By Barbara White Walker
Senior Editor

------A legacy: Something handed down from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past.

------When I became editor of The Gazette, reporters from other newspapers asked me how it felt to be handed a legacy. I did not know how to answer that question at the time, for I had not yet experienced the impact of taking on a legacy, or what it meant.

------In the beginning, Ijust felt like someone's daughter and granddaughter. I was a woman with grown children and a life of my own, but in terms of the newspaper, I felt like an insignificant member of a powerful family. I knew that my grandfather was a famous newspaperman, and that my father wrote books that were sometimes made into movies. I had grown up hearing words like deadlines, proofs, dummy, typeface, layout, mitigating factors, etc. When my friend's families were listening to Amos and Andy and Lux Radio Theater, my parents and I were listening to news programs or intellectual discourses on why there should be a United Nations. When other mothers and fathers were relaxing in the evening, my parents were usually poring over a manuscript dummy ofone of my father's books, and I would hear the drone of their voice long into the wee hours of the morning.

------We lived in New York City when I was growing up, but both my parents had their roots well planted in small-town Midwestern values. My mother abhorred New York Society, and refused to have her name in the social register or allow me to be a debutante. She agonized over the decision whether to send me to private or public school, and was only swayed in the direction of the former, when a friend asked her if she had taught me how to use a switchblade to defend myself.

------I lived surrounded by culture and the hustle of a frantic city. The life my parents modeled for me, however, was the life my father had known as the son of a famous small-town editor, and the world my mother had experienced as the daughter of a pharmacist who liked to race horses. Our world was filled with work, laughter and tears, and often was controlled by whether my father could write or not. Our lives centered around activities in the city, what was going on at the paper in Emporia, Kansas, my mother's vast storehouse of medical knowledge, and practical jokes such as my mother ordering a live penguin for my father's birthday, and then worrying how to keep it on ice.

------My father, for most of his life, suffered from deep depressions and manic highs, and depended on my mother to provide the balance of normalcy for both work and family. My mother did an amazing job of keeping life on a fairly even keel, in spite of my father's changing moods, frequent forays into risky adventures, and uneven work performance. When he was well, my father was a warm, loving man with a keen sense of humor, but his devastating mood swings took their toll on my mother, who sometimes seemed hard and demanding. Depression was a family thing, and felled several generations of Whites. Both my grandfather and my grandmother took long rest cures in New Mexico and California, even before they lost their daughter in 1921. Mental illness was never talked about in those days, and even in my father's lifetime my mother carefully covered up his illness, and my father referred to "his sick old mud turtle days."

------So what does this have to do with a legacy?

------I found out that when you are handed a legacy, there is more to it than just passing on a position or a job. There is a responsibility to uncover the whole complex family story.

------What I learned from my legacy was something my father never quite learned. William Allen White was a wonderful, talented man who was, nevertheless, neither saint nor devil, but a simple human being. In spite of his many reverent followers, he too was just someone's son, husband and father.

------How do I feel about my legacy today? Mighty proud.