Sometimes Lynn would nod discreetly for me to follow her into the hall outside the pressroom. Then I was allowed to run along behind her while she chased down a judge or a clerk for information. I took notes during the interviews, but I was not permitted to file my story until one second after Lynn’s story was in print. The arrangement worked for me.
After Lynn filed an exclusive story, we would wait anxiously until the next edition of the Sun-Times. Then I was free to file my version of the story. Minutes after Lynn’s story hit the streets, the Tribune guy at the courthouse, an experienced, hard-working reporter with deep sources, would get a call from his editors saying he had been scooped by Lynn. We watched him bang down the phone. Then he would glare at Lynn with dark eyes, and begin to plot his revenge.
Lynn would just wink at me, but she barely could contain her delight.
The back-and-forth, the keeping score, pulled me into the game. I got a scoop or two of my own, but my exclusive stories lasted only a short time because they went on the wire and were shared instantly in all the competing newsrooms around the city. The best moment came when, shortly after I quietly filed a good story, the phones in the pressroom would start to ring, and the more seasoned reporters at the papers and the radio and TV stations would acknowledge a scoop by me, which they had been ordered to chase.
Most of the time, however, I was chasing them.
2
CITY HALL
——— ON GETTING IT RIGHT ———
Chicago’s top beat was City Hall. Formidable pros, including radio reporter Fran Spielman and the Tribune’s young political ace, David Axelrod, were regulars. When I walked into the City Hall pressroom for the first time, it was like walking into the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. But not as a major league player. More like a fan who had tumbled out of the stands. I sat down at the City News desk, and kept my mouth shut and my eyes open.
One of the aldermen we covered—a powerful, elected member of the City Council—came by the pressroom to complain about that morning’s commute to City Hall. He told us he had just about run over a bicyclist because the kid had some kind of headset covering his ears and couldn’t hear the car honking. Can you believe that? Listening to music or something crazy on a bike!
This was unusual at a time when music was played inside cars and living rooms, but not on bikes.
You should make that illegal, one of the reporters suggested, mostly joking.
It’s dangerous, the alderman agreed, getting more upset. People are going around listening to music instead of watching where they are going!
There oughta be a law, someone chimed in.
You’re right, the alderman declared.
Pretty soon a reporter put a piece of paper into the typewriter and hit the keys: “Whereas . . .”
In a few minutes, the alderman had a proposal to ban listening to music while operating a bike. We filed our stories about the headphone ban and had a good laugh in the pressroom—on some days it felt like the best clubhouse ever—and then we returned to trying to scoop each other with an exclusive story nobody else had.
The mayor was Jane Byrne, elected in 1979 as an efficient alternative to the previous mayor, who had unforgivably failed to get the city running after a snowstorm. She was tough, as she had to be as the first woman to run the city. She was married to a reporter on leave from the Chicago Sun-Times, Jay McMullen, who bragged about being able to scoop the Tribune by rolling over in the morning. Not very classy, but it reflected the spirit of competition between the Tribune and Sun-Times, then the last-standing giants among the dozens of great Chicago newspapers that had battled to their deaths.
The Sun-Times reporter assigned to City Hall was Harry Golden Jr. Harry’s desk touched mine, and I learned a lot just being near him. Harry was small and tough as a welterweight, with a tan, lined face like a hawk and perfectly done hair. He always dressed smartly Chicago-style, which meant a suit with wide lapels, a tightly knotted necktie, and shined shoes. His sharp, raspy voice cut through any other conversation in the room.
Harry’s phone rang, and he picked up right away. I always monitored Harry’s calls. He had covered City Hall for years, had sources in every city department, and was considered the dean of the press corps. People called with tips, and Harry would hunch over to cover the phone to protect his sources from people like me. This time he was listening instead of talking, nodding his head as if in agreement, then shaking it in silent protest.
Someone on the other end was yelling nonstop. Then Harry spoke: “No I’m not trying to ruin the city. No, I love the city, too.” I pretended to be looking out the window, wondering who was powerful enough to chew him out and keep him on the line. “Yes, I do love the city, just like you do,” Harry repeated, exasperated. “Yes, I do, Madame Mayor.”
The mayor and her press-secretary husband followed news stories closely, and they objected to many of them. They also were very good at Chicago politics, something I was about to learn the hard way.
I was working in the office one night when the phone rang. The mayor’s husband was calling. I recognized his voice; everybody in the city knew him. I tucked the phone between my shoulder and my ear and rolled a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter. By then I could type faster than I could write longhand, and my notes were easier to read. How are you tonight, Jay?
He was mad, frothing. I could hear the mayor in the background, equally outraged and egging him on. They often were angry, and this night the target of their wrath was the Tribune, for yet another story criticizing the mayor’s administration.
They were sick of the paper’s unfair attacks on the mayor, and they had decided the Tribune should no longer be allowed to use a desk in the City Hall pressroom, which was property of the city. Nor were they going to allow city officials to talk to the Trib or provide city records. No more cooperation with the Tribune, McMullen told me several times. None.
I typed as fast as I could and tried to ask questions, but they kept complaining about the Tribune and making threats. We had a little back-and-forth, but mostly it was them ranting. Then they hung up.
I wrote the story and handed the pages to the night editor. He made a few changes and gave a copy to the guy operating the Teletype. In minutes, the story was fed to all the newspapers, TV stations, and radio stations in the city. It was late but still in time for the final deadlines of the morning papers. I had a nice little scoop, all to myself.
I had no idea what a mess the story would cause.
On Monday morning every news outlet in town sent someone to City Hall to see if the Tribune’s reporter would defy the mayor and be at his desk. Bob Davis did show up, wearing a tie for the cameras, and declared he would not be moved. The Tribune ran the eviction story above the fold on page one—self-righteously treating their reporter like the Rosa Parks of the pressroom—and ran an angry editorial denouncing the mayor for restricting the paper’s virtuous and constitutionally protected coverage of City Hall.
At a press conference, the mayor’s husband pulled back a little. “We ordered the Tribune to vacate rent-free space in the pressroom,” he admitted, but nobody was told not to cooperate with the Tribune. “I don’t know where you got that idea.”
From me, I thought, with a knot in my stomach.
The following day the Tribune headline—over a photo of a defiant Bob Davis at his desk surrounded by reporters—read, “Byrne backs down, Tribune stays.”
I was called into the office early because the Trib had questions about my original story, which the mayor now was disputing. The paper wanted the complete transcript of the call. I had not recorded the conversation, but I had my notes. We sent the transcript to our clients, and it ran in the paper the next day. The Trib didn’t dispute my version of what had happened, but now the mayor had decided to let the Tribune reporter stay. She claimed she never tried to limit the paper’s access to official information, and that part of the story was typical media exaggeration and lies.
I
went over my notes again and again. I was sure I had reported accurately what the mayor and her husband told me. I could still hear their angry voices in my head. But now the mayor had a whole new, more reasonable version of our conversation. She delivered her threat to the Tribune, and then dodged the criticism by blaming me for an inaccurate story. After a few days, the mayor moved on triumphantly, as if the whole thing had never happened.
I felt confused and humiliated. No one had ever lied to me like that or challenged my integrity, least of all a respected public official. Nor did I feel comfortable being part of the story instead of the one writing the story. The tussle with the mayor cost me a little of my rookie self-confidence, and it would not be the last I would hear about the incident. At the time, all I could do was sit there in stinging pain, hit for the first time by a major league fastball.
Working in the office usually was not as exciting as being on the street, but I enjoyed the company of other reporters. For most of our shifts we were on the phone or banging out stories, but just underneath the workflow, there was a steady chorus of banter and teasing, a contact sport for word lovers.
I was friendly with the support staff, and on slow days I tried to learn their jobs, too. I loved the antique switchboard, and Leo the operator was delighted to show me how it worked. I sat there happily plugging in the lines and connecting calls, while Leo, his feet up, read a thick novel.
The guys who operated the Teletype machines—all of them were men—included African Americans and Latinos, while the reporting and editing staff was mostly white. The operators were surprised but tolerant of my interest in learning to work the industrial-sized machines.
The Teletype keyboard was unexpectedly quick because it was electric. Each keystroke punched holes into a ribbon of paper, similar to ticker tape. Then the tape was run through the teleprinter to transmit the pattern of holes across town to machines receiving our stories, where the holes were translated back into words, IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Pretty soon I could “read” the holes on the tape that spelled out words and entire stories. It was a little like reading braille.
Operating the switchboard and Teletype were great skills to have, until somebody got sick. If Leo didn’t come in, I had to run the switchboard. I wasn’t fast enough to do a full shift on the Teletype machine, but I could operate it in an emergency. I even remember going “live” on a breaking story, which meant typing a message directly to the receiving newsrooms without first cutting a tape. That was risky because there was no way to call back the words once they were typed.
I also took a turn on the broadcast desk, where we rewrote the newspaper stories for TV and radio. The trick was to boil down the essence of the story and write it for the ear rather than the eye. For example, a standard newspaper story had all the facts loaded into the top and included less important things as it continued. That way the story could be trimmed from the bottom if it didn’t fit the allotted space in the paper. Writing for radio, you had to catch the listener’s ear before delivering the big news. So instead of writing “John Smith was killed Thursday,” you wrote, “A South Side man was killed Thursday.” Gets their attention. Then, “John Smith was shot twice by a robber.”
Our most important reporting tool was the telephone. We didn’t have time, or the means, to cover every story in person, so we worked the phones fast and hard. Sometimes this had awful results.
I was told to look into the death of a male child, cause unknown. The death could have been from an accident, an illness, or a homicide. Maybe the family was newsworthy. I called the police station near the family home, but they hadn’t heard about a boy who had died. I called the hospital where the child had been pronounced dead. I asked for the nursing supervisor, identified myself as City News, and sweet-talked her for details. The nurse working that shift had left for the day, I was told, and nobody else knew anything.
The last resort was dreaded by all of us, but I knew what I had to do: call the family. I looked up the number and dialed. A man answered and I identified myself. Yes, the man said, he knew about the dead boy. The man was the father. I started to ask questions, and the father broke down crying. The boy had been sick and died suddenly. He was so young.
I apologized and felt my throat tighten while the man told me about his little son. Big tears plopped onto the desk in front of me, and I tried to hide my face from the newsroom.
I’m sorry, I said. I’m so sorry.
I hung up and told the desk there was no story.
The editor pushed back for details.
No story, I said. Cheap it out.
Those family calls were made on every shift, and the editors forced us to dig for telling details, no matter how painful. One such story I was told about a call, which I absolutely believed was true, concerned a child who died one Christmas morning. The parents told the reporter their toddler was playing under the tree, surrounded by presents, when he accidentally swallowed an ornament. Before help could arrive, the child choked and died in their arms.
The reporter clearly was upset by the call with the family, but he turned in his story to the desk.
The editor, hunched over the copy with a pen, yelled out, “What color was the ornament?”
The reporter didn’t know.
“Call them back!”
Along with the telephone, reporters relied on the big, heavy Chicago telephone book. We were required to look up the name of every person mentioned in a story to confirm the spelling and middle initial. Most people didn’t use middle initials, so you had to remember to ask. We also had to include their ages. Neither detail mattered that much, but this was how we were taught to get the facts and confirm them. If we couldn’t get the little things right, we were going to miss the big things.
The valuable companion to the telephone book was a directory called the Criss Cross, which was organized by address and phone number instead of by name. So if you heard over the scanner about a fire on West 63rd Street, you could look up the nearby residents. Even at 2 a.m., the call usually was, “Hello, can you tell me if there is a fire across the street?” Perfectly normal at City News.
The emphasis always was on getting the story quickly and getting it right. Storytelling or fancy writing didn’t matter as much as getting the basic facts correct. We were taught to ask and then to confirm. Never assume, guess, surmise or ever, ever predict the future. It was hard enough to describe something that had happened, let alone speculate on what might or could happen next. Even things you were certain about had to be verified. “If your mother says she loves you,” went the unofficial City News motto, “check it out.”
After nearly two years of reporting and editing, I felt I had learned everything I could from City News, and I was ready to move up. Most people left City News for small papers in the provinces, maybe Flint, Michigan, or if they were exceptionally good, Milwaukee.
A Trib reporter who had worked at a paper in New Mexico told us that editors out west would appreciate a reporter trained by City News. He made a call, and two of my City News friends went to Albuquerque for newspaper jobs. Once they had proved themselves, they called back to City News—they might as well have been on the dark side of the moon—to say the paper was scrappy and the region was fascinating. I was happy for them, but I was staying in Chicago and headed to the Trib as part of my original plan. I didn’t need to go to a small paper; City News was training enough for me.
I called the editor who had first interviewed me at the Tribune. He was not available. After several tries, I managed to get him on the phone. Another thing I had learned at City News was to keep calling. Just because somebody didn’t call you back on the first try, or the fifth, didn’t mean they wouldn’t talk to you. The editor finally picked up and was kind if not encouraging, the way you might be with a kid hanging around the fire station who dreamed of becoming a firefighter. Go to a small paper first, he advised, and then call me. I was disappointed he didn’t understand the plan, but I was stuck.
I star
ted writing to some of the 1,700 daily newspapers around the country. I made copies of my better stories and sent them off with letters asking for a reporting position. The help-wanted ads in a weekly magazine called Editor & Publisher were the main source of job information, although reading the magazine in the office was best done discreetly, so no editor would think you were trying to leave.
Fortunately, my former City News friends working out west had put in a good word for me. This I learned when my phone rang with an unexpected call: some guy named Tim Gallagher from a paper called the El Paso Herald-Post. Tim said he had hired my City News friends for the Albuquerque paper. Now Tim was staffing up a sister paper in El Paso, and would I be interested?
Interested, yes, but not very informed. While we talked, I pulled out the atlas, one of the many reference books on my desk. I opened the tall book and listened while Tim told me about his plans for the paper. I found Texas and searched the map of the big state, up and down. There was Dallas. There was Fort Worth. I couldn’t find El Paso. I was pretty sure it was in Texas. Tim mentioned something about the border. I dragged my finger along the line between Mexico and the United States, and there, way out at the end of the page, I found it: El Paso.
Two years at City News had raised my level of skepticism from near zero to maybe 20 percent. Less when it came to my own situation. Of course this guy wanted to hire me. I hustled and I could write. He had talked with people who had worked with me, so I was “sent” by somebody. On the other hand, I had been applying to papers I wouldn’t even read, and they were rejecting me. Many of them never responded to my letters and calls. Here was a paper I had never heard of, in a town I couldn’t find on a map. And they were offering a job without ever meeting me. How desperate could they be?
I hung up and announced the job offer to everybody in the City Hall pressroom. Somebody sang the Marty Robbins country classic about falling in love with a Mexican girl out in El Paso. They started calling me “Pedro” and wondered why I wasn’t packing up my stuff and heading to the border. I wasn’t sure. It seemed so far away. And I had never heard of this paper. Go check it out, the other reporters said. Make them have you in for an interview. Not one of them said it was a bad offer.
Finding the News Page 4