If I am being completely honest, I owe my fabulous success at being the Internationally known gifted writer that I have become in my long and storied life to one guy, a long-haired hippie-boy named John Shilton. Before John gave me the platform to effectively wield my, as yet unknown, rapier like wit with words, I was just an unknown schlub, invisibly making my unremarkable way through life, wondering what I was gonna be when I grew up. And I owe him big time for taking a chance on me at a time when his reign as the greatest living editor of college newspapers was at its pinnacle.

I was walking down the road on the south side of campus early one evening as the sun was setting, as usual up to no good, and in the near distance I saw the tiny house that was the headquarters of the campus newspaper, The Witness, and there was light in the windows. Out of curiosity about someone burning the midnight oil at the Witness office, I decided to stop in, and see what was going on. Maybe I would run into Mardy Townsend, a totally smokin hot babe, excuse me, woman, who also was a writer for the Witness, and chat her up. 

Up to that point, I had been an occasional contributor to the newspaper, purely on a junior varsity level, with none of the Pulitzer Prize winning stories that the paper was famous for, having been assigned to me. I opened the door and walked in, and saw John sitting at his paper laden desk, just staring off into the distance, and he looked troubled.

Me: Hey John, what’s up? You look like your dog died.

John: Hi Sam. I am trying to find a way to fill up the rest of the paper so that I can take it to the printers and be done with it for this week. I don’t have enough material, and I don’t know where I can find enough column inches to complete it.

Me: (always trying to be helpful) That sounds bad. When do you need to take it to the printers?

John: Tomorrow afternoon.

Me: Whoa, that is not much time! Can I help? I could go do something newsworthy, like stage a panty raid on Bailey Hall, or burn down the yurt. Maybe I could super glue the locks on the jocks room doors in Pickett Hall. 

John: No no no! I don’t want to create a story. I just report the news, not try to make it.

Me: Well, what can I do?

John: I just need 3 or 4 column inches on page two to have enough. Since you have your fingers on the pulse of the college community, maybe you could come up with something as filler. Maybe an editorial story.

Me: Like what? What would you call it?

John: I don’t care, just some fucking thing. I just need filler for this issue.

Me: Ok, I can do that. I will have it on your desk by 8am tomorrow. Will that work?

John: Yes it would, Sam. Don’t leave me hanging. 8am, not a minute later, promise?

Me: My word on it.

So, I went home, cooked some supper for Jenny and myself, and sat down at the table and took out a paper and pen, ( the early version of a home computer before they were invented) and let my thoughts wander back over the past week, and tried to conjure up something newsworthy that I might have observed while being BMOC (big man on campus) and going to classes, or doing my rounds as bottom man on the totem pole at the maintenance department, my work study job. In spite of searching my memory, I could come up with nothing. It had been a slow week on campus, with nothing much going on except some random Girl Scouts selling cookies. The harder I thought, the less I could find.

Well, I thought, what is a news story anyway? It is just words, presented in a believable manner, that could hold the attention of the reader. And since it was on the editorial page, it wouldn’t even have to be completely true. I could write one easily enough. 

There was a muddy path cutting across the grass field between Marble Hall and Austin Pickett dorms that students had worn into the grass, and it had become so unsightly that the administration, in all their wisdom, had finally decided to pony up the money to have maintenance put in a concrete sidewalk. In preparation for the sidewalk, maintenance had trenched and buried electric wires, which were for the future light poles on the future sidewalk. Where the plan for the sidewalk called for lights, the wires came up out of the ground, made a loop, and went back down. It was just a muddy path with loops of wires every 30 feet or so, and rife with potential.

That same week I had read somewhere that McDonalds had been accused of bolstering their hamburger meat with ground up worms, to cut the cost of expensive beef. It turned out not to be true of course, but it was out there in the news sphere anyway.

And this past week, there had been a high-visibility low-profile administration meeting about finding ways to stretch the budget because the permanent fund was at an all time low. The college president had handed down a mandate, and everybody was scrambling to come up with ideas.

So I put these things together and came up with a story that would fill John’s empty column inches. I wrote the breaking news story about how the administration had decided to bolster the permanent fund to pay for the sidewalk by turning the field around the muddy path into a worm farm, and they would sell the worms to the local McDonalds, thereby bringing in the needed funds. The wires sticking up beside the muddy path would be used to shock the ground at sunup, making the worms come up to the surface, and the newly created Worm Harvesting sub-department of the maintenance department using the Shur-Stun worm reaping system, would go out with buckets and pick up the stunned worms.

It was everything a news story needed to be. Who, what, why, where, when and how. I made up quotes from prominent administrators, attributing nonsensical ideas to innocent departmental chairpersons, and generally made it sort of believable. It was a masterpiece. All it lacked was a title, and following John’s dictum, I titled it “Some Fucking Thing” by Sam Birchall. It was taped to the front door of the Witness office by 7:30 the next morning.

I didn’t see John for a couple days, and on the day that the new Witness was printed and in a pile of copies in Pyle Center, I eagerly grabbed a copy to see if my story had been included. Amazingly, it had been printed on page two, though John, not wishing to print profanity, had changed the title to “Blankety Blankety Blank” by Sam Birchall. And my weekly column was born. Surprisingly, it was popular with the student body, and some students actually believed the stories to be true. So many people commented on it, that John asked me to write another “news story” for the next issue. 

Every week for the next year or so, I wrote a patently false news story, but written in a way that if you kind of squinted your eyes and held your head crooked, you might find it believable. I wrote a story about the Ohio State Baby Huey Look Alike Contest, in which Bob Warren in the finance office had won second place. I often quoted the “President’s Committee To Think Up Silly Ideas”, and attributed just about anything to them. There was so much hubbub over the budget shortfall that I wrote a story about “The Conehead Plan” in which it was shown that the college could save millions by instead of paying instructors what they were worth, increase their workload so that the pay seemed even less commensurate, quoting the old Roman saying “Cum Quantitum Non Qualitum”. 
Nobody was immune to my pen.

Even John, who I quoted in a story about the dearth of contributions to the Witness as saying “If you put 100 monkeys in a room with 100 typewriters you would get better crap than I have to edit.” At first I worried about blowback because I was attributing quotes to people who had not said anything at all, and making them look silly. But surprisingly, after I was 8 or 10 issues into writing Blankety Blankety Blank, administrators and hierarchy and professors meeting me wandering the campus would complain that I had not put them into one of my stories, and why was that? Didn’t I like them? They were obviously reading the Witness too.

It was a heady time for me. I grew some small fame for my creative efforts. I came to really enjoy sitting down on Tuesday nights, and knocking out a story for the next issue. Most of my stories were based on scuttlebutt I had heard around campus. I graduated with a degree in Economics and Administration, and could tell people that I had also written for the college newspaper. Woo woo!

Twenty years later I had joined the Peace Corps and went to Swaziland, Africa to teach woodworking and Technical Drawing in a high school, and there was an opening for the editor of the Peace Corps Swaziland newsletter, which no one seemed to be interested in filling. I stepped up to the plate and with my previous experience at John’s knee, turned what was a boring 4 page newsletter into a monthly mini Rolling Stone, and managed to fill the 30 pages with all sorts of interesting stuff for the Peace Corps volunteers to read. 

I blatantly stole things from Rolling Stone magazine, the Austin Chronicle, MAD Magazine, Playboy, (which people stateside had sent in care packages of things I must be missing from the USA. Playboy was not available in Swaziland) and anywhere else I could find ironic and funny things.

Even the Swazi Times, a serious newspaper, in which I found the story of the Prophet Five Dlamini (Yes, his name was 5) and his quest to rid a community of the 7 headed snake monster that lived in the river by the village and it was capturing schoolgirls and holding them underwater where it was impregnating them, to make new 7 headed snake monster babies. I really wanted to be there when he did that, but in the next days Swazi Times, the project fell through because ol’ Five couldn’t get transport. Hey, you can’t make these things up. 

And of course, I wrote stories lampooning the hierarchy of Peace Corps Swaziland, making up things and attributing silly quotes to the administration muckety mucks. I included recipes for healthy food prepared on the crude cooking facilities at my school which had no electricity or running water. It contained original art by PCV’s, and poetry written by them. It was called The Incwadzi Yetfu, which meant “Your Newsletter” in SiSwati.

After I took the first one to the printers and it came out, I was immediately called on the carpet by the bigwigs in charge of finances. What was the bill for $400 for the newsletter printing? And why was it so many pages? Remembering how much the students had enjoyed the Witness back in college, I told them that it was what it was because I was trying to produce something that was humorous and interesting for Peace Corps volunteers to read, that took them away from how very hard their job was, teaching in a third world country. It wasn’t something that you sat down and read through in one shot. At least for normal people. And besides, I had read up on the operations budget for Peace Corps Swaziland, and they had allotted $600 a month for the newsletter, so I had saved them $200, so what was the problem? It proved to be very popular with the volunteers, and I was mighty proud of it.

And I owe John Shilton credit for that, for having given me the opportunity to start to hone my skills way back in college. I have always been a controversial figure, and still was twenty years later.

Fast forwarding to about 4 years ago, when I was doing hormone and chemotherapy for prostate cancer, and sitting in my lounge chair on my back porch, so fatigued and queasy from the therapy that I could barely move all day, I pulled up my laptop and used my John Shilton taught skills to write humorous stories about my life, something that I had always wanted to do. In the two years of feeling like animated death, I cranked out 145 ish short stories about my life, which are posted on Facebook, and also on my own website https://maseko.us which are available without a sign in or advertising or tracking by unscrupulous entities. 

So, in closing, I would like to thank John Shilton for putting me in motion on this enjoyable path. See what you have wrought?

Taking advantage of the things life presents to you. 

Never being afraid to be me.