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Soapbox Philosophy: Lots of folks help us put out the news
by Gregory R. Norfleet · Op-Ed · December 11, 2014


Thank you. To all of the people who help make this newspaper what it is, thank you.


And I’m not only talking about our staff, but many people who share information with us that gets us to the information that appears in stories week after week.

I cannot possibly list everyone who has helped us throughout the years, but the spirit of Thanksgiving made me realize it was time to share just a peek at two examples of how folks help us put out the West Branch Times.

There is a story in last week’s paper about the all-state football players. A reader will note that we’ve interviewed the players and their coach. Before I became a writer, I thought a story like this had everyone sitting in a room being interviewed at once. Yet the coach and these players all have busy schedules, and I thought it would be best to try to catch them before the holiday.

So I placed a call to West Branch High School’s Ruth Farmer, who was kind enough to tell me when each of the players had an open period, like lunch or study hall, so I could call each one without pulling them out of class. Amazingly, each player I needed to reach had different open periods, so I had a lineup of phone calls that spread over four hours on the day before the students took off for a five-day weekend. And one of the students was on a field trip almost all day, so they helped me catch him before he headed out of the school that afternoon.

Of course, that meant Ruth and officemate Pam Harnack had to field several phone calls from me that day, then call each of the athletes to the office to pick up the phone. Now Ruth and Pam are masters at their jobs and I am constantly amazed when I see them juggle phones and office visitors. So I’m sure they didn’t even blink when helping me out, but what they did saved me a lot of headaches and extra hours trying to track these guys down. From what I can tell, Ruth and Pam love their jobs and love the students almost like their own, so no doubt a big part of their motivation is helping get the many high school success stories the attention they deserve.

A second story in last week’s paper reports on the death of Allan Kornblum, part-time poet and full-time independent publisher who helped bring many new writers to public attention. The difficulty for me was finding people who knew him, because he lived in West Branch from 1972 to 1985, so his family moved away almost three decades ago.

I started by reaching out to middle school language arts instructor Jim Calkins, West Branch Public Library’s Claudia Wallick and Jessie Schafer and Main Street Antiques & Art’s Lou Picek.

These folks dug into their Rolodexes and contact lists and other resources, providing me with names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses to reach people to interview, information about Mr. Kornblum, and some of his actual writings still available from his West Branch years. Their help set off a snowball effect, as the people who they found also started providing me with more contacts and more information.

Since Mr. Kornblum moved away long before my arrival in Iowa, I was starting at zero. This amount of help I got from Mr. Kornblum’s friends and acquaintances got me up to 60 in no time. Just a day after starting that assignment, I had more information about Mr. Kornblum than I could fit into a story, which is always a good problem to have. So I was able to select the most relevant and interesting pieces of information, interviews and photographs.

Yep, that’s my byline on those stories. But there are a lot of people who work behind the scenes to help make those stories happen. Some get mentioned in the stories, some don’t.

And this happens all year long. I don’t always have a direct line to the information that gets funneled into each of my stories, and the same is true for writers Norv and Mary Coblentz or Rick DeClue.

So allow me, on behalf of our staff and myself, this opportunity to thank the many people who help your West Branch Times bring you the news each week.

We couldn’t do it without you.