Our lives read like straightforward narratives, but they live more like braiding. This happens, and then that happens, and then the other happens, seemingly without follow-up, and then something else happens that incorporates them; depends upon them; makes sense of them. We look back and say, “Well sure, it’s obvious.” But it isn’t obvious until after the fact. In the year after I graduated from college, four strands braided together to move me toward a future I could not have imagined.
Looked at thematically, they would seem to have little in common: a walk in a riot zone, an early death, a science-fiction novel, a final gathering of friends. But look how they braided.
- The news
While in college, I never gave a thought to how I would make a living afterward. I couldn’t imagine a path. Just as well. It would have been a waste of time trying to imagine the path that did open up.
In April, 1968, the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, sparked wild rioting in black neighborhoods in cites all across the country. The western limit of the riot zone in Washington, D.C. was only a few blocks east of campus. I was curious. I took a walk past police lines into the riot zone, wrote up my impressions, and sent them to the editor of my hometown newspaper, who printed some of it and sent me a note asking to see me next time I was in town. A year later, I began working for his paper as news reporter.
I was still taking it for granted that I would run for Congress in 1974, at age twenty-eight, though I did nothing to prepare for that far-off day. (That was entirely typical. I was very unworldly.) Meanwhile, I threw myself into becoming a reporter.
At first, it was fun. Being a reporter is a license to kibitz. As low man on the (short) totem pole, naturally I got the most routine, unexciting assignments: hospital admissions, police blotter, night court. But it was a change from sitting in class taking notes – not to mention quite a change from working in a factory or (as in college) working at a grocery store. And gradually other things came up. I never got what you could call training, but I stumbled along, and, as I say, it was interesting.
We were an afternoon paper, which means we put it to bed midday, which meant we had all morning (starting at 7:30 a.m.) to write our stories. And since I was living in my parents’ house, and for the first two months was unmarried, often I would return to the newsroom after night court and sit and talk to Al Wallitsch. Al seemed pretty old to me, but I suppose he was in fifties. He had seen and done a lot, and read a lot (he was a particular fan of Thomas Wolfe and Ben Hecht). He was a real reporter in a way I would never be, but he seemed to like shooting the bull with me That part was fun. But it didn’t take long before disillusionment set in.
Strike one. I wasn’t there long before I got thrown out of the police chief’s office. In my defense, I was innocent, sort of. We had heard on our police scanner that a couple of cops had gotten into a shoving match with three or four black kids. Nothing major, but not the first such incident. My editor told me to see if I could find out if we were building up to a race riot. So I combed through the incident reports at the station and didn’t see anything about it. When I asked the desk sergeant, he went through an elaborate search through the flimsies and said I had everything.
So I asked the police chief, and he said everything is fine, no incidents, no information on anything happening overnight. I could see the canary feathers sticking out of his complacent lying mouth, so I said, “What about the four black kids that put a crack in the windshield of car 308 Tuesday night. That didn’t happen either?”
Ralphie shouted, “Get out of here.” (A la Steven Leacock: “Shut up,” he explained.)
By the time I got back to the newsroom, Ralphie had already talked to both editor and publisher, and they had agreed to kill the story. I was hot. I asked if we were going to put up with letting the police lie to us and kill the story. My editor said, “Ralphie’s been police chief a hell of a lot longer than you’ve been a reporter.” In retrospect, he had a point, but at the time all I could see was the silent censorship.
Strike two. The paper sent me to cover a press conference with the president of the new four-year state college they were setting up in Atlantic County. I went there thinking of myself as a rookie next to these Philadelphia-area professionals. But every single one of them asked variants of the same question: “Is the college going to concentrate on offering a relevant education?” That was the buzzword of the time, relevance. I was the only one who asked other things: What kind of students were they looking for, what did they intend the school to specialize in, what kind of special needs and opportunities did they see in the South Jersey area. These media professionals never considered asking anything beyond the universal topic du jour. I had been thinking about becoming a real journalist, because after all, I was good with words. But did I want to become like them?
Strike three. And then there was the question of favoritism, something everybody else knew about from the cradle, but that I in my innocence didn’t consider. I was reporting night court, and six kids were getting charged with possession of marijuana. One of them was a kid I had known in school, but I when I wrote down the names for the police report, it never occurred to me to leave his name off the list. It wouldn’t have been ethical. But the next day, my roundup piece included his name, but not that of one of the others. Turns out that boy’s family and the publisher’s family were close friends. From that moment, I learned how to read the news in a different way. It became clear how some stories got slanted and some were smothered. It stank, and there was nothing I was ever going to be able to do about it.
I could still do the job, more or less, but the thrill was gone.