Brave Men: Chapter I

Reading Dan Carpenter's commenting on a deceased Indiana newspaper columnist, I decided to say something about my days as a newspaper reporter, such as they were. In 1966, when I was forty years younger than I am now, I determined I was going to become a writer. I'd read that writers like Hemingway had begun their salad days as newspaper reporters. And so I followed suit.

First I wrote a story for the North Vernon weekly, about a gathering of teachers which involved a nice banquet free to me and an entertaining motivational speaker, a World War Two Purple Heart vet. I remember that his name was "Tooter" Tenius (it's incredible even to me the flotsam and jetsam that's embedded in there in that strange collection of gray matter behind my eyes), and he'd lost some limbs in the European Theater. Moreover, he made fun of a colonel who was gung ho but was nowhere to be found when hostilities began on Normandy Beach on June 6, 1944. Tooter came away from the conflict with fewer limbs and a saying by the bloviating colonel he liked, to wit: "When the going gets tough, and the going gets rough, that's just the way we like it."

Then I found out about the trade magazine, Editor & Publisher, which had want ads for editors and reporters, including "cubs." I found two in Indiana that I decided to check out. One was in Marion, the other in Franklin. I recall driving to Marion on a windy March day -- the reason I recall the weather was that when I drove through Gas City, the girls were out of high school and their skirts were lifted indecorously high by the wind and I along with several males driving through town at that hour did our best not to wreck our vehicles.

I also recall that the editor of the Marion paper (Tribune?) gave me a little test to see if I could write a story. He had a vignette of breaking news which included the 5 W's of a news story -- a fire or something -- and I was to write a story from the facts given. I passed with ease and he offered me a job on the spot.

I didn't take it and ended up instead taking a job for the Franklin daily. Can't recall why I didn't choose the Marion job. (I often think about Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken." What if I had gone to Marion instead of Franklin? What if I had stayed in Chicago in 1960 instead of returning to Hanover? What if my family and I had stayed in Columbus, Indiana in 1976? Etc.)

Anyhow, I went to work at the Franklin daily and turned in several stories on the first day and the editor was obviously impressed with my ability and that evening I volunteered to cover a meeting -- seem to recall it was volunteer firefighters. I'd started drinking about noon that day, I think, and by nine o'clock that night I was shit-faced. I walked out of that meeting and before the evening was over in the early darkness hours of the morning I'd migrated to a bar whose clientele were principally African-American and I was having a great time.

Funny thing: there I recognized a man from my hometown of Madison, a good seventy miles away from Franklin, also having a good time, but much better behaved than I, not drawing attention to himself as I almost always did in drinking situations. I knew who he was because he was a friend of Bill, my brother older by sixteen years. He happened to be Jewish, not unremarkable in Madison, the Jewish population of which was about five. This gentleman was a mensch, an admirable human being. For a definition of that word, see The Apartment starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley McLain. The physician who saves the life of Shirley's character is a mensch.

Well, I recall leaving that genteel establishment and driving to an apartment I'd rented in Franklin and getting out of my car and falling down, blotto. I'd driven the car there but was too drunk to walk.

I didn't turn in the story and was fired early the next day.

Next, I struggled to get sober and, hanging on to abstinence with white knuckles, I went to work for the LaPorte Herald-Argus. LaPorte is on the periphery of "da Region," in the same county as the Indiana State Prison (Michigan City), at that time it had an Allis-Chalmers tractor factory, and at Hudson Lake in LaPorte County, Chicago hoodlums had once come to listen to hot jazz and consort with "flappers," the hot chicks of the Prohibition era.

And the LaPorte Herald-Argus was where Ernie Pyle, the World War Two journalist had worked. Ernie wrote several books, one of them, Brave Men, about the soldiers in Europe*. Ernie was an embedded journalist, and he was killed by a Kraut* bullet. Folks told me it was quite a distinction to work for the H-A because Ernie, an authentic Indiana hero, had worked there.

I worked there for a couple of months in 1966, and then once again my alcoholism caught up with me.

* My bad: Ernie was killed by a Japanese sniper's machine gun on Okinawa (where the Marines staged raising a flag** -- they also fought bravely and bloodily -- not knocking their valor in that just war, just their being so goddamn stagey. When I was a dogface for that short while, I remember Sarge Delaney saying that the Army had 11 men to a squad instead of 12, like the Marines. Eleven to fight and one to take pictures). I thought the movie in which Burgess Meredith ("The Penguin" in TV's Batman and spokesman for the Honda Accord and Sargento Cheese and -- oh yes! -- a very fine "George" to Lon Chaney's "Lenny" in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men) played Ernie, from Dana, Indiana (west of Nap Town on 36 in Vermillion County, near the Illinois line) was set in the ETO rather than the PTO (European and Pacific Theater of Operations, respectively). It probably was, considering how Hollywood in the forties played so fast and loose with the facts. C'mon! Bogie as Roy "Mad Dog" Earle with that Manhattan accent from INDIANA in High Sierra? Do you want to sell me a bridge in Brooklyn? Bogie probably never set a foot in Indiana in his entire life. (If anybody knows different, please disabuse me.)

**My second bad of which I'm aware in this post: the immortal photo of the Marines raising the flag from World War II was on the island of Iwo Jima -- not Okinawa.