Linda Hall: Once a Writer, Always a Writer

I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. I didn’t envision my future as a journalist, despite my heavy involvement with newspapers over the years.

A Writer’s Life Foreshadowed

As an elementary school student, it thrilled me to contribute my poem about a deer, based on our third-grade Alaskan studies unit at Parkview Elementary School, to a mimeographed paper called the Panther.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer and The Daily Record were staples at our house, and in between meals, their various sections were strewn across our kitchen table. Even as a child, I read The Daily Record and was particularly interested in news about my classmates, teachers and friends, besides events I never would have known about had I not read about them in the local paper.

I submitted two poems which were published in the paper’s Spindrift column and are now pasted for posterity in one of my scrapbooks. “Cape Cod” was billed as “an eight-year-old’s idea of summer vacation,” and “Spring” listed me as a Parkview School third-grade student.

A Writer’s Life Takes Shape

Later on, I was a contributor to the Edgewood Junior High School (it wasn’t called a middle school during my attendance there) newspaper, the Echo, and then become a reporter and ultimately co-editor of the Wooster High School paper, then known as The General.

The General of yore unfortunately bore very little resemblance to the present-day Wooster Blade, which tackles significant school and community issues. Probably one of our greatest achievements, if I could call it that, was our April Fool’s edition, in which our reporting staff explored such riveting subjects as our collection of coke cans in the newspaper office falling on English teacher Frank Hostnick’s head.

At the same time, I penned a serious editorial, “Lives of Great Men All Remind Us,” for a different issue. I based it on a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem which said, “all remind us, we can make our lives sublime … and leave behind us footprints in the sands of time.” It apparently displayed my perennial idealism and resulted in comedic effect I hadn’t intended.

I did fortunately play more significant journalism-related roles in high school. For example, I served as one of the teen reporters for The Daily Record’s feature called “it’s HIGH time,” aimed at “expanded coverage of the area high school scene.” I kept no record of what I wrote for it, and maybe that’s just as well.

Stories in The Daily Record featured me several times for my volunteer efforts in local politics. One photo showed me with then-office coordinator Jean Mohr in an article titled “Democrats Open Wooster Office,” and a reporter included me in another article, “If the Phone Rings, It May Be a Democrat.” This story talked about a phone bank in which I took part. I also got a shout-out in “Wooster Girl Earns Trip to Washington,” where I attended the Presidential Classroom in Washington, D.C., as a high school senior.

Despite my obvious interest in writing or being written about, I didn’t look to journalism as a college major, or even to a career in language arts or literature. In my very first history and political science classes, I became addicted to those topics and double majored in them. But, again, showing my eclectic nature, I maneuvered a place on the English majors’ trip to England, Scotland and Ireland with a term spent at the University of Exeter in England. On side trips, I enjoyed every minute of visiting the sites where authors such as William Shakespeare, Beatrix Potter and the Brontes received inspiration for their works.

Without thinking of making it a career, I joined the staff of the college newspaper and became much more serious about the craft of writing as news editor of The Torch, Wittenberg University’s student-run weekly newspaper. I saved clippings, including my favorite — a piece generated by a Vietnam War protest fellow Wittenberg students and I took to Washington, D.C. — mixing history, politics and journalism.

My topics in my “Pondering Politics” column encompassed Vietnam, Watergate, migrant workers, the balance of power in Congress and equal rights. The editors of Wittenberg’s alumni magazine republished one of my pieces, “There Were Founding Mothers, Too,” inspired by this country’s bicentennial.

Over the course of my college career, which culminated in graduating from Wittenberg, I also studied in the Washington Semester Program at American University and spent a term at George Washington University in Washington D.C., all the while volunteering in the office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy housed across the street from the Capitol in 431 Old Senate Office Building.

After graduating from Wittenberg, I returned to his office as a paid employee and enjoyed once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

A Writer’s Life Realized

I made a change; with the goal of possibly attending graduate school to become a museum curator — plans which took a wide angle turn when I met and married Jonathan Hall, who became a pastor. We subsequently raised four wonderful children — Andrea, a pediatric nurse practitioner; Christina, a senior planner in fashion merchandising; Melinda, a philosophy professor; and Justin, an English teacher and tutor for Japanese students.

But throughout that time, as much as I enjoyed that phase of my life and wouldn’t trade it, I harbored a desire to continue writing. When I saw an ad for a correspondent for The Daily Record, I applied.

The rest is history, to purposely make a pun related to my college major. In that role, I covered all the villages surrounding Wooster from Burbank to Creston and got an education in local government that college political science classes could never replicate. Rounding out my on-the-job experience, I filled in on everyone else’s beat.

Former editor Lance White gave me the opportunity to become a full-time staff writer; and for 20 years I never looked back.

I started on the county beat and ended up on the education beat, which captivated my attention. I am completely invested in the endless opportunities offered through education and the dedicated teachers who guide it. I loved visiting schools across the county as part of my job and observing what teachers and students were up to. But I also, like all reporters, covered just about everything over time, writing stories ranging from crime and accidents to composing feature stories on every conceivable subject.

White’s directive was to fill the paper with community stories our readers could not get elsewhere.

That objective began to change with the evolution of social media and its encroachment into reporting the news, resulting in other avenues of communication which, in my opinion, in no way replace the work of local reporters, who live and work in the community with the people they’re writing about and to whom they are fully accountable.

A Writer’s Life Reimagined

Local journalism is adjusting, and I admire those who are working through the many changes in the industry, which include becoming a strong digital presence.

For me, the changing times brought on still another phase of my life, which I’d rather not call retirement, but the “r” word, full of options and possibilities.

I have been freelancing once again as a correspondent for The Daily Record, a paper in which I have been invested since I was young, as a tool to grasp what was happening in my community and the world around me, and I am working on other writing projects, too.

I will always appreciate the wealth of opportunities employment as a Daily Record staff writer afforded me, including, but not limited to, attending an Educator’s Workshop, Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina; covering the Scripps National Spelling Bee with local participants twice in Washington, D.C.; hearing speakers ranging from Amy Tan to Angela Davis at The College of Wooster; and even more importantly, becoming acquainted with the drivers of our community — its local heroes who impact the world around them daily.

One of my “r-word” projects is a book about working as a local reporter for a community newspaper for two decades.

My husband and I highlight travels which I describe in my Facebook posts via “On the Beat — Walking Ohio and Beyond.” You can also follow me on Instagram @walkingohioandbeyond. I am additionally planning to debut a website of the same name by the end of April.

I have in mind a couple of Ohio-based children’s books I want to research, and I remain open to other possibilities.

Just as the catchphrase of Wooster City Schools is “Once a General, Always a General,” I would ascribe to the philosophy “Once a Writer, Always a Writer.”

I thank The Daily Record and the wonderful and dedicated coworkers with whom I shared the newsroom’s mission to cover the community with fair and accurate reporting for an unforgettable and enriching experience I will always treasure and try to build upon.

Linda Coccia Hall grew up in Wooster, Ohio. She worked in Washington, D.C.; and lived in Arizona, New Mexico and California with her husband, Jon, and children before returning to her hometown of Wooster, where she worked as a staff writer for The Daily Record for 20 years. Since retiring in December of 2020, she has continued to freelance for The Daily Record and is working on other writing projects as well.