The Calling
If I ever had a calling, it’s to write. It’s one of the few things I’ve known with absolute certainty from a fairly young age.
At nineteen years old, I walked into our local newspaper office with a file folder of poetry and short stories and tried to parlay them into a reporting job. The managing editor, Tom Edmunds, sat there with his flat-top haircut and bow tie flipping through my folder. Finally Tom said, “Son, I have college graduates coming in here every week with journalism degrees. I just don’t need any more writers right now.”
Desperately wanting to get on the paper, I blabbered, “I’ll do anything to work here. I’ll wash windows, sweep floors, clean toilets…”
Tom laughed and said, “Well, if you want to get your foot in the door, come to think of it, I do have a position open for a typist. It doesn’t pay much. Can you type?”
I’d had taken typing in high school, so said yes. I grabbed the job and was soon typing 60 words a minute. This was back in the days before computers and reporters’ used such caveman-like tools as manual Royal typewriters. As The Spirit was a morning paper, it had an 11 p.m. deadline. The reporters all made sure they had their stories in by eleven, then the night editor Kenny Anderson laid the paper out, and the printers (not HPs or Canons, but huge industrial sized rolls of paper that looked like King Kong-sized toilet paper) had till 6 a.m. to crank out 10,000 copies for the local residents.
As this was in the Dark Ages before the advent of the internet, my job was to sit at a typewriter wearing a pair of earphones and take the calls from our reporters as they phoned in their stories from all over the tri-county area. Most were out covering county, township, and local meetings. After the meetings they found whatever cubby hole they could, banged out their story, and called it in to me. They were generally in a hurry to get home and spoke a lot faster than I could type, so my typing skills improved immeasurably. After they were done, I tore the copy out of the spindle and handed it off to Kenny who checked it for mistakes and then found a home for it in the layout.
In between frantic bouts with the Royal, while I was waiting for the next reporter to call, Kenny had me help him. It surprised me to learn the reporters did not create their own headlines. The night editor created them based on how many columns the story covered in the paper. Kenny would hand me a news story and say, “Read this about the fire at the mall and give me an 18-point font, 32-character headline.” When I saw my first headlines in the paper I was as a giddy as parent looking down at their newborn child. My words were in print!
Once I got inside the paper, like a faithful puppy I began following our star reporters Andy Petite and Karen Wilson everywhere. Thus began an unofficial apprenticeship. Andy and Karen allowed me to tag along with them when they went out to cover supervisory and school board meetings, and afterwards told me to write a news story based on what I’d witnessed. They’d write the actual story for the paper, and sit down with me later and go over my copy, giving me pointers. From them I learned how to take notes, how to write a lead sentence, getting in the ‘who, what, where and when,’ and how to organize a news story, from most important to least important facts, skills I use to this day.
A month after I’d started at the paper Tom called me at home one day. He had a huge story on his hands concerning an incident that occurred in Washington D.C. where Muslim terrorists had held a group of people hostage for a week in a Jewish synagogue. The hostages had just been released that day and one of them was a local man. Sounding somewhat desperate, Tom said, “I need someone to interview that hostage and all my reporters are out on assignment. Do you think you can handle it kid?” I did more than handle it, I interviewed the man at his home in Southampton, banged out the story, and it landed on the front page in the lead spot. Nor did Tom edit a single word, a feat I’m not sure that I’ve ever duplicated since. No bad for my first effort. Anyway, it proved to Tom I could write a news story. The rest, as they say, is history.
During my brief stint as a high school English teacher I told my students, “Each of you has a calling. Each of you has a special talent. There’s something that comes easy to you. Something that makes you come live. It could be math or science or history. Your primary goal in high school should be to figure out what your special gift is and pursue it. It could lead you to be an artist or an auto mechanic or a nurse. But the important thing is, you’ll spend your life doing something that gives you immense satisfaction.”
As someone wrote, “Find your passion and you will find your purpose in life.”
At nineteen years old, I walked into our local newspaper office with a file folder of poetry and short stories and tried to parlay them into a reporting job. The managing editor, Tom Edmunds, sat there with his flat-top haircut and bow tie flipping through my folder. Finally Tom said, “Son, I have college graduates coming in here every week with journalism degrees. I just don’t need any more writers right now.”
Desperately wanting to get on the paper, I blabbered, “I’ll do anything to work here. I’ll wash windows, sweep floors, clean toilets…”
Tom laughed and said, “Well, if you want to get your foot in the door, come to think of it, I do have a position open for a typist. It doesn’t pay much. Can you type?”
I’d had taken typing in high school, so said yes. I grabbed the job and was soon typing 60 words a minute. This was back in the days before computers and reporters’ used such caveman-like tools as manual Royal typewriters. As The Spirit was a morning paper, it had an 11 p.m. deadline. The reporters all made sure they had their stories in by eleven, then the night editor Kenny Anderson laid the paper out, and the printers (not HPs or Canons, but huge industrial sized rolls of paper that looked like King Kong-sized toilet paper) had till 6 a.m. to crank out 10,000 copies for the local residents.
As this was in the Dark Ages before the advent of the internet, my job was to sit at a typewriter wearing a pair of earphones and take the calls from our reporters as they phoned in their stories from all over the tri-county area. Most were out covering county, township, and local meetings. After the meetings they found whatever cubby hole they could, banged out their story, and called it in to me. They were generally in a hurry to get home and spoke a lot faster than I could type, so my typing skills improved immeasurably. After they were done, I tore the copy out of the spindle and handed it off to Kenny who checked it for mistakes and then found a home for it in the layout.
In between frantic bouts with the Royal, while I was waiting for the next reporter to call, Kenny had me help him. It surprised me to learn the reporters did not create their own headlines. The night editor created them based on how many columns the story covered in the paper. Kenny would hand me a news story and say, “Read this about the fire at the mall and give me an 18-point font, 32-character headline.” When I saw my first headlines in the paper I was as a giddy as parent looking down at their newborn child. My words were in print!
Once I got inside the paper, like a faithful puppy I began following our star reporters Andy Petite and Karen Wilson everywhere. Thus began an unofficial apprenticeship. Andy and Karen allowed me to tag along with them when they went out to cover supervisory and school board meetings, and afterwards told me to write a news story based on what I’d witnessed. They’d write the actual story for the paper, and sit down with me later and go over my copy, giving me pointers. From them I learned how to take notes, how to write a lead sentence, getting in the ‘who, what, where and when,’ and how to organize a news story, from most important to least important facts, skills I use to this day.
A month after I’d started at the paper Tom called me at home one day. He had a huge story on his hands concerning an incident that occurred in Washington D.C. where Muslim terrorists had held a group of people hostage for a week in a Jewish synagogue. The hostages had just been released that day and one of them was a local man. Sounding somewhat desperate, Tom said, “I need someone to interview that hostage and all my reporters are out on assignment. Do you think you can handle it kid?” I did more than handle it, I interviewed the man at his home in Southampton, banged out the story, and it landed on the front page in the lead spot. Nor did Tom edit a single word, a feat I’m not sure that I’ve ever duplicated since. No bad for my first effort. Anyway, it proved to Tom I could write a news story. The rest, as they say, is history.
During my brief stint as a high school English teacher I told my students, “Each of you has a calling. Each of you has a special talent. There’s something that comes easy to you. Something that makes you come live. It could be math or science or history. Your primary goal in high school should be to figure out what your special gift is and pursue it. It could lead you to be an artist or an auto mechanic or a nurse. But the important thing is, you’ll spend your life doing something that gives you immense satisfaction.”
As someone wrote, “Find your passion and you will find your purpose in life.”
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