I had done one other job interview, in Seattle. I sent the paper my resume, barely a page long, even in a large font, and a packet of clips. I flew there on my own and stayed with my college roommate to save money. The editor was serious, unsmiling, and much older than I was. Everybody at the paper was older than I was. He invited me to sit, and I noticed my resume and clips on his desk. (Every reporter learns to read material on a desk, even when the words are upside down.) We chatted for a few minutes, and then he floored me: “What is the worst mistake you’ve ever made?”
Wait a second. Mistake? I didn’t think we were supposed to talk about mistakes. Weren’t they to be buried, pushed down so they never would surface or repeat themselves? Did he mean in my personal life? A lot of mistakes there. Is that what he meant? No, I thought, he must mean a professional mistake. But my career was limited to two years at City News, and we weren’t allowed to make mistakes. The whole thing was about not making mistakes.
“Well,” I said, trying to buy time. My mind was racing. What was an error that was bad enough to mention but not so bad as to be disqualifying? I needed something between journalistic jaywalking and a felony. What’s a mistake I learned from, that made me better? Come on, think. “Well,” I said again.
Then I thought of something. “I got a call one night from the mayor and her husband. She wanted to kick the Tribune out of the pressroom at City Hall.” That got his attention. He looked up from the papers on his desk.
“I should have assumed they were drinking; it was late,” I said, encouraged to see he was listening intently. “I could hear them egging each other on. The whole thing was strange.”
So what was your mistake? he asked.
“I guess I should have been more careful writing it,” I said, not sure exactly what my mistake had been, but still burning from the mayor’s denial of my story and my shame at having to reproduce my notes. I explained that the mayor cleverly got to have it both ways: she used me to put the Trib on notice, and the next day she was able to appear magnanimous in her denial of the story.
He picked up a sheet of paper on his desk and waved it at me. “If that story was a mistake, why did you include it in the clips you sent me?”
Bad. Floored again, just when I thought I had pulled myself up off the rug. “Well. I, uh, learned from that experience that you have to be careful with the writing even when you have all the facts. . . .” I went on for a few agonizing minutes. He just looked at me. There was no way I was going to work in Seattle.
I called Tim at the Herald-Post and asked if I could visit. He was enthusiastic. There’s somebody here I want you to meet, he said, a photographer we just hired. I think you guys will get along. I tried to get a couple of weekdays off, but I was denied. I called Tim back, apologized, and asked if I could come on a weekend. No problem, he said, they worked all the time.
I flew for hours to get to El Paso. From the air, I saw flat, dry ground. There were mountains, which was a surprise. A few earth-toned buildings were clustered together, about the size of a shopping mall at home. Downtown El Paso, I guessed. The only water was a muddy canal encased in concrete. Later they told me that was the mighty Rio Grande. It was late Saturday afternoon before I arrived at the newspaper.
Tim, the city editor, was eager and smiling, pulling me into the newsroom. He was about my age, twenty-four, but he seemed old, like forty, meaning mature and competent. He joked with everybody on the staff, but he clearly was the boss. People followed him because they wanted to, not only because they had to.
Tim walked me around the newsroom and stopped at a cubicle piled with camera gear. A silent young man with a cool mustache looked up at us, making his eyes wide, the only sign he had noticed me.
This is the guy I told you about, Tim said, introducing John Hopper. Tim left us alone for a minute.
I told John I had heard all about him and looked forward to knowing him better. Apparently I was a little too eager, or people didn’t talk that way out west (even if John was from Indiana), because he looked at me like I had proposed a kiss on the mouth.
The instinctual rejection of a newsroom outsider was familiar because it was the same reception I had received on my first day at City News.
Awkward conversation over, I was led into the office of Tim’s boss, editor Harry Moskos. Both Tim and Harry had worked at the paper in Albuquerque and had been transferred to El Paso by the parent company of both papers, Scripps Howard. The company was one of the largest American newspaper groups, the owner of United Press International, a large news bureau in Washington, DC, local television and radio stations around the country, and many nationally known columns and cartoons, including Peanuts and Garfield.
Harry had big ambitions for the paper, even though his resources were small. He bounced up and down in his chair, laughed out loud at his own jokes, and gushed about all the great people he was recruiting, hinting that maybe I would be one of them. Let’s go to dinner, he said, and he jumped up from his desk and headed out the door. I stumbled to keep up.
As we got into the car, Harry extolled the virtues of the town, the people, and especially his staff. I nodded and smiled. He drove us through the streets of downtown El Paso, where traffic was light, and pointed out the landmarks, such as they were. A few people were shopping in little stores that had signs in English and Spanish. The only thing big was the sky.
I was on my best behavior. I liked Harry’s enthusiasm, and I already had fallen in love with Tim. The town seemed kind of slow, however, and the paper wasn’t much. I had never seen a copy before arriving that day, and it felt thin in my hands, an unfamiliar typeface on newsprint so cheap it appeared gray.
Then Harry announced: “Well, you’re in Mexico now.”
I looked around, startled. I had been focused on Harry’s chatter and wasn’t paying attention to where we were going. I looked out the window and saw the streets suddenly were busy with people shopping, strolling, and eating at food carts, including one serving corncobs slathered with cream and powdered chili. Kids were hawking full-color newspapers in Spanish and selling Chiclets in tiny packs. I turned in my seat and locked eyes with an exotic woman wearing a tight blouse stretched over a push-up bra, high heels and leopard pants painted onto long, curvy legs.
I don’t remember talking during dinner about pay or what my job would be, or any of the details of getting from Chicago to El Paso. I knew I was going to work there, however, and if I could have started that night, I would have. Most of the papers I had applied to were not interested in me. I sure wasn’t going to be hired in Seattle. Driving back across the international bridge between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, I took in everything. Harry made me feel I would be part of something exciting and meaningful, but the border is what closed the deal. This was a place where you could eat dinner in another country.
Back home in Chicago, just before Christmas, I had second thoughts. El Paso was so far away. What if I never made it back home? There were people who lived in El Paso their entire lives. If my goal was to work at the Tribune, maybe I shouldn’t take such an extreme detour. What if the Trib forgot about me? I knew Chicago and the issues. I had covered all the beats at City News and even had supervised a few reporters when I was on the desk. The transition to the Trib would be seamless. I was ready for the Trib, and I was sure the Trib needed me.
I snuck out of the pressroom to a pay phone in City Hall. This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have in a roomful of professional busybodies. I called the Tribune editor who had interviewed me.
The editor was surprised to hear from me again so soon. You still need to go to a small paper, he said, and then we’ll talk.
I did have an offer, I said, raising the ante. I told him about El Paso and how much they wanted me. If he didn’t pick me up now, I subtly warned, he might lose me forever.
The editor laughed gently at my persistence, and he sounded genuinely happy I had a good job offer. Saying good-bye, he said encouragingly, “It sounds like Santa came e
arly.”
3
THE BORDER
——— ON HONESTY ABOVE ALL ———
I bought a used Datsun station wagon and packed my few belongings for the drive to El Paso in early 1982. I said good-bye to my mom, her husband, and my four brothers. My family was proud of me, although disappointed I would be so far away. I promised that within two years I would be moving back to Chicago to work at the Tribune. The editors at City News were happy for me. A new crop of cub reporters had been hired, and I didn’t even know their names.
For the first day of work in El Paso, I got up early in my new apartment and used a city map to plot the route to the office. I remembered little from my earlier visit; I had been so tense I hadn’t paid attention to directions. I wrote the street names on a piece of paper, put it on the passenger seat, and headed for downtown. My hands were sweaty on the wheel, even though the desert morning was cool. Had I made the right decision? What was I doing here? I turned on the radio and skipped through the many Spanish stations to find rock. I looked down again at the directions.
Damn, I missed the turn. I glanced in the rearview mirror, signaled, and cut across two lanes onto the next street. A siren whooped, and in the mirror I saw flashing red lights close on my tail. Great. I pulled over, took a breath, and rolled down the window.
The police officer came to my side of the car and bent down to look inside. “Do you know why I pulled you over?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I changed lanes in the middle of an intersection.”
He nodded, looking at my license.
He was just a cop. Even though I was in a strange land, he had a familiar uniform, a gun, and a car with flashing lights. I knew all about cops. “I’m kind of nervous,” I said. “It’s my first day at work. I’m a reporter at the Herald-Post.”
He looked at me again and handed back my license. “Be more careful next time.”
“Hey, officer,” I called out as he walked to his car. “Got any news tips?” He just laughed. I should have gotten his name.
For the first time in my career, I had a desk all to myself. When I worked rewrite at City News, I had a desk for one-third of the day, but other people sat there during the next two shifts. I also got my first computer, which actually was a clunky terminal connected to a room-sized mainframe computer somewhere in the building.
The work tools I supplied were a notebook, a pen, and a tape recorder. In the old days, you had to turn in a worn copy pencil to get a new one. The El Paso Herald-Post wasn’t known for spoiling its employees, but on my first day I was feeling pretty flush.
I rode into El Paso on a big reputation, most of it unearned. First, I was from Chicago, a tough city with a no-nonsense reputation. In fact, I had grown up in northern Wisconsin and the gentle suburbs of Chicago’s North Shore, but that distinction grew weaker the farther you got from Illinois. Second, City News had a fearsome image as a boot camp where real journalists were made. I had success at City News, but two years of chasing stories did not make me a seasoned professional.
I was fast and I was accurate, but most of what I had covered were things that had happened: fires, crimes, press conferences, government meetings. “Cover” was the right verb. At City News we tried to record what happened because that was what the clients wanted. There was less emphasis on, and little time for, breaking a story or investigating something.
The Herald-Post was different. The paper appeared in the afternoons, following the morning paper, the El Paso Times. As editor, Harry explained he had the challenge of making our paper different from the morning paper to attract new readers. The Times was the bigger paper of record; the Herald-Post had to be feistier and more creative. The veteran reporters at the paper were solid and knew the community. Harry was bringing in fresh blood like me to shake things up.
My job was to be an investigative reporter, an exotic species found mostly at bigger papers. Even Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were local news reporters for the Washington Post before the Watergate story made them famous, when I was still in high school. Like most young reporters, I liked the sound of the job title. Investigative reporters were an elite force who weren’t going to wait for something to happen, they were going to make things happen. They didn’t cover news, they made news. What nobody told me was that the job required a killer instinct, tenacity, a passion for conflict, the judgment that came from experience, and a constitution that could stomach fear, hatred, threats, reprisals, self-doubt, and resentment. Of all those traits, I probably had tenacity, or at least thoroughness.
I worked with Harry and Tim to come up with story ideas, which really were targets. My editors were far more experienced journalists, but they also were newcomers to El Paso. The advantage of being recent arrivals was that we saw things through fresh eyes. The downside was that our understanding of the community was incomplete, and what we saw as novel or even shocking was regarded by regular readers as just another day along the border.
One of my first targets was the local art museum, where the editors had heard grumbling about the management. My initial guide was the paper’s veteran culture reporter, Betty Ligon, who introduced me around town as if I were her own son. Betty covered the art museum, and while other reporters might have resented a newcomer poaching on their beat, Betty launched me at the museum like a guided missile. The one advantage I gave Betty was that she wouldn’t burn her own sources there.
I met secretly with people who knew about museum operations. They complained about the artistic focus of the museum and how money was spent. Part of it was personal, and some of the staff simply didn’t like the director. They didn’t allege any criminal activity, just mismanagement. More accurately, the museum wasn’t being run the way they would run it. For example, the critics would have focused on Mexican or Chicano art rather than on European classics. Fair enough, but that was a question of taste and artistic direction, not of being incompetent or squandering money. I spent weeks trying to define a story that might be interesting to readers—not just museum patrons—from the mishmash of allegations and complaints.
With the museum project, I began to develop a technique for working investigative stories. I started with a tip or a hunch, just a hypothesis, and tested it with reporting. The information I collected from investigating helped refine the theory until it became a theme for a story supported by the facts.
This was a journalistic version of the scientific method, where a hypothesis was tested with experiments. Like in a lab, it was easier to disprove a theory than to prove one. In other words, it was easier to knock down a story idea as false than to develop one as true. Unfortunately for me, my juiciest tips were better than the final, verified stories. That’s why reporters joked that some tips were “too good to check out.”
I taught myself about museum management by talking to people in the art world, including at similar museums in other cities. I had a short time to become an expert on a new topic, just as when I had learned about cops and city government in Chicago. The stakes seemed higher now because the paper carried a lot of weight in a small town. The other reporters and I would regularly bump into the people we covered, which helped keep us honest and careful with the facts.
I tried to focus the story on spending rather than artistic merit because money was more quantifiable than taste. I had been taught at City News to write from the point of view of people receiving a service, rather than those providing a service, especially when tax money was involved.
The first installment of my series ran on the front page. I was happy to see my byline, but mostly I was relieved the project was finished. I hadn’t found a smoking gun, or even a stolen painting, but I managed to stir up the little community that supported the art museum. Most people in El Paso had never visited the museum and probably didn’t care. I did send my parents a copy of the story, which they saved with my other clips.
Just before the story ran, somebody doing layout asked me what name to use for my byline in the paper. I alwa
ys had gone by Pete as a kid, and that’s what my family called me, but “Peter” seemed more appropriate for a real newspaper. And in one snap decision, I became Peter to most people for the rest of my life.
My editors seemed happy enough with my stories, but I wanted something with an edge. I worried I merely was explaining things rather than exposing them. I couldn’t sit around any longer and wait for assignments. I needed to be bold and find my own stories. I wanted to kill something and drag its bloody carcass back to the office. I asked everybody I knew for tips and ideas, but it was hard to find something when I didn’t know what I was looking for.
One of my regular sources was a prominent Mexican American judge. I met him covering a trial, and he trusted me, so some evenings after work I would visit him in his chambers. A lot of what he told me had nothing to do with his cases or even the courthouse, but he knew how the town was run. I learned to just let him talk, and to listen deeply. A good interviewer is alert but still. I never quoted the judge by name. Nor did I publish anything I didn’t verify, but he never had steered me wrong.
Something was bothering the judge. He had noticed that many of the adoptions going through the court were arranged by one woman. The number of these cases was suspicious, he said, and he was angry. It looked like this despicable woman was setting up adoptions for a fee, or “selling” Mexican babies, often to non-Mexican families, known locally as “Anglos.” I pulled out my notebook to get the details.
The next morning I searched the “morgue,” which is what we called a room with metal cabinets packed with decades of newspaper clips filed by name and topic, but I couldn’t find anything on the mystery woman. She had a common Mexican last name; it probably filled a page in the phone book. I started at the top and worked my way down, calling every number. I needed to find the person with the right name, but also a person who was involved with adoptions. Finally, I got a hit.
Finding the News Page 5