(I started as a reporter for my father’s daily newspaper in Sulphur Springs, Tex., at age 16. The Daily News-Telegram was perhaps the smallest daily in Texas then and therefore a good place for me to learn to put words together into sentences and sentences together into paragraphs. I covered high school sports during the academic year and Little League games in summer, while interviewing the city manager in the morning and riding patrol with deputy sheriffs at night. Best of all, when the managing editor took his vacation, I convinced my dad to let me take over, laying out pages and editing all the copy. It was heaven, and I was still too young to vote! These blogs tell of my first job in newspapers.)
In April of 1958, I had just turned 14 years old. Soon I’d be ending the eighth grade and that fall would start high school. One afternoon that month my mother cleared her throat and said we needed to talk. “Fred,” she said, “you’re starting to become a young man, and your father and I have decided that when school ends, so will your allowance.” I was getting $5 a week at that time, enough to buy Cokes and snacks and put some coins in the church collection plate. I must have looked confused. Mom looked nervous, because I don’t think she knew how I would take what she was about to say. “But your father has a job waiting for you at the newspaper. In the job shop. It will pay 25 cents an hour to start, more if you do well. What do you think.”
I did the multiplication in my head. Twenty-five times 40 hours is $10 a week. A fortune to me then! That settled it. I told mom that of course I’d work for Pop. My sister Carolyn, six years ahead of me in school, had been a cub reporter for our dad. Like her and my father, I wanted to become a newspaper reporter, and this was a first step toward that end. I just didn’t think it would start so soon.
My father, F. W. (Bill) Frailey, was editor, publisher, and majority owner of the Daily News-Telegram, an afternoon newspaper in Sulphur Springs, Tex., a town of about 9,000 people then. I once discovered that when he bought the paper in 1951, it was literally the smallest daily newspaper in Texas, with a circulation of 1,700. Until just a year or two prior to his arrival in Sulphur Springs, the paper got its news feed from the Associated Press by telegraph key—that’s right, by Morse code.
Pop was one-quarter of the paper’s editorial staff—that is, when he could find people who would work for what he could pay. His longtime managing editor was Joe Woosley. Joe edited all the stories that appeared in the paper, wrote their headlines, and sketched out the design of pages. Christine Moelk was society editor, writing the wedding announcements and other social news, plus a daily comings-and-goings column. It was finding that fourth person, to be general news reporter and sports editor, that forever frustrated my father. Sulphur Springs was easily two hours from the nearest big city, Dallas, and could be a lonely place for a young man just out of school. And as I said, the money wasn’t much. What he could offer an ambitious young reporter was a lot of experience.
For several years my dad found such a person in Tony Price, a personable young fellow of considerable talent, who my dad took under his wing. Tony stayed around longer than anyone my dad hired, for maybe two years, before getting a better job for more money at the Galveston Daily News. My father later said he knew he’d lose Tony, but it still hurt; they stayed in touch with each other for years afterward. Thereafter, more often than not, my dad not only managed a company with 30-some employees but was also his newspaper’s only general reporter. Small wonder he wanted me to help out!
Of course, at age 14 I wasn’t ready to be a reporter. Instead, that summer of 1958 found me working in the bindery of the newspaper’s commercial printing operation. Echo Publishing, parent company of the Daily News-Telegram, specialized in printing forms for scores of cotton gins throughout Texas. My job in the bindery, working for a woman in her sixties named Lorraine Wise, was to collate printed copies of pages into book size, perforate them when necessary, bind them into books using staple machines and binding tape, and finally trim them to final size on a paper-cutting machine.
If that sounds even faintly interesting, believe me, it wasn’t. And of course, as the boss’s son I had to endure a lot of good-natured hazing. Right away I was sent across Main Street to a competing print shop to ask its owner, Rex Flippin, for a “type squeezer.” I knew damn well no such device existed—it would be like asking for a rock squeezer. But the job shop foreman, Eddy Guidry, barely able to contain his laughter, insisted I do as instructed. Rex responded to my request by saying he had lent his only type squeezer to a third printing shop.
At least I was having fun at such moments, even if I was the butt of the joke. Otherwise, I was incredibly bored; I swear the clock would stop in the bindery that first summer as minutes took hours to pass. But the money was good—Pop raised my pay to 35 cents an hour after six weeks and to 50 cents at the end of summer. Yes, bored or not, I asked to work after school and on Saturdays during the school year, because I needed the money. Believe it or not, you could get a driver’s license in Texas at age 14 in that era, and by the end of summer I had saved enough money ($300) to buy a blue 1949 Ford two-door coupe. Now I had to insure and fuel it. My parents said if I owned a car, I’d have to pay every penny for its cost, and I did.
In 1960, after my sophomore year in high school, Pop gave me the promotion I had been waiting for. I was to be his reporter, covering local sports and on Saturdays, helping out with police and municipal news. Yup, I was now a newspaperman, or maybe newspaperboy.