Finding the News
Page 3
Would you be willing to move back to Chicago? Mr. Cook asked. I was excited if a little unsure. I knew enough not to close an open door, even if I wasn’t positive I wanted to walk through. He told me to call the next time I was in town visiting my family. The two of them beamed. I wasn’t sure what had just happened.
Later, I thanked Mr. Hoenecke for the introduction. So what does Mr. Cook do at the Trib?
“Stan? He’s the publisher.”
I drove down to the Chicago suburbs, where my mother lived with her new husband. My father, whom I was very close to, had died when I was 16, while we were living in northern Wisconsin. The next year, my mother married a good man, a widower with four sons, and she and I moved into their house in Winnetka, Illinois. My stepfather adored my mom, and my mother and I were fortunate to join a big and loving family.
I made an appointment with a senior editor at the Tribune. Next, I went to the local men’s store to buy my first suit—gray, with a vest—a blue shirt, red and gray tie, and a pair of heavy dress shoes. I visited the barber for the first time in years, and then displayed a clipped ponytail in my room like a beloved stuffed animal from childhood.
The Tribune editor was close to three times my age and burrowed into a comfortable office. I looked around and could imagine myself working on stories, talking on the phone, feet on the desk, sorting out the messy and corrupt politics of Chicago and Illinois, and then the world.
He asked a few questions and quickly picked up that I was more interested in changing the world than writing about it. If you want to do politics, he said dismissively, as if politics were something vile and beneath him, you should go to the governor’s office, not a newspaper.
No, I said, I think I can make a difference as a reporter.
He shook his head but seemed resigned. He told me to head over to the City News Bureau of Chicago and gave me the address in the Loop.
I was a little confused—I had never heard of this City News Bureau—but I smiled and nodded. I didn’t realize the fix was in, and I was about to start my first paid job in journalism.
In military terms, Tribune publisher Stan Cook was the general leading a storied infantry division. The Tribune editor he ordered to meet me was a brigade commander. City News was boot camp. The drill sergeant at City News was Paul Zimbrakos, a compact man with a dark mustache who sat at a large desk in the middle of the room. Other editors had desks that touched his, and the rest of the writers and reporters occupied cluttered desks around a large open area lined with yellowed windows that faced the tall buildings of the downtown area known as the Loop. City News, they explained, was a news agency—called a wire service because the stories once moved over a telegraph wire—started in the late nineteenth century. It covered local news for all the radio and TV stations and newspapers in Chicago.
At the entrance to the office was an old-fashioned switchboard: a console with cords that plugged into holes to make the connections. There were bulky industrial-looking contraptions, which I learned were the Teletypes used to transmit stories to the TV and radio stations as well as newspapers in the city. On the walls were the remains of pneumatic tubes that once had sent hard copies of stories whooshing under the streets to the newspapers.
The noise in the newsroom was raspy and percussive. Police and fire scanners crackled over the steady hum of all-news radio. The writers had to type through multiple-sheet carbon paper, which required a sharp snap of every key on stiff manual typewriters. The place felt as old-timey as a black-and-white movie from the 1940s.
I was assigned to shadow a more senior reporter for a week before working a shift from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m., every day except Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which would be my days off. City News never closed. Ever. The more senior people worked the day shift, and enjoyed regular weekends and holidays off. I was starting at the bottom, so I would work nights, weekends, and every holiday.
An editor introduced my trainer. Theo, she said, firmly taking my moist, limp hand in hers, Theo Stamos. I tried not to stare, but my young male brain registered only big eyes and high cheekbones. She ignored my awkwardness and was polite, if not all that enthusiastic, about training a new guy. Theo set me up with notebooks and pens, and introduced me around the office.
The reporting staff at City News was young, mostly right out of school. A few adults supervised the operation, but the place was powered by what cops and politicians called “City News kids.” Theo was senior to me but only by a matter of months.
The office desks were occupied during three shifts, but I was going to be working out of a police station. There was some discussion about where to send me because I did not have a car, so the editors decided I should stick to the relative safety of the North Side, where I had rented a threadbare studio apartment in an old building that smelled of pot roast. My mom was a little concerned about the late hours in the big city, but she was pleased I was working as a reporter like her parents, and mostly that I had a “real job.”
Soon I was a familiar face at the police area headquarters at the corner of West Belmont Avenue and North Western Avenue. The headquarters building included a police station, a holding cell, and offices for detectives. Nearby was a cozy tavern, painted with faux jail bars, called The Slammer. I didn’t drink much, and never while working, but the bar was a place to meet cops when they were more relaxed.
My job was to sit at a desk or on a bench in the lobby and wait for crimes. I monitored the scanners, grabbed the officers when they came in at the end of their shifts, and stood by hungrily for the reports they had to file whenever something happened. I took it for granted that the bigger the crime or the worse the tragedy, the better the story. Over time I was allowed to walk behind the counter and poke through the paperwork. I wasn’t one of the boys, more of a friendly pet, but they looked out for me and threw me the occasional bone.
Because I worked nights, I usually was the only reporter in the building, probably the only civilian who wasn’t locked up. The detectives were divided into offices for property crimes, gang crimes, and homicide. I spent my shift schmoozing them and calling other police stations and firehouses looking for a story, which was called a beat check. Sometimes editors in the office, collectively known as “the desk,” would call with a random and mostly unhelpful tip from the police scanner, such as “man being chased by woman with hammer” or “sirens in the Loop.”
My growing familiarity with cop ways kept me out of serious trouble one night when I was off duty. It was on the morning side of midnight when my childhood friend Matt and I left a new club called Neo and headed toward another bar.
“I gotta pee,” Matt said, and led us into an alley. When he had finished, we walked back down the darkened alley toward the lights of North Clark Street. A patrol car was waiting, the windows down.
One of the cops spoke to us from the car. “What were you guys doing in the alley?”
Matt, who was pretty wise to the city, was suddenly and uncharacteristically quiet. I, normally the silent partner on our late-night excursions, was talkative, if not especially courageous.
“Taking a shortcut?” I offered.
“First you peed in the alley, and then you lied about it,” the cop said. “Get in.”
Matt and I piled in the backseat behind the two cops.
You got any ID?
We handed over our driver’s licenses. The car was running, and I could hear the familiar police radio. I recognized the voices of different dispatchers, the codes and the jargon. We stayed parked by the curb. The cop at the wheel looked slowly at our licenses, until he turned to stare directly at our faces. Then he spoke. “You’ll spend the night in jail and see a judge in the morning.” Matt was frozen next to me.
“I wasn’t even peeing,” I whined. “He was peeing.”
The cop put the car into gear and started to pull out, heading north on Clark.
“Where are we going?” I asked. “The Belmont lockup?”
The officer stopped the car. He looke
d at me in the rearview mirror. “What do you do for a living?”
“I work for City News,” I said.
That got a dashboard-pounding laugh from both cops. Matt remained silent, probably thinking not about jail, which was scary enough, but about what his father, a strict disciplinarian who had been a prisoner of war during World War II, was going to do to us.
“I can see the headline now,” one of the cops said. “Promising Young Reporter Arrested for Peeing in an Alley.” They both laughed. The cop behind the wheel looked up at us again in the mirror. He tossed the licenses back onto the seat between Matt and me. “Get outta here, City News. And take your friend with you.”
The cops drove off. Freed from the patrol car and back on the street, we laughed hysterically, high from the relief of our narrow escape. Matt didn’t say anything about being betrayed, but I knew what I had done. And I was the one who had lied to the cops, not him. He was such a good friend that he didn’t blame me.
I had been raised to be respectful of police officers. Then in college, I began to see them, in theory anyway, as the armed force of a repressive state. This point of view, or bias, seemed absurd after a few months spending every day with real police officers. My opinions about law enforcement were still narrow, however, because I rarely talked to victims of crimes or the suspects. Most of what I learned about crime and justice came from the police. The cops were loyal to each other and didn’t let in strangers, except for the occasional City News kid like me.
Part of my regular beat check was to call the morgue. I was looking for any death out of the ordinary, something that might be a story. An eighty-five-year-old who died in the hospital of natural causes was probably not a story. At City News that was a “cheap” death and would be ignored, or “cheaped out.” Most deaths did not merit a story.
A gunshot victim, a young person, or any death classified as “unknown causes” was worth examining. I also was taught—not in a spoken way but still unmistakable—to think address. A death in an upscale neighborhood was unusual and therefore more newsworthy than a death in a poor neighborhood. A young black man shooting another young black man might be a story, but usually not a big one. An older white newspaper reporter made me cringe when he called those stories “Tyrone shot Willy.”
The older reporter and I were competitors, but one night we both were writing about the same gang of kids sent out to rob jewelry stores. The police told us that adult criminals had trained the children to steal because they could fit into tight spaces and would not get in much trouble if caught. I overheard the white-haired reporter ask a cop on the phone, “So, they are kind of like latter-day Fagins?” Then he chuckled and nodded and took more notes.
When the reporter hung up, I asked him about the reference to Fagin, whom I vaguely remembered as a Dickens character who trained child pickpockets. The reporter laughed and said, “The cop probably thought I said ‘faggots.’”
The older reporter’s story the next morning was filled with colorfully literary cops spinning clever bits from Oliver Twist. The desk yelled at me because my story had not a word of Dickens.
I called the morgue every two hours. The man who answered the phone at the coroner’s office had a slurred way of speaking as though he were blowing air out the side of his mouth. He would recite the names of the deceased, ages, addresses, the apparent causes of death, and the police stations and hospitals involved. His favorite joke was to challenge us with a good Chicago name. I could see him smiling over the phone when he would say: “Wojciechowski.” Pause. “Common spelling.” Laughter.
After a final call to the morgue, my shift ended at 2 a.m., a time when the bus ran only twice an hour. If I could leave the police station ten minutes early, I could catch the 1:50 a.m. bus and be home in thirty minutes. If not, I had to wait until 2:20 a.m. and not get home until almost 3 a.m. The editor on the desk, who wasn’t much older than I was, never let me leave my post ten minutes early. There was no discussion. He was the editor, and I was a reporter, the ranks and status as clear and rigid as in the army, a hospital, or the police stations I covered.
Standing alone at the bus stop after 2 a.m. one night, I tried to stare straight ahead to avoid eye contact with passing drivers. At that hour, the ratio of weirdos and predators to normal people was high. I felt a car approach and slow down. I looked up and saw it was an unmarked police car, dark and riding heavy on worn shocks.
The detective at the wheel rolled down the window and yelled, “Hey, City News! You can’t be standing out here in the middle of the night. Get in.”
I jumped in the back and told them where I lived. I was thrilled when the detective put a flashing light on the dashboard and raced me home through the dark streets, slowing barely but never stopping at the red lights.
When I reported to the office at the start of my evening shift, I was given an envelope stuffed with clippings from that day’s Chicago newspapers. Each story was a version of something I had covered the day before, cut and pasted into a long single-column strip topped with a label that read “Scoop Recovery.” The facts or sentences or entire paragraphs that had not been in my story were marked with a pen. That was where I had been scooped by the papers.
Shame and dread greeted the envelopes, depending on the thickness of the packet. I often reported on four or five stories a night, so there were going to be things I missed. We were being compared word-for-word to experienced reporters from the newspapers, and my envelope was never empty.
It wasn’t enough to be criticized for the missing information. We had to dig it out the next day, or “recover” it. So each shift began by revisiting the incomplete stories from the previous night. The challenge was to find a way to restart the same story, using “police continued to investigate,” or some other phrase to initiate the process again.
The good thing was that it made us thorough. The bad thing was, we tended to include everything and didn’t know what to omit. That was fine for a wire service that had unlimited space but a problem when we went to newspapers governed by the laws of finite space for stories—called news hole—among the ads.
The rookie reporters were free to ramble because we didn’t write complete stories but called in the facts to a rewrite, who shaped the story and typed it. Then more senior editors made corrections and improvements, marking the pages with a precise set of lines, arrows, notations, loops, and swirls, which I soon could read like a second language. The editors quickly passed the marked-up copy to the Teletype operators for transmission to the papers and TV and radio stations.
I filed so often that I became very fast. As I got better, I roughed out the stories in my notebook and dictated the finished product to the rewrite. After my first year, I could compose an entire story in my head without writing it down. When I walked out of a news conference, I would have the lede, or first sentence, in my mind. While I was dialing the office, I would mentally compose the second paragraph. By the time I got a rewrite, I had the third paragraph in my head. The rest of the story came easily. Soon I was dictating stories all the time, which eventually would prepare me for a job as rewrite.
I don’t remember how I learned to identify “the story” in the whirl of events, but I soon picked up the unique way of seeing things like a reporter, structuring the world into tight sentences, neat paragraphs, and complete stories. It came naturally to me, like learning a sport by playing it. Some cub reporters had trouble recognizing the lede of a story. An editor told us, “If you call your mom after something happens, that first thing you tell her about it, that’s the lede.” It was unclear why we spelled the word “lede” instead of “lead,” but that, too, was part of being in the club.
I moved up to the day shift and through a series of beats including transportation, the courts, and local government. Each time, I followed the person I was replacing on the beat for a few days until he or she moved to another beat and I took over. We learned by watching other reporters, imitating them, and then doing it on our own.
The one thing we were taught was to ask questions. If you didn’t ask you wouldn’t know, and if you didn’t know, you would be scooped, which was a powerful motivator. There was nothing worse than the sour look on Paul’s face when he handed over a particularly heavy envelope of scoop recoveries. “Pete,” he would say, exasperated at some failure of mine, “you’re one of my best guys . . .”
The more experienced editors and reporters in town regarded us as a farm team for the big leagues, or tipsters who might point the way to good stories. We regarded the older reporters as imposing, a little scary, and the true professionals we hoped to become. They were the competition and our teachers.
For example, when I was assigned to cover the county courthouse, City News had a desk in the pressroom. Within a few feet from me were the desks of the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and a couple of suburban papers, all publications I admired. I worried most when the desks were empty. What were the other reporters up to?
The Sun-Times reporter was Lynn Sweet, who stopped to chat with everybody in the courthouse, worked all the time, and beat me on stories every single day. At some point she took pity on the City News kid and offered to show me how to be better, but only after she had filed her own story.
Lynn didn’t care about competing with me, as long as she broke stories before the Tribune and her bosses knew she was first. On days when she got beat by the Tribune, she would be almost sick with anger and would immediately seek revenge and reassurance with a scoop of her own.