by Gary Taylor
Despite those potential problems, I still recall our household as a wholesome, comfortable, and nurturing place. Dale worked Monday through Saturday and barbecued on Sunday. I had a sister two years younger and then, later, another sister came along when I was fifteen, allowing Dale to repeatedly boast: "There's still some fire in the furnace." Neither of my parents drank alcohol. They took us to church every Sunday at the Overland Christian Church where Dale served as a deacon, elder or something like that. Although the name sounds a tad cultish, the Disciples of Christ was and is just a simple denominational Christian group differentiated only by its doctrine of accepting new members after they've made what they call the "good confession." In this ceremony, the convert merely confesses belief in Jesus Christ as lord and savior, and then the minister baptizes the convert by immersion. Historically the group began in the early 1800s as a frontier offshoot of Presbyterianism, its members rejecting the rituals of the larger church and adopting democracy as a governmental structure.
I made the good confession at the age of fourteen and joined the congregation before I had matured enough to deeply examine my true beliefs. Once I did a few years later, however, I realized I had no faith in God's existence and decided it would be pointless to pretend I did. After all, I reasoned, wouldn't God see through the hypocrisy of pretending to believe? So what would be the point? And if he couldn't, would he be much of a God? Someday I figured an epiphany might strike. Until then I decided to create a value system from common sense. Of course, my agnostic conversion occurred after my childhood, and I concede that youthful exposure to the Overland Christian Church served me well. I read the Christian Bible and enjoyed its stories, taking lessons from the mythology and admiring the literature.
As a kid I must have seemed a walking contradiction. To some I appeared as a shy introvert. The summer after fifth grade, for example, I read most of that 1948 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, A to Z. I also learned the game of chess from the girl who lived next door. From chess I learned the power of planning. From her I learned the traits I wanted to find in female companions: intelligence, wit, attractive looks, a forceful manner, and a hint of mystery. I nurtured a serious crush, and we became inseparable that summer, playing chess or learning to dance, unless I was out on one of my adventures.
That quest for adventure formed the other side to my childhood. I enjoyed disappearing on my bike to explore the neighborhoods. I played baseball and roamed at will in those days before helmet laws and child molestors. Even reading fed my imagination as I embraced the tales of historical figures like Daniel Boone. I dug rock and roll for the rebellion as much as the rhythm. And from television I learned appreciation for the antihero in literature as a fan of James Garner's Brett Maverick, the riverboat gambler who avoided fights but usually did the right thing at the end of each show.
In Life magazine I read the exploits of the twentieth century adventurer John Goddard, who had sat down at the age of fifteen and wrote a list of 127 goals he hoped to accomplish in his life. These included everything from climbing Mt. Everest to visiting the moon. By the time I read about him he had traveled the Nile in an historic expedition by kayak as he continued to work his way down the list.
While other ambitious youngsters focused on goals like getting rich or becoming president, I emerged from childhood hooked on adventure and determined to pick a career that offered action as well as a chance to deploy my language skills. I recognized the opportunities my household could provide. More than anything else I wanted to become an adult who was independent and self-sufficient. Journalism or the law loomed as my answer.
It was purely coincidental that I managed to attend one of the top three schools of journalism in the United States. As a state resident, I had bargain-rate tuition at the University of Missouri about 120 miles west in Columbia. Since I funded my education myself on earnings from the family lawnmower shop, it also was all I could afford. Fortunately, for aspiring journalists, it also was the best there was. So off I went in the fall of 1965 to Mizzou, hitching a ride with a buddy's big sister. I never looked back.
Mizzou's School of Journalism was very different from its reputed rivals on the highbrow campuses of Columbia and Northwestern. Some academics actually looked down their noses at old Mizzou. While students elsewhere spent their hours listening to lectures and pretending to cover make-believe events, Mizzou employed the trade school formula. Missouri J-school students actually worked for a commercial paper, called the Columbia Missourian. It supported itself by covering the governments and culture of central Missouri and selling advertising there. To get a three-hour credit in basic reporting, for example, a student would attend class on the city desk and might work the whole semester covering Columbia City Hall, the local police, or anything else found in a real daily newspaper. Instead of taking tests, the student just received a grade from the editors based on job performance.
And these editors were not your typical college professors. One of the best at Mizzou had never even graduated college himself. Tom Duffy had started working during high school in East St. Louis, Illinois, as a copy boy during the Great Depression. Marshalling his natural nose for news and a fascination for the written word, Duffy made his mark at the paper there, hammering away at local corruption and rising to an editor's job. Upon retirement he accepted a job running the city desk at Mizzou's Columbia Missourian with a title as associate professor. He was the kind of guy who would wad your incompetent copy into a ball and throw it at your face, an inspirational old style newsman from the real world.
Students could not enter J-school until their junior year, after consuming the usual diet of coursework required to prepare all of us for life: English, history, math, science, etc. You know the drill. Although I had expressed an early interest in communication with my Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer plays, I wasn't that clear about journalism until forced to submit my course plan for my third year. By then I was considering an eventual shot at law school after graduation and I saw journalism as a means to that end. After I covered my first murder case for the Missourian, however, it became something more. I was hooked on the rush of being at the center of the action.
Beyond the action and the fun of writing, however, I also began to develop the concept of a "higher authority" in journalism. It was Duffy who explained the principle of public service and I took it to heart. He warned us we couldn't really ever have friends among the sources we would cover. The time would come when we might have to expose anyone as a fraud or a thief. That was our duty. And it flowed not from the publisher who paid our salary or the politicians we might quote. Our duty was to serve as that independent monitor to provide our true superiors—the readers—with the facts to help them make their daily decisions. It sounded great, I thought. Not only can I have fun and get paid for asking rude questions, but I also would actually be doing something important.
Near the end of my senior year, I received a letter from the school inviting me to report in person to the Dean's secretary. When I arrived she told me I should plan on attending the 1969 awards assembly scheduled a month away. She said I would be receiving something called the Walter Williams Award.
"Huh?" I said. "Are you sure you have the right guy?"
She laughed but I was serious. She compared my student identification card with the name on her list and confirmed it. Honestly shaken, I visited the library and researched the award. It went annually to the J-school student who ranked as the "outstanding writer" there.
I already had a job offer before I won the Walter Williams Award. So I collected that accolade and then shipped off to Flint, Michigan, for a spot on The Flint Journal. It was summer of 1969, and all I had to fear was the Vietnam War. I figured I'd end up in a rice paddy anyway before I could establish myself as a reporter. I wanted to eventually cover a state legislature or the federal government for a newspaper, but I also felt war experiences could be character builders. Newspapers and war—wasn't that how Hemingway got his start?
The Flint Journal was the flagship of Michigan's Booth Newspapers chain. Outside of Detroit, Booth owned the state with a daily paper in every major city and no competition. Flint was a boom town in the early 1970s as home to Fisher Body, Buick, and other General Motors units. And it would serve as the first rung on my ladder of professional development.
EIGHT
Early 1970s
My romanticized notion of the classic American outlaw disintegrated on September 10, 1969, when I entered the real world of crime and punishment as the official observer at the Genesee County Courthouse for The Flint Journal. That was the day Judge Donald R. Freeman sentenced the city's two most notorious felons of all time for the murder of a Flint policeman during the January robbery of the El Toro Lounge and the related killing of an innocent bystander who lived in a home where they had sought refuge. A jury had convicted them some weeks before of capital murder. Because Michigan had no death penalty, however, that conviction included an automatic sentence of life in prison without parole rather than execution. So Freeman had no discretion on the fates of Norvel Simmons and John J. Moran as deputies ushered them suddenly into his courtroom a day earlier than their appointed date on a tip that the pair had a dramatic plan in the works to escape from Freeman's court. That rumor only added to the tension in the courtroom as the two killers stood before a judge with a penchant for verbal abuse and no option for leniency in the outcome.
Their saga offered another intriguing twist with the involvement of a woman named Constance Haines. The mother of eleven children, Haines had pleaded guilty to charges of helping them with the robbery and murder. She was scheduled for sentencing the following day, giving me my first look at an authentic bad girl.
Looking back, it's hard to understand my naiveté as I watched Simmons and Moran standing there in shackles and handcuffs. I'm glad they were white like me because that allowed me to experience my epiphany without any hint of racial prejudice. I'm not sure exactly what I had expected before entering that courtroom for my first look at authentic killers. Perhaps, in the back of my mind I had envisioned someone sad and defeated by life, someone who never had a break, forced into violence by circumstances beyond their control. If so, that picture vanished in a heartbeat when I looked into the eyes of Simmons and Moran. Not only did those eyes communicate a lack of concern about their situation, but they also burned with contempt and hatred for everyone in that room. They were shackled and still I felt threatened. My mind formed only one thought: I hope I never meet those guys on the street. Can society rehabilitate a rabid dog? All you can do is destroy it, or, in the case of Simmons and Moran, lock them away in a hole. And that is exactly what Freeman prescribed in his speech sending them to the state's highest security prison in Marquette on the Upper Peninsula.
"A judge can send you to prison but only the Almighty can send you to hell," thundered the judge, introducing me to what would become a weekly dose of Freemanisms delivered to whatever poor slobs appeared before him on his sentencing day. He enjoyed seating his sentencing targets in the jury box in progressing order of the prison times they would receive. On any occasion he might have half-a-dozen convicted felons awaiting their fates with those last in line realizing the sentences were growing harsher as the judge came closer to their seats on the bench. During the next two years, I repeatedly would hear Freeman tell felons things like, "I wish we had the death penalty in Michigan," or, "You are the lowest form of life"—comments that would constitute judicial abuse outlawed in later years. But Freeman drank his fill before higher courts took exception to such behavior. One time a felon cracked during a particularly aggressive lecture, pushed the court stenographer to the floor, and leaped onto the bench hoping to strangle his honor in his black robe. Deputies pulled him off and I had a great story. Of course, I couldn't write it until I stopped laughing.
Professionally, The Flint Journal proved the perfect stop for me straight out of school. The city was big and complicated enough to humble me into a rookie more willing to learn than dictate demands like a prima donna. And the veteran journalists working there provided plenty of education on asking the tough questions while developing a skeptical view of the world.
As the courts reporter for The Journal between 1969 and 1971, I presided over a colorful cast of characters who provided a thorough education on criminology and our legal system. Besides Freeman, the county bench included five other judges with their own eccentricities. The county prosecutor, Robert F. Leonard, was a firebrand in his own right with Democratic Party political ambitions well beyond that office at the time. Later on in the 1980s, he would be convicted himself for embezzling federal law enforcement grant funds. In the 1970s, however, he ranked as the ringmaster for action that ran the gamut from administrative battles with county government to his crusade for a special grand jury to investigate corruption in both county and city government—a crusade that bore fruit and made my time in Flint even more exciting with bribery indictments pending against Flint's mayor and the county's top elected officer by the time I left in 1971.
Besides the judges, the prosecutors, and the criminals, Flint's courthouse community also boasted an intriguing array of defense attorneys eager to teach me their points of view. In the process I learned to get along with all kinds of folks, even dangerous characters like Simmons or Moran. But I also learned to maintain a skeptical eye while listening to anyone's version of the truth, just taking notes and saying nothing in a state of absolute detachment. For me, they were a story. For them, I was their soapbox. Life as a reporter became just a never-ending parade of symbiotic relationships.
My typical workday began at the courthouse, where I would make rounds looking for news. I maintained a diary on the dockets and knew in advance about trial dates and such. I became a part of the infrastructure there, visiting the secretaries of each of the judges, chatting with Leonard, sitting through trials, or joking with the defense attorneys. I gathered research on two levels, one for that day's breaking news and another for enterprise or feature stories I might craft when time allowed. About three every afternoon I would gather my notes and walk the four blocks back to The Journal offices where I would hunker down at my desk and hammer out the stories of the day on my manual typewriter for the evening deadline. Sometimes, when an important story broke during the day, I would find a phone at the courthouse and call a rewrite reporter in the newsroom so he could combine my news from the scene with necessary background from our files to develop a finished product superior to what I might eventually deliver after waiting all day.
I didn't realize how much of a professional I had become until my father paid a visit the summer of 1971. He had always scoffed at my journalistic ambitions, viewing them as a self-indulgent crapshoot when compared with the hard work of real men who fix lawnmowers. Or, maybe he just felt jealous that I had chosen my own way in a world alien to him rather than accepting my legacy as heir to his lawnmower repair empire. At any rate, I didn't know what to expect when he tagged along on my beat, following me every step of the way as I moved through the back stairwells like an invisible ghost from courtroom to courtroom.
We attended a Donald R. Freeman sentencing session—always a treat for the uninitiated—and for once that judge was at a loss for words. Freeman invited his featured felon-of-the-day to beg for mercy before sentence was passed. We listened intently as the prisoner sought leniency because the night before, in his cell, he recounted: "An angel of the Lord appeared and said, 'Tyrone, straighten yourself up.'" Freeman closed his eyes, shook his head and simply replied: "Sixty years." Before the judge left the bench, I grabbed my dad and escorted him into the hallway, around a corner, and through a side door where we emerged into Freeman's private chambers, employing a maneuver I repeated almost every day without even thinking about it. My dad was even more surprised when Freeman joined us without a word, as if we were part of his furniture.
While we sat and talked with the judge, I watched my dad's expression and actually felt satisfaction
beaming as he realized I had become my own man. In later years, as a father myself, I've often thought that must have been a great moment for him to actually live a day in the life of his grown child. It's something I'd like to do with my own daughters. A bring-your-dad-to-work-day might give all dads a chance to start seeing their offspring as people, rather than the kids they only recall.
When I began my tenure in Flint I had expected to be there only a short time while waiting for my draft date. But a funny thing happened on the way to Vietnam. Richard Nixon instituted a draft lottery, and just days after passing a pre-induction physical exam in Detroit my birth date came up roses at number 343. Essentially that meant I would not be drafted unless the Viet Cong managed to mount an invasion of California. Suddenly, the whole world opened wide. I no longer had to plan my life around a two-year hitch in the Army. So I reviewed my options. Although I loved my job, I focused on a reality of my existence. Michigan's winters are cold, dark, and long. And my professional ambitions went beyond The Flint Journal. So I sent letters to the editors of every newspaper in the Sun Belt. The Houston Post was the first to call.