Wonderful Room

by Woolley, Bryan

  He explained: “A feature is a story about something — a person, an event, a place — that isn‧t news. It gets into the paper not because it‧s important, but only because it‧s interesting and people will want to read it.”

  He rummaged through a couple of his own scrapbooks, showing me feature stories he had written over the years. They occupied far more newspaper space than the real news stories and nearly always had photographs with them. Sending variant versions of them to his newspapers in San Angelo and El Paso, whose readership didn‧t overlap, Mr. Scobee was building a couple of nice strings every month. During the next year, he would go through his stories with me and show me how he did them and why they worked. He read mine, and made many suggestions.

  One day I received a letter from Mr. Raynor. It said he was planning a Sunday series in the Times about the courthouses of West Texas and southern New Mexico. Please give him a feature story about Jeff Davis County‧s, he said.

  Mr. Scobee‧s files were full of the lore I needed: Fort Davis had been the seat of a huge county called Presidio, but when the railroad was built through Marfa, the larger town stole the courthouse. Then the Fort Davis people seceded from Presidio County and formed Jeff Davis County. There were tales of ranchers and cowboys, Texas Rangers, sheriffs and outlaws, soldiers, Indians, a famous jailbreak. Mr. Scobee even had good photographs of the present courthouse, built in 1910, and the adobe structure it had replaced, built in 1880.

  I ran to the drugstore every Sunday to search the Times for my story. Week after week, Mr. Raynor was celebrating some other county: Lea, Dona Ana, Lincoln, Culberson, Hudspeth, Brewster. Where O where was Jef Davis?

  Then on Sunday Oct. 17, 1954, I opened the Times, and there was, spread across the top of almost an entire inside page, this headline: “Ft. Davis Has Been County Seat Of Two Counties.” And below it, the most beautiful words I have, even to this day, ever seen in print: “By Bryan Woolley.”

  Mr. Scobee was as proud of my first byline as I. He carried a clipping in his pocket and showed it to anyone who would look.

  I ransacked his mind and files for subjects for more features. He and I roamed the old fort and old cemeteries together. I drove, of course. He climbed Dolores Mountain with me, an amazing feat for a man of his age. We sat in his office and talked for hours.

  I wrote about a still-living old soldier who had served at the fort in the 1880s. I wrote about Uncle Billy Kingston, who as a child had met George Scarborough, the man who shot John Selman, who shot John Wesley Hardin. My story about the 60th wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. Jessie Merrill, pioneer ranchers, made Page One, with picture, another proud Sunday for Mr. Scobee and me.

  In his capacity as coroner, Mr. Scobee also introduced me to death.

  One morning I rode in the backseat of the county‧s only police car, bouncing over a narrow, rocky road. In the front seat, Sheriff Tom Gray and Mr. Scobee were talking as though it was a normal day, but I was speechless. I had never seen a corpse. We were headed toward a ranch headquarters where a cowboy had shot and killed an illegal Mexican national who had broken into the house.

  I remember the dead man‧s black hair, full of dust and moving slightly in the breeze.

  The Times ran a few paragraphs, but no byline. In those days, a reporter‧s name didn‧t appear on every story he wrote. A byline was a gift from the editor for a job he considered well done. During my time as a stringer, my byline appeared only on a few feature stories.

  In the spring of 1955, two years after my conversation with Mr. Moore, I was to graduate from Fort Davis High. As the eldest child of five, supported by two women on small salaries, I would thenceforth be on my own, loose in the world.

  I wanted to go to college, but would have to find a job to do it. I drove to El Paso and introduced myself to Mr. Raynor, who introduced me to Bill Latham, the managing editor. I urged Mr. Latham to hire me. I would be a copyboy, anything. He said he had no job to offer. I drove home, deeply sad for all the 200 miles, fearful for my future.

  A week later, a letter arrived from Ed Engledow, the Times city editor. I hadn‧t met him. I had never heard his name.

  His letter read: “Mr. Latham has gone into the hospital for a hernia operation. In his absence, I‧m acting managing editor. If you can get back here before he returns, I‧ll give you a job.”

  I packed my suitcase.

  SECTION B

  THE WONDERFUL ROOM

  The room into which I stepped on that June afternoon in 1955, a couple of months shy of my 18th birthday, was everything my imagination wanted it to be. There were six rows of reporters‧ desks with typewriters on them, arranged two to a row. At several desks, reporters already were writing, their neckties loosened, one even wearing a fedora, cigarettes dangling from their lips, smoke curling blue into the fluorescent lights. The heady aromas of ink and newsprint and coffee mingled with the cigarette smoke. Typewriters and Teletype machines chattered, telephones rang, reporters and editors laughed and shouted at each other.

  At the left end of the newsroom was a large desk shaped like a horseshoe, with another desk jammed against it, perpendicular to the horseshoe‧s closed end. The space inside the horseshoe, I would learn, was called the “slot.” There Mr. Latham (when he returned from his surgery) would sit most nights, ramrodding the making of the next morning‧s newspaper. To Mr. Latham‧s left sat Raynor, editing his regional stringers, and to his right sat the wire editor, Bill Cook, handling dispatches delivered by the Teletype machines of The Associated Press, The United Press and The International News Service. These editors‧ work places were the “rim.”

  The desk protruding from the horseshoe was the city desk, Engledow‧s place. He ran the reporters. Along one wall were the sports desk and the Sunday desk, little domains on their own, and at the opposite end of the room from the slot, the women‧s desk. On a table behind the slot, a police radio mumbled metallically and spewed bursts of static. Near it a pneumatic tube system rose into the ceiling. A copyboy was rolling up stories for the early edition, stuffing them into cylinders and shooting them through the tube to the composing room downstairs.

  The floor trembled under my feet. The presses in the basement were roaring out the day‧s last edition of the Herald-Post, and the Times cycle was getting underway.

  Although intense rivals, the two newspapers occupied the same Spanish-style building at Mills and Kansas Streets. Both newsrooms were on the third, top floor. They shared the advertising and circulation departments, and used the same wire room, composing room and presses. But the Scripps-Howard chain owned the Herald-Post, which published in the evening, and a local man, Dorrance Roderick, owned the Times, which published in the morning.

  A sallow, black-haired man, skinny as I and much shorter, saw me standing awkward inside the swinging doors. He rose from his first-row reporter‧s desk and sauntered to me, his dark eyes squinting. “Yes?” he said.

  His name was Lynwood Abram. He was one of the best reporters. “I‧m looking for Mr. Engledow,” I said.

  “Hey, Ed!” Abram said. “The mullet‧s here!”

  “What‧s a mullet?” I asked.

  “A useless fish,” Abram said, and walked away.

  Engledow was at Mr. Latham‧s place in the slot, rolling up his sleeves, preparing for the night‧s work. He was even darker than Abram, with even sharper black eyes, American Indian looking. His mouth seemed fxed in a permanent sneer.

  “You‧re Woolley,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You want to be a newspaperman.”

  “Yes, sir.” I was nervous, trying not to show it.

  “Well, you beat Latham back.” Mr. Engledow laughed, a high-pitched “hee-hee-hee” that didn‧t match his speaking voice. “But he was right. There aren‧t any job openings here.”

  My heart made a fist.

  “I‧ve made up one,” he said. “Come on.”

  He escorted me about the newsroom and introduced me to everyone who had arrived for w
ork so far. Art Leibson, the city hall reporter, and Steve Barker, the courthouse reporter, both of them old hands. They glanced at me without curiosity, grunted and returned to their frantic two-finger typing. The other reporters were in their late 20s and their 30s. Nancy Miller was friendly, and Ralph Lowenstein, and Ramon “Pete” Villalobos, and the librarian, Baltazar Alvarez, a kind man.

  Raynor, a frail, gray-haired, gray-faced man wearing a green eyeshade, muttered as if I were a stranger. I would learn he rarely spoke to anyone except his stringers, and to them only on the phone. I would learn that he had liked my Fort Davis features so much that he suggested Engledow hire me. He never told me he liked them. Raynor‧s behind-his-back nickname in the newsroom was “the gray ghost.”

  Engledow led me down the hallway to the photo studio and introduced me to the only Times photographer, Jorge Bate. He was a small, nervous bantam type who wore cowboy boots and huge green aviator sunglasses and a brown cloth cap like the one Hemingway wore fishing.

  “You‧ll be Jorge‧s assistant,” Mr. Engledow said. “He‧ll teach you to develop film and print pictures. He‧ll teach you how to use a camera. You‧ll work four hours a day. You‧ll be paid a buck an hour.” (The minimum wage.) “If something better comes up, we‧ll see about it.”

  He departed, leaving me in Bate‧s charge. Bate whined at length about how overworked he was. It was about time he got some help, he said. He showed me around his darkroom, then invited me home with him for dinner.

  Bate and his wife lived in a tiny apartment in the basement of an old brick building not far from the newspaper. We had a beer while Mrs. Bate prepared a meal of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits and iced tea. She was a young, attractive Mexican woman. She spoke not a word of English. Bate spoke no Spanish. Neither did I, beyond “por favor” and “gracias.”

  It was an odd evening.

  Bate taught me how to develop his film and use the enlarger to make prints from the negatives. That‧s what I did from 2 to 6 p.m. every day. In the mornings I took summer classes in English and history at Texas Western College. When my workday ended, I studied at the public library until it closed, then rode a bus from San Jacinto Plaza to the little house beyond Mt. Franklin, near Fort Bliss, where my mother‧s cousin, her husband and two children lived. I paid $10 a week for their spare bedroom and breakfast. The late-night buses out Dyer Street were full of drunk, puking GIs getting back to base.

  The day Mr. Latham returned to work, I was the first thing he saw. I was wearing my rubber darkroom apron and laying some photographs in the wire basket on the city desk. While he took of his hat and coat and donned his green eyeshade and sleeve garters, his face got redder and redder. He said not a word to me.

  One afternoon in mid-July Chuck Whitlock, the sports editor, came to the darkroom. “Hey, Woolley,” he said. “We could use some night help on the desk. Taking calls from stringers, writing shorts about ladies golf tournaments and softball games and the like, writing heads. You interested?”

  The job was 20 hours a week, 7 to 11 p.m., at a dollar an hour. For the remainder of the summer and most of the fall, I worked in Bate‧s darkroom in the afternoon and on Whitlock‧s sports desk at night.

  Then I got fired.

  SECTION C

  MY CAREER IN PERIL

  Quitting and getting fired were common events in newsrooms in those days. Many reporters and copy editors were itinerant laborers who wandered the country, working in one town and then another, their wanderings often depending on the weather. They went north in the summer and south in the winter.

  Newspapermen also tended toward volatile tempers, which were sometimes fueled by alcohol, and they favored spur-of-the-moment ultimatums. If a reporter got furious with an editor, he quit. If it was the editor who blew up, he fired the reporter. The departing scribe was supposed to give or get two weeks notice, but often decamped before the deadline.

  Jimmie Cotten, a police reporter, once got so furious that he batted out a long, sulfurous resignation letter. Damn the two weeks notice, it stated; Cotten‧s departure would be immediate. He thrust his letter into Mr. Latham‧s hand just as Latham was distributing our Christmas bonus checks. Latham declared that since Cotton was no longer an employee, he would get no bonus. And he didn‧t.

  Some bilious newspapermen would return to El Paso and get hired again after six months or a year in Albuquerque or Tucson or San Antonio. Cotten did that. Others disappeared forever.

  I had just arrived for work one Monday. Chuck Whitlock said, “I want to see you in the morgue.”

  The morgue was the small chamber of the newsroom that contained file cabinets full of old newspaper clippings and photographs. It was the domain of Balta Alvarez, the librarian, who filed and found things for us. The newsroom coffeepot was in the morgue. The morgue also was where serious private conversations were held.

  Balta could sense whenever such a conversation was about to happen and would disappear. A reporter entering the morgue for a cup of coffee, seeing a private conversation in progress, would leave with empty cup. To be summoned to the morgue was bad. Private conversations there were rarely happy.

  Whitlock weighed close to 300 pounds. He had wavy reddish hair and sported a city slicker mustache. He looked a little like the actor William Conrad. He was sweating. I saw he didn‧t like what he was about to do.

  “I‧ve got to let you go,” he said.

  “Go?” I said.

  “I‧m giving you two weeks notice,” he said. “You‧re fired.”

  On the previous Friday night, he reminded me, I had taken a call from a stringer in New Mexico who was reporting his town‧s high school football game. It was an important game, maybe a district championship. I took notes, wrote the story, wrote a headline for it and sent it all down the tube to the composing room. Nobody but I had read the story before it appeared in the newspaper.

  “You left out the damn score,” Whitlock said. “You wrote the whole damn story and never mentioned the damn final score. Half of New Mexico is jumping down my throat.”

  I apologized. I said I would be more careful. I would do better.

  “Writing a story about a ballgame and leaving out the damn score, that‧s unforgivable,” he said. “You‧re fired. Two weeks notice.”

  He poured himself a cup of coffee and left. Balta reappeared. He shook his head sadly.

  The newsroom was hellish on Fridays in the fall. Every stringer in West Texas and southern New Mexico was delivering the results of his local ballgame. Every reporter and editor worked Fridays and was expected to pitch in. We sports people — Larry Johnson and Walt Switzer besides Whitlock and me -- inhabited the deepest pit of this football hell. We took more calls than anybody, wrote nearly everything, gave the stuff a quick read, put headlines on it and shipped it all downstairs. Of course mistakes crept in. Only one was unforgivable. I had made it.

  Subsequent evenings on the sports desk were nearly unbearable. My presence embarrassed Whitlock, Johnson and Switzer. They averted their eyes from me. They spoke to me only when necessary, and then in an embarrassed mutter. They didn‧t hate me. They just wished I wasn‧t there.

  So did I. Less than six months into my newspaper career, I was a failure. Halfway into my first full semester in college, I probably would have to drop out. I visited the Navy recruiter. I went to work that day and announced to Whitlock and the others that I was joining up. Maybe I would go to Japan.

  The night before I was to sign my Navy papers, Whitlock called me into the morgue again. He poured me a mug of coffee, shot me his serious William Conrad look and said, “Woolley, you‧ve been doing a damn good job lately. We‧d like you to stay. I was in the Navy. It‧s no damn good.”

  Of course I would stay.

  Later that same night, Ed Engledow called me into the morgue. “I talked to Latham,” he said. “We‧re giving you a five-dollar raise.”

  SECTION D

  FAMOUS PEOPLE I USED TO KNOW

  A few months after Chuc
k Whitlock unfired me, a city desk reporter blew up and quit. He stormed out the swinging doors and jabbed the elevator button like it was Engledow‧s eye. Before he reached the street, I had asked Bill Latham for his job. Mr. Latham was in the slot, pulling on his sleeve garters. He squinted from under his eyeshade, studied my face a long time. “All right,” he said. “I‧ll tell Chuck and Jorge you‧re moving over Monday.” Just like that. Suddenly I was a real reporter.

  A young Oklahoman named Bill “Monty” Montgomery worked police and was the best reporter on the paper. I worshipped him. Within a few months I was covering cops on his days of.

  The rest of the time I was a general assignments reporter, although we didn‧t use that term. We also didn‧t use the term “journalist,” a word then coming into fashion among college-educated members of the craft. “A journalist,” said Ed Engledow, “is just a newspaperman looking for a job.” We were reporters. We wrote about everything.

  In the years since, I have come to realize how lucky I was to get some of the assignments I did. To the green kid that I was, some were frightening. I knew so little. But to show my fear would invite ridicule from the other reporters. They would see me as “the mullet,” the useless fish that Lynwood Abram had called me when I arrived.

  The first famous person I interviewed was Conrad Hilton, the hotel tycoon. He owned a large hotel in downtown El Paso and was a director of the city‧s largest bank. He flew in a few times a year for board meetings. He also was a buddy of our publisher. So every time Hilton came to town, some Times reporter had to interview him.

  All the reporters had done the Hilton story at least once and thereafter dodged the assignment if they could. The newest guy got stuck with it.