A friend of mine, Emory Jones, sent me his column about a pig named Frank that lived up in North Dakota. He stayed in the house because it was cold outside.

Frank’s owner, a corn farmer, had bought the porker thinking he was one of those pet Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs that stay small and run around the house like a little boy with a new toy truck. This pig’s DNA, however, did not match that of the Vietnamese kind, Emory said, but by the time the owner discovered the mistake, the kids had fallen in love with Frank and didn’t want him to go outside where pigs normally live.

Emory, by the way, is a master storyteller. When he’s not selling paintings and puzzles and pottery to tourists visiting Cleveland, Ga., he’s making his living doing advertising and public relations for people who sell corn, soybeans and cotton. He’s obviously good at what he does. He not only can make a sow’s ear look like a silk purse, he can make you want to buy one.

Every journalist, I think, ought to serve time in public relations. He or she needs to understand how the other side lives, how to cover an errant client’s rear end and get him not to say stupid things, and just how humbling PR can be.

I did my time. Twenty months, three days, 22 hours and 37 minutes, I did public relations. I had started working in a newsroom at the tender age of 15, but at 47, I yielded to temptation, the promise of more money and the chance to see the world, via Indianapolis.

I’ve had my scary moments working for newspapers. A couple of guys shot through a window of the newspaper office where I was publisher because we’d run stories and editorials about a police chief who got caught driving under the influence; an irate reader came to see me carrying a Taser gun; I’ve been sent out to take photos in an ice storm, driving the city editor’s car with four bald tires.

But I never really felt my life was in danger until I rode around Indiana in an un-airconditioned school bus, in August, wearing a long-sleeve shirt, looking at test crops in cornfields. I almost suffered a heat stroke.

Working at newspapers never scared me as much as riding on the wrong side of the road through the streets of England, where my client and I interviewed chicken farmers about a new feed additive used there. The client was driving.

I was in serious trouble when I had to present a PR plan to officials of a company that made excavators and bulldozers—and I didn’t know a joystick from a dipstick.

Believe me, folks, PR people live with danger—and sometimes boredom. So when they come across a bright spot in their jobs, perhaps a housebound pig named Frank, they are in hog heaven.

I understand completely.

Phil Hudgins, a former community newspaper editor, can be reached at phudgins@cninewspapersinc.com.