It's extraordinary how often ordinary people make news
There is an axiom in the newspaper business that every person is a news story. If you dig deep enough, you'll find something remarkable about even the most ordinary person that anyone would want to read about because, in truth, there's something unique, something extraordinary, about all of us.
Once many years ago, we even successfully tested this notion, as then-Daily Herald feature writer Tom Valeo picked three or four suburbanites at random and wrote the compelling stories of individuals whom you might otherwise pass on the street without a second glance.
But grabbing people off the streets to become the subjects of public examination is not something we make a habit of, if only because there are just too many other stories crying out to be told.
Occasionally, though, the extraordinary moments in ordinary people's lives simply demand to be shared.
Such was the case on Saturday when columnist Burt Constable wrote a front-page story about the Rev. Edward Franz, a retired Hanover Park pastor who, at 78 years old, finds himself struggling to get by without a pension but still ministers to others through the way he lives his life.
The financial challenges facing Franz opened the door to his personal story, but it was the details of his life - his baptism of a cat at age 8, the way his neighbors rely on him and his wife, his selfless prayers for the mayor when the mayor drops by to check on him - that keep you reading.
On Monday, another "ordinary" person made the front page, this time with an extraordinary tale about his $16,670 electric bill. While we can't often help individuals with their personal battles with government or business, Burton Shepard's struggle with ComEd demonstrated, if nothing else, the importance of paying attention. For, as Kimberly Pohl's article showed, both Shepard and ComEd appear to have missed some pretty obvious signs that could have headed off a crisis.
Right next to Shepard's story on Monday's front page was Madhu Krishnamurthy's prominent story of a 3-year-old Huntley boy for whom an ordinary life once was considered an unlikely dream because of his rare genetic bone disease. Thanks to a bone-marrow transplant, though, the outlook has improved for Teddy Christiansen to the point where his mother can jokingly foresee him and his older sister "climbing trees by the end of this summer."
Oddly, transplants figured into the news quite a bit this week. Bob McCoppin told on Monday's Health and Fitness front of an Arlington Heights family whose twin toddlers need a liver transplant to give them the opportunity for a normal life.
Then Wednesday, he reported on a St. Charles man who donated a kidney under a Pay-It-Forward program matching living donors with patients who have lined up donors for others, creating a chain of organ transplants saving dozens of ordinary lives.
News is by definition the recounting of the unusual events in life. Important changes in the law. Heart-rending tragedies. Ruthless crimes. Wars. Accidents. Natural disasters.
But it doesn't always have to be so. Once in a while, it's good to sit back, take stock of how often "ordinary people" make the news and realize the truth in the maxim that there's something unique and extraordinary in everyone's life.
Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.