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He won many awards including the National Headliners Club award for writing the best local interest column in the country in 1962. In 1977 his fellow Tri-State Journalists honored him with with the first Distinguished Service Award. He is the author of five book: A Pig In The Gray Panel Truck, A Dandelion in Winter, Day of a President, Just a 100 Miles From Home, and The Journey in the Red Jalopy. He worked for newspapers in Santa Fe, N.M., Monett, MO, Beckley WV, and Memphis, TN. He began working for the Evansville Courier in 1957. Aaron was born in Cone, Texas and reared on a farm in Portales, NM. He attented the University of New Mexico where he graduated with honors with a degree in journalism.
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by Joe Aaron The pretty beauty queen contestant, resplendent in a frilly white formal, was asked - simply to assess her personality - what she wants, above all things, out of life.
She twisted her gloved hands nervously in her lap, as young girls are inclined to do in the presence of grownups, and without very much hesitation she replied:
"I want to be perfectly happy."
She smiled a shy, tentative smile at the judges, then - walking with great caution lest she trip on the hem of her billowing dress - she left the room to make way for the next contestant.
And left in her wake a little cloud of sorrow, a tiny blotch of regret.
For she wants from life the one thing, above all others, that it cannot give her - the one thing, for that matter, that does not even exist.
Who can say what happiness is? Who can define its limits? Of what is it distilled.
Who can say?
Happiness, I suppose, is a baby's smile, or an ice cream cone, or the feel of a finely bound book.
Happiness is a spring day, coming after a winter that has been cruel - a gentle day of sunshine and promise of daffodils.
Happiness is a smart business deal, or a new dress, or a story that is well written, or a Sunday picnic with fried chicken and chocolate pie, or a little girl putting her arms around your neck and holding tight.
Happiness is this, but this is not its sum total. No one man can say what its sum total is.
But it is not perfect, happiness, and it cannot last, for one day the winter will return, and tomorrow will be Monday, and the next story will affect its readers like a sleeping pill.
And that is the strange thing about happiness, little beauty queen with the diffident smile. That is the one thing you will learn as you reach toward the maturity that you long so for.
And that thing is this:
There must be tragedy in our lives, tragedy and sorrow and tears, for without them happiness has no meaning. We would have nothing to compare it with.
We would not know what daylight is if there were no darkness.
We would have no reason to laugh if we had no reason to cry.
It is the contrast between the two that is the essence of happiness.
That is the reason, I suspect, that life does not travel in a straight line, without interruption.
It is composed of dark valleys and sunlit mountaintops, of tears and laughter, of tragedy and triumph.
And just as happiness is not perfect and cannot last, neither can sorrow, and one is the counterpart of the other
