| (The Dallas Times Herald did an outstanding job of covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. I was lucky to be an intern at the paper two summers afterward, before my senior year in college. But the lessons I learned there were not all uplifting. For example, the editorial excellence it displayed in November of 1963 didn’t extend to coverage of its advertisers, to whom it pandered. Still, I came to work at 6:30 every morning ready to have some fun, and often enough, I did. This series of essays tells of that experience.) |
Luck seemed to follow me everywhere in my professional life. In 1987, while at U.S. News & World Report and wishing I weren’t, I was having lunch with the writers whose stories I edited. One of my young writers blurted: “I just turned down the number-three job at Changing Times,” the monthly money magazine later renamed Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. “You what?” I said back, startled. Several months later, I had that job and her to thank for letting me know the opportunity existed. Somewhat the same luck awaited me on June 7, 1965. when I walked out of the elevator into the fourth-floor newsroom of the Dallas Times Herald. I was the newspaper’s summer intern. Who knows how many kids applied for that job? I got it.
Later in life I had a lot of experience with summer interns. They followed people around, spent a week or two in each department doing not much of anything and finally toward the end of summer got to actually report and write something. These weren’t the sorts of internships I would have enjoyed.
Instead, the Times Herald worked my ass off, starting that first day, and I loved it.
The smaller of the two Dallas dailies (the Dallas Morning News was the city’s dominant paper), the afternoon Times Herald was competently run but undistinguished. Its shining hour was coverage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the aftermath in November 1963. I read both Dallas papers and thought the Times Herald did a noticeably better job of documenting those tragic days.
I got my toe in the door there by becoming its Hopkins County “stringer,” or correspondent, my last two years of high school. What this entailed mainly was calling the Times Herald sports desk from Sulphur Springs on Friday nights after home football games to dictate a two-paragraph story and supply the necessary box-score data. These little pieces appeared in the Saturday afternoon edition. Otherwise, if there was some big story breaking in little Hopkins County (there seldom was), I’d call the state editor in Dallas to see if he wanted a writeup.
I did score one coup—a feature story published the spring of my senior year in high school. A dairy farmer by the name of Gene Gibson had refused to let a pipeline be laid under his farm property, threatening the construction crew with a shotgun. Enjoined in district court from interfering with the pipeline company’s right of eminent domain, he threatened the crew again, this time without a gun. “Are you going to let them alone and let them go through?” the judge asked. “Judge, I don’t see how I can,” Gibson replied. So he got thrown in jail for contempt of court.
That was on a Saturday. On Sunday afternoon I visited him in jail. Gibson was in good spirits and said he was ready to comply with the law, “but that doesn’t mean I agree. There’s just nothing I can do. They will put me back in here if I do it again.”
Gibson was a handsome young father of four. He let me photograph him in the slammer. It all had the makings of a good human interest story and I offered it to the Times Herald, which snapped it up. “Hopkins Man Stands Firm,” the headline read, above the byline reading, “By FRED FRAILEY, Special Writer.” I had just started to shave, and now I had a Dallas Times Herald byline under my belt.
I continued to send the Times Herald pieces the next two summers during college vacations while I worked at my dad’s paper in Sulphur Springs. The advantage of this was to make that toe in the door into something more. The people at the Times Herald got to know me. So right after New Years in 1965, I wrote to Ken Smart, the city editor, asking to work as a reporter that summer, between my junior and senior years at the University of Kansas. I showered Ken with pieces I’d written for his newspaper, the Kansas City Star and the Daily News-Telegram in Sulphur Springs. I don’t recall that Smart offered much resistance. He said to show up as soon as classes ended.
On Saturday, June 5, 1965, I married Margaret Hughes at the First Methodist Church of Ottawa, Kan. Our families and a few friends had a brief reception—brief because we had to drive to Oklahoma City that evening. Sunday we got to Dallas and moved into a furnished apartment I had previously reserved. And on Monday, at 6 a.m., I became a Dallas Times Herald reporter. Yes, technically I was an intern, but I didn’t think of it that way and neither did Ken Smart.