Words to live by
Drawn to journalism inexplicably, I have loved it without illusion. Post-Gazette executive editor DAVID M. SHRIBMAN reflects on a career in news gathering
This was written for the Pulitzer Prizes on the occasion of their 100th anniversary (pulitzer.org). The first prize was awarded June 4, 1917.
Martin F. Nolan, former editorial page editor and Washington bureau chief of The Boston Globe, is one of the greatest journalists of our age. For me, as for so many aspiring writers in the Boston area in the late 1960s and 1970s, he was role model and hero. We worshiped his prose, admired his analysis, and, later, for those of us who became his friends and colleagues, delighted in his joy in the chase of the story and in his deftness in telling it. Because I so respected him, I never forgot how he loved to paraphrase the words the novelist George V. Higgins directed at writers: No one asked you to start. No one will notice if you stop.
Words to live by, as so many of us have. Ours may seem now to be a fleeting craft, but even in its robust prime we knew words were fleeting. They informed for a day and disappeared. They endured, to be sure, in dusty and ungainly bound volumes in the hidden backrooms of the public library, and they were preserved on microfilm that would almost never be inspected even if it was not balky to use. And even if every word we type now is preserved on the Internet, we sometimes feel more ephemeral than ever.
The notion that words typed for a newspaper have a shelf life of about 20 hours came home to me one evening in New Hampshire, when over hot cider I offered a job to a luminous reporter of her generation. I was the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, she was a graduate student in history. I asked her to join our paper, and then Maeve Reston, who later covered politics for the Los Angeles Times and now does so for CNN, asked if her new colleagues might think she was hired because of her grandfather.
“Maeve,” I said, firmly but sadly, “no one today has the slightest idea who your grandfather was.”
Her grandfather, in case you are under 60 years old, was James “Scotty” Reston, the onetime Washington bureau chief and executive editor of The New York Times. He and Walter Lippmann were the most influential newspaper columnists of the 20th century, an age when the word vice took a lower-case “v” and, in newspapers at least, almost always modified the word squad. Now that I am typing this, I suppose I ought to add that Lippmann was a columnist, author, political theorist and adviser to President Woodrow Wilson. Reston and Lippmann won two Pulitzer Prizes apiece. No one I have encountered who is enrolled in journalism school today — and, truly, not one person I’ve met who is a history major at a selective college today — has ever heard of either of them.
Writing without illusion
So none of us invited to contribute to this Pulitzer Prize centennial project ought to have any illusions about our influence, or our endurance in the culture, if such a word even applies to what we did and do. No one asked me to start and no one will notice if I stop.
Even so, there might be a slight virtue in relating that when I did start — in 1970, at the age of 16, in the dark early Atlantic mornings in Salem, Mass. — I entered a world that was picaresque and lacking in pretension. It was an Edward Hopper setting, with the addition to the canvas of green eyeshades, copy spikes, gluepots, grease pencils, Royal
typewriters and pneumatic tubes. Most readers will have no idea what any of those six items were, so suffice it to say that they were, like the protective raiment of the baseball catcher, the tools of ignorance. I didn’t have a college degree then, and neither did the editor of the paper, who wrote better then than I did even in the year that I won the prize that I probably didn’t deserve.
My job was to get everyone coffee from the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street (shorthands included “CNS,” for cream, no sugar). Once I did that and scrawled the headlines on a huge piece of paper that I hung in the front window along Washington Street, I was permitted to pursue stories. The first one I wrote was in longhand. It was not a propitious start, although everyone agreed my penmanship was flawless.
I must be honest and say I was the sort of suburban boy with conventional parents who thought piano lessons were important and believed shirts should be tucked into trousers. They — we — were, in a word, respectable. I was unshaven in the way someone is unshaven when he is not old enough to require the performance of that task. I was young, sheltered and idealistic and naïve enough to think idealism was a creed that endured (though, to my delight, I retain a bit of naivete and idealism). And many of these guys — my new colleagues — were basically drunks. Wisecracking drunks. With dirty mouths and dirtier minds.
But could they write. And they were droll. They knew how the world worked. They had seen dead bodies on the street and gunshot victims on the porch. Few of their spoken words were not scatological, and the preferred idiom tended to the promiscuous employment of a word that rhymed with truck. How I miss them — how I miss their kind — today.
Smoking, drinking, playing cards
They tried to teach me life’s lessons, like how to sneak into an open door and steal off the mantle a picture of a teenager who had been killed in a motorcycle accident. (I didn’t do it. Too terrified.) One of them tried to sell me nude pictures of his wife. (I didn’t do that either. What a prig!) Another wrote his political column under the name Bill Brawders and his sports column under the name Jack Denty. (Not only did I not disapprove, I thought it was the way things were supposed to be, and I wondered whether maybe I should go by a nom de plume as well, probably Mark S. Richardson, given that my middle name was Marks and my father, who disapproved of this entire line of work and my new friends, was named Richard.) When Bill Brawders, aka Jack Denty, got up from his typewriter, an eighth of an inch of ashes covered the keys. Who cared? Wipe ’em off if they bother you. He’ll only do it again tomorrow.
Everyone smoked in the office. Everyone drank, often from a bottle stashed in the bottom drawer, the one built to hold manila files but bettersuited for a liquor cabinet. A few played bridge in the back of the newsroom after the editor went home. No one played golf. No one. And not once over the four years I worked there did a soul order a salad at lunch. Mostly we ordered the hot dog special from a coffee shop called the Pewter Pot: two dogs and a Coke for 99 cents. When it went up to $1.09, we found another place, across the street from the post office. There we ordered the hamburger club. It was not served on 9-grain bread.
Falling in love
God, how I loved this, every last sordid bit of it, and so what if some of them didn’t have a full set of teeth? By the time I was a high school senior and as steeped in this world as they were marinated in cheap booze, I was telling the editor that I wanted to hang around longer, that I wasn’t so sure I ought to go to college. Even now I’m not sure I was kidding. He told me to go to Dartmouth anyway. He said it couldn’t hurt.
But I had fallen in love with a way of looking at the world (with skepticism), with a way of comporting myself (asking impertinent questions of my social betters), with the rhythms of the newspaper business (to the tune of a Benny Goodman ballad — and I should have taken the hint, for this was a business frozen in the Swing Age). No matter. It was fun, you could throw words around like beanbags (or grenades), and in time I fell in love once more, this time with a pretty girl who was smart and fun and who, I could tell right away — proof that I was a trained observer, with good instincts — would be the best partner a boy could have. We recently celebrated our 39th anniversary, and between us we have had six houses, two children, and 14 newspapers. Mostly we are of one mind.
Well, now that I think of it, it may not be 14 newspapers, because I double counted the Buffalo Evening News, where we met and wed and from where I stole the gluepot that today sits on my desk. I refill that gluepot every once in a while, mostly out of sentiment, and still know how to wipe the excess away by smudging it into a little ball. (If they’re bigenough they bounce. Try it sometime.) But the sad truth is I haven’t glued together two pieces of ripped copy paper (best to use a metal ruler, if you can find one today, or the edge of your desk for this function) since 1979. My first-born child, who has an adult job, which is to say in another field entirely, was born nine years later.
My principal job in snowy Buffalo was to walk to the Statler Hotel and ask the sleepy clerk at the front desk whether anyone famous was staying there overnight. No one famous had stayed in the Buffalo Statler since the days of Nelson Eddy. It was satisfying work, coming as it did as prelude to typing up Golden Age notices celebrating the 50th wedding anniversaries of people in Kenmore and Cheektowaga and then collecting the names of five-gallon donors. There was a lot of bloodletting in the early days of my career.
Even so, I loved every tawdry, senseless, mindnumbing minute of it. The point of all of this is that I fell into this biz for the same reason people fall in love, which you have probably noticed is the leitmotif of this tale. They are drawn to it inexplicably and inadvertently. The verb is the same: fall. That should have told me something — one of the many lessons I did not learn along the way — and so maybe I wasn’t that shrewd an observer after all, though I did figure out, at least a week before Election Day on the first campaign that I covered start-to-finish, that Walter Mondale was probably not going to be president of the United States. He lost 48 states. Good call.
Still believing
These days I’m the editor of a good newspaper in an interesting city, with good colleagues, and I think most of them, including the young ones, still believe. Believe that the big truths lie in small details. Believe that it is essential that we get the details right. Believe in the indispensability of this work. Believe in the great fun inherent in this work. We all come to work fortified by those beliefs, deadline after deadline.
I’m moving toward the end of my career, but I can say this with confidence: Throughout my voyage in this remarkable profession, which has taken me to all 50 of the United States and all 10 provinces of Canada — and to some terrific steakhouses and bakeries and taco stands, which I’ll tell you about another day — I have never forgotten two things.
The first comes from “A Chorus Line” and a song titled, poignantly, “What I Did for Love,” where the dancers sing a great truth, as applicable to their profession as to ours: “The gift was ours to borrow.” The second comes from Marty Nolan, now 75 years old and still channeling George V. Higgins: No one asked me to start, and no one will notice when I stop.