Country Editor's Boy

What struck me most in “Country Editor’s Boy” was how much this memoir read like fiction, in style. Because Hal Borland was a writer by profession, he might have had a tendency to notice and remember more than his peers – or, he could have done supplementary research to tell his own story, told somewhat removed, as if another person. Because it's not fiction, it's not quite as interesting, but has the elements of any coming-of-age story. Most notably owing to the dialogue, it doesn't feel like the distant past, but breathes as if you stepped back in time and got to see firsthand how things were in Flagler, Colorado, just about 100 years ago. Written when he was an adult, he'd had the time to see the perspective he may have lacked as a youngster.

One of my favorite passages was when he described going from being the “printer’s devil” covered in ink from cleaning the shop and tools, to an apprentice, where he describes the whole printing process, as he learned it. With hand lettering, he points out where the terms “upper” and “lower case” come from. The logotypes, however, are not as not as easy to appreciate: the combination of the letter “f” with “l” or “i” doesn’t seem like it would need its own block, but if you had to pick out every letter every time, I suppose you would find where shortcuts could come in handy.

Young Borland kept quite busy. He tried to get a baseball and then a football team together, football being one constant through his high school career. Every odd job where someone was needed, they’d go into the newspaper office and get the boy and his father to agree for him to do the job. Nature writing wasn’t even on his radar at the time, but he remembered enough to include some nice passages about the plains. He and his friends Little Doc and Spider, real names Justin and Stanley, saw one time some “shitepokes” – what they called herons and other associated birds, perhaps because they poke around in the shite. They went out and about all the time, but sadly, illnesses could turn deadly back then – there wasn’t as much that could be done when someone got sick.

Still, he characterized the people in those towns as having “pioneer doggedness and frontier optimism,” and there were “old-timers” and all the other characters of a small, western town. To describe his parents in one word based on what they say and how they act, I’d say his mother was shrewd and his father was jovial, but also kind, generous, optimistic. His mother was practical and fair, and strict about rules. How much of that was inherent, how much was just worry about her only child growing up? This memoir, while saturated with detail, is never long-winded. It is very well written, and each chapter, linking nicely to the next, surrounds some aspect of growing up, his experience within the changing times.