By Frances Stebbins
{Frances Stebbins has been covering events in Western Virginia, especially relating to faith communities, since 1953. She lives in Salem.}
In my living room there’s a metal wastebasket. It’s distinguished by being printed with a facsimile of a newspaper.
The wastebasket and the almost-invisible piece of soft lead embedded in my palm take me back 71 years to Petersburg, Virginia. Late husband Charlie Stebbins and I were in our first month of marriage, and we were both employed as reporters for newspapers, the beginnings of our careers.
We had met while being educated at the Richmond Professional Institute (RPI) in nearby Richmond. By 1951 we were both its graduates. That school was absorbed years ago into what became Virginia Commonwealth University.
Charlie, a Navy veteran of World War II, already had some newspaper writing experience at 28 so he was qualified for a reporting job on the daily “Petersburg Progress-Index.” I, aged 22 and an honor graduate of Orange (Virginia) High School as well as RPI, walked into an editor’s job at the weekly “Southside Virginia News” on my 22nd birthday.
At that point we did not own a car, so we walked the few blocks to our respective jobs in historic Petersburg. The car situation was the result of our single-parent upbringings, for we had both lost our fathers early in our lives and been largely reared by single mothers who both were in middle age. Charlie could drive on a farm but as yet had no permit, and I had scarcely sat behind a wheel.
All that would come in the next few years.
We had a rented basement apartment in Petersburg; we both could walk home for lunch. As we shopped for some household items at a nearby grocery store, we found the wastebasket which seemed especially suited to a professional newspaper couple. It was a good omen.
The lead in my hand was also a symbol of the stressful Wednesdays I experienced as the sole news employee in the building that still bore marks of the famous siege of the Civil War. Copy had to be written and edited and given to the woman who ran the remarkable Linotype machine unknown now in these days of a totally different process in producing newspapers.
One afternoon a freshly sharpened pencil found its way into my hand. Many attempts in ensuing months failed to get it out so a tiny black spot remains as a symbol of those long-ago days.
Charlie and I had planned to work in the historic Southside Virginia city for two years, but we moved sooner to the “big city” that was Roanoke 18 months later. It had been an interesting political summer, 1952, for we both voted for the first time. A hero of World War II, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was running for president as a Republican, made a whistle stop in Petersburg. As reporters we had the thrill of shaking his hand.
Political history was made that year as Virginia went Republican and elected, not only the general, but also three members of Congress for the GOP.
We wrote to the late W.C. Stouffer, managing editor of the daily Roanoke evening paper, “The Roanoke World-News.” He offered us each a job; Charlie would do general assignment reporting while I would edit “Church News” into an approved newspaper style which at that time meant accurate but concise and objective.
A college education was expected for employment at the daily papers which had been established more than 80 years before by the Fishburn family.
For the next three years Charlie and I rode together to our jobs at the downtown Roanoke newspaper office, recently relocated. Meanwhile, we bought a small home in North Roanoke County, acquired a cat and kittens and started a family. Stouffer permitted me to work a few hours weekly at home with our baby daughter and later two sons.
After the children were well into school, I gradually expanded development of Religion News, and in 1976 I was invited to rejoin The Roanoke Times staff on a regular part-time basis. That ended in 1996 with both of us being let go from the staff of the daily paper.
Since then, I’ve been a regular contributor to this weekly publication, as well as several of its sister papers; Charlie also reported for Virginia Media until his death. In 2018 I moved from active Religion News reporting to a memoir column, “Give Light” which may or may not have a focus on my years of knowing the religion communities.