This New Year marks an anniversary of sorts for me, it now having been three decades since I first began writing for money.
It all started out innocently enough when, after coming across a copy of a pulp magazine called "Lost Treasure," I cobbled together 350 words on some unverifiable local legend and sent them off.
I'd been reading a lot of Hemingway, and watching old newspaper movies like "Deadline USA" with Humphrey Bogart, "Teacher's Pet" with Clark Gable, "Ace in the Hole" with Kirk Douglas and, of course, Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane." Being 20 years old and working 60 hours a week in a heat-treating factory, the writer's life seemed a perfect one to me.
From what I could tell, they spent most of their time hanging out in saloons, trading barbs with tough dames like Barbara Stanwyck and Ava Gardner and avoiding even the slightest appearance of work.
A few months later, I received a letter from Long John Latham, the magazine's publisher, informing me that my piece had been accepted. Included in the letter was a check for $12.50, about what I made for three hours of sweaty, grimy work in the factory.
After the piece was published, I took it to the offices of a small chain of free suburban weeklies in Cleveland, and showed it to one of the editors, Ken Baka. I pestered and cajoled and ultimately he gave in, hiring me as a "stringer" to write outside pieces.
In the wake of my initial jubilation, it occurred to me that I knew nothing at all about newspaper writing. So I went and visited Pete Vogt, an old friend who had written for the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes, during the Korean War. Pete disappeared into his basement and came back a while later with a moldy old copy of an Army manual on how to write for newspapers.
Like all Army manuals, this one was done largely in cartoon form, illustrating what's called the "inverted pyramid" style of writing, where you put the most important thing at the beginning of the story and continue on down to the least important thing at the end. That way, some lazy editor could whack the last few inches off to make it fit on the page and the reader wouldn't miss anything.
Thus armed, I sallied forth and, over the next months, covered girls' varsity swimming matches, town meetings, an appearance by Cher at the local mall and even a homicide until, finally, they gave me a staff position.
It was my first taste of the newsroom. Everybody smoking -- not just cigarettes but cigars and pipes as well -- the clatter of the old manual typewriters and long, drinking lunches that our lady publisher often wouldn't make it back from. A hard-boiled heaven with cops and politicians and con men of every stripe providing needed grist for the mill.
About a year later, I left the paper to launch a spectacularly unsuccessful career as a freelancer. It got to the point where I thought I was out of the news business altogether, when I was picked up by George Sample, publisher of a small daily in northwestern Pennsylvania, the Corry Evening Journal.
George was -- and still is, for that matter -- old school all the way. "Young lady, people 'pass away' in the Christian Science Monitor. Around here they just die," he once told a trembling obituary writer. Smoke hung like a blue cloud in the newsroom and everyone came back from lunch a little worse for wear.
I worked for George for seven years and learned a lot. There were tornadoes, murders, jury trials, plane crashes, house fires and way too many fatal automobile accidents. I wrote stories, edited copy, laid out pages and took pictures. On occasion, I'd deliver papers or work a shift on the old Goss press, watching with awe as the giant rolls of paper fed into one end of the thundering machine and finished copies of the Journal spat out the other.
But New York City beckoned, and I got into the literary criticism racket at the Irish Echo. This gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of truly great writers. David Markson, Jack Newfield, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and William Kennedy all provided further education. For fun, and some extra cash, I wrote about murder cases, the IRA and other sordid topics for magazines like "Hustler."
The Redhead and I weren't exactly setting the Big Apple on fire, though. Hamill wrote a fine letter of recommendation -- "Mike deserves to be rescued from the ghetto of Irish journalism ..." -- and soon I was chained to a desk at the Niagara Gazette. It was, without question, the most unpleasant experience I've ever had in the news business.
The rest, as they say, is history. Smoking is not mandatory here at the Reporter, but it is mightily encouraged. And, while there's not a pint bottle of cheap hooch in every top desk drawer in the newsroom, there is a liter of good vodka in the office refrigerator.
At least there was the last time I looked.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Dec. 27 2005 |