Reporter
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So I waited. The coroner came and made the foregone pronouncement. I then called it in, describing the scene to a rewrite guy and explaining that the names of the two agents—obviously undercover cops, because they were wearing street clothes—were not immediately available. I stayed away from the sergeant, but the coroner was nice.
The lesson? Being first is not nearly as important as being right, and being careful, even if it did not matter in the case at hand. That was in late 1959. The mistakes I made over the next five or so decades—and we all make them—would have been avoided if I always kept in mind what the sergeant had said about waiting for an official pronouncement.
The second lesson came a few weeks later, while on temporary night assignment for a week or two at police headquarters in Hyde Park, near the university. The process had quickly become familiar: hang around with other reporters; ingratiate yourself with the desk sergeant; buy him all the coffee he wants; help him, if he asks, with last week’s Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle; and wait for the radio to sound off. Late at night comes a report of a deadly fire in the black ghetto a few miles to the west, with many victims. Off I go.
A shabby wooden frame house, twenty or so blocks north of my dad’s cleaning store, was a pile of embers by the time I arrived. A cluster of bodies, wrapped in white sheeting, was lying in perfect order on a small lawn. They were wrapped by size—daddy bear, mommy bear, and three or four little bears. I was horrified. A distressed fire chief—or was it a cop?—told me that the best guess was that a father had gone berserk and set fire to the home, killing his wife and children, if they were his wife and children. I asked a lot of questions, but essentially got nowhere, though someone—perhaps a neighbor—gave me the names of those thought to be the dead, and some details about the family, if that was the family lying under the sheets.
What a story, I thought, but I knew how much I didn’t know. Still, I had to get to a pay phone and dictate what little I knew to rewrite. It was, I thought, a story that could end up on the front page. As I was yapping away, Mr. Dornfeld, he of the sometimes muddy boots, cut in on the call. There are traumatic events we remember all of our life, and I remember every word he said: “Ah, my good, dear, energetic Mr. Hersh. Do the, alas, poor, unfortunate victims happen to be of the Negro persuasion?” I said yes. He said, “Cheap it out.” That meant that my City News dispatch would report the following, give or take a phrase: “Five Negroes died in a fire last night on the Southwest Side.” It might also have included an address.
I thought, having worked for years in a family store in a black area, that I knew something about racism. Dornfeld taught me that I had a lot to learn.
There was one final lesson to learn just before I would go off for compulsory army training, after only seven or so months on the job at City News. It was my shameful, but unavoidable, involvement in what we now call self-censorship. I was back on overnight duty at the central police headquarters when two cops called in to report that a robbery suspect had been shot trying to avoid arrest. The cops who had done the shooting were driving in to make a report. Always ambitious, and always curious, I raced down to the basement parking lot in the hope of getting some firsthand quotes before calling in the story. The driver—white, beefy, and very Irish, like far too many Chicago cops then—obviously did not see me as he parked the car. As he climbed out, a fellow cop, who clearly had heard the same radio report I had, shouted something like “So the guy tried to run on you?” The driver said, “Naw. I told the nigger to beat it and then plugged him.”
I got the hell out of there, without being seen, called the bureau, and asked for the editor on duty. (It was not Billings.) What to do? The editor urged me to do nothing. It would be my word versus that of all the cops involved, and all would accuse me of lying. The message was clear: I did not have a story. But of course I did. So I waited a few days and then asked for and got a copy of the coroner’s report. The victim had been shot in the back. I took a copy of the report to an editor. He wasn’t interested. No one was interested. I had no proof that a felony murder had been committed other than what the killer himself had said, and he, of course, would deny it.
So I left the story alone. I did not try to find and interview the cop who bragged about doing the shooting, nor did I seek out his partner. Nor did I raise hell at City News. I shuffled off to six months of army training, full of despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship. I’ve hated both practices ever since while more than once having gone along with looking the other way. I had found my calling and learned, very quickly, that it wasn’t perfect. Neither was I.
· THREE ·
Interludes
My six months as a grunt in the U.S. Army was not a transformative experience. I went through basic training in the summer heat of 1960 at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, a forlorn base in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains 150 miles southwest of St. Louis. I did get in great physical shape marching back and forth for hours and doing hundreds of push-ups and jumping jacks daily. I also learned how to fire a rifle and take it apart and reassemble it while blindfolded. There was more to learn: how to force showers—we called them GI showers—upon those poorly educated country boys in my unit who refused to wash their uniforms, and themselves, after long days in the brutal heat of a firing range. There were a few good times, too, bolstered by the relaxing power of the country moonshine that was usually available for purchase outside the base gates.
After basic training, my brief stint at City News got me assigned to the headquarters of the First Army Division at Fort Riley, Kansas, as a journalist. Given the alternatives—such as more combat training—it seemed to me an elite posting. My first morning there was a stunner. Reveille was before 6:00 a.m., and while I was brushing my teeth, a couple of GIs, disheveled and reeking of booze, rushed into the large bathroom in the basement of division headquarters. They were the playboys of the company. Asked why they were so late, one explained that they had driven from Topeka after a night on the town with some women who had cost them a large chunk of money. Someone asked where they got the cash. The soldier answered, with no hesitation, that he and his pals initially had gone to a bar in “T-town”—Topeka—known to be frequented by gay men and gave enough blow jobs to finance their later partying. At first I thought they had to be kidding but was assured later that they were not. I still wonder. Brave new world for this kid, who still had a lot of growing up to do.
Fortunately, the GIs I worked with in the division’s office of public information were much less quixotic, and my four months there introduced me to a few experts on army bureaucracy—a relentless machine that eliminated variation and randomness, just as basic training was designed to eliminate individuality. Nine years later, while desperately searching for army lieutenant William L. Calley Jr., the officer initially singled out as the mass killer of My Lai, I learned he had been hidden away at an army base in Georgia. I knew that if I kept on looking at the base, I would find him, because someplace, somewhere there, Calley would be listed by name.
At the end of 1960, I was freed from active duty and went back to Chicago, eager to return to City News. I became the first reporter there in years, perhaps forever, as someone told me, to not be offered a job after military service. I deserved the shaming, for I had decided on my last day of work to pay back the sports editor at City News for the many Friday nights on which I had transcribed hundreds of thousands, so it seemed, of high school basketball scores. I purchased a number of British and Irish newspapers and clipped out dozens of stories dealing with obscure sports for Americans, such as rugby, curling, and cricket, and pinned them to a scoop sheet on the office bulletin board—just as I had done as a copyboy with missed stories by beat reporters. I guess at the time I thought accusing the sports editor of gross dereliction of duty was funny, but I knew, even then, that it was vindictive, unnecessarily so. He cared about his work as much as I di
d. So I got what I deserved.
Because I was without a job, and without any money, my sister Phyllis, now married with children, let me crash in the basement of her home as I began searching for a new job. I tried the Chicago dailies, and several radio networks, without success. After a few months, I got lucky: A small weekly paper in south suburban Chicago was looking for an editor and paying $110 a week. The weekly circulated in Evergreen Park and Oak Lawn, two prosperous and growing suburbs that I knew well. I had worked weekends and two midweek nights while in law school selling whiskey and beer for a buck fifty an hour in a shopping mall in Evergreen Park. I mentioned that history while being interviewed by the publisher, who clearly knew nothing about the writing and editing of a newspaper—neither did I—and was immediately hired. A major factor, I realized later, was familiarity: to my new boss, having sold booze in the area was more than enough experience.
It was a long commute from my sister’s basement north of Chicago to the far South Side, but I did it happily. I was a one-man shop—a reporter and editor responsible for content and also responsible for the makeup of each page of the weekly, which was printed by an offset press. Each page was laid out in type and headlines and, once at the printers, transferred to an ink image and eventually to the press that produced the tabloid newspaper. I was on my own from the moment I signed on, and over the next nine or so months I got a doctorate in small-town newspaper production. I eventually realized that I had been a small pawn in the very tough world of suburban newspaper publishing, Chicago-area style. Our main competition was a well-financed and fully staffed weekly newspaper known as the Southwest Suburbanite, whose regional editions were distributed throughout southwest Chicago and its suburbs, including Evergreen Park and Oak Lawn. The Suburbanite owned the weekly I worked on. My newspaper existed solely to keep out a competitor who would produce a better product and cut into the Suburbanite’s circulation and advertising revenue.
Such details mattered not to me. As an inner-city boy, I was eager to learn how suburbia worked and got hooked on the job. It was a trait I learned from my father; the only way to work was hard. I wrote about school boards and city commissions and found a way to work with the weekly’s small coterie of social and gossip columnists—mostly married women with children at home—who filled the pages with chitchat. I found a bright teenager who wrote about local high school sports. I paid visits to the few local bankers and merchants who were advertisers and was told again and again that they wanted a better newspaper—more coverage meant more readership and more response to their ads. I taught myself how to lay out easier-to-read pages for the printer and actually thought about the headlines. The Chicago mob—then headed by Sam Giancana—controlled many of the unions whose members did sewer construction throughout the region, and I wrote a series of articles supporting a young reformer named Smith who ran for township office on an anticorruption platform. I got a taste of big-city reality, Chicago style, when the reformer was assassinated before the election, shot repeatedly in his car. He had a family, and of course the murder, like many mob murders in those days, was never solved. (I would learn more about his death while working for the Times in the late 1970s.) There was no editorial interference from my paper, saddled with a hapless publisher and with no political influence.
During these months, I renewed my friendship with Bob Billings, who made merciless fun of my working for a dinky weekly newspaper. We both loved golf and played often on our days off.* After a while, Bob began talking about the two of us starting a weekly newspaper in the same suburbs, one that would report the hell out of the region and make a difference, as my weekly had not. He had enough money to get us started and knew there was something fishy about my little weekly that kept on going with few advertisements and little income. I had the experience of editing and producing a weekly and, most important, the gift of gab. I knew most of the bankers and small-shop owners in Evergreen Park and Oak Lawn and was pretty sure, young and green as I was, that I could convince more than a few of them to invest in what promised to be a serious weekly newspaper. Our yapping was little more than fantasy until Christmas, when my publisher gave me a holiday bonus of a brand-new ten-dollar bill, enclosed in a corny Christmas card. The guy had no idea how insulted I was, and that was it. It was time to face the fact that the weekly I was editing was hopeless. So I quit and told Billings it was a go.
The paper we started a month or so later, the Evergreen Park/Oak Lawn Dispatch, had an ambitious first edition. A friendly local banker and independent grocer committed to full-page advertisements, and we launched in midwinter, just as registration began for the second half of the school year. Ron Goldberg, a friend from high school days, was a relentless amateur photographer, and he spent a long day at my begging recording the first day of kindergarten at a few local grammar schools. Bob and I were eager to produce a newspaper that would be provocative and have substance, but I understood from my years running my father’s business and my year as an editor that we had to start with more advertisers. And more readers. Thus, the centerfold of our first edition consisted of a dozen or more candid photos of timid and excited kindergartners being coaxed by anxious mothers to class, including the carefully collected names of all. Bill Hunt, a colleague from the University of Chicago (he would become a professor of English), joined our staff, after further begging from me, and he agreed to accept the chore of copying local want ads from the Southwest Suburbanite and the Chicago dailies and reprinting them in our early editions. All of us would spend a few hours on the day of publication calling those who placed the ads and telling them that we had seen their ad in the new newspaper in the area, the Dispatch. Within a month or so, we were publishing two full pages of want ads, which were, until the advent of the internet, a major profit source in the newspaper world. It was validation: I knew I could produce a winning newspaper. The weekly I had edited previously quietly went out of business by spring.
Billings convinced some of his former colleagues at City News to help out by writing a feature story or two, with a local angle, we hoped, and by occasionally covering the real news of the areas—school board meetings and the like. Our unpaid and irregular volunteers included Mike Royko, who would win the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1972 as a columnist for the Chicago Daily News, and Lee Quarnstrom, who, after a successful newspaper career in California, ended up as a core member of Ken Kesey’s drug-loving Merry Band of Pranksters. (After my My Lai dispatches, Quarnstrom was quoted as sardonically saying he had no idea I was “a great journalist.” Correct. My idea of a solid story then was one that found a way to praise an advertiser.)
Cash flow was always a problem. Many advertisers were more interested in placing ads than in paying for them. I therefore also became a part-time collection agency. We were printing more than ten thousand copies of our newspaper every Thursday night, and the printer insisted on a certified check before running off even one copy. We hired a driver who dropped off the newspapers by late the next morning to the 150 or so teenagers we’d recruited as delivery boys. Inevitably, mothers would call the office during the day to report that their son or daughter was ill and unable to do the delivery. That left it up to me, and sometimes Bob, to spend the afternoon as newspaper carriers.
Despite all, the Dispatch remained viable—terrifyingly so. After a professional circulation audit in the spring, we began getting national advertisements from the big three auto manufacturers. This was great, but I was spending more and more of my time selling ads. There was a payroll to meet, and the rent, and telephone service, and inevitable and unforeseen day-to-day needs. I did not want to own a press; I wanted to work for one. So I woke up one morning, in the late summer of 1962, and realized I’d had it with suburban Chicago, and weekly newspapers.
Billings was right to feel betrayed by my abrupt decision to clear out. But he knew I was the one who made the paper work, so he did what I might have done if the situation were reversed: He walked away before I did. He
went on to become press secretary for Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, a job he must have hated, and a sports reporter for the Chicago Daily News, a job I’ll bet he loved. He died in 1998.
I took off for California with the woman I would later marry, dropped her off at Berkeley, and graduate school, and spent the next few months bumming around in the sunshine with my golf clubs. In Los Angeles and out of money, I applied for a job with the Los Angeles Times. They weren’t interested. I drove back to Chicago and somehow got an interview with a senior news editor for United Press International (UPI) named Gene Gillette. I liked Gillette and still remember his warmth during the interview. He took a chance on me, but certainly not because of my credentials. I had been kicked out of law school; fired, essentially, by the City News Bureau; had walked out on a newspaper I started; and had crapped around for the past few months in California. Perhaps one of the editors at City News had stood up for me. In any event, my assignment was to cover the annual three-month meeting of the South Dakota legislature in Pierre, the state capital, which was to begin after New Year’s Day. The pay was eighty-five dollars a week. I was ecstatic. Finally, I was a real newspaperman. It did not matter that my old jalopy, which now had rotten bearings, broke down en route to South Dakota near La Crosse, Wisconsin, and I had to ask Gillette to wire me a $350 advance. He did it, albeit, I would guess, with trepidation.
I arrived in Pierre on a Sunday night in late October, with no need to sell advertisements or worry about budgets. This was going to be fun. So what if I was the number two man in UPI’s two-man bureau in a town that felt smaller than its population of ten thousand? My boss, the bureau chief, was pleasant enough, and reasonably competent, but as I quickly learned, he was intent on staying within bounds. He covered the governor’s office and various state agencies and wrote accurate accounts of their pronouncements and decisions. No news beyond that existed for him.