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The Stockton Record
vintage section
By Paul WeeksW ednesday, April 3, 2003
Breaking the color barrier with friendship
dpa," my granddaughter Erin wrote, "how come you wrote so much about civil rights when you were a reporter? Who, what shaped the way you believe?"
Erin had an English class assignment to interview some ancient member of the family for an essay about his or her career. At least it sounded that way.
That was a year ago. And I was only 80. "Interview"?
Who ever wanted to interview a newspaper reporter?
I thought about it. I'd long been a news junkie when the turbulent 1960s prompted much of America -- blacks and whites -- to turn around and look inside themselves.
Martin Luther King? Malcolm X? Medgar Evers? A sick racist like Lincoln Rockwell? White Citizens Council marchers? I'd met with them all.
But then I knew how I had to begin my story: With Johnny Lewis.
In 1933, our family pulled up stakes from the prairies of North Dakota and moved to New Mexico. I was the loneliest kid in Albuquerque. Then Johnny swung into stride with me on the way home from junior high one day, and I'd found a pal. We met in band class. Wasn't he on clarinet and I on the snare drum?
One day my mother asked, "Who is that boy you walk home with?"
"Johnny."
"Do the other kids in school like Johnny?"
"Gosh, I s'pose so."
"Son, Johnny's black, isn't he?"
Only I doubt if she said "black."
What a funny question. Sure, Johnny was black. No kids in Mott, North Dakota, were black.
"Now," she began -- as I've heard many others begin throughout the years -- "I think Johnny's probably a fine boy, but ('er) what would the neighbors think?"
Eventually, I got to know the Weeks kids were probably the only ones in Mott who were raised on good Southern cookin', which Mom learned at the knee of her Tennessee-raised mother.
My mother and dad eventually proudly showed off to THEIR neighbors the byline on top those civil rights newspaper stories in the '60s, and I was proud of their enlightened views on who could walk home from school with whom.
I'd wondered whatever happened to Johnny Lewis. The day I was writing my granddaughter, it was on my mind. I took my usual break for coffee and the morning newspaper.
And there I found the same name -- in the lead obituary in the Los Angeles Times.
John Lewis, internationally known and respected musician, composer, leader of the renowned Modern Jazz Quartet, had died at 80. Why, I'd listened over and over to my computer downloads of their music.
I read on quickly. I've read of many famous John Lewises in labor, politics -- and, yes -- music. I read reporter Jon Thurber's moving account of this John Lewis' life, paragraph after paragraph. And then my heart almost stopped -- joy, gladness and sadness intertwined.
John Lewis, Thurber wrote, began learning his music in Albuquerque, went to school there, and to the University. Achieved world acclaim. Raised a family. Retired on the French Riviera.
Johnny, I wish my mother were still alive to read that.
* Journalist Paul Weeks' column debuts with this edition of Vintage. Weeks was a longtime reporter who pioneered civil rights coverage in mainstream metropolitan daily newspapers throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. He began his career at the Albuquerque (N.M.) Journal. He joined the old Los Angeles Daily News in 1946, working as a reporter and assistant city editor before joining the Los Angeles Mirror, where his assignments included a stint at the paper's Washington, D.C. bureau. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 1962. He later worked for the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and in public relations at the RAND Corp. He lives in Oceanside. To reach him, e-mail Rand9999@aol.com.
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The Stockton (CA) Record, Vintage Section
Originally published Tuesday, May 7, 2002
The bridge over the River Cannonball
But I probably was among only a handful of elders who w
I ‘m among only a handful of elders who w
Twenty-five-year old Lindbergh, a no-nonsense, serious-minded fellow, bullied his new crate, made of wood and cloth and held together by some welded steel tubing, across the dark waters without forward vision on takeoff because of the rigging -- without radio, without much but a few cold sandwiches and so much gasoline that it made his takeoff questionable. He covered 3,600 miles in 33 hours and 33 minutes.
Grandson Erik, 37, made it with hardly a ripple in the news about the hop in his "new" Spirit of St. Louis, with state-of-the-art global positioning equipment, his flight monitored by specialists in aviation, navigation and meteorology from Mission Control in St. Louis. Even the press seemed bored about young Erik's flight.
Today's kids would be far more excited if someone water-skied the Atlantic.
Maybe the news arrived first from radio station KFYR, Bismarck. But the full story wasn't spread before me until a day or two later when my father, a rural mail carrier, brought the Bismarck Tribune home from the post office after his morning round.
If my father's enthusiasm over Lindbergh's achievement was to teach me the values of bravery and stick-to-it-iveness, he wouldn't for the minute have related it to the bridge arch over the Cannonball River. The big kids ran over the arches as if that was what you do for fun on the way to school. Such damn-foolishness wasn't supposed to enter my head.
A few days after learning about Lucky Lindy, I gazed up in awe of the concrete arches -- maybe 10 feet high. If Lindbergh could make it across the Atlantic, why couldn't I conquer the arch?
I hesitated. I started up. Two or three steps. My knees began to shake. Another step. I dropped to my knees. I paused. Then I started to crawl. I crawled all the way.
"Pauly Weeks Makes It!" I envisioned the headlines.
My black stockings, held up by elastic garters, were torn and ragged and blood-soaked from my skinned knees. After the vision of headlines, my head began to envision going home to Mama and Dad. All of the schooling in honesty and obedience crumbled away. I hid the stockings and covered my bloody knees with another pair.
Oh, my father finally heard about it. Ninety-three when he passed on in 1983, he read about it in the Los Angeles Times a year earlier. I'd written a memoir about returning to my old hometown -- 55 years after Charles Lindbergh and Pauly Weeks had made it. Dad had lived long beyond Americans landing on the moon.
My grandchildren are already in their 20s. But, thank heavens, I'll never catch any of their children trying to run the arches over Rainbow Bridge. It crashed into the river sometime ago when the spring breakup of ice on the Cannonball built up behind it and brought it to its knees.
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* Paul Weeks is a longtime reporter who now lives in Oceanside, CA. To reach him, e-mail Rand9999@aol.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Stockton (CA) Record, Vintage Section, June 2002
Weeks’ Worth”
The Day I Set the Press Box on Fire
By Paul Weeks
When I got my first five-dollars-a-week job at 16 writing sports for The Albuquerque Journal, I took my early arrival at manhood seriously and realized (ah, how sadly now!) how incumbent it was upon me to learn to smoke.
In no time, I was able to scratch kitchen matches across the seat of my pants, offer a pal a "weed," and flip the butt away with nary a thought about whether it might ignite a conflagration like Mrs. O'Leary' s cow kicking over a lantern and burning down half of Chicago.
At first I practiced in men's rooms, in rumble seats, on hikes along (flammable) forest trails, in the garden at night where I could eat the green tops off the onions to disguise my pungent breath.
(I probably should confess I lost my smoke-free virginity with an amicable circle of friends ranging from 10 to 12 years old by rolling dried corn silks into strips of newspaper and puffing away.)
So, it wasn't long before I would light up in the city room like the grizzled, old men around me -- some even in their late 30s, twice my age.
In the autumn of '37 or '38. I could inhale and cough and spit, and maybe even have two cigs burning at once, perched on each side of my desk -- a practice that seared and blackened my lungs for five or six decades.
I I was assigned to cover a football game between the University of New Mexico and the Arizona SState Lumberjacks at Flagstaff, overnight by rail from Albuquerque.
The game was a humdinger, but being a "professional" reporter (and a UNM sophomore at the same time), I, of course, was duty-bound to swallow any joy or dismay as the game swayed back and forth between the goal posts.
BBut cigarettes disguised partisanship. I lighted one after another that crystal fall afternoon. tThrough the smoke haze in the press box, I scribbled notes about passes, punts and penalties, aand eyed the leaping cheerleader girls -- strictly for color for my story.
My nicotine-stained fingers slammed cigarettes down on the desk to shake the ashes. The butts aaccumulated under my feet. I stomped them out with the sole of my shoe.
Wait a minute. . .
Heads were turning away from the field toward the press box. Spectators, finger-pointing. What goes on here? The game waged on.
What was everybody looking at?
!oke billowed below the press box. The cloud geysered skyward. Were the bleachers on fire?
No, the press box was.
Oh, migod.
Leaning out, I saw smoke oozing from the press box siding -- inside, a red glow at my feet.
The game halted. Players afield and on the bench, coaches, referees. . . all gawked at the smoke rising from the press box.
But the instincts of two waterboys were exceptional. Buckets splashing, they raced up repeatedly and doused the fire before it could ignite headlines the next morning:
“HUNDREDS FLEE BURNING BLEACHERS
Holocaust from kid reporter's cigarettes
Averted by waterboys’ heroic dash of’ to press box”
I think I quit smoking after that – ‘well, I quit often, that is, until on March 10, 1982: I was in Chicago, puffing my way in and out of newspaper city rooms and television studios, inviting the media to a news conference now that I had departed newspapering for the service of a corporation on the shores of the Pacific. Chicago, in winter, was hot inside and freezing and snowing outside.
Days later, still valiantly trying to inhale one more Pall Mall despite roaring influenza, I consulted a sage man of medicine who advised I give up going to Chicago or give up smoking.
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Paul Weeks, a longtime reporter, lives in Oceanside, CA. Reach him at rand9999@aol.co
The Stockton Record, Vintage Section
(Originally published July, 2002)
OH, A NEWSPAPERMAN MEETS
SUCH INTEESTING PEOPLE. . .'
It's probably a good thing you can't hear me singing that rollicking old tune as the echoes of my newspaper years ring like music in my ears.
The phone rang a couple of days before my graduation from high school: "Would you like to cover your commencement night for us?" It was The Albuquerque Journal's editor.
That night in May 1937, was magic. How many other grads could sit there in black cap and gown, copy paper (folded like the pros do), a thick-leaded editor's pencil in hand, breathlessly taking notes of a college professor's pompous parables. . . "You are now going out into this world . . ."
Wow, was I! Two painful note-scribbling hours were condensed later that night into five or six paragraphs in the newsroom. I waited until it was time for Cinderella to come home from the ball for the first edition to come up the chute. Yeah, I'd seen my copy in lead type before in the high school newspaper -- but these were mine, anonymous as they were, in a daily with 20,000 circulation.
The grizzled copy desk man, maybe in his 40s, gave me a ride home that night. I blurted out that I wanted always to be a reporter.
"Well, kid," he said, ït's a helluva way to make a livin' -- but it's a damn sight better than workin'." He even swore like a newspaperman. Trite as it may have been, I've never forgotten it.
Not long after that, I was on the payroll at $5 a week. I quit my 10 cents-an-hour job in a rootbeer barrel for that hefty salary increase.
Probably noticing my squirming a week or so later, sitting at my typewriter one night trying to look busy, Red Pryor, on the desk, said, "Kid, why don't you go out on the street and see if you can come up with an item or two?"
Again, I hit it big: I wandered down to the brickwalk at the depot where a special trainload of Shriners bound from Los Angeles to the national convention in Chicago were whooping it up as they went into the dining room at the Alvarado for supper. A p.r. man (that's our shoptalk for "press agent,") invited the kid reporter to the feast.
Maybe a paragraph, I figured. They were getting onto the train later. The p.r. man came running over to me:
"Hey, reporter, we've kidnapped the warden of the New Mexico penitentiary and we're taking him with us!"
The train was pulling out -- no time to check with the kidnap victim.
The next day, two-column headline above the fold on Page One, something like:
"STATE PRISON'S WARDEN KIDNAPPED
BY FROLICKING LOS ANGELES SHRINERS"
My first scoop -- right out of Damon Runyon or Walter Winchell.
The next day as I strutted into the newsroom, the opposition's newspaper was spread out of my desk. Two column, Page One, headline:
"WARDEN SAFE IN PRISON, HE SAYS;
SHRINERS GOT THE ASSISTANT WARDEN"
There goes my job. Down the drain. I looked around the office, expecting the floor to fall in any minute. No one looked up. First lesson from the newspaper primer, not necesssary to be spoken:
ALWAYS, always check the facts and your sources. Get a second source (or talk to the victim, if you can!). I didn't even get a cut in pay.
Never will I forget the Journal's editor, Homer P. Pickrell. In midsummer, I heard his booming voice off the newsroom. His sports editor, a roving newspaperman most recently off Chicago's notorious Cook County beat, from which Hecht and McArthur'derived their classic "Front Page," had been called on the carpet.
"You're fired!" Pickrell roared at Bub Fraser -- fired for drinking on the job. Looking back, when else was a newspaperman going to get a drink, having to work from morn until late at night, before wages-and-hours rules came along?
Bub scratched his head. He looked the editor straight in the eye and said: "For the amount of sports you want in this newspaper, that 16-year-old kid out there could do it!"
Pickrell promptly marched through the door to my desk:
"Paul," he said, "you're our new sports editor."
Gracious sakes alive, I thought (paraphrasing newspaper profanity), what hath God wrought?
I didn't know an infield fly from a pass ball, a bunt from a four-bagger. But I learned -- from Evelyn Shulman, two years my junior, daughter of Herman Schulman, a laundry truck driver who was official scorer for the Albuquerque Cardinals, a farm club for St. Louis, in the Class D Arizona-Texas League.
Bill DeLancey, who used to catch Dizzy Dean occasionally before illness struck him down. Branch Rickey named him manager in Albuquerque, where the desert air would be good for his lungs.
Rickey, who broke baseball's color barrier by hiring Jackie Robinson, for which I will always second remember him, is first with me for inviting this kid reporter to sit in a Tingley Field box with him one night while he scouted a pitcher.
Archie (I've forgotten his last name) threw the fastest ball I'd ever seen. The problem is he never seemed to be able to put it over home plate. A steady diet of balls and no strikes won't put y ou up there with Sandy Koufax. (Yes, I was in Dodger Stadium when Sandy pitched his no-hitter in the World Series -- but, alas, I was doing a sidebar on the crowd for The Los Angeles Times, after having moved from sports to city-side when I left Albuquerque.)
If you read my previous piece in this space, you're already aware of how I covered a football game out of town by setting the press box on fire in Flagstaff. In another autumn, Ted Shipkey, former All-American end for Pop Warner at Stanford who coached the University of New Mexico Lobos, apparently decided to forgive me for that and invited me to go along later to cover their game with Texas Tech in Lubbock.
It was a furious struggle afield. The Lobos were no match for the Raiders. Trained to be an objective reporter and not a "home-towner," I wrote just the facts, ma'am.
Unfortunately, the next day on the training coming home, Shipkey came up and sat down beside me. He had picked up The Journal's morning paper somewhere at a station stop, read my story, and thrust it in my face.
"Hey, Weeks," he growled, "which game were YOU covering yesterday?"
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The Stockton (CA) Record, Vintage Section Originally published Tuesday, August 6, 2002
Weeks’ Worth
Reporter recalls golden days of JFK's new frontier
By Paul Weeks
"And so, my fellow Americans, ask not for what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
Dropped like crystals into the freezing morning of January 20, 1961, those words from John Fitzgerald Kennedy's inaugural address are etched deeply into American patriotism. They framed my brief years as a Los Angeles correspondent in the nation's capital.
Television brought JFK's face, his voice, his confidence to the nation. He did for television what Franklin D. Roosevelt did for radio with his fireside chats. Both captured the country. Followers loved them with fierce loyalty. Detractors hated them with ferocity.
In Washington's below-freezing temperatures in the days preceding Kennedy's inauguration, he drew the press like a magnet to his Georgetown door as he dribbled out the nominations to his Cabinet.
Each morning's watch dragged abominably as we waited, teeth chattering, feet going numb. We envisioned the sportily clad 43-year-old basking in the heat from a brick fireplace, talking politics and issues, before emerging with another nominee for hot, "breaking news!"
A motherly lady across the street scolded, "You boys, for land's sake!" for standing out in the cold. Her steaming coffee, fresh-baked cookies and doughnuts were accepted gratefully while we kept a sharp eye on Kennedy's front door.
Later, made-for-television news conferences in a spacious auditorium with cushioned seats at the Department of State began with a ritual first question from the newswire reporters as the President entered from stage right. Press personalities carved their own niche: Chirpy, crackling May Craig, the lady from Maine, with a wardrobe of splendiferous hats; Sarah McClendon, with her mile-long questions served up in a deep Southern drawl; Marianne Means, the pert blonde from the Hearst Newspapers, always drawing the eye of the president; precise, bright Helen Thomas, then with UPI but still doing correspondence now for Hearst; dignified John Hightower of AP.
Those were heady days heralding the New Frontier. A young secretary from California had found a job earlier in then Senator Kennedy's office. As president-elect, he called her on the phone. "Frankie,{Childers, not used} what job would you like?" Frankie, who before had called her boss "Jack," said her mouth fell open. She choked: "Mr. President, I have no idea."
]
"How would you like to go to our U.N. office in New York?" She would. She did.
"The first night after I reported for work," she said, "the phone rang. It was the President of the United States."
"Well, Frankie," he said, "what did you do on your first day?"
"Uh ... I can't tell you, Mr. President." Pause again.
"It was classified." She giggled.
At the outdoor inauguration at the Capitol, JFK came out lightly clad, hatless. I hadn't gotten around to buying the heavy overcoat, winter underwear, fur hat and the like. I was still wearing California winter clothes. "How's the weather back there?" gloated the man on rewrite back in L.A., knowing what the weather was like in Washington.
Optimism for months. The president promised a landing on the moon in 10 years. He didn't live to see it. His days swung the pendulum from the Cuban Missile Crisis, a hair-split of an atomic confrontation with the Soviets, through calls for a Job Corps, Head Start classes and a war on poverty.
On Jan. 6, 1962, the Los Angeles Mirror ceased publication. There I was with a new heavy overcoat, winter underwear, overshoes and snow tires on my car.
The following year, reassigned home to the Los Angeles Times, I was in the city room when the newswire tickers reported that the president lay dead from an assassin's bullets. Days of mourning shrouded the nation -- scenes like little John-John saluting the horse-drawn caisson bearing his father's body to Arlington National Cemetery.
The city desk tried unsuccessfully to reach me on a day off to fly to Dallas. Another reporter got the assignment. He saw Jack Ruby slay Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin, in the Dallas jail.
I haven't regretted missing the assignment.
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5(* Paul Weeks is a longtime reporter who lives in Oceanside. To reach him, e-mail Rand9999@aol.com. )
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(“Weeks Worth”) By Paul Weeks
For The Stockton Record, Vintage, September 2002
Into the New Millenium, Nat King Cole Still Sings:
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn Is just to love and be loved in return. .”
- from the song, “Nature Boy”
By Paul Weeks
Let your imagination roll , if you like Vintage memoirs, and you can hear the velvety voice of Nat King Cole: “Nature Boy,” “Sweet Lorraine,” “Unforgettable,” “Ramblin’Rose.”
Hear it? Cole, a black man, was one of the most famous and beloved of the jazz greats with his piano and an unforgettable singing voice.
His press agent called, asking, “How’d you like to interview Nat King Cole? He’s just back from the White House.”
I was covering civil rights for the Los Angeles Times in the turbulent ‘60s.
“The White House? How’s that?”
“Lyndon Johnson invited him to dinner – a good story possibility for you.”
I thought so, too. Cole had drawn sharp protests from his new neighbors when he bought a home in the exclusive -- and lily-white -- Wilshire district of Los Angeles. He moved his family in without batting an eye. That’s where the interview would take place.
King met me at the door:
“What can I do for you?”
“I understand you’ve been dining with LBJ and Lady Bird.”
His answer was a slight frown, but he suggested we sit down and talk. After all, wasn’t it his press agent’s idea?
I began firing questions. Did they talk about school desegregation? Discrimination in housing? Employment?
Cole frowned noticeably this time.
I pressed on: Had he seen any improvement at all in race relations in these troubled days in Los Angeles? Did he talk about it with the President? I wondered: Was he beginning to think my questions sounded like ugly bullets aimed at a moving target? They were.
The black man bristled. He stood up.
“Sir, I am an entertainer, a musician. I make my living just as you do. Why do you insist on asking me this line of questions?”
Pause.
“Mr. Cole, it was your agent’s suggestion. You’d just come from the White House, right?”
That’s it. With a sweep of his hands and those long, sensitive fingers, Nat King Cole invited me to leave. I exploded:
“I’m not my newspaper’s entertainment writer. If that’s what you expected, your agent should have called Cecil Smith. I admire your singing and have listened to your recordings often. But I cover civil rights!”
He stopped dead still. He thought about it. He began to thaw. He couldn’t hide a smile. I was relieved.
“Nat,” I said, now that the ice was broken, “could I stay a little longer and hear you play one of your songs?”
If that jolted him, it also seemed to please him. He sat on the piano bench. I sat beside him. He started to sing – I don’t remember what, but the words came back to me then. We sang a duet. It wasn’t an audition, believe me,.
A wide-eyed little girl sat on the winding staircase, listening in amazement. I learned much later that her name was Natalie -- Natalie Cole. She went on to become a musical sensation on her own, and even recorded a duet with her late father, voicing over his "Unforgettable.” It won a Grammy award.
Nat Cole and I didn’t cross paths again. But I wrote about him once more.
On March 16, 1965, the Los Angeles Times’ Page One banner headline screamed: “NAT KING COLE DEAD.” He had died the day before of lung cancer in a Santa Monica hospital. It was more than a local story, more than a national story. The Times news syndicate beamed the news around the world.
The world of music was stilled for a heartbeat. But today it throbs with the King’s voice carrying on through the ages.
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(Paul Weeks is a longtime reporter living in Oceanside, Calif. Reach him at Rand9999@aol.com.)
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THE STOCKTON RECORD, Vintage Section
Originally published November, 2002By Paul Weeks
I was taken for a ride once by a notorious gangster of yesteryear -- but don't feel sad for me. It's an opportunity to tell one more story. Mickey Cohen is going to surrender this morning at the Federal Courthouse on a charge of income tax evasion," the city editor of the old Los Angeles Daily News said. "Pick up a photog and get a shot of him leaving home."
When we arrived at Cohen's home in Brentwood, it was no surprise that other city editors had the same notion. All the metro press sat curbside.
The maid came to the door. "Mistah Weeks, you out theah?
Sheepishly, I raised my hand.
"C'mon in!" she said.
The door closed behind me. Mickey, the chubby little hoodlum, a boxer preceding his more income producing activities, glared at me.
"What'sa matter with you? Why're you standin' out there like some sort of chicken? Why'nt ring the doorbell?" Pause. " Sit down,"
We were already acquainted. Mickey had succeeded Bugsy Siegel as the head of the mob in L.A., after Bugsy's assassination in the Beverly Hills home of Virginia Hill, his mistress.
I was leaving the office that night in 1947 when Sparky Saldana, on the city desk, put down the phone and hollered: "Stop by Beverly Hills on your way home. The police beat says Bugsy Siegel has been wiped out."
Fairly new to the big city, my coverage of murders was in its infancy. At the plush home on Linden Drive lay the late Mr. Siegel, his body riddled by automatic gunfire from a nearby window as he sat on a sofa chatting with Alan Smiley.
I began gathering information as I had in other incidents of violent death. But my colleagues sounded like characters out of Hecht and MacArthur's "Front Page," a bestseller based on the police beat antics of reporters covering Chicago's underworld.
That frightful introduction segued into further assignments as Mickey Cohen rose to power -- a gangster who, to his ultimate misfortune, seemed to revel in newspaper coverage as did some movie actors in his coterie of friends.
It his highly likely that my bylined coverage of a budding scandal in the Los Angeles Police Department endeared me to the little gangster. If so, he didn't express that when he accepted my request for an interview.
Cohen had been press-shy only of coverage in his home, so I took along photographer Gib Brush with instructions to shoot Mickey in every room to which we were admitted. Gib worked feverishly: Mickey's bedroom, his wife Yvonne's liberally adorned from walls to ceiling to wastebasket with mirrors, his sitting room, and so on.
(Our ulterior motive? Someday one of those pictures might be useful for another story. And they were. When the house was bombed later, Mickey's bedroom lay in shambles. He wasn't sleeping there that night. Yvonne's bedroom was untouched.)
Naive as I may have been, I was so impressed by Cohen's agile mind that I got up the nerve to ask him:
"Mickey, with your business acumen, why don't you go straight? You could make a fine living. . ."
"Kid," he turned to me solemnly, "I ain't done nuttin' illegal in t'ree years!"
I wasn't so naive that I didn't know what the statute of limitations was for prosecution of most crimes short of murder in California.
The day arrived of Cohen's impending surrender for income tax evasion He outlined the scenario: He would drive his big, black Cadillac, reputedly bulletproofed. Yvonne would sit beside him.
"You," he said, "will take the back seat."
We shot out of the garage past the startled press contingent. Instead of taking the shortest distance. Mickey nosed the Cadillac into the splendor of Sunset Boulevard. We paraded its length.
Mickey was fiddling with the radio dial until he found a newscast. MacArthur was doing something in Korea. Mickey was impatient. The newscast went on: "Mickey Cohen is due to surrender in Federal Court today . . ."
He straightened up behind the wheel, smiled broadly and proceeded to the flood of popping flashbulbs that awaited him at our destination.
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The Stockton (CA) Record, Vintage Section Originally Published Friday, December 6, 2002 (This also appeared in The Albuquerque, NM, Journal on December 7, 2002, and on http://www.riprense.com/ -- Rip Rense’s “Rip Posts”website)) Messages from the frontDec. 7 remembered
Almost anyone can tell you where they were, what they were doing, when word flashed of terrorists crashing airliners into New York City's twin towers. The ranks are growing thin of those who "Remember Pearl Harbor" -- Dec. 7, 1941. The radio was on that Sunday morning. Pearl Harbor? How could the Japanese be attacking United States territory -- Hawaii? Japanese diplomats were in Washington that very day, talking of peace. Registered for the draft but not yet called up, I rushed down to The Albuquerque Journal where I wrote sports. Not that day. New Mexico's 200th Coast Artillery, with dozens of my friends, was in the Philippines, thousands of miles away from Pearl Harbor -- but almost that many thousands closer to the Japanese homeland. War reached them in hours. A cavalry unit federalized only that previous January, the 200th was dispatched in September to the Philippines. War? Some of the guys "joined up because it was the best and cheapest way to get a date on the weekend to go horseback riding" before they left Albuquerque, Mrs. Ruth Jackson,of Ramona, Calif., a grandmother, remembers. Years earlier, the Guard's band couldn't find a drummer. In school, I had marched miles with a snare drum beating into my midriff. It wasn't hard to get into the military under age when they wanted you. My father, bless his soul, said flatly, "No." After the war's outbreak, Japanese planes were reported heading toward Clark Field on Luzon, where the 200th was stationed. U.S. planes rose to the challenge, but the enemy didn't arrive. Our airmen, short of fuel, landed. Then the symbol of the Rising Sun came into telescopic view. Clark Field could be defended only from the ground with outmoded weapons that had not been fired in anger since "doughboys" manned them in World War I. As bombing and strafing descended, the 200th's band broke out incredibly in the din to, "The Ol'Gray Mare, She Ain't What She Used to Be." Jimmy McCahon, once the kid next door whose trumpet practicing kept the neighborhood awake, was wielding the baton as the director. Years later, Cipriano Ramirez of Gallup, N.M., recalled McCahon saying, "It wasn't very good music, but it had spirit." Back to that unbelievable Dec. 7: Everyone on the newspaper, from police beat, to society, to sports, was on the phones and in the files, collecting every dribble of background, history and troop movement of the 200th -- names, rank, dates -- oblivious to the crackdown that came before the presses rolled. Wartime censorship. There were no cell phones, e-mail or even personal telegrams, no war correspondents yet on the distant battlefields to get word back to loved ones. Espiridion ("Espeedie") Ruiz, who lived until 1982, remembered the 200th's defiant -- yet somber -- slogan: "We're the battling bastards of Bataan; no mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam." They held the lines beyond human endurance. Surrendering nearly six months later, the fate awaiting them was even worse. They trekked the infamous Bataan Death March -- nearly a hundred miles of starvation, open to the tropical sun, thirst, beating and slaughter if they fell. Maj. Ted Parker, my brother-in-law, not only made it but lived through the hell of prison camps until the advancing U.S. forces were almost at the door. Later we learned, he was crammed into the hold of a Japanese ship with 1,800 other prisoners en route to Japan. There were no marks visible to U.S. bombers that their own kin and comrades were aboard. When a death-dealing bomb struck, Parker was near the only hatch from which air was available to the men inside. He rushed to thrust it back for the others. In confusion, a fleeing Japanese guard fired one shot. Only a few of those who escaped returned home to tell about it. While writing this account, I sent an e-mail message to Ted's widow, Mrs. Helen Wilson of Boynton Beach, Fla., who went into nurses training when she expected he might come home in need of her care. After Ted's death, she married again -- a doctor -- and is now a grandmother. "Did you ever hear from Ted while he was a prisoner?" I asked. She had received only two heavily censored post cards through the Red Cross in three years. "Not quite saying 'having a wonderful time,' " she said, "but something similar." #### *.========================================================== |
Originally published in the Stockton Record, Vintage section, January 7, 2003)
Khruschev, Monroe and Maclaine
By Paul Weeks
The cast of characters in this story: Nikita Khrushchev, head of the Soviet Union and the "guest of honor" for a civic luncheon in Los Angeles; Marilyn Monroe, a luncheon guest, and Shirley Maclaine,who danced the Can-Can -- all of whom I encountered one autumn day in 1959.
I say "guest of honor" with some hesitation because Mayor Norris Poulson wasn't exactly entranced with having Khrushchev as a distinguished tourist within his city limits. The visit became something of an international incident, what with the Soviet Premier's feeling insulted by Poulson's remarks to the press -- and, besides, Police Chief William H. Parker wouldn't let the Khruschev entourage go to Disneyland.
The chief and many others were strong on Homeland Security long before it became fashionable, with bin-Layden cast as the villain.
It was closer to go directly to the luncheon from home rather than to go to the newspaper office where I worked, so I arrived early -- maybe a half-hour early. So did Marilyn Monroe, the reigning queen of Hollywood glamour, probably still pleased with the box office from her recently released, "Some Like It Hot."
The tables were still being set. No one else had arrived. I guess it was only polite for us to talk. No, it wasn't an interview -- just chit- chat by two people waiting for lunch. Nor was Khrushev's speech memorable. Apparently, I didn't save a clipping of my story.
What was memorable was Shirley Maclaine's dance for the guests later on 20th Century-Fox's set for her forthcoming movie, "Can-Can." It's a sexy, squealing, high-kicking romp with Shirley andthe chorus line rocking the roof to Cole Porter's muscial score .
Mrs. Khrushchev glared. I looked down and saw Khruschie tapping his foot to the beat.
Shirley Mclaine, once described by a reviewer of one of her books as "ethereal and earthy, chartreuse and caliarvoyant," still is. Reflecting on the performance in a memoir, she quoted the Premier's response to a reporter's question as to what he thought of the number.
"The face of humanity is prettier than it's backside'," he is quoted as saying in Ms. Maclaine's website (www.shirleymaclaine.com).
The dancer, who admitted she liked Khruschev, said she was having lunch at Sardi's in New York later, when a note was sent to her table, "I have seen 'The Apartment,'and you have improved." It is doubtful if Mrs. Khruschev thought so.
After his visit to Los Angeles, the Khruschev group entrained for San Francisco, their track going right through the top secret rocket-launching base at Vandenberg. But the Soviet leader was busy glad-handing all of us in the press contingent that was riding along.
In the city by the Golden Gate, Khruschev made the most of the rivalry between San Francisco and L.A., extolling the welcome he got in the north and chiding the city of the Angels' inhospitability.
But Khruschev must be said to have been enjoying his peek into Western capitalism in full bloom. He visited a well-sttocked grocery -- Safeway, if I remember correctly. The press ran amuck in the aisles. Photographers clambered over stacks of canned goods, sending them clattering in a heap. It was the foreign press, by the way -- not us polite Westerners -- bus perhaps even my memory is biased.
A year later, my editors transferred me to Washington, D.C., to open a bureau there. Within two months, I was ordered to New York, where the world's leaders were to meet at the United Nations. But I arrived late Sunday night, too late to get my UN press credentials.
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Stockton (Ca) Record, Vintage Section
Originally Published Tuesday, February 4, 2003
Lincoln's wise words ring true years later
By Paul Weeks
Have I been writing my memoirs of newspapering and never gotten around to telling you about the day I interviewed Abraham Lincoln?
With President's Day coming Feb.17, sandwiched between Lincoln's (Feb. 12) and Washington's (Feb. 22) birthdays, it is indeed appropriate this month.
In 1948, I met the Great Emanicipator face-to-face for the first time. Privileged to have been one of a hundred "freeloading" press passengers -- then the largest number ever to have crossed the United States nonstop in record time -- I left the Navy's new Constitution upon landing near Washington, D.C. My intention: visit the Lincoln Monument alone early the next day.
There he was in deep thought, sitting high in his marble edifice, surrounded by words chiseled in stone for the ages:
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. ..." -- his Gettysburg address delivered on the battlefield where thousands had recently died.
Then, in the midst of his brief oration: "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget ... ."
We remember the words, but have we forgotten the solemn resolve at the end?
"... that these dead shall not have died in vain ... and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
All right. It wasn't new. I'd recited it once, in full, in a seventh-grade performance. But it hit me full force, tears forming, in Lincoln's majestic presence. The interview? Bear with me. I was too young and inexperienced to talk with him that day.
But my chance was coming.
Thirty years later, I was up early again one clear Sunday morning in the nation's capital, the ground covered with snow from a recent storm. The thermometer outside Peoples' Drugstore hovered at 32 degrees. I shuffled off, drawn to the monument.
What in the world? People were fuss-budgeting all over the place, thwarting my hopes for another visit alone with Honest Abe. Marines in full dress were chalking the pavement to mark where the color guard was to stand. Someone was incessantly violating the quiet by testing microphones: "TESTING ... ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR ..."
Women were passing out programs: "Commemoration of the 169th anniversary of the birth of President Lincoln, at the memorial, Feb. 12, 1978." What a day to drop in!
Representatives of the sitting president, the diplomatic corps and others placed wreaths. Floral tributes followed from 22 patriotic organizations.
Startled, I noticed that one was from the National Society of the Daughters of the Revolution. That prompted me to look at the brooding figure. I swear his eyes were twinkling.
"Mr. President!" I blurted out, holding up my program for him to see. "These are the people who wouldn't let Marion Anderson sing in Constitution Hall not long ago because she's black!"
"You, the young newsman from Los Angeles," he beamed. (When you figure he was 169 and I was only 57, I guess he could put it that way.) "Their flowers ... downright fresh and pretty, aren't they? Remember, son, we still have a long way to go, but we're 'binding up the nation's wounds,' aren't we?"
When the Air Force band struck up, "Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies," I figured I'd been wrung out emotionally for the day. A beautiful day. A beautiful country. I walked away before the speech-making was over.
I hope our nation will remember the horrors of war, will be humble now that we are the world's superpower, and will apply our responsibilities with respect, with hindsight and foresight.
And, maybe, recite old Abe to our grandchildren and their children this day:
"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. ... With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds. ... To do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
Thank you, Mr. President.
* Paul Weeks is a longtime reporter who lives in Oceanside. To reach him, e-mail Rand9999@aol.com
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Stockton Record, Vintage Section Originally Published March 2003
My visit with Caryl Chessman on San Quentin's Death Rpw
By Paul Weeks
Caryl Chessman’s book, “Cell 2455 Death Row,” lies on my desk today, a reminder of the man who invited me to his execution in San Quentin’s gas chamber on May 2, 1960. I politely – and urgently -- declined.
They could have thrown the book at him for a rampaging career of crime. But he was convicted on May 22, 1948, not of murder, but of kidnapping, rape and robbery and sentenced to death a month later under the “Little Lindbergh” law.
He never admitted being the “Red Light Bandit,” the car bearing a police light, who preyed on romancing couples in the dark backroads of the Hollywood hills.
Yes, he knew “who did it,” he said, and would have it disclosed 50 years after California lifted a moratorium on the death penalty. Will any of us in the “Vintage” crowd be around to learn?
Why wait so long? In one of his five books Chessman says his father pleaded for him never to try violence to break out of prison “because it would kill your mother.” The guy “who did it” – the Red Light Bandit crime – said he would “blow away” Chessman’s parents if he ever blew the whistle.
One night in the early ‘50s, the phone rang in the Los Angeles Daily News city room. I got the call.
“Has there been any word whether the Governor has given Caryl Chessman a reprieve?”
No, it wasn’t just another thrill seeker. A woman’s voice trembled.
“Nothing yet,” I said. Execution was set for 10 the next morning.
“Ohhh,” her voice trailed off in despair. I could hear her trying to muffle her sobs. I was curious and asked more questions.
An hour or two later, The Daily News whisked photographer Helen Brush, me, and “Judy,” Carl Chessman’s ex-wife, to a San Francisco-bound airliner. She wanted us to try to get her in to see before he died the man for whom she still harbored hopeless affection,. We knew that probably was impossible. She was a divorced woman.
After landing, we learned that the Governor, indeed, had granted one of the many reprieves that were to follow. Judy’s tears turned to those of joy. The Daily News’ threadbare expense account would have to show some disguise for the round of martinis we ordered at the “Top of the Mark” Hopkins Hotel that night.
Early the next day we hurried out to the to San Quentin set in the unlikely rural beauty of Marin County, for an interview with Chessman.
The warden had promised it for the exact hour the execution otherwise would have begun. No photog, no ex-wife. I would carry Judy’s message to “Chess,” although, forgive me, I was looking for another good story.
It was one of the most fascinating interviews of my life. Chessman had been correctly characterized as a “criminal genius.” He was hungry for the words I relayed from Judy. He was grateful for a world-wide outcry of opponents of the death penalty. He had never been granted a lie detector test, and DNA-testing of stained skirts was decades away.
Unsuccessfully serving as his own lawyer, he had studied law, had read philosophy, had searched his own life, and written a best-seller that had sold more than half a million copies and wsas tanslated into 18 languages.
Any newspaper reporter who still dreams of the day he writes a best-selling hardcover will understand why I grilled the handsome prisoner -- destined for the gas chamber.
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THE STOCKTON (Ca) Record
Vintage Section
Originally Published Wednesday, April 2, 2003
By Paul Weeks
What songs will the latest war bring?
We're at war again. Have you heard any war songs -- jubilant or sad -- about this one?
Patriots are marching, some favoring the war and some protesting what they regard as a pre-emptive strike. I have heard only the din of booming guns afar and clashes among the marchers with police at home and in other countries.
Why do I call them all patriots? Because patriotism "is love for one's country." The advocates and the protesters share that love. Both hope fervently for their sons and daughters now in harm's way to get home safely and as soon as possible.
War songs? America has heard them since the rebelling colonists shouted out their rollicking "Yankee Doodle." The revolutionists were also revisionists, because Braddock's Redcoats, fighting alongside George Washington's ragged New Englanders, had sung it in the French and Indian War of the 1750s, spoofing the motley Yanks fighting alongside.
In 1778, our "enemy" also sang "The Rebels," the music from which America borrowed for "Old Black Joe":
"I'll show you those Yankees are all wrong/Who, with blustering look and most awkward gait/ 'gainst their lawful sovereign dare for to prate ..."
In the Civil War, the Yanks reverently sang, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord" -- the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Atlantic Monthly paid Julia Ward Howe $4 for the lyrics. She borrowed the tune from "John Brown's body lies a moldering in the grave."
The Boys in gray sang, "Our Dixie forever!/ She's never at a loss!/ Down with the eagle/ And up with the Cross ..."
Change battlefields. World War I -- although it wasn't known that way until we had a World War II. The first one was "the war to end all wars." And we'd changed partners: England and France were our allies; Germany, the enemy.
We sang: "We're all going calling on the Kaiser/ We've got to teach the Kaiser to be wiser ..."
The doughboys, in love with the French beauties, sang out, "Mademoiselle from Armentieres, Parley Voo ..." which ventured on into more colorful language: "It wasn't the war that made me a wreck/ It was Mademoiselle -- boy, how she could neck/ Hinky dinky parley voo."
Doesn't everyone know "Over There," "It's a long way to Tipperary," "Goodbye Broadway, Hello France," "Give My Regards to Broadway"? Most of them upbeat, bold and brave.
That war brought forth sad tunes as the struggle dragged on in the trenches -- verses too, that I remember, from the '20s -- one of them sung by my parents, which they learned in the war years:
"America, here is a boy for you/ America, you'll find him brave and true/ With a gun upon his shoulder/ He is ready to do or die,/ America, he is my only son/ My hope, my pride and joy/ But if I had another, he'd be right beside his brother/ America, here's my boy!"
World War II: "Let's remember Pearl Harbor, as we go to meet the foe/ Let's remember Pearl Harbor/ As we did the Alamo ..."
Swingin' Sammy Kaye drove it to the top of the "hit parade" -- America, angry, but supremely confident. It would be a short war. It wasn't.
So the tone softened: "When the Lights come on again/all over the world ...," "Comin' in on a wing and a prayer ...," "I left my heart at the Stage Door Canteen," "Don't sit under the apple tree/ with anyone else but me ..."
The Korean War? "Police action," they said, but it was as vicious as any of them. Battered veterans don't remember any ballads. Mostly, they were
longing-for-home tunes such as "Good Night, Irene."
Vietnam produced little martial music, only plaintive songs -- "Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing" and on to: "Where have all the young men gone?/ They're all in uniform/ Oh when will you ever learn?", then to the most morbid line: "They've gone to graveyards, every one."
You take it from there.
I'll stop singing for a while.
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The Stockton Record
Vintage column for May, 2003
'EMBEDDED' IN WORLD WAR II
……………………………………..By Paul Weeks………………………………
They call it "embedding" reporters into military units nowadays. I was "embedded," too, in World War II -- an enlisted soldier, writing for the Army Air Corps in what the military called, "public information."
But the only combat I covered was the football, basketball, baseball and boxing events for the athletes at an Army Air Corps base. Its commandant had an itch for winning on the athletic field as well as in the wild blue yonder.
Ted Shipkey had won a captain's commission in Albuquerque to direct the physical training program at nearby Kirtland Field. He'd been an All-American football player in the days of Pop Warner at Stanford, and later coach at the University of New Mexico in an era when UNM actually won football games.
First, I had a few weeks of training, picking up cigarette butts on the lawns of the reception center at Fort Bliss, Tex., and then in an Air Corps base in Roswell, N.M., where I encountered the obstacle course.
Captain Shipkey had never seen an obstacle course. "Private Weeks," he said, "you design us one for the bombardier cadets training here."
I had never fashioned anything more complicated than a sling shot..
When Kirtland Field's completed course lay in the splendor of the desert sun, I couldn't help but admire it. The first obstacle loomed maybe 12 or 14 feet high. You were supposed to run and leap to a toe hold of a board mounted across the face of the structure, then spring to the top and drop to the sawdust on the other side.
"Awright, kid," leered Shipkey's big Texas assistant, Lt. Ted Wright, "you designed it -- YOU RUN IT!" I ran, jumped and fell; ran, jumped and fell -- couldn't make it up to the toe hold. Wright guffawed. I wish I'd had my slingshot then.
Soldiering could be arduous, though, even at Kirtland Field. When the sports-minded commandant moved on, I was transferred to the regular public information office..
No, that wasn't so perilous, but did you ever try to operate a "china clipper" - the dish-washing machine in the mess hall, or break 30- or 40-dozen eggs for breakfast without breaking a yolk?
That's what I was doing on "KP"-kitchen police -- the morning of a solemn tribute on the parade grounds to the fallen President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You know how it is: Someone has to stay in the kitchen to cook and wash the dishes.
Interviewing combat returnees to ply the civilians with stories of heroism fell to my lot. My favorite one never left my old Underwood typewriter. It could have been interpreted as making our guys the enemy, and an enemy a nice guy:
The returned flier slouched in a chair as he talked:
"The men flying B-24s out of New Guinea ran into a nest of Jap (excuse me, but that's the way it was said then) Zero fighters. One of ours was crippled so badly that he had to limp home and let the others high-tail it ahead."
I was glued to the story -- awaiting what heroism I was to retell to the awaiting press.
"The Zero made a pass at the crippled bomber, and the crew thought they were about to buy the farm" -- a quaint expression to describe a fatal plunge to earth, but hardly applicable to the wild blue Pacific.
The lone Japanese flier made two or three more passes, my returnee said, his voice growing more tense.
"But he never fired a shot."
"Why?" I blurted.
"Well that sonofagun just flew up alongside and flashed a light signal in Morse code," the officer said.
"What did he say?" I awaited, breathlessly.
"'UCLA 1937."
Apocryphal? I'll never know - unless someone who reads this vouches for it.
The B-24s found that "UCLA 1937" continued to frolic with them on later missions, and they played along - carefully analyzing the Zero's capabilities.
But one day, the officer continued, a new B-24 crew entered the game, and didn't know it was for keeps. A gunner brought old UCLA down.
I have more war stories to tell. And if I haven't bought the farm in the meantime, I'll get back to them.
But you wouldn't believe them anyway.
Originally Published Wednesday, June 4, 2003
The Stockton Record, Vintage Section
By Paul Weeks
A report from the past of a changing field
What was it like to work for a newspaper 65 years ago? Listen, you children and grandchildren who write for other than the Vintage section, you, too, will have grand memories of newspapering when you move into your vintage years.
Newspapers change. They never have "vintage" eras because they are ageless if they are successful. The newspaper is constantly reinventing itself through young, new talent, through new technologies, improved distribution systems and by the challenge of competition with new media outlets such as television and the Internet.
But the march through the years is unforgettable.
"You can't put out a newspaper with reporters working a five-day week or an eight-hour day," blustered Editor H. P. Pickrell of The Albuquerque Journal, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress moved forward with minimum wages-and-hours legislation in the 1930s.
It wasn't only the boss who felt that way. The old-timers then looked upon their jobs as a calling that started not long after daylight and meandered through sun, rain or snow, covering their beats, meeting people who would be good "sources" another day, keeping on top of "breaking news," digging into dark corners of crime and corruption. Then, long after sundown, they sat behind old Remington or Underwood or Royal typewriters, manually grinding out their copy (usually with the "hunt-and-peck" method) -- if another breaking story didn't interrupt.
It was possible then because only radio sometimes got out a headline or two ahead of them. And if the story was big enough, the newspaper scrambled to put out an "EXTRA!" edition. "Big" stories could be anything from champion Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmelling to Hitler's stormtroopers marching into the Rhineland.
"Investigative reporters"? A redundancy. Every reporter was "investigative," or he didn't stay on the payroll long. (Notice I didn't say "she," because women reporters were a rarity. The only one we had was called "society editor" -- handling, for instance, all the engagement and wedding announcements for anyone-who-was-anybody, which excluded most of the population.)
Pay? I was delighted, coming out of high school, to be offered a part-time summer job of sometimes less than 40 hours at $5 a week. In that hot summer, I heard some fellow named Heywood Broun and his newspaper pals in the big cities decided to form the American Newspaper Guild to seek better working conditions and salaries. A young writer on the opposition Tribune and I became instant "union organizers." That virtually made us Communist sympathizers in those days, and we didn't understand how serious that was. We telemarketed the staffs of both newspapers, scheduling a 10 a.m. Sunday meeting at the Franciscan Hotel.
Shortly, we learned the managements of both newspapers (we shared advertising and composing room facilities) had summoned all employees to an unheard-of Sunday morning meeting. Imbued with the power of organized labor, my collaborator and I went to the union meeting instead. We were the only ones who showed up.
Editor Pickrell was sorely disappointed in me. Called "on the carpet," I foresaw the end of my newspaper career before it had hardly begun.
"Why did you try to pull this sort of thing?" he asked -- more with a tone of having been betrayed than pre-emptively challenged.
Was a guilty plea in order? Apology? Oh, shucks!
"Mr. Pickrell," I said, as best I can recall -- and admittedly, that's with a biased memory, "I hope I can someday get to a better job in a big city, and you have to belong to the union to get a job there."
He paused only for a minute.
"Well, son," he said, "since you're about to go to college, I'm going to raise you to $10 a week ..."
Bribe? A note of appreciation? Hey, who's going to sneeze at a 100 percent pay raise?
Yes, I joined the Guild to get my first job on a metro newspaper, but I had to hide my affiliation when that one went bankrupt and a nonunion shop put me to work. Conditions in cityrooms everywhere have improved, I suppose, looking back on 1937 standards.
But, at 82, I've moved up to a computer keyboard and send my copy in via
e-mail. I can't wait to see what it's like when I reach 100.
#####
======================================================
|
Originally Published Wednesday, June 4, 2003
The Stockton Record, Vintage Section
By Paul Weeks
A report from the past of a changing field
What was it like to work for a newspaper 65 years ago? Listen, you children and grandchildren who write for other than the Vintage section, you, too, will have grand memories of newspapering when you move into your vintage years.
Newspapers change. They never have "vintage" eras because they are ageless if they are successful. The newspaper is constantly reinventing itself through young, new talent, through new technologies, improved distribution systems and by the challenge of competition with new media outlets such as television and the Internet.
But the march through the years is unforgettable.
"You can't put out a newspaper with reporters working a five-day week or an eight-hour day," blustered Editor H. P. Pickrell of The Albuquerque Journal, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress moved forward with minimum wages-and-hours legislation in the 1930s.
It wasn't only the boss who felt that way. The old-timers then looked upon their jobs as a calling that started not long after daylight and meandered through sun, rain or snow, covering their beats, meeting people who would be good "sources" another day, keeping on top of "breaking news," digging into dark corners of crime and corruption. Then, long after sundown, they sat behind old Remington or Underwood or Royal typewriters, manually grinding out their copy (usually with the "hunt-and-peck" method) -- if another breaking story didn't interrupt.
It was possible then because only radio sometimes got out a headline or two ahead of them. And if the story was big enough, the newspaper scrambled to put out an "EXTRA!" edition. "Big" stories could be anything from champion Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmelling to Hitler's stormtroopers marching into the Rhineland.
"Investigative reporters"? A redundancy. Every reporter was "investigative," or he didn't stay on the payroll long. (Notice I didn't say "she," because women reporters were a rarity. The only one we had was called "society editor" -- handling, for instance, all the engagement and wedding announcements for anyone-who-was-anybody, which excluded most of the population.)
Pay? I was delighted, coming out of high school, to be offered a part-time summer job of sometimes less than 40 hours at $5 a week. In that hot summer, I heard some fellow named Heywood Broun and his newspaper pals in the big cities decided to form the American Newspaper Guild to seek better working conditions and salaries. A young writer on the opposition Tribune and I became instant "union organizers." That virtually made us Communist sympathizers in those days, and we didn't understand how serious that was. We telemarketed the staffs of both newspapers, scheduling a 10 a.m. Sunday meeting at the Franciscan Hotel.
Shortly, we learned the managements of both newspapers (we shared advertising and composing room facilities) had summoned all employees to an unheard-of Sunday morning meeting. Imbued with the power of organized labor, my collaborator and I went to the union meeting instead. We were the only ones who showed up.
Editor Pickrell was sorely disappointed in me. Called "on the carpet," I foresaw the end of my newspaper career before it had hardly begun.
"Why did you try to pull this sort of thing?" he asked -- more with a tone of having been betrayed than pre-emptively challenged.
Was a guilty plea in order? Apology? Oh, shucks!
"Mr. Pickrell," I said, as best I can recall -- and admittedly, that's with a biased memory, "I hope I can someday get to a better job in a big city, and you have to belong to the union to get a job there."
He paused only for a minute.
"Well, son," he said, "since you're about to go to college, I'm going to raise you to $10 a week ..."
Bribe? A note of appreciation? Hey, who's going to sneeze at a 100 percent pay raise?
Yes, I joined the Guild to get my first job on a metro newspaper, but I had to hide my affiliation when that one went bankrupt and a nonunion shop put me to work. Conditions in cityrooms everywhere have improved, I suppose, looking back on 1937 standards.
But, at 82, I've moved up to a computer keyboard and send my copy in via
e-mail. I can't wait to see what it's like when I reach 100.
16 V
The Stockton Record, Vintage Section
(Originally published
Time doesn't ease racial, cultural biases
Published Tuesday, July 1, 2003
The air was chill that night in December 1945. The brickwalk along the railroad station in Albuquerque, N.M., encouraged a brisk walk. The war was over, and some of us were awaiting the train to Colorado Springs to get our
discharges.
Leaning against a wall, catching my breath, a stranger sidled up -- gray-haired, and, I guess, a patriot through and through. We began to talk. He was a retired railroad engineer who liked to come down to watch the trains run though.
"Where are you bound for, son?"
I told him.
"Mighty proud of you boys. You did in the Japs, and now we've got to take on the ch---s."
His crude labels hit me.
"Dad, I hate to hear you say that. You see, I was based in Burma for a while when we had to fly over the hump to get to China." (I had never had a day of overseas duty.) "When we got to the other side after a rough flight, the Chinese couldn't do enough for us, treating us royally, and thanking us for the help we were giving them."
I thought the old engineer was about to let off steam.
"Wa'll," he drawled, "maybe so ... but ... why don't we slip into the Alvarado's bar and git outa this cold?"
::: Advertisement ::: |
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It would have been ungracious of me to refuse.
Over some warming potables, we talked on -- our conversation more like a slam-bang game of Ping Pong than anything. He served. I slammed one back -- politely, that is. He treated my stinging serves with the same politeness of two on a tennis court.
Then he started on a new course:
"You know what this country's gotta do next, don't ya?" I didn't answer.
"We got to clear out them
ni----s," he said. "They're comin' up from the South and runnin' all over us."
I stalled, looked away -- just ready to walk away. But I turned to him and said, softly as I could:
"Hey, Grandpa, I'm sorry to hear you say that. You know why?" He'd heard enough of my backtalk already. He said nothing.
"You see, my grandfather was from New Orleans." (He was really a Yankee from Indiana, whose brother marched through Georgia with Gen. Sherman.) "He fell in love with a black woman, and they married!" (Grandpa's wife was really a farmer's daughter from near South Bend.) "So I have their blood in my veins."
The old engineer was nonplussed, dumbfounded. If I could have put words into his mouth, I'd probably have him sputtering, "What's this younger generation coming to, anyway?"
Fortunately, someone cried, "All aboard!" and this home-based hero, with only a Good Conduct medal, got on the train headed for his discharge.
Race and cultural biases, alas, haven't stopped at railroad crossings. Years later, I covered the civil rights beat for a Los Angeles newspaper. Distrust and hatred was near the breaking point in Watts.
Booker Griffin, a savvy public relations man for the Westminster social welfare house, confided one day: "Paul, when it starts, you're the only white man who'll be able to come into Watts."
"Booker," I replied, "I'm one white man smart enough not to!"
Not long afterward, the managing editor said I'd "been working too hard" and ought to take another beat. It took me a couple of days before I remembered Booker and said to my boss, "This town is about to blow up, and apparently I've done a lousy job letting this newspaper know why!"
I was on vacation in Mazatlan when I learned by radio that the riot had broken out. I drove a couple of miles to a telephone to see if I should come home. The city desk man told me to go back and enjoy my vacation. "It'll be over in a couple of hours."
Four days later, I got a telegram to get home fast. Soon, I was flying down the approach to LAX what has historically become known as "Charcoal Alley." Watts was still smoldering, although the uprising had just been quelled.
Ironically, the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the riot and its aftermath. The coverage of the riot deserved it, as did the in-depth analysis later by the staff, organized and written by reporter Jack Jones -- but has the community ever learned? A
couple of decades later, violence erupted again.
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Wednesday, April 3, 2003, The Stockton Record
Breaking the color barrier with friendship
dpa," my granddaughter Erin wrote, "how come you wrote so much about civil rights when you were a reporter? Who, what shaped the way you believe?"
Erin had an English class assignment to interview some ancient member of the family for an essay about his or her career. At least it sounded that way.
That was a year ago. And I was only 80. "Interview"?
Who ever wanted to interview a newspaper reporter?
I thought about it. I'd long been a news junkie when the turbulent 1960s prompted much of America -- blacks and whites -- to turn around and look inside themselves.
Martin Luther King? Malcolm X? Medgar Evers? A sick racist like Lincoln Rockwell? White Citizens Council marchers? I'd met with them all.
But then I knew how I had to begin my story: With Johnny Lewis.
In 1933, our family pulled up stakes from the prairies of North Dakota and moved to New Mexico. I was the loneliest kid in Albuquerque. Then Johnny swung into stride with me on the way home from junior high one day, and I'd found a pal. We met in band class. Wasn't he on clarinet and I on the snare drum?
One day my mother asked, "Who is that boy you walk home with?"
"Johnny."
"Do the other kids in school like Johnny?"
"Gosh, I s'pose so."
"Son, Johnny's black, isn't he?"
Only I doubt if she said "black."
What a funny question. Sure, Johnny was black. No kids in Mott, North Dakota, were black.
"Now," she began -- as I've heard many others begin throughout the years -- "I think Johnny's probably a fine boy, but ('er) what would the neighbors think?"
Eventually, I got to know the Weeks kids were probably the only ones in Mott who were raised on good Southern cookin', which Mom learned at the knee of her Tennessee-raised mother.
My mother and dad eventually proudly showed off to THEIR neighbors the byline on top those civil rights newspaper stories in the '60s, and I was proud of their enlightened views on who could walk home from school with whom.
I'd wondered whatever happened to Johnny Lewis. The day I was writing my granddaughter, it was on my mind. I took my usual break for coffee and the morning newspaper.
And there I found the same name -- in the lead obituary in the Los Angeles Times.
John Lewis, internationally known and respected musician, composer, leader of the renowned Modern Jazz Quartet, had died at 80. Why, I'd listened over and over to my computer downloads of their music.
I read on quickly. I've read of many famous John Lewises in labor, politics -- and, yes -- music. I read reporter Jon Thurber's moving account of this John Lewis' life, paragraph after paragraph. And then my heart almost stopped -- joy, gladness and sadness intertwined.
John Lewis, Thurber wrote, began learning his music in Albuquerque, went to school there, and to the University. Achieved world acclaim. Raised a family. Retired on the French Riviera.
Johnny, I wish my mother were still alive to read that.
* Journalist Paul Weeks' column debuts with this edition of Vintage. Weeks was a longtime reporter who pioneered civil rights coverage in mainstream metropolitan daily newspapers throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. He began his career at the Albuquerque (N.M.) Journal. He joined the old Los Angeles Daily News in 1946, working as a reporter and assistant city editor before joining the Los Angeles Mirror, where his assignments included a stint at the paper's Washington, D.C. bureau. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 1962. He later worked for the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and in public relations at the RAND Corp. He lives in Oceanside. To reach him, e-mail Rand9999@aol.com.
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The Stockton (CA) Record, Vintage Section
Originally published Tuesday, May 7, 2002
The bridge over the River Cannonball
I ‘m among only a handful of elders who w
Twenty-five-year old Lindbergh, a no-nonsense, serious-minded fellow, bullied his new crate, made of wood and cloth and held together by some welded steel tubing, across the dark waters without forward vision on takeoff because of the rigging -- without radio, without much but a few cold sandwiches and so much gasoline that it made his takeoff questionable. He covered 3,600 miles in 33 hours and 33 minutes.
Grandson Erik, 37, made it with hardly a ripple in the news about the hop in his "new" Spirit of St. Louis, with state-of-the-art global positioning equipment, his flight monitored by specialists in aviation, navigation and meteorology from Mission Control in St. Louis. Even the press seemed bored about young Erik's flight.
Today's kids would be far more excited if someone water-skied the Atlantic.
Maybe the news arrived first from radio station KFYR, Bismarck. But the full story wasn't spread before me until a day or two later when my father, a rural mail carrier, brought the Bismarck Tribune home from the post office after his morning round.
If my father's enthusiasm over Lindbergh's achievement was to teach me the values of bravery and stick-to-it-iveness, he wouldn't for the minute have related it to the bridge arch over the Cannonball River. The big kids ran over the arches as if that was what you do for fun on the way to school. Such damn-foolishness wasn't supposed to enter my head.
A few days after learning about Lucky Lindy, I gazed up in awe of the concrete arches -- maybe 10 feet high. If Lindbergh could make it across the Atlantic, why couldn't I conquer the arch?
I hesitated. I started up. Two or three steps. My knees began to shake. Another step. I dropped to my knees. I paused. Then I started to crawl. I crawled all the way.
"Pauly Weeks Makes It!" I envisioned the headlines.
My black stockings, held up by elastic garters, were torn and ragged and blood-soaked from my skinned knees. After the vision of headlines, my head began to envision going home to Mama and Dad. All of the schooling in honesty and obedience crumbled away. I hid the stockings and covered my bloody knees with another pair.
Oh, my father finally heard about it. Ninety-three when he passed on in 1983, he read about it in the Los Angeles Times a year earlier. I'd written a memoir about returning to my old hometown -- 55 years after Charles Lindbergh and Pauly Weeks had made it. Dad had lived long beyond Americans landing on the moon.
My grandchildren are already in their 20s. But, thank heavens, I'll never catch any of their children trying to run the arches over Rainbow Bridge. It crashed into the river sometime ago when the spring breakup of ice on the Cannonball built up behind it and brought it to its knees.
#####
* Paul Weeks is a longtime reporter who now lives in Oceanside, CA. To reach him, e-mail Rand9999@aol.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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The Stockton (CA) Record, Vintage Section, June 2002
Weeks’ Worth”
The Day I Set the Press Box on Fire
By Paul Weeks
When I got my first five-dollars-a-week job at 16 writing sports for The Albuquerque Journal, I took my early arrival at manhood seriously and realized (ah, how sadly now!) how incumbent it was upon me to learn to smoke.
In no time, I was able to scratch kitchen matches across the seat of my pants, offer a pal a "weed," and flip the butt away with nary a thought about whether it might ignite a conflagration like Mrs. O'Leary' s cow kicking over a lantern and burning down half of Chicago.
At first I practiced in men's rooms, in rumble seats, on hikes along (flammable) forest trails, in the garden at night where I could eat the green tops off the onions to disguise my pungent breath.
(I probably should confess I lost my smoke-free virginity with an amicable circle of friends ranging from 10 to 12 years old by rolling dried corn silks into strips of newspaper and puffing away.)
So, it wasn't long before I would light up in the city room like the grizzled, old men around me -- some even in their late 30s, twice my age.
In the autumn of '37 or '38. I could inhale and cough and spit, and maybe even have two cigs burning at once, perched on each side of my desk -- a practice that seared and blackened my lungs for five or six decades.
I I was assigned to cover a football game between the University of New Mexico and the Arizona SState Lumberjacks at Flagstaff, overnight by rail from Albuquerque.
The game was a humdinger, but being a "professional" reporter (and a UNM sophomore at the same time), I, of course, was duty-bound to swallow any joy or dismay as the game swayed back and forth between the goal posts.
BBut cigarettes disguised partisanship. I lighted one after another that crystal fall afternoon. tThrough the smoke haze in the press box, I scribbled notes about passes, punts and penalties, aand eyed the leaping cheerleader girls -- strictly for color for my story.
My nicotine-stained fingers slammed cigarettes down on the desk to shake the ashes. The butts aaccumulated under my feet. I stomped them out with the sole of my shoe.
Wait a minute. . .
Heads were turning away from the field toward the press box. Spectators, finger-pointing. What goes on here? The game waged on.
What was everybody looking at?
!oke billowed below the press box. The cloud geysered skyward. Were the bleachers on fire?
No, the press box was.
Oh, migod.
Leaning out, I saw smoke oozing from the press box siding -- inside, a red glow at my feet.
The game halted. Players afield and on the bench, coaches, referees. . . all gawked at the smoke rising from the press box.
But the instincts of two waterboys were exceptional. Buckets splashing, they raced up repeatedly and doused the fire before it could ignite headlines the next morning:
“HUNDREDS FLEE BURNING BLEACHERS
Holocaust from kid reporter's cigarettes
Averted by waterboys’ heroic dash of’ to press box”
I think I quit smoking after that – ‘well, I quit often, that is, until on March 10, 1982: I was in Chicago, puffing my way in and out of newspaper city rooms and television studios, inviting the media to a news conference now that I had departed newspapering for the service of a corporation on the shores of the Pacific. Chicago, in winter, was hot inside and freezing and snowing outside.
Days later, still valiantly trying to inhale one more Pall Mall despite roaring influenza, I consulted a sage man of medicine who advised I give up going to Chicago or give up smoking.
####
Paul Weeks, a longtime reporter, lives in Oceanside, CA. Reach him at rand9999@aol.co
The Stockton Record, Vintage Section
(Originally published July, 2002)
OH, A NEWSPAPERMAN MEETS
SUCH INTEESTING PEOPLE. . .'
It's probably a good thing you can't hear me singing that rollicking old tune as the echoes of my newspaper years ring like music in my ears.
The phone rang a couple of days before my graduation from high school: "Would you like to cover your commencement night for us?" It was The Albuquerque Journal's editor.
That night in May 1937, was magic. How many other grads could sit there in black cap and gown, copy paper (folded like the pros do), a thick-leaded editor's pencil in hand, breathlessly taking notes of a college professor's pompous parables. . . "You are now going out into this world . . ."
Wow, was I! Two painful note-scribbling hours were condensed later that night into five or six paragraphs in the newsroom. I waited until it was time for Cinderella to come home from the ball for the first edition to come up the chute. Yeah, I'd seen my copy in lead type before in the high school newspaper -- but these were mine, anonymous as they were, in a daily with 20,000 circulation.
The grizzled copy desk man, maybe in his 40s, gave me a ride home that night. I blurted out that I wanted always to be a reporter.
"Well, kid," he said, ït's a helluva way to make a livin' -- but it's a damn sight better than workin'." He even swore like a newspaperman. Trite as it may have been, I've never forgotten it.
Not long after that, I was on the payroll at $5 a week. I quit my 10 cents-an-hour job in a rootbeer barrel for that hefty salary increase.
Probably noticing my squirming a week or so later, sitting at my typewriter one night trying to look busy, Red Pryor, on the desk, said, "Kid, why don't you go out on the street and see if you can come up with an item or two?"
Again, I hit it big: I wandered down to the brickwalk at the depot where a special trainload of Shriners bound from Los Angeles to the national convention in Chicago were whooping it up as they went into the dining room at the Alvarado for supper. A p.r. man (that's our shoptalk for "press agent,") invited the kid reporter to the feast.
Maybe a paragraph, I figured. They were getting onto the train later. The p.r. man came running over to me:
"Hey, reporter, we've kidnapped the warden of the New Mexico penitentiary and we're taking him with us!"
The train was pulling out -- no time to check with the kidnap victim.
The next day, two-column headline above the fold on Page One, something like:
"STATE PRISON'S WARDEN KIDNAPPED
BY FROLICKING LOS ANGELES SHRINERS"
My first scoop -- right out of Damon Runyon or Walter Winchell.
The next day as I strutted into the newsroom, the opposition's newspaper was spread out of my desk. Two column, Page One, headline:
"WARDEN SAFE IN PRISON, HE SAYS;
SHRINERS GOT THE ASSISTANT WARDEN"
There goes my job. Down the drain. I looked around the office, expecting the floor to fall in any minute. No one looked up. First lesson from the newspaper primer, not necesssary to be spoken:
ALWAYS, always check the facts and your sources. Get a second source (or talk to the victim, if you can!). I didn't even get a cut in pay.
Never will I forget the Journal's editor, Homer P. Pickrell. In midsummer, I heard his booming voice off the newsroom. His sports editor, a roving newspaperman most recently off Chicago's notorious Cook County beat, from which Hecht and McArthur'derived their classic "Front Page," had been called on the carpet.
"You're fired!" Pickrell roared at Bub Fraser -- fired for drinking on the job. Looking back, when else was a newspaperman going to get a drink, having to work from morn until late at night, before wages-and-hours rules came along?
Bub scratched his head. He looked the editor straight in the eye and said: "For the amount of sports you want in this newspaper, that 16-year-old kid out there could do it!"
Pickrell promptly marched through the door to my desk:
"Paul," he said, "you're our new sports editor."
Gracious sakes alive, I thought (paraphrasing newspaper profanity), what hath God wrought?
I didn't know an infield fly from a pass ball, a bunt from a four-bagger. But I learned -- from Evelyn Shulman, two years my junior, daughter of Herman Schulman, a laundry truck driver who was official scorer for the Albuquerque Cardinals, a farm club for St. Louis, in the Class D Arizona-Texas League.
Bill DeLancey, who used to catch Dizzy Dean occasionally before illness struck him down. Branch Rickey named him manager in Albuquerque, where the desert air would be good for his lungs.
Rickey, who broke baseball's color barrier by hiring Jackie Robinson, for which I will always second remember him, is first with me for inviting this kid reporter to sit in a Tingley Field box with him one night while he scouted a pitcher.
Archie (I've forgotten his last name) threw the fastest ball I'd ever seen. The problem is he never seemed to be able to put it over home plate. A steady diet of balls and no strikes won't put y ou up there with Sandy Koufax. (Yes, I was in Dodger Stadium when Sandy pitched his no-hitter in the World Series -- but, alas, I was doing a sidebar on the crowd for The Los Angeles Times, after having moved from sports to city-side when I left Albuquerque.)
If you read my previous piece in this space, you're already aware of how I covered a football game out of town by setting the press box on fire in Flagstaff. In another autumn, Ted Shipkey, former All-American end for Pop Warner at Stanford who coached the University of New Mexico Lobos, apparently decided to forgive me for that and invited me to go along later to cover their game with Texas Tech in Lubbock.
It was a furious struggle afield. The Lobos were no match for the Raiders. Trained to be an objective reporter and not a "home-towner," I wrote just the facts, ma'am.
Unfortunately, the next day on the training coming home, Shipkey came up and sat down beside me. He had picked up The Journal's morning paper somewhere at a station stop, read my story, and thrust it in my face.
"Hey, Weeks," he growled, "which game were YOU covering yesterday?"
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The Stockton (CA) Record, Vintage Section Originally published Tuesday, August 6, 2002
Weeks’ Worth
Reporter recalls golden days of JFK's new frontier
By Paul Weeks
"And so, my fellow Americans, ask not for what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
Dropped like crystals into the freezing morning of January 20, 1961, those words from John Fitzgerald Kennedy's inaugural address are etched deeply into American patriotism. They framed my brief years as a Los Angeles correspondent in the nation's capital.
Television brought JFK's face, his voice, his confidence to the nation. He did for television what Franklin D. Roosevelt did for radio with his fireside chats. Both captured the country. Followers loved them with fierce loyalty. Detractors hated them with ferocity.
In Washington's below-freezing temperatures in the days preceding Kennedy's inauguration, he drew the press like a magnet to his Georgetown door as he dribbled out the nominations to his Cabinet.
Each morning's watch dragged abominably as we waited, teeth chattering, feet going numb. We envisioned the sportily clad 43-year-old basking in the heat from a brick fireplace, talking politics and issues, before emerging with another nominee for hot, "breaking news!"
A motherly lady across the street scolded, "You boys, for land's sake!" for standing out in the cold. Her steaming coffee, fresh-baked cookies and doughnuts were accepted gratefully while we kept a sharp eye on Kennedy's front door.
Later, made-for-television news conferences in a spacious auditorium with cushioned seats at the Department of State began with a ritual first question from the newswire reporters as the President entered from stage right. Press personalities carved their own niche: Chirpy, crackling May Craig, the lady from Maine, with a wardrobe of splendiferous hats; Sarah McClendon, with her mile-long questions served up in a deep Southern drawl; Marianne Means, the pert blonde from the Hearst Newspapers, always drawing the eye of the president; precise, bright Helen Thomas, then with UPI but still doing correspondence now for Hearst; dignified John Hightower of AP.
Those were heady days heralding the New Frontier. A young secretary from California had found a job earlier in then Senator Kennedy's office. As president-elect, he called her on the phone. "Frankie,{Childers, not used} what job would you like?" Frankie, who before had called her boss "Jack," said her mouth fell open. She choked: "Mr. President, I have no idea."
]
"How would you like to go to our U.N. office in New York?" She would. She did.
"The first night after I reported for work," she said, "the phone rang. It was the President of the United States."
"Well, Frankie," he said, "what did you do on your first day?"
"Uh ... I can't tell you, Mr. President." Pause again.
"It was classified." She giggled.
At the outdoor inauguration at the Capitol, JFK came out lightly clad, hatless. I hadn't gotten around to buying the heavy overcoat, winter underwear, fur hat and the like. I was still wearing California winter clothes. "How's the weather back there?" gloated the man on rewrite back in L.A., knowing what the weather was like in Washington.
Optimism for months. The president promised a landing on the moon in 10 years. He didn't live to see it. His days swung the pendulum from the Cuban Missile Crisis, a hair-split of an atomic confrontation with the Soviets, through calls for a Job Corps, Head Start classes and a war on poverty.
On Jan. 6, 1962, the Los Angeles Mirror ceased publication. There I was with a new heavy overcoat, winter underwear, overshoes and snow tires on my car.
The following year, reassigned home to the Los Angeles Times, I was in the city room when the newswire tickers reported that the president lay dead from an assassin's bullets. Days of mourning shrouded the nation -- scenes like little John-John saluting the horse-drawn caisson bearing his father's body to Arlington National Cemetery.
The city desk tried unsuccessfully to reach me on a day off to fly to Dallas. Another reporter got the assignment. He saw Jack Ruby slay Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin, in the Dallas jail.
I haven't regretted missing the assignment.
#####
5(* Paul Weeks is a longtime reporter who lives in Oceanside. To reach him, e-mail Rand9999@aol.com. )
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(“Weeks Worth”) By Paul Weeks
For The Stockton Record, Vintage, September 2002
Into the New Millenium, Nat King Cole Still Sings:
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn Is just to love and be loved in return. .”
- from the song, “Nature Boy”
By Paul Weeks
Let your imagination roll , if you like Vintage memoirs, and you can hear the velvety voice of Nat King Cole: “Nature Boy,” “Sweet Lorraine,” “Unforgettable,” “Ramblin’Rose.”
Hear it? Cole, a black man, was one of the most famous and beloved of the jazz greats with his piano and an unforgettable singing voice.
His press agent called, asking, “How’d you like to interview Nat King Cole? He’s just back from the White House.”
I was covering civil rights for the Los Angeles Times in the turbulent ‘60s.
“The White House? How’s that?”
“Lyndon Johnson invited him to dinner – a good story possibility for you.”
I thought so, too. Cole had drawn sharp protests from his new neighbors when he bought a home in the exclusive -- and lily-white -- Wilshire district of Los Angeles. He moved his family in without batting an eye. That’s where the interview would take place.
King met me at the door:
“What can I do for you?”
“I understand you’ve been dining with LBJ and Lady Bird.”
His answer was a slight frown, but he suggested we sit down and talk. After all, wasn’t it his press agent’s idea?
I began firing questions. Did they talk about school desegregation? Discrimination in housing? Employment?
Cole frowned noticeably this time.
I pressed on: Had he seen any improvement at all in race relations in these troubled days in Los Angeles? Did he talk about it with the President? I wondered: Was he beginning to think my questions sounded like ugly bullets aimed at a moving target? They were.
The black man bristled. He stood up.
“Sir, I am an entertainer, a musician. I make my living just as you do. Why do you insist on asking me this line of questions?”
Pause.
“Mr. Cole, it was your agent’s suggestion. You’d just come from the White House, right?”
That’s it. With a sweep of his hands and those long, sensitive fingers, Nat King Cole invited me to leave. I exploded:
“I’m not my newspaper’s entertainment writer. If that’s what you expected, your agent should have called Cecil Smith. I admire your singing and have listened to your recordings often. But I cover civil rights!”
He stopped dead still. He thought about it. He began to thaw. He couldn’t hide a smile. I was relieved.
“Nat,” I said, now that the ice was broken, “could I stay a little longer and hear you play one of your songs?”
If that jolted him, it also seemed to please him. He sat on the piano bench. I sat beside him. He started to sing – I don’t remember what, but the words came back to me then. We sang a duet. It wasn’t an audition, believe me,.
A wide-eyed little girl sat on the winding staircase, listening in amazement. I learned much later that her name was Natalie -- Natalie Cole. She went on to become a musical sensation on her own, and even recorded a duet with her late father, voicing over his "Unforgettable.” It won a Grammy award.
Nat Cole and I didn’t cross paths again. But I wrote about him once more.
On March 16, 1965, the Los Angeles Times’ Page One banner headline screamed: “NAT KING COLE DEAD.” He had died the day before of lung cancer in a Santa Monica hospital. It was more than a local story, more than a national story. The Times news syndicate beamed the news around the world.
The world of music was stilled for a heartbeat. But today it throbs with the King’s voice carrying on through the ages.
###
(Paul Weeks is a longtime reporter living in Oceanside, Calif. Reach him at Rand9999@aol.com.)
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THE STOCKTON RECORD, Vintage Section
Originally published November, 2002By Paul Weeks
I was taken for a ride once by a notorious gangster of yesteryear -- but don't feel sad for me. It's an opportunity to tell one more story. Mickey Cohen is going to surrender this morning at the Federal Courthouse on a charge of income tax evasion," the city editor of the old Los Angeles Daily News said. "Pick up a photog and get a shot of him leaving home."
When we arrived at Cohen's home in Brentwood, it was no surprise that other city editors had the same notion. All the metro press sat curbside.
The maid came to the door. "Mistah Weeks, you out theah?
Sheepishly, I raised my hand.
"C'mon in!" she said.
The door closed behind me. Mickey, the chubby little hoodlum, a boxer preceding his more income producing activities, glared at me.
"What'sa matter with you? Why're you standin' out there like some sort of chicken? Why'nt ring the doorbell?" Pause. " Sit down,"
We were already acquainted. Mickey had succeeded Bugsy Siegel as the head of the mob in L.A., after Bugsy's assassination in the Beverly Hills home of Virginia Hill, his mistress.
I was leaving the office that night in 1947 when Sparky Saldana, on the city desk, put down the phone and hollered: "Stop by Beverly Hills on your way home. The police beat says Bugsy Siegel has been wiped out."
Fairly new to the big city, my coverage of murders was in its infancy. At the plush home on Linden Drive lay the late Mr. Siegel, his body riddled by automatic gunfire from a nearby window as he sat on a sofa chatting with Alan Smiley.
I began gathering information as I had in other incidents of violent death. But my colleagues sounded like characters out of Hecht and MacArthur's "Front Page," a bestseller based on the police beat antics of reporters covering Chicago's underworld.
That frightful introduction segued into further assignments as Mickey Cohen rose to power -- a gangster who, to his ultimate misfortune, seemed to revel in newspaper coverage as did some movie actors in his coterie of friends.
It his highly likely that my bylined coverage of a budding scandal in the Los Angeles Police Department endeared me to the little gangster. If so, he didn't express that when he accepted my request for an interview.
Cohen had been press-shy only of coverage in his home, so I took along photographer Gib Brush with instructions to shoot Mickey in every room to which we were admitted. Gib worked feverishly: Mickey's bedroom, his wife Yvonne's liberally adorned from walls to ceiling to wastebasket with mirrors, his sitting room, and so on.
(Our ulterior motive? Someday one of those pictures might be useful for another story. And they were. When the house was bombed later, Mickey's bedroom lay in shambles. He wasn't sleeping there that night. Yvonne's bedroom was untouched.)
Naive as I may have been, I was so impressed by Cohen's agile mind that I got up the nerve to ask him:
"Mickey, with your business acumen, why don't you go straight? You could make a fine living. . ."
"Kid," he turned to me solemnly, "I ain't done nuttin' illegal in t'ree years!"
I wasn't so naive that I didn't know what the statute of limitations was for prosecution of most crimes short of murder in California.
The day arrived of Cohen's impending surrender for income tax evasion He outlined the scenario: He would drive his big, black Cadillac, reputedly bulletproofed. Yvonne would sit beside him.
"You," he said, "will take the back seat."
We shot out of the garage past the startled press contingent. Instead of taking the shortest distance. Mickey nosed the Cadillac into the splendor of Sunset Boulevard. We paraded its length.
Mickey was fiddling with the radio dial until he found a newscast. MacArthur was doing something in Korea. Mickey was impatient. The newscast went on: "Mickey Cohen is due to surrender in Federal Court today . . ."
He straightened up behind the wheel, smiled broadly and proceeded to the flood of popping flashbulbs that awaited him at our destination.
=============================================================
|
The Stockton (CA) Record, Vintage Section Originally Published Friday, December 6, 2002 (This also appeared in The Albuquerque, NM, Journal on December 7, 2002, and on http://www.riprense.com/ -- Rip Rense’s “Rip Posts”website)) Messages from the frontDec. 7 remembered
Almost anyone can tell you where they were, what they were doing, when word flashed of terrorists crashing airliners into New York City's twin towers. The ranks are growing thin of those who "Remember Pearl Harbor" -- Dec. 7, 1941. The radio was on that Sunday morning. Pearl Harbor? How could the Japanese be attacking United States territory -- Hawaii? Japanese diplomats were in Washington that very day, talking of peace. Registered for the draft but not yet called up, I rushed down to The Albuquerque Journal where I wrote sports. Not that day. New Mexico's 200th Coast Artillery, with dozens of my friends, was in the Philippines, thousands of miles away from Pearl Harbor -- but almost that many thousands closer to the Japanese homeland. War reached them in hours. A cavalry unit federalized only that previous January, the 200th was dispatched in September to the Philippines. War? Some of the guys "joined up because it was the best and cheapest way to get a date on the weekend to go horseback riding" before they left Albuquerque, Mrs. Ruth Jackson,of Ramona, Calif., a grandmother, remembers. Years earlier, the Guard's band couldn't find a drummer. In school, I had marched miles with a snare drum beating into my midriff. It wasn't hard to get into the military under age when they wanted you. My father, bless his soul, said flatly, "No." After the war's outbreak, Japanese planes were reported heading toward Clark Field on Luzon, where the 200th was stationed. U.S. planes rose to the challenge, but the enemy didn't arrive. Our airmen, short of fuel, landed. Then the symbol of the Rising Sun came into telescopic view. Clark Field could be defended only from the ground with outmoded weapons that had not been fired in anger since "doughboys" manned them in World War I. As bombing and strafing descended, the 200th's band broke out incredibly in the din to, "The Ol'Gray Mare, She Ain't What She Used to Be." Jimmy McCahon, once the kid next door whose trumpet practicing kept the neighborhood awake, was wielding the baton as the director. Years later, Cipriano Ramirez of Gallup, N.M., recalled McCahon saying, "It wasn't very good music, but it had spirit." Back to that unbelievable Dec. 7: Everyone on the newspaper, from police beat, to society, to sports, was on the phones and in the files, collecting every dribble of background, history and troop movement of the 200th -- names, rank, dates -- oblivious to the crackdown that came before the presses rolled. Wartime censorship. There were no cell phones, e-mail or even personal telegrams, no war correspondents yet on the distant battlefields to get word back to loved ones. Espiridion ("Espeedie") Ruiz, who lived until 1982, remembered the 200th's defiant -- yet somber -- slogan: "We're the battling bastards of Bataan; no mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam." They held the lines beyond human endurance. Surrendering nearly six months later, the fate awaiting them was even worse. They trekked the infamous Bataan Death March -- nearly a hundred miles of starvation, open to the tropical sun, thirst, beating and slaughter if they fell. Maj. Ted Parker, my brother-in-law, not only made it but lived through the hell of prison camps until the advancing U.S. forces were almost at the door. Later we learned, he was crammed into the hold of a Japanese ship with 1,800 other prisoners en route to Japan. There were no marks visible to U.S. bombers that their own kin and comrades were aboard. When a death-dealing bomb struck, Parker was near the only hatch from which air was available to the men inside. He rushed to thrust it back for the others. In confusion, a fleeing Japanese guard fired one shot. Only a few of those who escaped returned home to tell about it. While writing this account, I sent an e-mail message to Ted's widow, Mrs. Helen Wilson of Boynton Beach, Fla., who went into nurses training when she expected he might come home in need of her care. After Ted's death, she married again -- a doctor -- and is now a grandmother. "Did you ever hear from Ted while he was a prisoner?" I asked. She had received only two heavily censored post cards through the Red Cross in three years. "Not quite saying 'having a wonderful time,' " she said, "but something similar." #### *. |
10 V
Originally published in the Stockton Record, Vintage section, January 7, 2003)
Khruschev, Monroe and Maclaine
By Paul Weeks
The cast of characters in this story: Nikita Khrushchev, head of the Soviet Union and the "guest of honor" for a civic luncheon in Los Angeles; Marilyn Monroe, a luncheon guest, and Shirley Maclaine,who danced the Can-Can -- all of whom I encountered one autumn day in 1959.
I say "guest of honor" with some hesitation because Mayor Norris Poulson wasn't exactly entranced with having Khrushchev as a distinguished tourist within his city limits. The visit became something of an international incident, what with the Soviet Premier's feeling insulted by Poulson's remarks to the press -- and, besides, Police Chief William H. Parker wouldn't let the Khruschev entourage go to Disneyland.
The chief and many others were strong on Homeland Security long before it became fashionable, with bin-Layden cast as the villain.
It was closer to go directly to the luncheon from home rather than to go to the newspaper office where I worked, so I arrived early -- maybe a half-hour early. So did Marilyn Monroe, the reigning queen of Hollywood glamour, probably still pleased with the box office from her recently released, "Some Like It Hot."
The tables were still being set. No one else had arrived. I guess it was only polite for us to talk. No, it wasn't an interview -- just chit- chat by two people waiting for lunch. Nor was Khrushev's speech memorable. Apparently, I didn't save a clipping of my story.
What was memorable was Shirley Maclaine's dance for the guests later on 20th Century-Fox's set for her forthcoming movie, "Can-Can." It's a sexy, squealing, high-kicking romp with Shirley andthe chorus line rocking the roof to Cole Porter's muscial score .
Mrs. Khrushchev glared. I looked down and saw Khruschie tapping his foot to the beat.
Shirley Mclaine, once described by a reviewer of one of her books as "ethereal and earthy, chartreuse and caliarvoyant," still is. Reflecting on the performance in a memoir, she quoted the Premier's response to a reporter's question as to what he thought of the number.
"The face of humanity is prettier than it's backside'," he is quoted as saying in Ms. Maclaine's website (www.shirleymaclaine.com).
The dancer, who admitted she liked Khruschev, said she was having lunch at Sardi's in New York later, when a note was sent to her table, "I have seen 'The Apartment,'and you have improved." It is doubtful if Mrs. Khruschev thought so.
After his visit to Los Angeles, the Khruschev group entrained for San Francisco, their track going right through the top secret rocket-launching base at Vandenberg. But the Soviet leader was busy glad-handing all of us in the press contingent that was riding along.
In the city by the Golden Gate, Khruschev made the most of the rivalry between San Francisco and L.A., extolling the welcome he got in the north and chiding the city of the Angels' inhospitability.
But Khruschev must be said to have been enjoying his peek into Western capitalism in full bloom. He visited a well-sttocked grocery -- Safeway, if I remember correctly. The press ran amuck in the aisles. Photographers clambered over stacks of canned goods, sending them clattering in a heap. It was the foreign press, by the way -- not us polite Westerners -- bus perhaps even my memory is biased.
A year later, my editors transferred me to Washington, D.C., to open a bureau there. Within two months, I was ordered to New York, where the world's leaders were to meet at the United Nations. But I arrived late Sunday night, too late to get my UN press credentials.
11 V
Stockton (Ca) Record, Vintage Section
Originally Published Tuesday, February 4, 2003
Lincoln's wise words ring true years later
By Paul Weeks
Have I been writing my memoirs of newspapering and never gotten around to telling you about the day I interviewed Abraham Lincoln?
With President's Day coming Feb.17, sandwiched between Lincoln's (Feb. 12) and Washington's (Feb. 22) birthdays, it is indeed appropriate this month.
In 1948, I met the Great Emanicipator face-to-face for the first time. Privileged to have been one of a hundred "freeloading" press passengers -- then the largest number ever to have crossed the United States nonstop in record time -- I left the Navy's new Constitution upon landing near Washington, D.C. My intention: visit the Lincoln Monument alone early the next day.
There he was in deep thought, sitting high in his marble edifice, surrounded by words chiseled in stone for the ages:
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. ..." -- his Gettysburg address delivered on the battlefield where thousands had recently died.
Then, in the midst of his brief oration: "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget ... ."
We remember the words, but have we forgotten the solemn resolve at the end?
"... that these dead shall not have died in vain ... and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
All right. It wasn't new. I'd recited it once, in full, in a seventh-grade performance. But it hit me full force, tears forming, in Lincoln's majestic presence. The interview? Bear with me. I was too young and inexperienced to talk with him that day.
But my chance was coming.
Thirty years later, I was up early again one clear Sunday morning in the nation's capital, the ground covered with snow from a recent storm. The thermometer outside Peoples' Drugstore hovered at 32 degrees. I shuffled off, drawn to the monument.
What in the world? People were fuss-budgeting all over the place, thwarting my hopes for another visit alone with Honest Abe. Marines in full dress were chalking the pavement to mark where the color guard was to stand. Someone was incessantly violating the quiet by testing microphones: "TESTING ... ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR ..."
Women were passing out programs: "Commemoration of the 169th anniversary of the birth of President Lincoln, at the memorial, Feb. 12, 1978." What a day to drop in!
Representatives of the sitting president, the diplomatic corps and others placed wreaths. Floral tributes followed from 22 patriotic organizations.
Startled, I noticed that one was from the National Society of the Daughters of the Revolution. That prompted me to look at the brooding figure. I swear his eyes were twinkling.
"Mr. President!" I blurted out, holding up my program for him to see. "These are the people who wouldn't let Marion Anderson sing in Constitution Hall not long ago because she's black!"
"You, the young newsman from Los Angeles," he beamed. (When you figure he was 169 and I was only 57, I guess he could put it that way.) "Their flowers ... downright fresh and pretty, aren't they? Remember, son, we still have a long way to go, but we're 'binding up the nation's wounds,' aren't we?"
When the Air Force band struck up, "Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies," I figured I'd been wrung out emotionally for the day. A beautiful day. A beautiful country. I walked away before the speech-making was over.
I hope our nation will remember the horrors of war, will be humble now that we are the world's superpower, and will apply our responsibilities with respect, with hindsight and foresight.
And, maybe, recite old Abe to our grandchildren and their children this day:
"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. ... With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds. ... To do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
Thank you, Mr. President.
* Paul Weeks is a longtime reporter who lives in Oceanside. To reach him, e-mail Rand9999@aol.com
Back to Top
12 V
Stockton Record, Vintage Section Originally Published March 2003
By Paul Weeks
Caryl Chessman’s book, “Cell 2455 Death Row,” lies on my desk today, a reminder of the man who invited me to his execution in San Quentin’s gas chamber on May 2, 1960. I politely – and urgently -- declined.
They could have thrown the book at him for a rampaging career of crime. But he was convicted on May 22, 1948, not of murder, but of kidnapping, rape and robbery and sentenced to death a month later under the “Little Lindbergh” law.
He never admitted being the “Red Light Bandit,” the car bearing a police light, who preyed on romancing couples in the dark backroads of the Hollywood hills.
Yes, he knew “who did it,” he said, and would have it disclosed 50 years after California lifted a moratorium on the death penalty. Will any of us in the “Vintage” crowd be around to learn?
Why wait so long? In one of his five books Chessman says his father pleaded for him never to try violence to break out of prison “because it would kill your mother.” The guy “who did it” – the Red Light Bandit crime – said he would “blow away” Chessman’s parents if he ever blew the whistle.
One night in the early ‘50s, the phone rang in the Los Angeles Daily News city room. I got the call.
“Has there been any word whether the Governor has given Caryl Chessman a reprieve?”
No, it wasn’t just another thrill seeker. A woman’s voice trembled.
“Nothing yet,” I said. Execution was set for 10 the next morning.
“Ohhh,” her voice trailed off in despair. I could hear her trying to muffle her sobs. I was curious and asked more questions.
An hour or two later, The Daily News whisked photographer Helen Brush, me, and “Judy,” Carl Chessman’s ex-wife, to a San Francisco-bound airliner. She wanted us to try to get her in to see before he died the man for whom she still harbored hopeless affection,. We knew that probably was impossible. She was a divorced woman.
After landing, we learned that the Governor, indeed, had granted one of the many reprieves that were to follow. Judy’s tears turned to those of joy. The Daily News’ threadbare expense account would have to show some disguise for the round of martinis we ordered at the “Top of the Mark” Hopkins Hotel that night.
Early the next day we hurried out to the to San Quentin set in the unlikely rural beauty of Marin County, for an interview with Chessman.
The warden had promised it for the exact hour the execution otherwise would have begun. No photog, no ex-wife. I would carry Judy’s message to “Chess,” although, forgive me, I was looking for another good story.
It was one of the most fascinating interviews of my life. Chessman had been correctly characterized as a “criminal genius.” He was hungry for the words I relayed from Judy. He was grateful for a world-wide outcry of opponents of the death penalty. He had never been granted a lie detector test, and DNA-testing of stained skirts was decades away.
Unsuccessfully serving as his own lawyer, he had studied law, had read philosophy, had searched his own life, and written a best-seller that had sold more than half a million copies and wsas tanslated into 18 languages.
Any newspaper reporter who still dreams of the day he writes a best-selling hardcover will understand why I grilled the handsome
==============================================================
THE STOCKTON (Ca) Record
Vintage Section
Originally Published Wednesday, April 2, 2003
By Paul Weeks
What songs will the latest war bring?
We're at war again. Have you heard any war songs -- jubilant or sad -- about this one?
Patriots are marching, some favoring the war and some protesting what they regard as a pre-emptive strike. I have heard only the din of booming guns afar and clashes among the marchers with police at home and in other countries.
Why do I call them all patriots? Because patriotism "is love for one's country." The advocates and the protesters share that love. Both hope fervently for their sons and daughters now in harm's way to get home safely and as soon as possible.
War songs? America has heard them since the rebelling colonists shouted out their rollicking "Yankee Doodle." The revolutionists were also revisionists, because Braddock's Redcoats, fighting alongside George Washington's ragged New Englanders, had sung it in the French and Indian War of the 1750s, spoofing the motley Yanks fighting alongside.
In 1778, our "enemy" also sang "The Rebels," the music from which America borrowed for "Old Black Joe":
"I'll show you those Yankees are all wrong/Who, with blustering look and most awkward gait/ 'gainst their lawful sovereign dare for to prate ..."
In the Civil War, the Yanks reverently sang, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord" -- the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Atlantic Monthly paid Julia Ward Howe $4 for the lyrics. She borrowed the tune from "John Brown's body lies a moldering in the grave."
The Boys in gray sang, "Our Dixie forever!/ She's never at a loss!/ Down with the eagle/ And up with the Cross ..."
Change battlefields. World War I -- although it wasn't known that way until we had a World War II. The first one was "the war to end all wars." And we'd changed partners: England and France were our allies; Germany, the enemy.
We sang: "We're all going calling on the Kaiser/ We've got to teach the Kaiser to be wiser ..."
The doughboys, in love with the French beauties, sang out, "Mademoiselle from Armentieres, Parley Voo ..." which ventured on into more colorful language: "It wasn't the war that made me a wreck/ It was Mademoiselle -- boy, how she could neck/ Hinky dinky parley voo."
Doesn't everyone know "Over There," "It's a long way to Tipperary," "Goodbye Broadway, Hello France," "Give My Regards to Broadway"? Most of them upbeat, bold and brave.
That war brought forth sad tunes as the struggle dragged on in the trenches -- verses too, that I remember, from the '20s -- one of them sung by my parents, which they learned in the war years:
"America, here is a boy for you/ America, you'll find him brave and true/ With a gun upon his shoulder/ He is ready to do or die,/ America, he is my only son/ My hope, my pride and joy/ But if I had another, he'd be right beside his brother/ America, here's my boy!"
World War II: "Let's remember Pearl Harbor, as we go to meet the foe/ Let's remember Pearl Harbor/ As we did the Alamo ..."
Swingin' Sammy Kaye drove it to the top of the "hit parade" -- America, angry, but supremely confident. It would be a short war. It wasn't.
So the tone softened: "When the Lights come on again/all over the world ...," "Comin' in on a wing and a prayer ...," "I left my heart at the Stage Door Canteen," "Don't sit under the apple tree/ with anyone else but me ..."
The Korean War? "Police action," they said, but it was as vicious as any of them. Battered veterans don't remember any ballads. Mostly, they were
longing-for-home tunes such as "Good Night, Irene."
Vietnam produced little martial music, only plaintive songs -- "Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing" and on to: "Where have all the young men gone?/ They're all in uniform/ Oh when will you ever learn?", then to the most morbid line: "They've gone to graveyards, every one."
You take it from there.
I'll stop singing for a while.
===================================================
The Stockton Recod
Vintage column for May, 2003
'EMBEDDED' IN WORLD WAR II
……………………………………..By Paul Weeks………………………………
They call it "embedding" reporters into military units nowadays. I was "embedded," too, in World War II -- an enlisted soldier, writing for the Army Air Corps in what the military called, "public information."
But the only combat I covered was the football, basketball, baseball and boxing events for the athletes at an Army Air Corps base. Its commandant had an itch for winning on the athletic field as well as in the wild blue yonder.
Ted Shipkey had won a captain's commission in Albuquerque to direct the physical training program at nearby Kirtland Field. He'd been an All-American football player in the days of Pop Warner at Stanford, and later coach at the University of New Mexico in an era when UNM actually won football games.
First, I had a few weeks of training, picking up cigarette butts on the lawns of the reception center at Fort Bliss, Tex., and then in an Air Corps base in Roswell, N.M., where I encountered the obstacle course.
Captain Shipkey had never seen an obstacle course. "Private Weeks," he said, "you design us one for the bombardier cadets training here."
I had never fashioned anything more complicated than a sling shot..
When Kirtland Field's completed course lay in the splendor of the desert sun, I couldn't help but admire it. The first obstacle loomed maybe 12 or 14 feet high. You were supposed to run and leap to a toe hold of a board mounted across the face of the structure, then spring to the top and drop to the sawdust on the other side.
"Awright, kid," leered Shipkey's big Texas assistant, Lt. Ted Wright, "you designed it -- YOU RUN IT!" I ran, jumped and fell; ran, jumped and fell -- couldn't make it up to the toe hold. Wright guffawed. I wish I'd had my slingshot then.
Soldiering could be arduous, though, even at Kirtland Field. When the sports-minded commandant moved on, I was transferred to the regular public information office..
No, that wasn't so perilous, but did you ever try to operate a "china clipper" - the dish-washing machine in the mess hall, or break 30- or 40-dozen eggs for breakfast without breaking a yolk?
That's what I was doing on "KP"-kitchen police -- the morning of a solemn tribute on the parade grounds to the fallen President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You know how it is: Someone has to stay in the kitchen to cook and wash the dishes.
Interviewing combat returnees to ply the civilians with stories of heroism fell to my lot. My favorite one never left my old Underwood typewriter. It could have been interpreted as making our guys the enemy, and an enemy a nice guy:
The returned flier slouched in a chair as he talked:
"The men flying B-24s out of New Guinea ran into a nest of Jap (excuse me, but that's the way it was said then) Zero fighters. One of ours was crippled so badly that he had to limp home and let the others high-tail it ahead."
I was glued to the story -- awaiting what heroism I was to retell to the awaiting press.
"The Zero made a pass at the crippled bomber, and the crew thought they were about to buy the farm" -- a quaint expression to describe a fatal plunge to earth, but hardly applicable to the wild blue Pacific.
The lone Japanese flier made two or three more passes, my returnee said, his voice growing more tense.
"But he never fired a shot."
"Why?" I blurted.
"Well that sonofagun just flew up alongside and flashed a light signal in Morse code," the officer said.
"What did he say?" I awaited, breathlessly.
"'UCLA 1937."
Apocryphal? I'll never know - unless someone who reads this vouches for it.
The B-24s found that "UCLA 1937" continued to frolic with them on later missions, and they played along - carefully analyzing the Zero's capabilities.
But one day, the officer continued, a new B-24 crew entered the game, and didn't know it was for keeps. A gunner brought old UCLA down.
I have more war stories to tell. And if I haven't bought the farm in the meantime, I'll get back to them.
But you wouldn't believe them anyway.
=========================================================================
Originally Published Wednesday, June 4, 2003
The Stockton Record, Vintage Section
By Paul Weeks
A report from the past of a changing field
What was it like to work for a newspaper 65 years ago? Listen, you children and grandchildren who write for other than the Vintage section, you, too, will have grand memories of newspapering when you move into your vintage years.
Newspapers change. They never have "vintage" eras because they are ageless if they are successful. The newspaper is constantly reinventing itself through young, new talent, through new technologies, improved distribution systems and by the challenge of competition with new media outlets such as television and the Internet.
But the march through the years is unforgettable.
"You can't put out a newspaper with reporters working a five-day week or an eight-hour day," blustered Editor H. P. Pickrell of The Albuquerque Journal, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress moved forward with minimum wages-and-hours legislation in the 1930s.
It wasn't only the boss who felt that way. The old-timers then looked upon their jobs as a calling that started not long after daylight and meandered through sun, rain or snow, covering their beats, meeting people who would be good "sources" another day, keeping on top of "breaking news," digging into dark corners of crime and corruption. Then, long after sundown, they sat behind old Remington or Underwood or Royal typewriters, manually grinding out their copy (usually with the "hunt-and-peck" method) -- if another breaking story didn't interrupt.
It was possible then because only radio sometimes got out a headline or two ahead of them. And if the story was big enough, the newspaper scrambled to put out an "EXTRA!" edition. "Big" stories could be anything from champion Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmelling to Hitler's stormtroopers marching into the Rhineland.
"Investigative reporters"? A redundancy. Every reporter was "investigative," or he didn't stay on the payroll long. (Notice I didn't say "she," because women reporters were a rarity. The only one we had was called "society editor" -- handling, for instance, all the engagement and wedding announcements for anyone-who-was-anybody, which excluded most of the population.)
Pay? I was delighted, coming out of high school, to be offered a part-time summer job of sometimes less than 40 hours at $5 a week. In that hot summer, I heard some fellow named Heywood Broun and his newspaper pals in the big cities decided to form the American Newspaper Guild to seek better working conditions and salaries. A young writer on the opposition Tribune and I became instant "union organizers." That virtually made us Communist sympathizers in those days, and we didn't understand how serious that was. We telemarketed the staffs of both newspapers, scheduling a 10 a.m. Sunday meeting at the Franciscan Hotel.
Shortly, we learned the managements of both newspapers (we shared advertising and composing room facilities) had summoned all employees to an unheard-of Sunday morning meeting. Imbued with the power of organized labor, my collaborator and I went to the union meeting instead. We were the only ones who showed up.
Editor Pickrell was sorely disappointed in me. Called "on the carpet," I foresaw the end of my newspaper career before it had hardly begun.
"Why did you try to pull this sort of thing?" he asked -- more with a tone of having been betrayed than pre-emptively challenged.
Was a guilty plea in order? Apology? Oh, shucks!
"Mr. Pickrell," I said, as best I can recall -- and admittedly, that's with a biased memory, "I hope I can someday get to a better job in a big city, and you have to belong to the union to get a job there."
He paused only for a minute.
"Well, son," he said, "since you're about to go to college, I'm going to raise you to $10 a week ..."
Bribe? A note of appreciation? Hey, who's going to sneeze at a 100 percent pay raise?
Yes, I joined the Guild to get my first job on a metro newspaper, but I had to hide my affiliation when that one went bankrupt and a nonunion shop put me to work. Conditions in cityrooms everywhere have improved, I suppose, looking back on 1937 standards.
But, at 82, I've moved up to a computer keyboard and send my copy in via
e-mail. I can't wait to see what it's like when I reach 100.
#####
===============================================================
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|
Originally Published Wednesday, June 4, 2003
The Stockton Record, Vintage Section
By Paul Weeks
A report from the past of a changing field
What was it like to work for a newspaper 65 years ago? Listen, you children and grandchildren who write for other than the Vintage section, you, too, will have grand memories of newspapering when you move into your vintage years.
Newspapers change. They never have "vintage" eras because they are ageless if they are successful. The newspaper is constantly reinventing itself through young, new talent, through new technologies, improved distribution systems and by the challenge of competition with new media outlets such as television and the Internet.
But the march through the years is unforgettable.
"You can't put out a newspaper with reporters working a five-day week or an eight-hour day," blustered Editor H. P. Pickrell of The Albuquerque Journal, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress moved forward with minimum wages-and-hours legislation in the 1930s.
It wasn't only the boss who felt that way. The old-timers then looked upon their jobs as a calling that started not long after daylight and meandered through sun, rain or snow, covering their beats, meeting people who would be good "sources" another day, keeping on top of "breaking news," digging into dark corners of crime and corruption. Then, long after sundown, they sat behind old Remington or Underwood or Royal typewriters, manually grinding out their copy (usually with the "hunt-and-peck" method) -- if another breaking story didn't interrupt.
It was possible then because only radio sometimes got out a headline or two ahead of them. And if the story was big enough, the newspaper scrambled to put out an "EXTRA!" edition. "Big" stories could be anything from champion Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmelling to Hitler's stormtroopers marching into the Rhineland.
"Investigative reporters"? A redundancy. Every reporter was "investigative," or he didn't stay on the payroll long. (Notice I didn't say "she," because women reporters were a rarity. The only one we had was called "society editor" -- handling, for instance, all the engagement and wedding announcements for anyone-who-was-anybody, which excluded most of the population.)
Pay? I was delighted, coming out of high school, to be offered a part-time summer job of sometimes less than 40 hours at $5 a week. In that hot summer, I heard some fellow named Heywood Broun and his newspaper pals in the big cities decided to form the American Newspaper Guild to seek better working conditions and salaries. A young writer on the opposition Tribune and I became instant "union organizers." That virtually made us Communist sympathizers in those days, and we didn't understand how serious that was. We telemarketed the staffs of both newspapers, scheduling a 10 a.m. Sunday meeting at the Franciscan Hotel.
Shortly, we learned the managements of both newspapers (we shared advertising and composing room facilities) had summoned all employees to an unheard-of Sunday morning meeting. Imbued with the power of organized labor, my collaborator and I went to the union meeting instead. We were the only ones who showed up.
Editor Pickrell was sorely disappointed in me. Called "on the carpet," I foresaw the end of my newspaper career before it had hardly begun.
"Why did you try to pull this sort of thing?" he asked -- more with a tone of having been betrayed than pre-emptively challenged.
Was a guilty plea in order? Apology? Oh, shucks!
"Mr. Pickrell," I said, as best I can recall -- and admittedly, that's with a biased memory, "I hope I can someday get to a better job in a big city, and you have to belong to the union to get a job there."
He paused only for a minute.
"Well, son," he said, "since you're about to go to college, I'm going to raise you to $10 a week ..."
Bribe? A note of appreciation? Hey, who's going to sneeze at a 100 percent pay raise?
Yes, I joined the Guild to get my first job on a metro newspaper, but I had to hide my affiliation when that one went bankrupt and a nonunion shop put me to work. Conditions in cityrooms everywhere have improved, I suppose, looking back on 1937 standards.
But, at 82, I've moved up to a computer keyboard and send my copy in via
e-mail. I can't wait to see what it's like when I reach 100.
16 V
The Stockton Record, Vintage Section
(Originally published
Time doesn't ease racial, cultural biases
Published Tuesday, July 1, 2003
discharges.
Leaning against a wall, catching my breath, a stranger sidled up -- gray-haired, and, I guess, a patriot through and through. We began to talk. He was a retired railroad engineer who liked to come down to watch the trains run though.
"Where are you bound for, son?"
I told him.
"Mighty proud of you boys. You did in the Japs, and now we've got to take on the ch---s."
His crude labels hit me.
"Dad, I hate to hear you say that. You see, I was based in Burma for a while when we had to fly over the hump to get to China." (I had never had a day of overseas duty.) "When we got to the other side after a rough flight, the Chinese couldn't do enough for us, treating us royally, and thanking us for the help we were giving them."
I thought the old engineer was about to let off steam.
"Wa'll," he drawled, "maybe so ... but ... why don't we slip into the Alvarado's bar and git outa this cold?"
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It would have been ungracious of me to refuse.
Over some warming potables, we talked on -- our conversation more like a slam-bang game of Ping Pong than anything. He served. I slammed one back -- politely, that is. He treated my stinging serves with the same politeness of two on a tennis court.
Then he started on a new course:
"You know what this country's gotta do next, don't ya?" I didn't answer.
"We got to clear out them
ni----s," he said. "They're comin' up from the South and runnin' all over us."
I stalled, looked away -- just ready to walk away. But I turned to him and said, softly as I could:
"Hey, Grandpa, I'm sorry to hear you say that. You know why?" He'd heard enough of my backtalk already. He said nothing.
"You see, my grandfather was from New Orleans." (He was really a Yankee from Indiana, whose brother marched through Georgia with Gen. Sherman.) "He fell in love with a black woman, and they married!" (Grandpa's wife was really a farmer's daughter from near South Bend.) "So I have their blood in my veins."
The old engineer was nonplussed, dumbfounded. If I could have put words into his mouth, I'd probably have him sputtering, "What's this younger generation coming to, anyway?"
Fortunately, someone cried, "All aboard!" and this home-based hero, with only a Good Conduct medal, got on the train headed for his discharge.
Race and cultural biases, alas, haven't stopped at railroad crossings. Years later, I covered the civil rights beat for a Los Angeles newspaper. Distrust and hatred was near the breaking point in Watts.
Booker Griffin, a savvy public relations man for the Westminster social welfare house, confided one day: "Paul, when it starts, you're the only white man who'll be able to come into Watts."
"Booker," I replied, "I'm one white man smart enough not to!"
Not long afterward, the managing editor said I'd "been working too hard" and ought to take another beat. It took me a couple of days before I remembered Booker and said to my boss, "This town is about to blow up, and apparently I've done a lousy job letting this newspaper know why!"
I was on vacation in Mazatlan when I learned by radio that the riot had broken out. I drove a couple of miles to a telephone to see if I should come home. The city desk man told me to go back and enjoy my vacation. "It'll be over in a couple of hours."
Four days later, I got a telegram to get home fast. Soon, I was flying down the approach to LAX what has historically become known as "Charcoal Alley." Watts was still smoldering, although the uprising had just been quelled.
Ironically, the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the riot and its aftermath. The coverage of the riot deserved it, as did the in-depth analysis later by the staff, organized and written by reporter Jack Jones -- but has the community ever learned? A
couple of decades later, violence erupted again.
posted by Paul Weeks at 10:42 PM
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