HERALD Official Organ Of The Sla vonie Benevolent Order Of The State Of Texas. Founded 1897. BENEVOLENCE
HUMANITY
VOLUME 54 — NO. 16
Postmaster: Please Send Form 3579 with Undeliverable Copies to: SUPREME LODGE, SPJST, P. 0. Box 100, TEMPLE, TEXAS
BROTHERHOOD
APRIL 20, 1966
FROM THE E MR'S DESK THIS, THAT, AND THE OTHER An editor hears and sees a lot of things. A lot of people send him a dearth of material. He's supposed to work fast, do things right, get them done on time, and with a minimum of friction. Msgr. James Tucek of Dallas says it also helps to "have a necessarily-thick hide." An editor's position might be compared to a person sitting by the side of a flowing brook, in whose waters flows an unending supply of paper material. He has to pluck an item from the brook occasionally, cleanse it, process it, "hang it up to dry," and then touch it up, or, re-write it, and finally, see that it's published. In the case of an ordinary newspaper, a lot of matter never gets pulled from the water. The Vestnik is not an ordinary publication, and seldom does anything fail to eventually get published. We operate under an entirely different set of rules, and that is as it should be. We serve a special and unique purpose. Nonetheless, the editor has to serve as a sort of editorial "traffic cop," deciding what goes where and when, and how many times. An individual policeman at an intersection, however, knows only the traffic problem at his vantage point. The traffic commissioner seated in front of a master control panel, sees the traffic pattern of the entire city. He sees the
MOTHER TUCKER'S PHILOSOPHY Don't tell the truth all the time and tell a lie no time. ♦ Be good, keep your mouth shut and, God willing, you'll live a long time. • Some people are just born to live long. We don't 'know how long we're gonna live, but God knows. e
When I got big, I had to stay in the cotton patch from sunup till sundown. That was a day's work. If I didn't, 1 didn't get my 75c. ♦ ♦ If a man's sick and he's gonna die, it makes no difference what color he is. He's just a man with pants on. whole picture. A plant manager sometimes appears to make a decision arbitrarily, but he knows the whole problem, not just a part of it. In many ways, the editor's position is much like that of the traffic commissioner and the plant manager. We have with us the age-old problem of the part versus the whole, and the person who has to make decisions in the interest of the whole cannot escape the criticisms of those whose interests lie in the "part." There are 169 lodges in the SPJST. There is just so much space to be used in the Vestnik each week — 32 pages,
to be exact. When those 32 are used, there are no more — that week, at least. In order to serve the whole, sometimes information has to be shortened — edited, as it were. That is the job of an editor. Anyone who submits anything to a newspaper does so with the understanding that the editor has the right to edit, to shorten, or re-write for the sake of clarity. What may be very clear to the writer, may not be to the editor, and the editor is a pretty good "barometer" of what is clear and what is not. Chances are, if the item isn't clear to him, it won't be clear to the rest of the readers. Your editor has been very fortunate in this respect. There have been very, very few criticisims of the way the Vestnik has been managed. We are proud of that. We hope the situation continues. We like it that way. ♦
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The enormousness of selling say, a million dollars worth of insurance, may seem staggering at first. Yet, writing a million is really nothing more than accumulating many policies, each representing a certain amount of life insurance. Bigness, after all, is, in reality, an amassing of many small things. And big success is really the sum total of numerous little successes. Even one prospect must be approached in terms of a succession of little but basic steps.