I think that if you can teach someone one thing that they will remember for life, you’ve done a good job. And I think teachers know this better than anyone. Teachers like TR Kerth of N. 17, who is featured in this edition of the Sun Day along with his band Old’s Cool.
Many of you will recognize TR from his Pub Night performances and, probably more so, from his regular column The Whole Nine Yards in the former Sun City Herald (now in the Sun City pages of the Neighbors section of the Northwest Herald).
Whether in print or on stage, TR has made a name for himself in Sun City, but the name TR Kerth is one I’ve known for much longer than the few months I’ve been reporting in Sun City. Only back when I met TR, he was Mr. Kerth, my first journalism teacher.
Our paths crossed when I was a senior at Maine South High School in Park Ridge, and I elected to take journalism, what I thought would be easier than your standard English class. What I didn’t know was that journalism included not only sentences and grammar, but things like inverted pyramids and column inches, which made me wonder in just what kind of weird hybrid English-geometry class I had stuck myself.
I wish I could tell you that this is a coming-of-age story, boy meets mentor, but if TR said he remembers me (of the thousands he taught), I’d call him a liar. There wasn’t much to remember. I was a poor student, hardly paid attention, fell asleep in class on several occasions, and, for the most part, I was all around disgruntled. A teacher’s dream, I know.
But despite my unwillingness to learn, which I was practically a professional at, TR taught me two things I remember to this day, one of which became the ethical cornerstone of my entire career in journalism.
Lesson 1: All things are art
I don’t remember in what context this applied, but one day in class, TR drew a standard click pen from his pocket, presented it to the class, and said, “I mean, even this is a work of art. Isn’t it?” He clicked it twice. Until his simple presentation, I overlooked the fact that even something so mundane and practical as a pen was at one point someone else’s passion.
Lesson 2: Same story, different news
A few editions ago, I wrote an editorial about taking the middle ground in news reporting and said that the Sun Day did not support any one issue, be it political or otherwise, over another. My steadfast resolution on this matter goes back to an afternoon class with TR, when we compared the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times and their two wildly opposing viewpoints of the same cover story that each paper ran. I call it opinion reporting.
The problem with opinion reporting is that, although it makes for a good page-turner and evokes lots of emotion, it’s only accurate in the eyes of the author, which leaves readers forming their opinion on someone else’s opinion of the matter rather than on the matter itself. Do we all remember Baby Richard? In TR surfacing this for me, I learned to bleach a story of its opinion to reveal the stark, white TRuth.
