📰 Lessons Learned In High School Journalism Class Still Resonate 🔌
Weekend Plug-in 🔌
Editor’s note: Every Friday, “Weekend Plug-in” meets readers at the intersection of faith and news. Click to join nearly 10,000 subscribers who get this column delivered straight to their inbox. Got feedback or ideas? Email Bobby Ross Jr.
KELLER, Texas — Ronald Reagan was president.
“Top Gun” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” were massive hits at the box office.
Telephones were attached to the wall, and long-distance calls were expensive. Not home? People left messages on answering machines.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram landed in my driveway each morning, and when I had enough quarters, I bought the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times Herald at newsracks outside Food Fare, the only grocery store in this North Texas community.
Big hair was, um, big — both for the girls I knew and the pop culture that defined the time.
The year was 1986.
I graduated from Keller High School that May — exactly 40 years ago — so I find myself a bit nostalgic during this annual season of pomp and circumstance.
Bobby Ross Jr.’s senior picture appears in the Keller High School yearbook in 1986. (Photo provided by Bobby Ross Jr.)
In past columns, I’ve reflected on my 35 years in full-time journalism and my 25 years covering religion news.
But I got my actual start writing for newspapers as a KHS student.
Keller, about 15 miles north of Fort Worth, was still more farm town than burgeoning suburb back then. An old gray water tower that proclaimed “Keller: Home of the Indians” greeted visitors along U.S. 377, referring to the school mascot.
I played sousaphone in the KHS marching band, traveled on mission trips to Mexico with my church youth group and drove my old Ford Pinto to flip Quarter Pounders at a McDonald’s in nearby North Richland Hills. In my free time, I listened to Texas Rangers games on my transistor radio.
But the turning point that transformed my high school experience — and my eventual career path — came when my late friend Jack O’Pelt urged me to join him in taking a journalism class.
The late Jack O’Pelt and Bobby Ross Jr. read a newspaper in the late 1980s or early 1990s. O’Pelt, the best friend of Bobby’s brother, Scott Ross, for 30 years, died suddenly in 2015. (Photo provided by Bobby Ross Jr.)
I liked writing, and I needed an elective course, so I figured, “Why not?”
“Ms. Crane” — now Janie Crane Burchfield — was our teacher.
In her class, we learned how to count headlines, which in the days before electronic pagination was necessary for print layout purposes. We steered proportion wheels to calculate photo sizes and cropping. We wrote our stories in longhand and sent them to a typesetter, who returned strips of text we cut with X-acto knives and arranged on pages.
Diana Dworin’s notes from a high school journalism class taught by Janie Crane Burchfield in the 1980s offer tips for counting headlines. (Photo by Bobby Ross Jr.)
But those ancient skills weren’t the most important lessons Ms. Crane bestowed.
From the moment I walked into her classroom my sophomore year, her passion for core journalistic values such as truth, accuracy, fairness and impartiality resonated with me. She taught English students, too, but that subject wasn’t what drove her 25-year teaching career.
“The only reason I taught was to teach journalism,” she told me in a Facebook message this week.
It didn’t take me long to decide I wanted to spend my life in the newspaper business.
1980s-era copies of The Wigwam, the Keller High School student newspaper, are pictured. (Photo by Bobby Ross Jr.)
But first, I had to muster the courage to conduct my first interview.
Shy and introverted, I moved around a lot as a kid. My father served in the Air Force and then became a preacher. I attended schools in five states — Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Missouri and Tennessee — before we moved to Keller in 1982 for Mom and Dad to serve as houseparents at a Christian children’s home. In my freshman year at KHS, I often ate lunch alone.
So when I got my first story assignment — a piece on the KHS stage band earning superior ratings — I scribbled my questions on a piece of paper. I snuck into band director Wayne Tympanick’s office and stuck my request for answers on his desk.
Before long, Tympanick came and found me.
“If you want to be a journalist, you need to sit down and ask me these questions,” he told me.
So I did.
Over the next two years, I devoted more and more of my time to The Wigwam. I reported on topics ranging from students cheating to a fatal crash involving classmates I knew. By the second half of my junior year, I became the editor.
A Keller High School yearbook article from the 1980s profiles the student newspaper staff, including Bobby Ross Jr. Although Ross is pictured in a Texas Longhorns hat, he later repented and became an Oklahoma Sooners fan. (Photo by Bobby Ross Jr.)
I covered trends such as the “VCR craze” — as we described it in a headline.
Here was the lede I wrote as an 18-year-old senior:
Signs that something’s sizzling, maybe even sweeping the nation, certainly abound.
From the ever-expanding number of video specialty shoppes to local supermarkets to convenience stores, rent-a-movie places are popping up almost everywhere.
Many teens are staying home on the weekends, popping their own corn and throwing “VCR parties”, as a substitute for those expensive, sky-high-priced trips to the movie theaters.
Besides our serious reporting, we had a whole lot of fun, too.
My junior year, Keller High opened a new school building with a large classroom for the newspaper and yearbook staffs. Each publication had its own office. They were side by side, and one day I mischievously lifted the tiles above the newspaper office and crawled into the ceiling space above the yearbook side to listen to the conversation below. Fortunately, when I crashed to the ground as I left a messy crater overhead, a chair below softened my fall.
Ms. Crane was anything but happy with me. But she evidently didn’t kill me. Because I lived to type this.
Fellow Wigwam staff member Diana Williams — now Diana Dworin — was a year younger than me but just as devoted to a future in journalism. While I was a geeky teen, her outgoing, bubbly personality made her popular beyond the newspaper classroom. She’d later attend the University of Texas and work for the Austin American-Statesman.
One time, Dworin and I wrote a joint column on how “squeezing the Charmin” had joined the list of KHS extracurricular activities. Yes, pranking people by covering their house, yard or trees with toilet paper was a thing even back then.
As high school students, Bobby Ross Jr. and Diana Dworin wrote a column about students’ toilet paper pranks. (Photo by Bobby Ross Jr.)
To my delight, Dworin — now a hospital chaplain and, like me, a doting grandparent — recently mailed me a package of old Wigwams that helped stir the memories I’m sharing.
Another Wigwam alum is Barry Ryan, a fellow Class of 1986 graduate who was one of my best friends at KHS. We still enjoy catching up from time to time at Rangers games.
“We were a very good team that complemented each other well,” Ryan said of our high school newspaper experience. “I enjoyed both the camaraderie and, in the case of Bobby and Diana, the playful and healthy competition. As a bystander to it all, it was great to watch the banter and the occasional one-upmanship.
“For me,” he added in a Facebook message, “the opportunity to explore, learn and develop skills in addition to some outstanding friendship was a privilege and a blessing.”
Amen to all of that!
Friends who worked together at McDonald’s in the 1980s reunite at a Texas Rangers game in 2023. Pictured, from left, are Barry Ryan, Rick Kalifa, Scott Ross, Bobby Ross Jr., Tony Cintron and Cintron’s wife. (Photo provided by Bobby Ross Jr.)
After graduating from KHS, I attended Oklahoma Christian University, where I edited the campus newspaper The Talon and earned my journalism degree in 1990. I later reported for small community newspapers in Oklahoma for three years before joining The Oklahoman staff in 1993 and then going to work for The Associated Press in Nashville, Tenn., in 2002.
I’ve spent the past 21 years with The Christian Chronicle, based in Oklahoma City. I’ve traveled to all 50 states and 20 countries to cover the news. I launched the Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged in 2020 and am in my seventh year of writing it.
In so many ways, I’m living my dream life as a journalist — four decades after my Wigwam days at Keller High.
To all my friends in the Class of 1986, happy 40th anniversary!
I know there’s a reunion planned, but I won’t be able to make it. Total honesty: That shy, introverted teen inside me never completely disappeared, and I’m still not ready for that level of social interaction.
Inside The Godbeat
Religion Unplugged won a top award for overall excellence in the Associated Church Press’ annual “Best of the Church Press” contest.
Winners were announced recently in Toronto.
“Well organized,” an ACP contest judge said of the religion news publication. “Brings together a lot of material in a way that is easy to navigate.”
Congratulations to executive editor Clemente Lisi, managing editor Cassidy Grom and the entire team!
Religion Unplugged was honored in the Associated Church Press “Best of the Church Press Awards” for 2025 content. (Image via ACP)
The Final Plug
The San Antonio Spurs blew out the Oklahoma City Thunder, 118-91, Thursday night to even the NBA’s Western Conference finals at three games apiece. Oklahoma City will host the decisive Game 7 on Saturday night.
Clemente Lisi wrote this week about “the basketball-loving nuns” — they are Spurs fans, by the way — “who are taking the NBA playoffs by storm.”
I did a column last year on how the Thunder are “in a league of their own — when it comes to pregame prayer.” As a longtime Oklahoma City resident, I am, of course, a Thunder fan.
Bobby Ross Jr. attends an Oklahoma City Thunder game with Chris Rettman and his sons, Keaton and Brady Ross. (Photo by Brady Ross)
Happy Friday, everyone! Thunder up, and enjoy the weekend.
Bobby Ross Jr. writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged and serves as editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 20 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.