Faith Facts

• A Christian journalist reflects on how a high school journalism teacher shaped his 40-year career through timeless principles of truth and accuracy
• From a shy band student to Editor-in-Chief, the journey began in a small Texas town classroom in 1986
• Core journalistic values taught decades ago continue to guide faith-based reporting across 50 states and 20 countries

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 year was 1986 in Keller, Texas — a small farm town about 15 miles north of Fort Worth. Big hair was everywhere, both in the hallways of Keller High School and across pop culture.

For one shy, introverted student who had moved through five states before settling in North Texas, that year would mark a turning point. The late Jack O’Pelt urged his friend to join him in taking a journalism class.

“Why not?” thought Bobby Ross Jr., who liked writing and needed an elective course.

“Ms. Crane” — now Janie Crane Burchfield — was their teacher. And from the moment Ross walked into her classroom his sophomore year, her passion for core journalistic values such as truth, accuracy, fairness and impartiality resonated with him.

“The only reason I taught was to teach journalism,” she told Ross in a Facebook message this week.

In her class, students learned how to count headlines, which in the days before electronic pagination was necessary for print layout purposes. They steered proportion wheels to calculate photo sizes and cropping.

They wrote their stories in longhand and sent them to a typesetter, who returned strips of text they cut with X-acto knives and arranged on pages.

But those ancient skills weren’t the most important lessons Ms. Crane bestowed. She taught English students, too, but that subject wasn’t what drove her 25-year teaching career — journalism was her calling.

It didn’t take Ross long to decide he wanted to spend his life in the newspaper business. But first, he had to muster the courage to conduct his first interview.

Ross had moved around constantly as a child. His father served in the Air Force and then became a preacher.

He attended schools in five states — Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Missouri and Tennessee — before the family moved to Keller in 1982 for his parents to serve as houseparents at a Christian children’s home. In his freshman year at Keller High, he often ate lunch alone.

So when he got his first story assignment — a piece on the KHS stage band earning superior ratings — he scribbled his questions on a piece of paper. He snuck into band director Wayne Tympanick’s office and stuck his request for answers on his desk.

Before long, Tympanick came and found him.

“If you want to be a journalist, you need to sit down and ask me these questions,” he told Ross.

So he did.

Over the next two years, Ross devoted more and more of his time to The Wigwam, the student newspaper. He reported on topics ranging from students cheating to a fatal crash involving classmates he knew.

By the second half of his junior year, he became the editor.

He covered trends such as the “VCR craze” — as they described it in a headline. Here was the lede he 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 their serious reporting, they had a whole lot of fun, too. His 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 Ross 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 he crashed to the ground as he left a messy crater overhead, a chair below softened his fall. Ms. Crane was anything but happy with him.

But she evidently didn’t kill him. Because he lived to type this.

Fellow Wigwam staff member Diana Williams — now Diana Dworin — was a year younger but just as devoted to a future in journalism. While Ross 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 as a journalist. One time, Dworin and Ross 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.

To Ross’s delight, Dworin — now a hospital chaplain and, like him, a doting grandparent — recently mailed him a package of old Wigwams that helped stir these memories.

Another Wigwam alum is Barry Ryan, a fellow Class of 1986 graduate who was one of Ross’s best friends at KHS. They still enjoy catching up from time to time at Texas Rangers games.

“We were a very good team that complemented each other well. 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, the opportunity to explore, learn and develop skills in addition to some outstanding friendship was a privilege and a blessing,” Ryan added in a Facebook message.

Amen to all of that!

After graduating from KHS, Ross attended Oklahoma Christian University, where he edited the campus newspaper The Talon and earned his journalism degree in 1990. He later reported for small community newspapers in Oklahoma for three years before joining a major Oklahoma newspaper in 1993 and then going to work for The Associated Press in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2002.

Ross has spent the past 21 years with The Christian Chronicle, based in Oklahoma City. He’s traveled to all 50 states and 20 countries to cover the news.

He launched the Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged in 2020 and is in his seventh year of writing it.

In so many ways, he’s living his dream life as a journalist — four decades after his Wigwam days at Keller High. The foundation laid by a dedicated Christian teacher who believed in truth, accuracy, and the power of storytelling continues to shape every story he writes.

To all his friends in the Class of 1986, happy 40th anniversary! He knows there’s a reunion planned, but he won’t be able to make it.

Total honesty: That shy, introverted teen inside him never completely disappeared, and he’s still not ready for that level of social interaction.

Let us know what you think, please share your thoughts in the comments below.