Jennifer Moody

We are at last continuing with interesting stories I’ve had, A-Z, in the 14 years I’ve been here. We’re on to “I” now.

I is for Iraq and ice cream

– This week marks the fourth year since the death of Cpl. Tyler Troyer. In January, it will have been five years since the death of Travis Moothart.

We’ve lost other soliders with mid-valley ties. Joseph Blickenstaff died in December 2003. Kevin Davis, in April 2005. Kory Wiens and his search dog, Cooper, in July 2007. But I remember the Troyer and Moothart stories because I was the one to do them; the one who talked with the grieving mom, in one case, and in the other, the one who saw the body go into the ground.

You can’t do such stories without being changed by the anguish of the people around you.

In the Troyer case, I remember, we had the initial call from, I think, a family friend. It was a weekend, and it fell to me to confirm the information and find the family, if possible.

That is a hard, hard thing; the worst part of any reporter’s job. But it is critically important to try. You never know when you might have incorrect information the family might be able to fix. You never know when there might be more to the story. Most importantly, you never know when the family might be aching to tell you something about that loved one, something about his smile, or the way he flipped a pancake, or just something other than the single sentence that he was killed by a roadside bomb half a world away.

So I started my search. I was lucky in that Graham Kislingbury was working that day, and he knows just about everyone in the valley. I vaguely remember we tracked down a neighbor who was willing to go next door and bang on the door. Then, I think, we found someone whose kid had the cell phone number of a family member of the high school principal, and we managed to put together her comments with those from the family. Connections make all the difference.

It was a difficult night, but, I felt, an important night. An important story. A reminder of the sacrifices of war.

– I can find no trace of the story I did several summers ago on the ice cream lady. It was for a special section, and I’m guessing it was about 2002. I no longer remember her name or her company, although I know she drove her ice cream truck around several Lebanon routes. (I also remember she gave Slightly Older Princess a cherry Popsicle during our interview.)

The reason the story sticks in my mind was because it symbolizes so much about what I love about my job. Here was this gal with an ice cream truck, tooling around Lebanon in the summertime and pausing for neighborhood kids with grubby palms filled with quarters and dimes. How does she listen to that music all day without going crazy? I wondered. How do you get started in a job like that, anyway?

And so, because I am a journalist, I tracked her down and asked her those questions and a whole bunch of other ones. A photographer and I followed her on her route and took pictures. We talked to her customers, too.

Being a reporter means having a license to be nosy. I love that I can follow something that sparks my interest, and learn about it, and turn it into something that other people can learn from. And on top of that, I get paid for that work. It boggles the mind.

Stories about war and misery and overspending and corruption are important and necessary components of any newspaper. But sometimes, you just need a piece about an ice cream truck.

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