Floyd Richardson is a YourHub.com rookie, but he's already batting a perfect 2-for-2 with a pair of grand slams.
For those who have no clue about baseball terminology, a grand slam is a home run with the bases loaded. For those who have no clue about YourHub.com, that means Richardson did a great job of instantly becoming a citizen journalist. Read on, and you'll learn that you can do the same thing.
A tragic community event and a joyous family occasion gave Richardson all the inspiration he needed to register on YourHub.com so he could post stories and photos. Reading stories and blogs and viewing photos and the community/area calendar on YourHub are all free activities -- as is the simple registration process, which is required before posting items.
July 11, Richardson jumped in head-first by posting two pictures of the early stages of a local house fire, plus a story about his GREAT new great-granddaughter.
When I saw what he had posted, as Your.Hub administrator I felt like shouting, "Now that's what I'm talking about!" out loud. I decided to give him a call instead.
Richardson, who was born in New Mexico and lived in Electra from when he was in the third grade until 1961, said he discovered YourHub when "... something caught my eye," eight or nine months ago.
"Then I discovered stories on there by people I knew," he added.
Richardson, a 67-year-old civilian employee at Sheppard Air Force Base who has lived in Wichita Falls since 1968, said he was driving in the Fountain Park section of town when he spotted smoke. He heard the sound of a fire truck on its way, so he stopped, pulled out his camera and started snapping photos. The house fire was relatively small when he took the shots, but he said that news reports later noted that it caused an estimated $300,000 worth of damage. He posted the fire photos with a headline that said, "How not to Bar-B-que."
"People who know me know I don't leave home without a camera," said Richardson, who got his first camera when he was an eighth-grader. He noted that over the years he has done wedding photos for various people, as well as shooting old barns, wooden windmills, horse-drawn machinery and, "just whatever catches my eye."
The story Richardson wrote about his great-granddaughter, Alyssa Kayle Pozun-- born May 26 to his granddaughter Amanda Pozun and her husband Roger of Wichita Falls -- was short but very sweet.
Richardson posted four photos of Alyssa Kayle. The first shows the proud great-granddad bottle-feeding the baby, his wife Oleta at his side.
After a thoughtful reference to something his father once told him about the passage of time, Richardson then added his thoughts on the blessings he felt as a result of the baby's arrival. He wrote, in part, "... God has sent a great gift ... and this makes me seem young again. Thank you God for this gift."
Insert pause here to let that soak in.
"I never considered myself any kind of writer, but I was pretty pleased with that," Richardson said. "I do have friends that write, and maybe they'll read the stories if nobody else does. My wife's a better writer than I am. Sometimes words come and sometimes they don't."
I have a feeling that not only will Richardson's first two YourHub posts be interesting to plenty of other readers, they may also inspire them to share their own local stories and photos.
And that's what YourHub is all about, Charlie Brown.
Column by Mark Wilson, originally published July 23, 2008, in the Wichita Falls Times Record News.