What's That Pig Outdoors? (17 page)

If I was uninformed about the larger world of the deaf, Miss Jones was equally uninformed about journalism. “The question of life goals should be examined closely by the patient over the next year,” she wrote in dubious conclusion to her case history. But she was an audiologist, not a professor of communications, and knew only what her specialty had told her about the capabilities of her clients (that “patient” was a telling slip). How could she know what I knew about journalism? I had only just learned it myself.

Shortly before Thanksgiving 1962, I spotted a small card on the “Positions Available” bulletin board at Medill. A Chicago-based sailing magazine needed a temporary editorial assistant to help get out its special New Year's issue. The card, dusty and stained, must have languished on the board for weeks.

The holidays were approaching and, like most graduate students, I was nearly broke, despite my job at the Y. I asked Mother to call the number on the card and see whether the job was still open. I wasn't optimistic, but I had nothing to lose. As usual, Mother explained why I couldn't speak on the phone myself. The reply was curt but surprising: “I don't care if he's deaf. Can he write?”

Johnny Wilson, the harassed managing editor of
One-Design Yachtsman: The Magazine of Sailboat Racing
, was a rough-hewn former sportswriter from Miami. Short, stocky, crew-cut, and pockmarked, he looked a little like Mickey Spillane and spoke out of the side of his mouth the same way, with a voice as melodious as a wheelbarrow of gravel bumping over cobblestones.

He knew nothing about deaf people. He had formed no prejudices about their capabilities, because he had never known, or heard about, any. And he was desperate. His was a fledgling magazine with a growing but still small circulation, and its wages were meager. Nobody seemed to want the job he was offering. He had decided he'd take the first warm body that walked into the office, so long as it knew how to assemble a sentence grammatically.

“Can he come down
today?”
he asked Mother. An hour later I was in his office. As we shook hands, his first words were: “Can you start now?” I could and did. The work was simple—a high school journalism student could have done it—but it was more interesting than pushing towels at the Y.

The January issue of the magazine was to contain a pictorial catalogue of more than five hundred racing sailboats, from eight-foot dinghies to the stately America's Cup twelve-meter yachts. Having “messed about in boats” at Camp Echo, I knew a little about the subject. It wasn't difficult to translate manufacturer's brochures into short paragraphs describing the length, beam, sail area, and other characteristics of each boat, with a sentence or two about the things that set it apart from other sailboats. In a few hours I had the task down to a formula, batting out a new paragraph every five minutes or so.

Wilson was delighted. When that job was completed a couple of weeks later, instead of giving me a check and a goodbye handshake, he thought I might continue to be useful if I could come in for a few hours a couple of times a week. He'd show me how to lay out and paste up page dummies of the catalogue from galley proofs of the paragraphs I had written, and how to read the page proofs when they arrived from the printer. This was hardly an unfamiliar task. It was the kind of thing I'd done as managing editor at Evanston High, and I took to it as swiftly as a swallow to the wind. Before long Johnny had me editing copy and writing headlines and helping plan the contents of the entire magazine.

“You've got talent, kid,” he'd say after a day of hard work, and I'd beam with pleasure. I was on my way.

Partly to earn money for school and partly to gain the experience, I delayed my return to Medill for two quarters while working full-time for
One-Design Yachtsman.
Most of my tasks were purely editorial, but on
two occasions Johnny sent me on the road to write articles about regattas. I'll never know for certain, but I think Johnny had two motives for doing so—first, to get more material for the magazine, and second, to see what my limitations as a reporter might be.

So long as I could talk to people face to face, I could get the information I needed for a story. These brief field trips, however, didn't involve telephone newsgathering, as does most professional reporting. If they were inconclusive in demonstrating my journalistic limitations, they did show me that I was happiest at an editor's desk. On the road, I often had to ask people to repeat what they'd said. As an editor I rarely had to do that, and my growing skills, at any rate, seemed most valuable at the desk.

Halfway through this period Johnny, sick unto death of Chicago winters, resigned to return to Florida. He had been a superb teacher, and had carved enough raw skill out of me so that for the next three months I could do most of the editorial and production work of the magazine almost alone under the sharp eye of Knowles Pittman, the publisher, as supportive in his quiet, intellectual way as Johnny had been in his craggy manner. I had needed a break, and Johnny and Knowles gave it to me in spades.

When I returned to Medill in the fall of 1963, I had an advantage over most of my classmates: the kind of experience and responsibility a young journalist doesn't ordinarily get until long after graduation. It stood me in particularly good stead in the Editorial Operations graduate course, in which the class of sixteen students was divided into two news desk staffs, each responsible for producing a mock newspaper during a three-hour lab. We'd rip copy from the Associated Press and United Press International teletypewriters, lay out pages, edit stories to fit their holes, and write headlines for them.

Johnny and Knowles had taught it all, the raw-copy-to-finished-product approach, and my performance impressed the course's instructor, Dan Sullivan, who was then cable editor of the Chicago
Daily News
—another major-league newspaperman moonlighting as a professor. “Sully,” bespectacled, balding, and brush-cut, looked like a middle-aged nerd, complete with plastic pocket protector. He was an old-fashioned newspaperman's newspaperman, with an intense, inquiring, and retentive mind that knew no boundaries. And he was a patient, compassionate
teacher, the kind who took a personal interest in his students. Near the end of the quarter he drew me aside and said quietly, “In a couple of years, come look me up.”

This time, going through the job-interview mill was different. I knew that I had value as a journalist and—thanks to my experience at
One-Design Yachtsman
—knew exactly what it was. So long as I did not have to use the telephone, I could edit. I was good at taking a piece of raw, unruly copy and blue-penciling it to its essence, making sure of the facts as I went along, and searching out its heart for the headline. Sullivan said he thought I was a natural newspaper copyreader and, even if I still wanted to work on magazines someday, a few years of newspaper experience would stand me in good stead.

The interviews were hugely different from those at Trinity. My voice was no longer a nervous squeak, but strong, confident, and poised. I was proud of my resume, which included straight A's at Medill and a sheaf of bylined clippings from
One-Design Yachtsman.

And the employment market was wide open. Not for a few years would journalism—still as low-paying as elementary school teaching—surge in popularity as a career after college. Like Johnny Wilson, newspaper recruiters were looking for warm bodies. Whatever unease my deafness raised in them apparently was overwhelmed by my thick resume, which included recommendations from the part-time instructors—professional newsmen, not just teachers—attesting to my ability to do the copyreader's task as well as any hearing person.

Before graduation half a dozen offers came my way. The two most attractive were at the Denver
Post
and at the
Evening Journal
of Wilmington, Delaware. The latter (circulation 90,000) was small enough so that a new editor on its five-person news copy desk could quickly gain experience editing all kinds of articles, from local squibs to major breaking national and international news. And so, a week after receiving my MS in journalism degree with distinction as well as a couple of top-student awards, I piled my belongings into my Volkswagen and drove east. I was to be paid $87.50 a week—a munificent sum considering I had been making $75 a week at
One-Design Yachtsman.

The day I arrived in Wilmington to look for an apartment, the temperature was in the humid nineties. After studying the classified ads, I
went to the city's largest real estate agency, thoroughly sweat-sodden in wrinkled, wilted shirt sleeves. When I told the receptionist that I was answering an ad for an apartment, she looked me up and down and turned to a manager at a desk nearby. I did not see what she said, but he looked me over and said, “I'm sorry, all our apartments have been rented.”

Such was my naĩveté that not for a long time did I realize I had gotten the brush-off. It could have been because I was deaf, therefore presumably unemployable and a poor risk for the rent. My scruffy appearance that sweltering day, however, probably would have scared away even the most enlightened apartment manager. I'll never know the truth.

That night I stayed in a motel. The next morning, dressed in coat and tie, I tried again, this time at the offices of a downtown dentist, who was advertising a $55-a-month walk-up efficiency apartment above a women's dress shop downtown, just three blocks from the
Evening Journal
plant. “I've just been hired as an editor at the paper,” I said to introduce myself, and the apartment—which had been vacant for many weeks—was mine. It was tiny and bare and, I am sure, quite depressing. The only furniture it ever held, aside from a bed and a bookcase, was an aluminum lawn chair. But it was
my
apartment. I was on my own—free, independent, and gainfully employed.

Professionally, the ten months I spent in Wilmington were highly valuable. At first the other members of the copy desk seemed wary, but after a few days they warmed up to me. Like any other young recruit, I was in the beginning given “shorts”—one-paragraph squibs—to edit. Then, as the “slot man”—as we called the copy chief, who sat in a niche at the center of a large semi-circular desk feeding raw copy to the editors on the “rim”—grew more confident in my talents, I was given more important work to do. In a few weeks I was handling my share of breaking news. At no time did the veterans patronize me as a deaf person, although I did come in for the usual gentle hazing every greenhorn had to suffer.

The only exasperation they ever displayed came during our lunch-hour bridge games. Despite their best efforts, I never could learn more than the rudiments of bridge, for I have absolutely no card sense. They shrugged indulgently. “You can be dummy,” they would say, and if the irony of that phrase ever occurred to them, they never acknowledged it.

Like young journalists everywhere, I wanted to do everything, to write
as well as edit. A fellow editor, knowing my wide reading interests, suggested I do as he did—write book reviews for the
Evening Journal's
sister paper, the
Morning News.
There was no critic's fee—just the free copy of the book under review—but I loved reading novels and felt honored to render a printed judgment upon them. So enthusiastic was I that I suggested to the feature editor that perhaps I could review subtitled foreign films as well.

I was young enough and brash enough to think I could get away with it. As I had done in school, I prepared for the task by researching the film, reading criticisms of the director's previous films as well as magazine reviews of the one under notice. Wilmington was far enough off the first-run path so that national magazines and newspapers would carry their notices weeks before the movie arrived in town.

Half a dozen times this system worked well. But one night I got my comeuppance when an Italian movie featuring Sophia Loren arrived in town. It was the wrong print, with dubbed English instead of subtitles. I had little idea what was happening on the screen—it was a drama with a great deal of dialogue and little action—and when I wrote the review at the office that evening, I had to fake it. The resultant review was skewed enough from reality so that the sharp-eyed feature editor (who himself had seen the movie the same night) immediately spotted my little exercise in fraud. He suggested gently that it might be better for my moonlighting career if I stuck to book reviewing, and I had to agree.

Back to books it was, and by the spring of 1965 I had persuaded the editor of the
Evening Journal
to let me write a weekly literary column for the paper, focusing on local books and authors. I should have been content—my career was growing, and I was gaining respect as an up-and-coming young journalist around town. I was, however, beginning to chafe.