There’s a fundamental rule in my business about freebies: journalists don’t take them.
If a source offers gifts, whether in an overt exchange for coverage, in thanks for a story, or just out of sheer goodwill, the only acceptable answer is “No, thanks.”
Right here in print I’m going to admit to violating the rule one time. Here’s what happened.
It was about 1990. I’d been dispatched to Proctorville, Ohio, to interview a veteran who’d been stationed recently in Berlin and had just come back to the United States with his wife and daughter.
There isn’t much I can recall about the family, other than they shared their recollections — and some pretty good pictures — of their time in Berlin.
At one point the veteran opened up a shoebox and out of it rattled a number of misshapen hunks of concrete. Some of the hunks had strands of rusty barbed wire embedded in them.
The family had lived in Berlin during that crucial moment in history when the infamous Berlin Wall went down. They’d seen and heard the joy of Berliners — the young ones newly discovering the freedom to travel wherever in their city they wanted, and the older ones getting re-acquainted with parts of a city so long closed to them.
Everyone has seen the video images of the time, the madcap celebrations that started with Berliners scaling the wall and ended with them knocking it down. The family I interviewed had picked up and kept some pieces as souvenirs.
Near the end of my visit, they offered one to me. Hesitation? Not much. The fragment I accepted is about the size of an egg, although not so elegantly shaped. In fact, it’s an ugly, jagged, brownish-gray piece of low-quality concrete, so non-descript it’s a wonder no one has tossed it out by mistake.
To avoid such a mishap, I keep the chunk in a safe place. If you should come to my house and ask to see it, I’d open the mahogany cabinet that holds my mother’s wedding china. It’s on the top shelf, next to the gravy boat. I’ve given some thought to mounting it on a wooden base with an engraved brass identification plaque.
Don’t think of these words as a confession, as a belated mea culpa. This week marks 20 years since the wall fell, and while global politics has taken some deplorable turns over the decades, I feel not a smidgen of regret for accepting the fragment.
As a piece of material goods, it’s worthless, of course. Even if pieces of the wall have some extrinsic value, which they probably don’t, there’s no provenance to this one, no way of proving its origin.
Still, every once in a while I take it out and reflect on the power history has to imbue such a piece of junk with the value of fine porcelain.
MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2652.
