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PORTRAIT of the JOURNALIST AS A YOUNG RUBE
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As a reporter, the kid was
a fizzle of epic proportions
By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
The only reason I made
it as a newspaper guy in New York is that I was lucky to have
been rescued from hard news reporting early or I might have wound
up writing copy for J.C. Penney in advertising, my original misguided
undergraduate goal.
My dirty little secret is that I’ve never felt at home in a city room--the place most non-journalists would call "the news room"--much as I love newspapers, newspaper people and the newspaper life. In various brief hitches in city rooms, I have felt like both orphan and embarrassment--from my first four-week teenage internship at the Oakland Tribune in junior college, where it took me a dozen drafts to write a two-paragraph car accident amid the clatter of rewrite men like Paul Lewis.
Lewis, who sat alongside me, hair falling in his eyes, banged away in a fury at his typewriter before ripping the copy from the roller, tearing and folding the top left corner into a sort of paper clip and, holding it aloft, giving a triumphal cry of “Boyyyy!” If a copy boy failed to materialize and snatch it from his hand, he would bellow, “Copyyy!”
Even decades later, as a syndicated columnist at the New York Daily News, I felt out of place in the city room and, on my way to lunch, just loved to watch the noisy bustle from a safe perimeter, a happy tourist in my own office, far from the madding newsroom ruckus.
Much as I wanted to prove my mettle and show that I had the right stuff, I had an ear for writing but no nose for news. My basic problem is that I never cared about the news--covering it, that is--and thus never thought like those possessed by a passion for fact-gathering for its own sake, on frantic deadline.
The very idea of a deadline made me crazy; what was the big hurry? Much as I was hugely impressed with anyone who had that gift and zeal, rushing a story into print, stuffed with facts, never seemed interesting. Getting facts was crucial, sure, but how the story was told, in what attitude and language, was far more fun, the real challenge for me.
As a 19-year-old Saturday intern at The Tribune, I was far too cowed to call out “Boyyy!” (being one myself). I would tiptoe up to the city editor’s desk and slip my stories into his basket when he wasn’t looking. The Tribune's city editor, Fred "Monty" Monteagle, wore a bristly mustache, rimless spectacles and resembled a World War I general. Once he saw me doing that and grabbed the copy and, after glancing at it, pounded it into publishable shape with a few slashing moves of a black copy pencil.
Monty never saw my trash basket piled high with endless earlier, even more hopeless, crumpled drafts. Meanwhile, reporters around me were barking into phones, shouting glib banter and producing long, complex stories to my few pitiful paragraphs.
And I never got much better--from a ruinous later summer internship at the Oakland Tribune’s Berkeley bureau in 1960, to a summer in the San Francisco Chronicle city room after I’d fled New York in `66, to the farcical three months at the New York Post described in earlier sections. I’ve forever been out of my depth as a news reporter, often in nightmarish ways, recalling Robert Benchley’s description of himself as “the very worst reporter in New York, even for my age.” I never bonded so closely with Benchley, my early idol as humorist and theater critic.
City editors had always terrified me. For some, I realize now, it was a role they felt obliged to play, doubtless influenced by all of those zippy `30s movies with fast-talking, wisecracking, hard-drinking, risk-taking, womanizing reporters. I wanted very much to be exactly like that myself but I didn’t talk very fast (stammered, in fact), was afraid to crack wise, take risks or make passes at the few eligible female reporters around.
I couldn’t even manage the simple mechanics of taking a story over the phone: I could not (still cannot) balance a receiver between my left ear and left shoulder, a major handicap for anyone hoping to carve out a career on a newspaper. The earpiece kept slipping off my ear and squirting away, forcing me to hold it in place with my left hand while frantically taking notes with my right hand rather than type my notes with both hands like the pros.
I didn’t even know all the lingo, basic now-archaic terms like “bulldog edition” and “lobster shift” and “shirt tail” and “read out” and “wood.” An editor would say, “Gimme five inches on this,” and I’d secretly measure the story before turning it in.
On my San Jose State summer internship, I was easily rattled by the boss, a tough, chain-smoking old bird named Rose Glavinovich, who had once been profiled by John Wesley Noble in The Reader’s Digest as his Most Unforgettable Character. For me, Rose was all of that, but much less charming to me than Noble depicted.
The daughter of a former Berkeley police chief, she now ruled Berkeley from her tiny office on Addison Street and ordered her two flunkies about--a nervous little bald guy named Charlie McIntosh and a smart, cynical young Bostonian, Ed Salzman, who seemed undaunted by Rose’s reign of terror. Ed covered UC and kept asking why I wanted to be a journalist; I never came up with a good answer. He scoffed that it wasn’t much of a life yet he seemed to love it just fine--most of all putting it down, which I came to realize is a healthy part of every good journalist’s mantra.
Rose cursed, growled and grumbled, and her laugh was even scarier--a raspy, smoke-encrusted death rattle. She clearly loathed the sight of me the moment I walked in the door, all eager and incompetent, and for the next three months gave me nothing to do but (a) rewrite YMCA and Berkeley Parks Dept. press releases, and (b) every hour dial police stations and hospitals in Piedmont, Richmond and Emeryville, part of our beat.
I tried my best to sound like a laid-back pro when I called around, asking, “Trib here -- anything doin’?,” hoping to God nothing was. Sometimes I would alternate that with, “Got anything for us?” Most of the time that summer I sat at my desk quietly reading Arthur Knight’s history of the cinema, which must have given Rose a good derisive snort. I recall her hostile reaction to seeing “West Side Story” on Broadway, hooting about romanticized dancing gang members (“They’re all murderous bums”).
Each morning, I made the rounds of the police stations by car to check the overnight police blotter for possible stories, unable to determine if a real story was staring me in the face. Had the mayor of Emeryville been picked up on sodomy charges with the mayor of Piedmont, I likely would have missed it on the police report.
Once, Rose took a chance and sent me to cover a small fire, but I went to the wrong fire. Notoriously bad on directions, I noticed a fire truck in the general vicinity of where the fire was supposed to be and decided to follow it. When I arrived, I cornered a high-ranking looking fireman, scribbled a few notes and called the office, where Rose informed me it wasn’t the fire she had in mind. She told me to forget it and come on in.
Another time, I called a story into a rewrite man in the Tribune city room, a seasoned pro named Havelock Hunter. I told the switchboard operator I wanted to be connected to Havelock Ellis (a world-famous sexologist). “Sorry, nobody here by that name,” she snapped. “Honey, you don’t mean Havelock Hunter, do you?” Um, yeah.
I anxiously waited to be assigned a feature, but Rose didn’t believe in such frippery. Not until my last week, in early September, did she toss me a tasty crumb--an interview with Miss California on her way to the Miss America pageant. Ah, at long last I was on solid turf! But the story didn’t run until my internship was over. My last day, I gave Rose a polite letter asking her to send to the head of the journalism department, Dwight Bentel, a note summarizing my three month’s work under her.
I flunked even worse than I’d feared. Dr. Bentel called me in to deliver the bad news and read me her note, in which she said I would “never make a reporter”--and also needed eyeglasses. Bentel, to his huge credit, told me, “I think she’s dead wrong--you’re a hard worker and a good writer and I think you’ll make it, and I’ve told her so.” He showed me his letter to her, twirling his glasses as I read it. With that crucial boost by the flinty Bentel, regarded by students as a cold department head, my career was salvaged from certain oblivion. Bentel earned his salary that day, and my everlasting gratitude.
Many years later, while writing a column at the Tribune as its theater and movie critic, I was invited to speak to a Berkeley women’s journalism group. One of their members was a little old lady--yep, Rose Glavinovich, suddenly much smaller and less frightening but still plenty feisty at 86. I reminded her, jokingly, of the note she had sent to Dr. Bentel 12 years earlier that almost crushed me.
Not missing a beat, she said, “I didn’t say you wouldn’t be a columnist--I said you wouldn’t be a reporter.” And, of course, she was right. The old girl got me again.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman
caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The cartoon is from IMSI's
Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael,
CA, 94901-5506, USA. This special extract from a work in progress
is published by special arrangement with the author. All inquiries
about this work should be directed to the author by use of the
Talkback feature below. This excerpt first posted here March
12, 2007.
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