The following is an excerpt from Chapter Four of the autobiographical
book I’m currently writing, entitled “Voices in the Storm: A Journalist’s
Memoir”, about my early days in Buenos Aires.
Robert Cox had led me to believe on my first night at the Herald that, for the moment, I would
mostly be observing, learning the ropes, seeing how things were done, filling
in gaps in the personnel roster, basically doing “one thing and another.” In
all fairness, he did warn, however, that because the paper was chronically
short-handed and run on a shoestring budget, I would frequently find myself on
my own when, truth be told, I should be under the supervision of someone more
experienced, and that, in those cases, I’d simply have to wing it and hope to
hell I got it right.
But I never imagined that this would be so much the case when I came in
for my second night on the job. Cox himself intercepted me at the swinging
doors of the editiorial department. He was frantic. A couple of the staff had
their night off and couldn’t be reached, and a couple of others had called in
sick. I’d have to get to work right away, he said, and as fast as I could. He
handed me a pile of local news agency cables in Spanish and said I needed to
get to work translating them ASAP.
It had never occurred to me when I was badgering the editor to let me
work in his paper that a significant part of the job of an English-language
newspaper in a Spanish-speaking country would be translating the local news,
but that reality became graphically clear to me right off the bat. Other than
textbook translations reluctantly carried out in two years of Spanish classes
back at Wapakoneta High School and during the two quarters of Spanish I had
taken at Ohio State, I had never translated anything in my life. My Spanish
skills were shaky to say the least. Despite a few months living in Buenos Aires,
my Spanish was still decidedly Tarzanesque.
Translating a single paragraph of news copy with the constant help of a
bilingual dictionary took me ages, and I was to learn quickly just how little
column space a translated paragraph could fill. I was in awe of veterans like
local news editor Andrew Graham-Yooll, senior reporter Reginald “Toby” Rowland
and cables editor Stuart Stirling, who could hammer out translations as fast as
they could type. Needless to say, I felt totally inadequate. When I had
struggled through my first fifteen-line brief, I took it to Graham-Yooll, as
Cox had told me to, and timidly said, “Mr. Cox told me to bring you this as
soon as I was finished translating it.”
Graham-Yooll looked up from his work and narrowed his eyes at me as if I
were a panhandler who’d just asked him for the price of a pint, wheezed,
muttered, “Thanks,” and laid the piece off to the side before returning to the developing
story he had rolled into his typewriter. I went back to my hammered-to-death-give-it-to-the-new-guy
typewriter in a far corner of the room and started struggling to understand a
second cable in Spanish. But as I worked, I couldn’t help glancing over
Graham-Yooll’s way every little bit to see when he was going to get to my
translation. When he finally did, I stopped working and watched as he placed it
on the desk in front of him, paused, took his long beard with one hand and
stroked it, while retrieving a pencil
from within the shaggy hair that hung over his ear with the other, and
beginning to edit—slashing, marking out, circling, writing in, slashing,
slashing, slashing, writing in, then writing instructions to the shop at the
top of the page before laying the piece off to the side again.
When he was done, he leaned back far enough to open his middle desk
drawer, rifled around in the pencil tray inside, took something out, then got
up and walked over to my desk. I smiled. He didn’t. Instead, he leaned over my
shoulder where I sat, and with his thick index finger, punched a series of aes,
oes and ees on the blank page in the roll of my typewriter. Then he pointed at
them as if to say, “What do you see?” What I saw was that the centers of the
letters that should have been white were blacked out, which made it easy to
mistake one letter for the other. I looked at the letters, then craned my neck backward to look at him and
when I did, he held up a longish straight pin that he was pinching like a tiny
sword between his thumb and forefinger up in front of my eyes and said, in his serene,
asthmatic, Alfred Hitchcock voice, “I hereby present you with the Order of the
Pin. Clean those out so we can tell which letter is which.”
As he turned to leave, I addressed the back of his head. “Um, how was
the piece.”
“I’m sure it’ll get better,” he said, still walking and without turning
toward me. And then he added, “It can’t get any worse.”
As I was starting my second translation, Bob Cox rushed out of his office
and over to my desk again. “Dan, how are you doing?” he said in a tone that
made it clear that this was a rhetorical question. “Um, I have something here I
think you might be suited to,” he went on.
“Well,” I said, “I still have these to do,” and pointed to the little
pile of agency cables on the corner of my desk.”
“Oh...yes, well, you can continue with those afterward. Right now, I
need you to write an obituary. It’s for a lady who worked at the Missions to
Seamen.”
“The what?”
“Missions to Seamen,” he said again, and then muttered under his breath,
“Quite, you wouldn’t know about that, would you?” Being a bloody Yank and a
Midwesterner to boot, he could have added, but, politely, didn’t. “It’s an
Anglican organization,” he continued, “that has branches in ports all over the
world.” He explained that these missions were usually run by Church of England
chaplains with a few staff, and the rest of the people working for them were
all volunteers.
It sounded to me like a sort of USO, without all of the singing and
dancing. It had started in the nineteenth century when Britannia ruled the
waves and there were British seafarers all around the globe. The organization’s
mission was “to offer practical, emotional and spiritual support to seafarers
through ship visits, drop-in centers and a range of welfare and emergency
support services.” Since the Herald
had started out as a maritime journal and still had strong ties to the shipping
community, Cox had been asked to put something nice in the paper about this lady,
Jenny, who had worked for the local Missions to Seamen drop-in center for
something like forty years.
Rather hesitantly, Bob now handed me the press release he’d received and
said, “This thing’s bloody awful but all of the basic information is there. Could
you try and write something that sounds like we knew her? You know, a nice
short article about what a nice person she was, how helpful to these sailors
far from home, something warm and human.
“I’ll give it a shot,” I said.
“Cheers!” he answered and rushed back to his office, leaving me alone
with Miss Jenny and a blank sheet of paper.
Thinking myself a consumate writer, I told myself this would be a piece
of cake and quickly dashed off an obit that I thought would bring tears to the
editor’s eyes. I zipped it out of the typewriter and strode briskly across the
editorial bay to the editor’s office. Maybe I couldn’t translate for shit, I
told myself, but I could write my ass off.
Cox’s door was open and he was sitting at his typewriter, hands poised to
type, looking at some notes on his desk.
When I knocked softly on the door-jamb, he looked up from his reading
but his hands remained poised over the typewriter keys. The body language was
not lost on me. It said, I hope you don’t plan to bother me for more than a
couple of seconds.
“What is it, Dan?” he asked.
“Here’s the piece.”
“What piece?”
“The obit...Jenny...Missions to Seamen?”
“Oh yes, cheers, Dan,” the editor said accepting the proffered sheet of paper
and, for lack of any desk space in his cluttered office, laid it on a magazine
on his knee, picking up a fountain pen from next to his typewriter and starting
to edit in his scrawling hand.
Already by the second line, however, he was shaking his head and
muttering, “Oh dear...Oh, bloody hell...Oh Christ!”
And then he looked up at me and said, “Christ, Dan, you’ve made the poor woman
sound like a tart! I mean... ‘providing aid, warmth and comfort to hundreds of
sailors...Really?”
I could feel my face flush and my scalp prickle with embarrassment.
“Go back and rewrite the bloody thing, and try to stay away from
language with dual meanings that can be misinterpreted.”
For the better part of an hour after that (an inordinate amount of time
in a daily’s newsroom) I re-wrote and re-wrote the obituary until I figured it
couldn’t be more perfect, then returned to the editor’s office. Cox was still
at his typewriter, looking harassed, his hair in disarray from running his fingers
through it. Standing apologetically in the doorway, I cleared my throat and he
looked up.
“Ah yes, Dan again,” he said. “Let’s see,” and he held his hand out for
the piece of paper I was holding.
I wanted to discuss the original version with him, offer my apology,
tell him I knew I was better than that and had no idea what had gotten into me,
but the editor’s body language and harried attitude invited no conversation. I
stood in silence while he read, half expecting him to say something like, “Now this is a story!” But instead, he merely
used his fountain pen to black out extraneous words, to draw lines and arrows
changing word orders, to line out most of a paragraph entirely, and to write in
a few words that he considered to be vital additions.
Then he penned in shop instructions and a headline at the top of the
page, handed it back to me and said, “Drop it off at the Night Desk window,
will you?”
“Sure.”
“Cheers.”
And that was it. I had written my first professional news story and the
die was cast.
