Sneak Peek
I am staring at a blank screen on my word hungry computer and I am thinking how my world has changed.
Much of the excitement of the journalism I once knew is gone, I reflect in my home office that has been converted from a bedroom. .It is a quieter more orderly world of print journalism in which I now work, and I am not sure that I like it this way, despite all the shortcomings of the past.. There is so much that I miss.
I miss the roar of the presses and the smell of the newsprint, the initial signals that it was time to rush to the pressroom in the basement of the daily newspaper I wrote for, and to snatch, still wet from the ink, the first early bird copies of that day’s editions. .
I miss the constant ringing of the telephones in the newsroom where reporter after reporter talked to their sources (and sometimes their bookies) in a quest for information for that day’s stories.
I miss the sight of veteran reporters, cigarettes dangling from their lips, pounding out their stories on typewriters bearing the names of Smith Corona, Underwood and Royal.
And, most of all, I miss the competition, the rivalry between newspapers that in the long run made for better newspapermen and sometimes better newspapers.
Today 68 years later, like some other reporters, I seldom see the inside of a newsroom. Many modern day reporters collect information at meetings of governments, at sporting events, at accidents and , if there is an immediate need to meet deadlines, they often write their stories right on the scene on laptops, or on their home computers in improvised offices such as the one in which I am cloistered.
I miss all this and more, but remnants of the past stay in my memory bank and in these years, when most reporters I have known are retired or have gone to the great editorial room in the sky, I continue my work for the love of the profession and for the opportunity to report the non-fiction (and some of the fictions) of the times..
This, for me, is no time to retire.
So, as my computer begs for sustenance, I am about to tell how it was then, long before the world of communications underwent a dramatic metamorphosis, and how it is now when it is difficult to believe what has happened since the years I wrote my stories on L.C. Smith manual typewriters and sent them by way of copy boys to critical editors with sharp pencils just a few desks away. .
Yet, while this is to be my story of 68 years in journalism, it also is to be a story representative of other newsmen whose careers have transcended the old and the new. They have not acquired the fame of a Bob Woodward, a Jimmy Breslin or a Neil Sheehan, but they have been important cogs in the wheels of journalism, bringing to the breakfast tables the news of what has happened at meetings of the zoning boards and city councils, at police stations and courthouses. These “bird dogs” of journalism, often underpaid for their accomplishments, ferret out the local news that seldom is reported in depth in the modern world of big city newspapers or in the snapshot coverage of television or even through the magic of the Internet.
Reporters still dig up the news, but how different it is from the times I once knew.
My story begins in a colorful decade of American history known as The Roaring Twenties when flappers danced the Charleston and bootleggers defied government regulations that prohibited the making and sale of liquor.
Rose Gehring Schaad, my mother, gave birth to her only child on October 22, 1921 in a house on Franklin Street in Paterson, New Jersey, at a time when babies were not usually born in hospitals. She was a pianist and a professional singer and she had high hopes that her son would succeed in the world of the arts too, perhaps as a singer at The Met, a pianist soloing at Carnegie Hall or, way down on the list, an actor emoting on Broadway.
None of those dreams came true, however. Instead, her efforts produced a newspaperman who, as far as she was concerned, was someone who sold newspapers on street corners. Unwittingly, though, her persistence and his early resistance to the musical arts led him to the alternative of the fourth estate.
Mother, who preferred to be called that instead of “Ma” or “Mom,” was born in the late nineteenth century in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of German immigrants.
Early in her childhood her family moved to the city of Paterson, about 15 miles from New York City. She attended business school and also studied voice and the piano.
She met my father, after whom I was named, at a dance and after a courtship they were married in 1917, four years before I entered their world.
Dad and his parents came to this country from Switzerland when he was one year old. They settled in an unpretentious house on the banks of the Passaic River in the Riverside section of Paterson which had a diverse population of Swiss, German and Italian immigrants. Later, he was to be joined by a brother and two sisters who all became part of a tightly knit family struggling to make it in the United States
When dad was old enough, he found a job in the silk industry which was flourishing in Paterson. The city, founded in 1791 by Alexander Hamilton, called itself the Silk City of The World until labor problems and strikes destroyed that industry in the 1920s and 1930s.Dad, nevertheless, managed to stay in the business in one job or another until he died at the age of 90 in 1979, one hour after we had celebrated my 58th birthday at a party at his ...
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