{"id":418,"date":"2021-06-17T20:21:35","date_gmt":"2021-06-17T20:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/?p=418"},"modified":"2021-06-17T20:24:38","modified_gmt":"2021-06-17T20:24:38","slug":"pin-stripe-suits-and-fedoras","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/pin-stripe-suits-and-fedoras\/","title":{"rendered":"Pin-Stripe Suits and Fedoras"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There is an old saying in journalism that goes like this: \u201cIf your mother says she loves you, check it out.\u201d This is amusing to journalists because it is precisely what we are trained to do\u2014be skeptical and double check everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re supposed to look with a jaundiced eye at every story we have been told and every fact we think we have unearthed. An unsettling experience I had in the mid-1980s, though, tested the skeptic in me\u2014and still does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, some background\u2014 My maternal grandfather was a crusading newspaperman who published a chain of weekly newspapers in the downriver area of Detroit from 1933 until 1969. His name was William S. Mellus, but to me and his other five grandchildren, he was Grandpa Bill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was about 13, Grandpa Bill suggested I might like to work at his newspaper office during my summer vacations. I thought this was a splendid idea, and over the years, he proceeded to teach me the news business. Short and rotund, with a cigar usually clamped between his teeth, I\u2019d watch him pound away on his typewriter, edit mercilessly his reporters\u2019 copy (including mine), and argue minute points of grammar as though the world depended on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grandpa Bill\u2019s newspapers won hundreds of awards for excellence over the years, and I loved him dearly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\" <\/picture><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As for me, after college and graduate school, I worked at four other newspapers\u2014daily papers in Michigan, North Carolina, and South Carolina\u2014until becoming a university magazine editor and freelance writer. Until he died in 1979, Grandpa Bill took an abiding interest in my journalistic career. \u201cWhat are you working on now?\u201d he would ask wistfully during our regular telephone chats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1984, during a period of personal turbulence in my life, I decided to schedule a \u201creading\u201d with a well-known psychic in the Charleston area. (It\u2019s called a reading because the psychic is said to \u201cread\u201d your higher self.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deep down, I figured psychics\u2014people claiming to use extrasensory perception (ESP) to identify information hidden from the normal senses\u2014probably perpetrated hoaxes. I kept the appointment anyway. The reading was held before the internet was available to the public. Major search engines such as Google had not yet been invented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The session proceeded uneventfully for about 30 minutes, until the psychic said she saw the spirit of a man hovering around me. The man, she said, was wearing a pin-stripe suit and a fedora. I was stunned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of the session, I inquired about this man in the pin-stripe suit and fedora. \u201cDo you know who that is?\u201d the psychic asked. \u201cYes,\u201d I said, \u201cthat would be my grandfather,\u201d a dapper dresser who often wore pin-stripe suits and fedoras.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somewhat unsettled, I went home that night and phoned my grandmother, who agreed the man in the pin-stripe suit and fedora would be my late grandfather. Then I called my mother and asked her what she thought. \u201cThat would be Grandpa,\u201d Mom replied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was never sure what to make of all this; my journalistic skepticism quickly kicked in. But the psychic had said Grandpa Bill\u2019s spirit was around me, and he would help me in my work if I permitted it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When my grandmother died in 1995, I inherited a large oil portrait of my grandfather: he is intently pecking away on his trusty manual typewriter, puffing on his ever-present cigar. The painting sits above my desk in the home office where I write. Whenever I look up, there he is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is an old saying in journalism that goes like this: \u201cIf your mother says she loves you, check it out.\u201d This is amusing to journalists because it is precisely what we are trained to do\u2014be skeptical and double check everything. We\u2019re supposed to look with a jaundiced eye at every story we have been…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}