Starting seventy years of journalism

Sam Smith -  Seventy years ago I was introduced to what would become a lifetime of journalism. I was a student at Harvard College and decided to join its radio station,  thanks in part to having already become a fan of Edward R. Murrow.  I covered events on campus as well as sessions of the Cambridge City Council. including a story of a councilmember who wanted to pave Havard Yard and turn it into a parking lot.

In my sophomore year (1956). I got a summer job in Washington with the all news station WWDC.  They liked my work enough that they offered me a job when I graduated. The downside of this was that I no longer felt pressure to do well academically my last two years and I ended up on probation. But the job came through anyway and the rest of my life was started.

Here is an excerpt from my memoir which appeared originally in Washington History:

Sam Smith - In the spring of my sophomore year I read in Broadcasting magazine that WWDC, an independent station in Washington, DC, was developing a major news operation. Most stations at the time just ripped and read copy from the wires; the exceptions were usually network affiliates.

I immediately added WWDC to a list of 40 stations -- all the others in New England -- to which I sent summer job applications. The 40 New England stations rejected or ignored me, but WWDC took me on. And so I returned to my native Washington, which my family had left when I was ten.

My bosses were two Texas liberals -- news director Joe Phipps and his assistant Bob Robinson. Short and bald, Phipps appeared a bespectacled and ambulatory small mouth bass. When excited his eyeballs almost rubbed against his glasses. His voice ebbed and flowed between 1950s broadcast fog and full-blown southern oratorical eruption. Robinson, on the other hand, had an unflappable Texas drawl. A tall man with white hair, Robinson was as imperturbable as Phipps was instantly reactive.

My initial task -- writing nine newscasts a day -- interned me in a small corner room with just enough space 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 was expected to be different, whether the news had changed or not. Three of the newscasts occurred during evening drive time and were 30 minutes apart. This coincided with the most likely period for accidents and thunderstorms. Since WWDC paid $1 to $5 for every news tip it aired, I would be regularly inundated with accounts of fallen limbs and fender benders as I struggled to write three newscasts in an hour and a half. Often the copy ended up like this:

Reports of damage done by this afternoon's thunderstorm are pouring into the WWDC newsroom. At least six houses are on fire, nine accidents have occurred and numerous trees and hot wires have fallen across roads. Police and electric company officials say their phones have been jammed. . .

That newscast probably cost $13, representing the number of incidents I managed to squeeze into one double-spaced page -- all typed in caps with the errors blacked out by a soft copy pencil.

The news tip system worked pretty well, although I sometimes suspected that the volunteer rescue squad dispatchers were calling us before they sent out their equipment, since once the dispatch had been aired, anyone with a scanner could call in the item. And on at least one occasion an employee at WTOP even earned a dollar for phoning in a news tip that he had heard on WMAL.

One of our regular callers was Dan. Matching Robert Frost's paradigm for the good life, Dan's vocation and avocation had become one. He sat in his apartment surrounded by police and fire scanners waiting for tragedy to strike somewhere in the metropolitan region. He would then call and hoarsely whisper the news: "This is Dan, Sam. I've got a body for you." And another buck went to Dan.

Writing constantly soon became tiresome and I discovered various ways to amuse myself. One was to pick a word for the day and then see in how many newscasts I could use it. It had to be something like evince or piqued because my goal, unlike that of station management, was to raise the general tenor of the WWDC sound. This quixotic effort came to a halt when a blue paper memo from Bill Robinson made it clear that he had noticed and didn't think much of my unsanctioned vocabulary lessons.

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In the late fifties WWDC was the area's top rated station, but it maintained this status with substantial help from exclusive broadcast rights to the Washington Senators games. Absent baseball, WWDC dropped to second or third in evening listening, behind WTOP and WRC, although keeping its lead in the daytime.

WWDC was sometimes known as Bubbly Bubbly DC. The song had come from a jingle house, one of the new parasites of the business -- a firm that provided stations with customized musical fillers. Knowing that the same jingle, slightly reworked, was being used by stations all over the country was a reminder of the illusions one could create in a medium where no one saw what you were doing.

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FRED FISKE INTERVIEWS ACTOR TAB HUNTER
[DC Public Library, Washington Post]

Washington radio had always been a bit different, though -- ever since a local morning man named Arthur Godfrey started making fun of his advertisers on the air. At least one of them, a furrier named Zlotnik, the man to see "when your wife is cold," became famous mainly as a result of Godfrey's comments about the dirty stuffed bear in front of his store.

Washington in those days was run by three commissioners appointed by the president. Many, though, assumed correctly that the real commissioner was the director of the very white Board of Trade. The local papers routinely listed the race of victims and perpetrators in crime stories. A Washington Star veteran recalled "the grieving widow who called me one day after I'd done an obit about her late husband, in which I had referred to him as a D.C. native. 'He wasn't no native,' she shrieked. 'He was as white as you or I!'" And when I went to cover the annual Brotherhood Week luncheon at a local hotel, a reporter leaned over and said, "Do you notice the only Negroes in this place are the waiters?".

This same reporter called me at 2 a.m. the morning after the funeral of Sweet, Precious Daddy Grace, the colorful bishop of the United House of Prayer for All People. "I'm down here waiting for them to choose Daddy Grace's successor," he whispered into the phone, "and I'm the only white person here. How about coming down?"

Later, in January 1961, I made my only foray into the real world of network television. I was hired for Kennedy's inauguration by CBS News as a news editor. Along with fellow WWDC newsman Ed Taishoff, I sat all day capped with a headset in a ballroom of the Hotel Washington , turning phone calls from CBS correspondents into stories then placed on Walter Cronkite's personal news ticker. If there was one thing Ed and I knew, it was how to take news from callers, turn it into copy and get it on the air fast.

After the summer of 1956, I returned to Harvard even more determined to go into radio. I was elected WHRB's station manager but two weeks later received an official letter stating that "the Administrative Board voted to place you on probation instead of severing your connection with the University." It had been my second unsatisfactory term as a result of my infatuation with radio; among the penalties would be the surrender of my new post. Nonetheless, and in the tradition of the college's station, I continued on the air under a pseudonym and comforted myself with the thought that WWDC had asked me to come back. I toughed it out and eventually graduated without honors but with a job.

I returned to WWDC in the summer of 1959 upon graduation from Harvard. I started working for Deadline Washington on my off-days and after work on other days -- putting in 12-14 hour stints. Often I would be on joint assignment for Deadline and WWDC.

WWDC also received feeds from other stations. For example, when Nikita Khruschev was visiting the US, we arranged for a mid-western station to give reports of his tour of an American farm.

WWDC's news fleet consisted of two vehicles, a Nash Rambler station wagon and an Isetta minicar. The light blue Rambler had WWDC NEWS, in reverse image, painted on its hood in large dark blue letters, thus allowing the sign to be read correctly in a rear view mirror. The style would become common, especially with ambulances, but at the time was the sort of novelty WWDC loved.

The Rambler had an even more startling, albeit unintentional, characteristic. The front seats of Ramblers folded down to become beds. Unfortunately, this capability had developed an anarchistic streak in our model, resulting in a tendency for the driver's seat back to become prone whenever sturdy brake pressure was applied, say at an ordinary stop light.

The Isetta, an Italian import, was far smaller than any car on the road today, and powered by a motor scooter engine. It had four wheels, but they were tiny and the two in back were almost adjacent to each other. You sat in what amounted to little more than a cockpit with barely enough room for a 210-pound reporter and a radio telephone. The door doubled as the entire front end, with the steering wheel swinging out of the way for entrance and egress. More than once I pulled up to a wall or post only to remember that I had blocked my own getting out.

 AN ISETTA OF THE SAME MODEL THE AUTHOR DROVE    AS A RADIO NEWS REPORTER.

[Microcar & Minicar Club]

It was not the best way to cover the news. The Isetta had a flank speed of 50 mph on flat, good pavement, and it practically had to be pedaled up hills. This sometimes interfered with arriving promptly at the scene of a distant fire, murder or drowning. Nonetheless, no one at WWDC would admit that novelty in this case had gotten a bit out of hand. Besides, the Isetta's light carriage allowed me to push it out of mud and sand in which a heavier car would have become mired.

Everything was simpler. Even the US Capitol which I wandered around with my mike and tape recorder like it was my apartment building. Even the US Capitol Police force was comprised mainly of young men benefiting from the patronage granted their fathers by various members of Congress. It was a fairly pleasant crowd and you knew you were not just dealing with a law enforcement officer but perhaps a grad student whose dad was a buddy of the majority leader.

My favorite Hill cop story from the period involves a friend who was a bagpipe -playing Lebanese Catholic from Boston who knew everyone in the Democratic Party and worked for a number of them including Massachusetts governor Foster Furcolo and, later, Ted Kennedy. She was on her way to an LBJ State of the Union from Boston but was late and arrived from the plane still carrying her bagpipe case in which rested not only the instrument but some pita bread her sister had made.

In a hall crowded with some of America's most powerful, my friend was told by a Capitol police officer to open the bagpipe case. The officer was disturbed by what he found inside. "Don't worry," said my friend. "It's just a bagpipe and some pita bread. . . Call your chief and tell him Terri Haddad is here with her bagpipes. He knows me."

The officer did and at the other end the Capitol Hill police chief issued one blunt order: "Tell her to play “Danny Boy."

And so for the chief, she did and then was allowed to repack her instrument and go hear the speech.

Before long, I knew Washington and its environ like a cab driver and could quickly compute such arcane calculations as the shortest route from the White House to a six alarm fire in Upper Marlboro. I also knew every press room in town.

My favorite was at the District Building, which one entered through swinging doors reminiscent of a frontier bar. Inside were three desks, a center table and a worn-out sofa. The stuffing was coming out of the sofa and the covering was greasy and black from years of resting heads. After Watergate, a sign was posted above the press room sofa. It read, "Carl Bernstein slept here."

Complementing the novelty of the station's news fleet was its collection of still rare battery operated tape recorders. These devices were about three inches thick, five inches wide and ten inches long.

The recorders were so new that the engineer's union had initially insisted it send a member out with all reporters using one. Fortunately for the future of news radio, this particular piece of featherbedding was scotched. The tape recorders, however, presented a number of other challenges -- including a deep sensitivity to temperature. More than once I returned from an outdoor winter taping -- a burial at Arlington cemetery or a fire -- only to find my recorded voice sounding like Porky Pig as the batteries returned to full power once back in the studio.

Whatever the machines' faults, there were fewer than a dozen stations and networks in Washington that had them, so even a neophyte reporter such as myself had easy access to the most senior politicians.

In a manual on WWDC news reporting that I wrote in 1960, shortly before leaving the station, I outlined some of the peculiarities of the technology:

The various machines operate in various ways at various times. For example, they have different proper recording levels and sometimes these change after the machines have been repaired. . .

Do not let the speaker hold the mike unless he is in such a position that you can not comfortably reach him. Saliva does not help the mike crystal.

Covering events with you on the local level will be the three daily papers, an occasional wire service man, and sometimes a man from WMAL The basis of successful operation alongside these other news people is largely intuitive and is worked out by experience. But if the WMAL cameraman asks you to move the mike a little to the left, you should do so as long as it does not hamper your work. If you need to get through a crowd of reporters with a mike, polite requests combined with the proper quantity of physical pressure will assure entrance.

There are many events at which over a hundred reporters will be present. Obviously, a dog-eat-dog attitude could easily result in chaos. A scoop is one thing, but it doesn't mean cooperation is eliminated.

Covering national stories, the networks present a problem. The network engineers and cameramen try to intimidate new independent newsmen and like to play tough. Some of their requests are responsible. Sometimes they just are trying to give you a hard time. It gains you nothing to get angry. Be good natured whenever possible; otherwise go about your business ignoring them . . .

In time this policy pays off. One cameraman, without being asked, gave me the idea for the paper clip mike holder. NBC's Johhnie Langanegger repaired a transformer for me. A cameraman named Skip lent me a screwdriver at a crucial moment. These men have a job to do and take a certain pride in being old-timers at it. It helps to remember this . . .

After the conference there is a mad rush for the few phones available. So the simplest thing to do is to go the People's Drug Store on the corner of 17th & Pennsylvania Ave, buy a cup of coffee, sit down at a table and write your story in relative peace.

THE AUTHOR, 2nd FROM RIGHT, INTERVIEWS JFK RIGHT AFTER HE                                       ANNOUNCED HIS PRESIDENTIAL CANIDACY.

Photo by Hank Walker, Life Magazine.

The stories I covered for WWDC ran from Eisenhower news conferences, to an interview with Louis Armstrong, to the murder of the former head of an Illinois college who was found "stark naked, beaten and dying" in a room of the seedy Alton Hotel, murdered by a male carnival worker.

My mind became centered  on other matters -- such as getting into Coast Guard Officer Candidate School before my draft board got me. But I know those months changed me even as they changed the country. I no longer thought of the Capitol as a cathedral, the exciting had turned a little tawdry, the right choice was less certain and the important no longer peremptorily apparent.

I had stopped noticing the shine of the marble. The floors of the House and Senate office buildings became harder, the hallways darkened, and the doors that lined them seemed to conceal more than they invited. Even on foggy and rainy evenings, the Capitol dome no longer floated in the sky but sat lumpy and leaden on top of the Hill, waiting for a new story to begin.

PHOTOS WASHINGTON HISTORY, MLK LIBRARY, WASHINGTONIANA DIVISION