If you’ve gotten this far, you know me as a 27-year-old newspaper dropout. That was almost half a century ago. What happened next? This is the rest of my story.
U. S. News & World Report, to whose Chicago bureau I reported on June 14, 1971, seemed like an empty refrigerator—substantial only on the outside. There were capable writers and editors, but also a lot of deadwood. The impression I got was that everyone was waiting for David Lawrence, its founder, to retire or pass on. Until then, it seemed that not much would change, and this turned out to be the case. (Lawrence died at age 84 in Sarasota in February 1973.)
My associate in the Chicago office, Peggy Schmidt, was even younger than me and proved quite a capable reporter and writer. The magazine wasn’t much interested in breaking news in our Midwest region or anywhere else. Rather, the emphasis was on “trend” stories. I’ll describe two perennials.
One of the senior editors in Washington, Grant Salisbury, must have grown up a farm boy, because it fell upon him twice a year to craft a feature story on the state of farming in America. This Grant did without ever leaving D.C., relying on a bevy of his own sources and field reporting from the Chicago, Detroit and Houston bureaus. In fact, my first out-of-town assignment was to interview farmers in central Illinois.
To find knowledgeable farmers, I called the director of the Illinois Agricultural Extension Service and asked the name of his most capable and industrious county agent in that part of the state. Then I called that county agent and flattered him with his boss’s compliments. He agreed to spend two days introducing me to farmers he worked with. This I did six times in the next three years, from Illinois to Nebraska, always with great success. It sure beat cold-calling on suspicious strangers in a farm field.
On that first farm assignment, I peppered the county agent with questions as we drove around. I didn’t know the first thing about the business of growing crops or raising livestock, but at least I was curious. From our car, I kept noticing what looked like fields of stunted corn crops. What a shame, I finally said to the county agent. “Son,” he replied, “those are very healthy soybeans.” We both laughed, and I started asking about the economics of raising soybeans.
The other assignment I could count on was the brainchild of the magazine’s resident intellectual, senior editor George Jones. George took upon himself a near-impossible task, crafting every six months a feature story called “Mood of America.” His legmen for this story became the dozen or so correspondents stationed across the U.S. I would set aside a week to wander around the Midwest, approaching strangers on sidewalks and inside taverns, introducing myself and asking what was on their minds about the state of affairs in our nation, the good and the bad. Amazingly, I got close to 100 percent cooperation from those I accosted, and in that week, themes always seemed to emerge. I’d write a long file for George my first day back, full of my impressions—and dozens of direct quotes—and wait to see how much of what I sent him ended up in the published piece.
I wonder today how much George Jones had to struggle to make his latest “Mood of America” article different from the ones before it. About the fifth or sixth time of working this story, I got bored. I called the Detroit bureau chief and proposed we make a bet: Whoever got the strangest name of a town we visited into George’s finished story would be taken to dinner by the other. That time I was supposed to wander through South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa, so I studied the names of little towns on the state maps, and in a matter of minutes knew I had a plan. In fact, I flew to Sioux City and beelined to Buffalo Trading Post, S.D., interviewing everyone I could find in that sleepy crossroads. And my last stop of the week-long trip was What Cheer, Iowa. The sidewalks were empty, but I struck gold in the town’s only bar, where people on the stools thought it hilarious that someone would want to know what they thought. I won hands down.
But the truth is that you can only travel so much. Most of the time I worked stories by phone from Chicago’s Prudential Building. Few were pieces I did all on my own; the clear majority were “roundup” articles that all the bureaus contributed to and someone in Washington wrote. I missed both newspapers and the labor beat. Learning of a vacancy in the Chicago office of the Los Angeles Times, I wrote its national editor, to no avail.
Sometimes you catch a break by just waiting patiently, and mine arrived in 1974. Archie Robinson, the magazine’s labor writer since the late 1940s, beloved by everyone on the magazine staff and by the labor union chieftains he wrote about, announced his retirement as of August. My boss, David Richardson, the chief of correspondents, put in a good word with the new managing editor, Marvin Stone, and in August, as newspaper front pages announced the resignation of Richard Nixon, Maggie and I and two-year-old daughter Barbara moved to Washington. Our son Will was born that November.
Writing about unions and the workplace—every week of the year—was as satisfying a job as I ever had. I was, in effect, my own boss, thinking up my own stories, doing my own reporting and writing my own articles. It helped that I had a kindly editor, Ellis Haller, and that Marvin Stone was energizing the magazine with new people and fresh ideas. Well, not always fresh ideas. Marvin had a habit of tearing stories out of old U. S. News issues and sending them to writers with the words, “Time to do again.” For some reason, this irritated me. When I’d suffered enough, I told Marvin I came up with better ideas than these old chestnuts. “That may be,” Margin replied, “but these were good ideas, too, and we didn’t do them well. I’m challenging you to make them sparkle.” That shut me up.
I kept that assignment four years, learning how to craft a magazine article (quite different from a newspaper story), traveling frequently around the country (always by train, when I could) and reveling in the company of both union leaders and working men and women. And by the way, filling two or more pages of every issue of the magazine made me the most productive writer on the staff. Raises came easily.
By 1979 I was deemed ready to become an editor, starting with editing my successor on the labor beat, Sara Fritz, who I lured away from the same job at United Press International. Let me just say of editing that it pays well. But if you want job satisfaction, stay a reporter and writer.
It took 30 years before I returned to being a writer. In the interim, as an assistant managing editor at U. S. News, I ended editing up its business coverage. But with the purchase of this employee-own magazine by the developer Mort Zuckerman in 1985 came a realization: If you worked there when Mort came to rescue it (in his mind) from certain oblivion, you didn’t deserve a promotion, and none of us got one. I liked Zuckerman as a person, but I didn’t like what looked like a dead end. I got out of there in 1987, to become deputy editor of Changing Times, which several years later became Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine. The last eight of my 22 years there were as its editor.
So now, at age 74, I am a writer again. My platform is Trains, a magazine about railroads and railroaders. I wrote my first story for Trains in 1978—10,000 words, every one of which was published!—and have continued to freelance for the monthly publication. I told its editor, Jim Wrinn, when I retired from Kiplinger’s Personal Finance in 2009: “I’m yours. Milk me like a dairy cow until I drop.” That he has done.
Now you know the rest of my story. Two marriages, five children and now grandchildren—I’ve been fortunate. But the times in life I still dream about are those newspaper days. I was young, burning with ambition, eager to live the life, which I assuredly did. I wouldn’t trade those 11 years for anything.