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“Admit it. You are a hoarder!” says my wife Nancy.
“No I am not. I clearly am not,” I reply.
“The evidence is clear. Look around you.”
“Just because of my tendency to save things, you think I am a hoarder. As a journalist, it is important to keep track of my stuff. Research, you know.”
“Okay. Here is a banker’s box. Written on it is ‘top of Bill’s desk, Feb. 11, 1993.’ Why are you saving that?”
“Well, you know, you never know what crosses your desk that some day will be important.”
“What about the 84 other boxes stacked up here that are just like that other one? Are they important, too? Admit it, Bill. YOU ARE A HOARDER!”
Over the course of my very interesting life, I have encountered (and acquired) so many interesting things. And according to my wife, all this stuff is still here.
She thinks maybe one of those TV shows about hoarding will be showing up any day. Since we also have lots of junk around, she also thinks those American Pickers may come calling, too, but that is another story.
Now my piles of piles are probably not worthy of a TV show expose’ but lately we have tried to get my two offices and five storage sheds organized.
Note: A “banker’s box” is a sturdy cardboard box used by banks and businesses to store old business records in. I have hundreds of these boxes stored with the records of the 20+ businesses we have operated plus the aforementioned 84 boxes of “personal” stuff.
We own a small acreage in Lander that has a garage, a shed, a small barn, a larger barn and a nice storage building. All are filled with remnants of a 46-year journalism career.
It is easy to admit that people who have worked with me know that I usually maintain one of the most cluttered offices and desks imaginable. Having worked in a business where gigantic amounts of paper come your way, well, this is almost a stereotype among newspaper editor-types.
Publisher Steve Woody of Sheridan, who worked with me in Lander back in the 1970s, always said: “Bill, you do not have a filing system. You have a piling system.”
Such little faith.
Actually there was a system. When the piles got so high that even I could not find anything, out would come a banker’s box and I would write the date on it plus the label “top of Bill’s desk” and then push the entire contents of the top of my desk and stuff inside the box. It would then go under my desk for a few months. After that, it was sent to a warehouse somewhere.
So there. Who says I am not organized?
My neat freak wife, that’s who. She is also known as Antiseptic Annie and the White Tornado.
One of my goals for 2011 was to go through all these hundreds of boxes and throw away the outdated records and “rediscover” my long lost treasures.
After going through a dozen of them, I have found some wonderful things that, under normal circumstances, probably would have been lost.
There are photos of our family skiing at Grand Targhee 30 years ago. Plus I found a letter from Ronald Reagan congratulating the Lander newspaper on its 100th anniversary. See?
Working its way up through the debris was a copy of a wonderful college report by our daughter Shelli Johnson dissecting the old newspaper war in Jackson Hole between the News and the Guide. (They have since merged.)
Even found remnants of when I attended the Master’s program at the University of Wales. Lots of British newspapers. But most important, found my Master’s thesis research, which I had long feared was lost.
Yes, my system really works well.
Another reason for all this is that I am now allowing my wife to share my man cave office at the house. It is amazing how neat and clean the office is now but it will be a wonder if anything important will ever be able to be found in the future.
Looming over the office is an old sculpture by the late Joe Back of Dubois. It shows a man pulling hard on a rope trying to get a mule to move and that critter is digging in its heels just as hard, trying to resist.
I tell Nancy that I am the man in the sculpture and the mule is . . .?”
She disagrees.
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