, a decent kickoff return. And while that first flight is the celebrated moment—the one to make the license plate and two state quarters—even Orville admitted those 12 seconds made up “an uncertain, wavy, creeping sort of a flight at best.” It’s the span between that first rock and the others that amazed me. The rock marking the fourth flight is way down there—852 feet, almost three full football fields. Wilbur flew that time, staying in the air for 59 seconds, enough time to think, to recognize he and his brother had not just gotten into the air, they had flown.
Yet even then, the world took no notice, and the Wrights continued to work another year in near-total seclusion back in Dayton, away from the famous Outer Banks winds. The public neglect of their successes was not entirely their doing—they’d notified the press to no avail—but it fit perfectly with the approach they most enjoyed. A nephew later remembered, “History was being made in their bicycle shop and in their home, but the making was so obscured by the commonplace that I did not recognize it until many years later.”
In their calm and safe hometown, Wilbur and Orville Wright could take on the intellectual risks and challenges of their work. They shunned attention by disposition—but also by intention. The contrast between Samuel Langley and the Wrights reveals the freedom found in obscurity.
Once their work drew the praise and attention it deserved—along with Langley-like scrutiny—the Wrights’ lives changed dramatically. Wilbur’s comments to a friend reveal how incompatible publicity was with their research and invention: “When we think what we might have accomplished if we had been able to devote this time to experiments, we feel very sad.”
***
My alma mater did not kill my dream of being in radio; my lack of talent accomplished that. Recognizing my muggle-level skills, I bowed out of broadcasting and into teaching English. A few years in, I became an advisor for the school’s newspaper.
That’s where I began to appreciate the tensions pulling on my old college radio station. My students’ paper was virtually unread, a combination of factors especially involving cost, so I quickly moved it online and the results—increased readership, broadened exposure—instantly validated my choice.
But there’s the rub. By moving the paper online, I created a temptation to use the students’ newspaper as a showcase rather than a training ground for journalists.
Catering to promotion might be helpful. Running stories that cast the school in a positive light would in improve our reputation and morale. Avoiding stories about controversy—about crime, about discipline issues—would keep the stereotypes about large, public high schools at bay. Steering clear of contentious issues would avoid provoking combative personalities in the community.
But that makes a newsletter, not a newspaper.
Part of the trouble with this tension is that it is so easy to create. Where my college radio station invested financially and logistically to put their content online, today, in 10 minutes, any of us can promote anything, free. With possibly no forethought, we all run unremitting mini-PR campaigns, promoting the Life of Me.
But as it concerns my school’s newspaper, to court public scrutiny is to recreate my college radio station’s dynamic, shifting our purpose from training our students to promoting our school. And while my college had every right to shift its radio station’s focus, such a shift completely undermines the pursuit and purpose of a school newspaper. To promote the school is to write the storyline before knowing the facts, characters, or conflict. It is to write the kind of news famously parodied in 1984—a product of the Ministry of Truth, where content depends not on truth but on public perception. I wouldn’t be teaching journalism at all.
I don’t want my students to live Samuel Langley’s story, to learn to write under the cruel criticism of those who might delight in their failure. They’re still learning, so I desire for them a Wright brothers experience—where they can pursue real work, in relative isolation. Where they can seek the public’s attention after they’ve managed to get their plane in the air. I’ll keep the newspaper online—it’s where the students are—but I’m not too interested in courting extramural attention. The Wrights have shown me that growth and daring thrive best in quiet places.
