Local serves community through journalism
Posted On: Monday, Dec. 28 2009 06:04 AM
By Jade Ortego
Killeen Daily HeraldBelton resident Bernita Peeples began her journalism career in the eighth grade, when Herbert Hoover was president.
"I knew I wanted to be a news reporter ever since then," Peeples, now 92, said.
When Peeples was a student at Belton High School, she would work for the Belton Journal one day a week when its circulation was around 400 (now it's more than 5,000).
Early life
In 1917, Peeples was born the sixth and youngest child to a family in Rogers. Her widowed mother moved the children to Belton when she was 8 years old.
As a high school student, she worked for the school's newspaper. Once a week her instructor would bring her to the Journal to work, where she got a job after finishing school. She attended the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton – when it was a women's school – in her 30s and has minors in sociology and English. She worked as a freelancer for newspapers in Austin, Waco and Killeen. In 1979, she took a break from reporting and tried working in construction and secretarial work in the legal and medical fields, but she didn't like anything as much as journalism so she returned to it in 1990.
Looking back
Peeples said she misses the sound of linotype machines; she laments that her paper is printed in Bryan now and that journalists these days don't know what carbon paper is. She feels that computers, which she admits she can't use well, are glorified typewriters, but the red underline to point out typing errors in Microsoft Word helps. She is not the best typist, she said, but she still uses computers for work.
"I'm 92 years old, but the world is not going to wait for me," she said.
Despite being a woman in a male-dominated field for decades, the women's movement was not for her, Peeples said.
"I had a job and I did it ... I called myself a women's libber because when I'd do something, I felt liberated," she said.
Peeples is involved in many organizations, including the Bell County Historical Commission and 1874 Church Restoration, for which she posed on a motorcycle for a 2010 calendar. She didn't miss a meeting of the Belton Rotary Club for 19 years, and she was the first woman to receive the Belton Area Chamber of Commerce Outstanding Citizen award. The Bell County Commissioners Court designated Aug. 4, 2007, Bernita Peeples Day in Bell County in honor of her 90th birthday and to recognize her years of reporting on the commissioners court.
That sort of involvement in the community is expected of her, she said, and it is her job to do it.
"It has become a way of life now," she said.