Back in 1961, when I was a 27 year old working on the first of what worked out later to be two degrees from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbama, it was relatively easy to get paid media jobs, As in “jobs”, not just internships.
That summer, I was hired on at the Southtown Economist news group, which published high-circulation dailies in the south suburban part of Chicago. It worked out to be a combination of inquiring camera boy, rewrite desk jockey and investigative reporter.
Managing editor of the lash-up was, a postwar survivor from the old W R Hearst yellow journalism reportage days. He ran is papers as if he were Willie himself, sans the California Xanadu.
Back in those days, integration in Daley’s working class Chicagoland was something your transmission did with your auto engine when you took your foot off the clutch pedal; but not something you tried doing in the white neighboods. Legend had it that in order to stir up some news, Mr Editor started his own near riot by pushing rumors that a group of blacks intended to integrate the Rainbow Park, located on Chicago’s far southeast side in the usual white ethnic neighborhood where resided many of the large number of workers in the Inland Steel Company mill, the big oil refinery complex in neighboring Whiting, Indiana, and the dozen or more mazes of the biggest rail yards in the western hemisphere.
Anyway, for all that, it was a paying job as a real working reporter.
The following summer, with a fresh Bachelor’s degree in journalism and communications from UI/Champaign-Urbana, I got a job with United Press International, which was an assignment in the Des Moines, Iowa state capital bureau.
So how did I do that, you might ask. I ran a column, “Night Beat”, on the Daily Illini, which was a community newspaper, serving a lot more than just the campus. Whom did I work for there? Hard to believe, but it was none other than Roger Ebert, who was working that year as managing editor of the D-I.
One night, a spurned and crazed middle aged insurance salesman shot to death his would-be lover, a UI graduate student, in the vestibule of his apartment, then turned his gun on himself. I got this fresh from the local police. And here’s what I did with it.
First, I got it into that night’s D-I. Then I contacted the Chicago bureaus of AP and UPI. AP sent me a $5 check. UPI offered me a job.
I was at that small UPI bureau office late one afternoon of October 1962, with the old-fashioned teletypes which in those years filled all such places. Then, on what UPI called the “A” wire — strictly for national and international news — came spilling out the text of John Kennedy’s speech to America and to the world that he would deliver via television about two hours later. There couldn’t have been too many people who learned in advance that we all were about to join hands with the USSR in a potential dance of thermonuclear death over Cuba. Until the situation ended in compromise some 13 days later, all the people in that bureau thought we were going into real war.
Later, like the rest of the human race, I sold out and turned my time and attention to industrial and assocational public relations. (One hell of a lot more money, and my own office.)
A true story.
————
My wife and I are reading you book about shutting off all the WalMarts in your life for the entirety of 2004. You’re an interesting and attention-grabbing writer. I hope the winters in Vermont are no harder on your cars than those of Wisconsin are on our 2006 VW Jetta TDI diesel and our 1995 Subaru Legacy. You are right about the Subarus. Great winter traction but lousy fuel economy.
Back in 1961, when I was a 27 year old working on the first of what worked out later to be two degrees from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbama, it was relatively easy to get paid media jobs, As in “jobs”, not just internships.
That summer, I was hired on at the Southtown Economist news group, which published high-circulation dailies in the south suburban part of Chicago. It worked out to be a combination of inquiring camera boy, rewrite desk jockey and investigative reporter.
Managing editor of the lash-up was, a postwar survivor from the old W R Hearst yellow journalism reportage days. He ran is papers as if he were Willie himself, sans the California Xanadu.
Back in those days, integration in Daley’s working class Chicagoland was something your transmission did with your auto engine when you took your foot off the clutch pedal; but not something you tried doing in the white neighboods. Legend had it that in order to stir up some news, Mr Editor started his own near riot by pushing rumors that a group of blacks intended to integrate the Rainbow Park, located on Chicago’s far southeast side in the usual white ethnic neighborhood where resided many of the large number of workers in the Inland Steel Company mill, the big oil refinery complex in neighboring Whiting, Indiana, and the dozen or more mazes of the biggest rail yards in the western hemisphere.
Anyway, for all that, it was a paying job as a real working reporter.
The following summer, with a fresh Bachelor’s degree in journalism and communications from UI/Champaign-Urbana, I got a job with United Press International, which was an assignment in the Des Moines, Iowa state capital bureau.
So how did I do that, you might ask. I ran a column, “Night Beat”, on the Daily Illini, which was a community newspaper, serving a lot more than just the campus. Whom did I work for there? Hard to believe, but it was none other than Roger Ebert, who was working that year as managing editor of the D-I.
One night, a spurned and crazed middle aged insurance salesman shot to death his would-be lover, a UI graduate student, in the vestibule of his apartment, then turned his gun on himself. I got this fresh from the local police. And here’s what I did with it.
First, I got it into that night’s D-I. Then I contacted the Chicago bureaus of AP and UPI. AP sent me a $5 check. UPI offered me a job.
I was at that small UPI bureau office late one afternoon of October 1962, with the old-fashioned teletypes which in those years filled all such places. Then, on what UPI called the “A” wire — strictly for national and international news — came spilling out the text of John Kennedy’s speech to America and to the world that he would deliver via television about two hours later. There couldn’t have been too many people who learned in advance that we all were about to join hands with the USSR in a potential dance of thermonuclear death over Cuba. Until the situation ended in compromise some 13 days later, all the people in that bureau thought we were going into real war.
Later, like the rest of the human race, I sold out and turned my time and attention to industrial and assocational public relations. (One hell of a lot more money, and my own office.)
A true story.
————
My wife and I are reading you book about shutting off all the WalMarts in your life for the entirety of 2004. You’re an interesting and attention-grabbing writer. I hope the winters in Vermont are no harder on your cars than those of Wisconsin are on our 2006 VW Jetta TDI diesel and our 1995 Subaru Legacy. You are right about the Subarus. Great winter traction but lousy fuel economy.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Comment by Arnold Harris — May 16, 2010 @ 1:42 pm