Enjoying The Show

This column originally appeared on July 1, 2007

Take it from me: Old news stories never die. They get recycled, reprinted and rediscovered. Then they become not news, but history.

The notion occurred to me recently as I revisited two stories from my past. One you’ve heard of endlessly. The other, you haven’t, unless you were born and lived somewhere near Morganfield, Ky.

The better known of the stories is that surrounding the anniversary of the release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the psychedelic album by The Beatles that may or may not be the most widely regarded rock music accomplishment in rock’s brief history.

The album came out 40 years ago this summer, and critics have been jumping all over themselves to relive the album’s meaning, its impact on the music world and its true place in rock history. I’ve been revisiting the story because it was one of the last albums I had to plead with my parents to buy me.

In 1967, Sgt. Pepper cost $4.19 cents at the Air-Waye Record store on Ludlow Avenue in Cinncinnati, Ohio, and you could have told me it cost 50,000 gold pieces at the Inn of the Seventh Happiness in Shangi-La, Himalaya and I would have had about as much chance of buying it.

Ten-year-olds in 1967 just did not have $4.19 lying around to spend on a record, even if it was the most monumental achievement in the world of rock music.

It occurred to me after reading the story of the making of Sgt. Pepper one more time that though there is little more new to be added, reading about it still makes me as happy as the day my father brought it home and I dropped our record player’s needle on the rotating vinyl and started singing along.

The other story came jumping back at me a few weeks ago after having slept undisturbed in my memory for the better part of three decades.

At the daily news meeting at the Daily Local News, at which we review the stories available for the next day, an editor began summarizing a wire story about a group of families in Kentucky who were fighting the government to get compensation for the land that had been taken away from them in the days before World War II.

The more the editor read, the more I remembered. I had covered this same story myself in 1980 as a neophyte reporter for the Sturgis, Ky., News, circulation 3,000, just down the road from Morganfield, Ky., the county seat, where the army had built a base on land taken from farmers.

The case was in legal limbo then, and still is, I gather. But it fell to me to write something about the case month after month because, well, that is what passed for news in Sturgis, Ky., population 3,000 -- and one fewer after I’d finally had it with stories about forfeited farms and packed up for Pennsylvania and, ultimately, to writing stories about Andy Dinniman.

Nostalgic nonetheless, I went through my old news clippings from Sturgis looking for whatever I had filed on the Morganfield families. I found much to revisit and rediscover, but nothing of their case. I had indeed left it all behind.

I do, however, have a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s, and I’m still enjoying the show.