Getting started as a reporter

 Sam Smith -   Getting a summer job in 1957 as a 19 year old reporter at WWDC Washington and coming back upon graduation from college two years later. I quickly learn that America isn't quite as I had been taught, as I cover the Jimmy Hoffa, U2 and TV game show scandal stories as well as some of the first civil rights sit-ins and anti-civil rights filibusters.

Covering Eisenhower news conferences and then going to the People's Drug Store on the corner of 17th & Pennsylvania Ave, buying a cup of coffee, writing my story and ducking into a phone booth to make my report. Covering the murder of the former head of a Illinois college who is found "stark naked, beaten and dying" in a room of the seedy Alton Hotel, killed by a male carnival worker. Interviewing Louis Armstrong in a hotel room on 16th Street and John F Kennedy right after he announced for president.

Being one of a handful of broadcast news reporters in town with a battery operated tape recorder - so new that the engineers union wanted to send someone out with us to make them work. The tape recorders present a number of other challenges -- including a deep sensitivity to temperature. More than once I return from an outdoor winter taping -- a burial at Arlington national cemetery or a fire -- only to find my recorded voice sounding like Porky Pig as the batteries return to full power in the warm studio .

When I'm not out on the street, writing nine newscasts in a day in a small corner room with just enough room for one window, four news tickers, two typewriters, several phones, reams of yellow copy paper, even more rolls of yellow ticker paper and a maximum of four human beings.

Each newscast is expected to be different, whether the news has changed or not. Three of the newscasts occur during evening drive time. This coincides with the most likely period for accidents and thunderstorms. Since WWDC pays $1 to $5 for every news tip it airs, I am regularly inundated with accounts of fallen limbs and fender benders as I struggle to write three newscasts in an hour and a half. . .

The news tip system works pretty well, although I sometimes suspect that volunteer rescue squad dispatchers are calling us before they send out their equipment, since once the dispatch has been aired, anyone with a scanner can call in the item. On at least one occasion an employee at WTOP earns a dollar for phoning in a story that he had heard on WMAL.

One of our regular callers is Dan who sits in his apartment surrounded by police and fire scanners waiting for tragedy to strike somewhere in the metropolitan region. He will then call and hoarsely whisper the news: "This is Dan, Sam. I've got a body for you." And another buck goes to Dan.

Spending my first summer on Argonne Place where the nearby Ontario Theater is playing Love in the Afternoon. At the end of the summer it still is. The radio stations are playing Pat Boone's Love Letters in the Sand. At the end of the summer they still are. When I work the late night shift, I drive to WWDC listening to a program on WOL called The Cabbie's Serenade -- dedicated, says host Al Jefferson, "to all you guys driving the loneliest mile in the world." Calling the DC police dispatcher to check on the overnight action and being told on a number of occasions, "Nothin' but a few nigger stabbings."

Eating at one of a handful of restaurants - such as the just opened Anna Maria's on Connecticut Ave.(with the most costly item being veal scaloppini at $4.25), the A.V. Ristorante on NY Ave, and spots along U Street - that stay open after midnight. It is still illegal to drink standing up or to carry your drink from the bar to your table. My late night choice is the Dee Cee Diner, squatted in a parking lot near Vermont & L NW. Into the Dee Cee Diner come cops, drunks and prostitutes and, on early Sunday mornings, congregants from the midnight "printers' mass" that the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception thoughtfully provides late shift workers at the Government Printing Office as well as for the Catholic young returning from dates.

Entering the press room at the District Building, the town's city hall,  through swinging doors reminiscent of a frontier bar. Inside are three desks, a center table and a worn-out sofa. The stuffing is coming out of the sofa and the covering is greasy and black from years of resting heads. After Watergate, a sign will be posted above the press room sofa. It reads, "Carl Bernstein slept here." The pale green walls have accumulated a half century of miscellany, written with bold copy pencils and fine pens, in illegible script and distinct printing. There are quotations from city officials of things they wished they hadn't said. Cliches, malapropisms and by the telephone there are numbers running in every direction. Sometimes the numbers have a name beside them but most often there is nothing but the exchange and the digits. Grave markers of stories long dead.
 
Covering the desegregation of lunch counters in Northern Virginia and the Glen Echo amusement park.

Interviewing one of the last residents of America's first major urban renewal project in a house surrounded by hundreds of acres of rubble. More than 20,000 people and 800 businesses had been kicked out of DC's Southwest to make way for the plan. Some 80% of the latter never went back into operation.

Covering the attempt by police to shut down DC's only coffee house - Coffee n Confusion - which is being ably defended by Texas lawyer Harvey Rosenberg who argues: "Personally, I must admit that I have very little knowledge of poetry, or the bohemian atmosphere that is found in Coffee n Confusion. But I have been informed by personages who have visited Paris that this is the way that numerous writers and poets have reached the French scene." DC is eventually found safe for coffee and poetry in close proximity.

Working for Roll Call newspaper, where editor Sid Yudain lets me be the resident poet, including writing a Christmas poem that took a whole page and included the names of all 435 members of the House of Representatives.

Being offered by Hartford Gunn the station manager job at WGBH radio in Boston because he wants to concentrate on TV. I can't take it because of my pending military service obligation.
 
Along with Ed Taishoff, serving as Walter Cronkite's private wire service for the Kennedy inauguration, taking telephoned info from CBS reporters in the field, rewriting it and passing it along to Cronkite.

Going through a 'Good Night & Good Luck' experience over my Coast Guard security clearance, owing to organizations to which my parents had belonged like the League of Women Shoppers and National Lawyers Guild. I am finally cleared but realize that forever more my name will be in a file. I almost flunk my subsequent physical because the trauma of the investigation has damaged my eyesight, blood pressure and blood sugar level, but a friendly Public Health Service doctor fudges the figures. I will go on to serve as aide to an admiral and operations officer aboard a cutter that handles aids to navigation and heavy weather search & rescue.

Leaving the Coast Guard after three years active duty. One month before I get out, the government gives us the defense service ribbon, which meant they had discovered we were in a war. I already know we are in a war because my friend Lew Walling, then 22 years old and flying a secret mission, has become the 33rd American to die in the Vietnam conflict. His pilot is the first member of the Air Force killed in Vietnam. There will eventually be 58,000 names placed on the Vietnam Wall. 

Lew and I had worked at Harvard radio station WHRB and he would sometimes show up with his friend, a Boston University student and singer named Joan Baez. Joan Baez' first radio appearance was on WHRB.

Starting in 1964 an alternative publication called The Idler and, in an early issue, running letters from a friend of mine who is taking part in the Mississippi summer of 1964. In 1965, I go to Jackson, Mississippi to cover the hearings of the US Civil Rights Commission and devote a whole issue to the story.

Having our ad refused by the Saturday Review of Literature because 'the board just decided your magazine was a little too liberal.'

Taking part in a citywide bus boycott organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to protest a fare increase. Over 100,000 people stay off the buses that day in what is the largest local protest in the city's history. I drive 70 of them down the Benning Road route and then write about it. The head of SNCC comes over to my apartment seeking public relations assistance. Thus begins my relationship with a man then sometimes described in the press as "dashiki-clad Negro militant Marion Barry." Barry will later describe me as one of the first whites who have anything to do with him. Some years after that he will also call me a "cynical cat" and still later he will go up to my wife at a dinner and ask, "Where is that son of a bitch?"

After writing an article headed, "Keep the Seat, Baby," being invited to meet with Chairman Adam Clayton Powell, soon to be expelled from Congress, at his office. At the morning session, Powell opens the largest office bar I've ever seen, explaining, "This, Sam, is what comes of serving the Lord."

Starting a neighborhood newspaper on Capitol Hill at the urging of a Saul Alinsky trained Presbyterian minister who is trying to organize the neighborhood.

Switching to offset printing, the inexpensive new technology that will encourage the flourishing of underground papers in the late Sixties. Type is set by an IBM Executive or Selectric typewriter, with all corrections cut out with razor blade and then scotch taped into place. Headlines are rubbed on letter by letter using Presstype.

Living in one of the toughest sections of town but experiencing relatively few problems. Two cars of friends are stolen from our block. Our house is broken into several times. Once, a half gallon of vodka is returned to us by the police, complete with blood stains and evidence tag. I keep it like that in my bar. Some months later, the house is broken into and the same bottle is stolen again along with the tag.

Being mistaken - perhaps not surprising for a 210 pound iron pumper - as an undercover cop at four different demonstrations, the one pleasant confrontation being as I sat smoking a pipe near the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool and a long haired guy next to me says, "FBI?" and I say, "Nope" and he says "CIA?": and I say "Nope" and he says "Smoke much?" and I say, "Half & Half all day long," and he says "cool" and gives me his love beads.

Having half our circulation department in jail, finding needles hidden behind stacks of papers in the office, having police stake out our home after a kidnap threat and having one staffer show up at our house at 11:30 pm seeking refuge from his drug dealer who is circling the block in a brown Cadillac.

Being visited at our office by a 9th Precinct cop who on several occasions drops by to talk politics. Officer Donald Graham listens to me better in those days than he will later on as publisher of the Washington Post.
 
Our first laptop weights only only 4 pounds, had only 32K of memory but can  run 16 hours on four AA batteries.

Getting a call from an angry young guy who is working in a car wash, complaining about us running one of his photos without credit. I point out that it had been sent with a news release from a community organization and add, "You wanna be a real photographer? I'll tell you how. Get a rubber stamp marked 'Photo by Roland Freeman. All rights reserved' and I won't run any more of your friggin' photos without credit." Two weeks later, Freeman becomes the Gazette's photo editor, later becoming an associate of Magnum, author of a number of books, and the first photographer to get a fellowship from the NEH and subsequently three from the NEA.
 
Sitting in our smoky living room watching the TV coverage of the 1968 riots, including what is going at that moment just four blocks north of us on H Street. Going the next morning through the neighborhood and feeling - as troops marched past the rubble - like I am in World War II Europe. Two of the city's four major riot strips are in our circulation area; 150 businesses and 52 homes in our neighborhood are damaged and things will never be the same.
 
Having one of our advertisers - ex-CIA agent Harry Lunn, now running a photographic gallery, tell me in the aftermath of the riots that if anyone burns down his store he is going to burn down my house. And another advertiser, Len Kirsten of the Emporium telling of a woman who came in and saw the stack of Gazettes on the floor. "Isn't that a communist paper?" she asks and Len replies, "No, the editor is a communist but the paper isn't"
 
Sitting in SNCC headquarters as Stokely Carmichael announces that we whites are no longer welcome in the civil rights movement.

With too many readers wanting to burn down too many of our neighborhood advertisers, turning the Gazette into a citywide alternative paper, the DC Gazette, dealing with such issues at the war, national progressive politics, freeways, DC self-government and urban planning.

Writing an article explaining how DC could become a state without a constitutional amendment. Total initial reaction: one reader sends in $5 for the cause. Later that summer editor writes a piece calling for the creation of a new third party. In the fall the two ideas come together as the editor and others form the DC Statehood Party under the leadership of civil rights activist Julius Hobson. The party will elect representatives to the city council or school board for the next 25 years.

Running in 1970 an article by Erbin Crowell on city council hearings concerning marijuana: "Most significant to the Council's hearing - and to a good number of kids who are in prison on pot convictions - was the fact, reiterated by Surgeon General Jesse L. Steinfeld, that 'in the case of marijuana, legal penalties were originally assigned with total disregard for medical and scientific evidence of the properties of the drug or its effects. I know of no clearer instance in which the punishment for infraction of the law is more harmful than the crime,' Steinfeld concluded."
 
James H. Heller of the National Capital Area Civil Liberties Union calls for legalization of pot. He said he saw no reason that it should be treated any different from alcohol. (He admitted to having tried grass once, but it didn't have any effect. 'Maybe you just didn't know how to smoke it,' Councilwoman Polly Shackleton consoled him.)"
 
Introducing the country's first urban planning comic strip - Archihorse - drawn by Washington architect John Wiebenson who designed Resurrection City and was a major figure in saving important local buildings such as the Old Post Office. We will also start running the first column in the country written by a prisoner, S. Carl Turner.

Publishing a picture by architect Rich Ridley that illustrates the difference between a Volkswagen and a two-man DC Jail cell. Biggest difference: the VW is larger.