YANKEE REDUX — HOW I NEVER MET SORIANO

 

This year is the 26^th anniversary of the death of Osvaldo Soriano, one of Argentina’s most celebrated contemporary writers. This is a rewrite of something I wrote about him in 2008, when I first created this blog. Actually, it’s the re-edited story of how, oddly enough, our paths never crossed in the exciting and violent Buenos Aires of the 1970s or later on when democracy returned. But it’s also about how, through his work and reputation, I got to know him all the same.

 

Funny thing, I’ve often thought, how I never met Osvaldo Soriano. We were colleagues, contemporaries pretty much (he was born six years before me), and we haunted some of the same environments in the bad old days leading up to the 1976 military coup in Argentina. Our turf back then were streets where hookers, sailors, printers and newsmen were about the only people stirring long into the wee hours of the night. And we started hanging out in those places in the same era, he having come to Buenos Aires from the Argentine interior and I from abroad.

I suspect we both got into journalism for the same reason, as a way of writing every day and earning a living at it. He did it all his life, despite his fame as a novelist, becoming one of the original founders of the controversial daily, Página 12, when he returned to Buenos Aires from European exile. There—there being Paris—he had written for such noted publications as Le Monde, Libération and Il Manifesto.

Some people go into journalism because they have a passion for the news. Others because they like telling people’s stories. These others are the ones people talk about when they say they never met a journalist who wasn’t writing a novel. In Soriano’s case it paid off big-time. From what I know about him—I became a huge fan of his from the very outset—I figure his enormous popularity surprised no one as much as himself. His novels have sold into the millions of copies (you can even buy them at Walmart!) and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. And still the more asinine among critics are wont to discuss whether he was, in fact, a “good writer”. What was it Hemingway said? Something like, “Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.” Soriano probably would have agreed.

Argentine journalist and author Osvaldo Soriano

Anyway, at about the time that Soriano was writing for owner/editor Jacobo Timerman at La Opinión, I was sub-editing and reporting for editor Robert Cox at the Buenos Aires Herald. Our editorial departments were more or less around the corner from each other in the then-red light district, in the vicinity of 25 de Mayo and Tucumán. Both of our papers printed at Alemann & Compañía, which was handy and one of the biggest printers of the day. It was a location that was a stone’s throw from the SAFICO Building on Corrientes and San Martín, where major international news agencies and correspondents had their offices, a few short blocks from the local agency Noticias Argentinas, and walking distance from the press offices of all major municipal and federal government departments and ministries.

Back then, it was hard to go into any of the bars or cafés in that district without meeting up with a colleague or two. So you would have thought that Soriano and I would have been almost bound to run into each other. But, as fate would have it, we didn’t. It was hard not to run into novelist, journalist, one-time radical Peronist and later fat-cat diplomat Jorge Asís, for instance. Asís was a sort of politically aggressive omnipresence on that circuit. But Soriano was, from what I hear, a somewhat retiring if friendly sort, and I was never really much of a joiner myself. I suppose we both spent a lot more time in front of a typewriter than some, even in the days before computers made it easier still to become a functional hermit.

Dan Newland, circa 1977, Buenos Aires Herald
reporter/editor and correspondent for the London
Daily Telegraph, World Environment Report and
ABC Radio News, New York.
Photo:John Claude Fernandes

I stayed on at the Herald while working as a stringer for papers and magazines in the United States and Britain, and thus started building a career of sorts. It wasn’t on purpose. I mean, the ultimate goal was to become a novelist. It was just that, in the meantime, I was limited to the Herald if I wanted to write in my own language, and besides, once the military junta shut down La Opinión and locked up Timerman, there was basically no other place but the Herald to write a semblance of truth about what was happening in Argentina. The times grew frighteningly interesting and one year just kind of led to the next.

Soriano, for his part, graced the pages of not only La Opinión, but also of Primera Plana, Noticias, Confirmado and Panorama with his inimitable prose. But his leftist bent and his uncompromising objectivity made it dangerous for him to remain in Argentina after the 1976 coup d’état, and he made a decision to live in exile until the military returned to their barracks in 1983. He was off to Belgium and would later gravitate to Paris, where he would co-found Sin Censura with venerated Argentine exile and author Julio Cortázar.

At the Herald, our news editor and my immediate boss, Andrew Graham-Yooll, made a similar decision at about that same time and was off to London practically overnight. I got bumped up the ladder to the news editor’s post and former McLean’s Magazine journalist James Neilson was brought in as associate editor under Cox.

It was in this editorial management post that I started to get a chance to write regularly under a by-line and thus to become mildly well-known in certain circles. So it was too that I got to know Soriano for the first time, without ever actually meeting him.

It happened one midnight (dreary) in 1978, as I was sitting at my desk, struggling with the first lines of an op-ed piece while waiting for the press to roll in our new installations on Calle Azopardo. Momentarily stymied, I decided to procrastinate by going through the day’s mail that was still piled untouched on the corner of my desk. I found the usual readers’ letters (which I dutifully separated and filed for future publication), some magazines, a few brochures (from merchants who wanted some free hype and which I put in the out tray for the advertising department), a couple of formal invitations to lunches and cocktails and, finally, a small rectangular package, the size of a book. It was addressed to my name in black marker, postmarked from Spain, had no return address and was wrapped in plain brown paper, as if to conceal some pornographic content.

Justifiably paranoid as I was in those days, given the constant threats the newspaper received, I sniffed the package, flexed it, shook it, picked at it, and tweaked it a bit, before finally deciding it was probably harmless. When I opened it, what I found was a rather thin little paperback book with a title as Argentine as tango itself: No habrá más penas ni olvido. So Argentine is that phrase from the classic tango, Mi Buenos Aires querido, that it is almost impossible to translate it correctly. I mean, one could try, say, No More Sorrow or Forgetfulness, or No More Sorrow or Oblivion, but what the devil does that mean in English. It is only within the context of porteño lore—of immigrants far from home, of families separated by destiny and longing to be together once more, of perennial hope against a backdrop of barely veiled despair, of terminal melancholy turned outwardly to false cheer, of romantic abandon and unrequited love, of vengeance and remorse, of arrivals and departures, of European Americans with heartstrings stretched taut between continents—that those words make sense, even in Spanish. They would probably make sense in Italian…if they were spoken in America (especially South America). But in English, it’s like: Huh? Anyway, as a title for what was to be an incredibly succinct and immortal synthesis of something as Argentine as the phenomenon of Peronism in the 1970s, it could not have been more fitting.

I scanned the first few paragraphs and was immediately, irretrievably hooked. I kept telling myself, “One more page and back to the op-ed piece…One more page and I’ll go down to put the paper to bed…One more page and I’ll put this thing down! But it was impossible. It wasn’t until I felt the rotary press shaking the floor of my office like a small, benign earth tremor that I tore myself away from the plot and characters that peopled the story to go down and do my duty, plucking a copy of the latest edition of the Herald from the downstream end of the press and having a quick general look to make sure everything was okay before bidding the press crew good night over the din of the machinery.

Arriving home in our tiny mid-town condo at nearly two-thirty in the morning, I took up where I’d left off in the book while I ate the supper my wife had left out on the kitchen counter for me and had a glass of wine. But when I’d eaten my meal, I poured myself some more wine and kept right on reading. By the time I fell into bed around dawn, I’d read half of the book, and before I went in to work the next afternoon, I had finished it.

I was spellbound. Political analysts of all colors and nationalities were straining their intellects to the point of mental hernia to try and paint a clear if complex picture of the Argentine phenomenon. They were seeking some even vaguely objective definition of Peronism, attempting to explain in some feasible way what had gone so horrendously wrong that the country had stumbled headlong into total chaos, only to fall into the gnashing jaws of unbridled repression and ironclad authoritarianism. And by and large, they had failed miserably.

But here was Osvaldo Soriano, high school drop-out, street-beat newsman and natural genius, who created the perfect allegory. He didn’t try to tell the story from the standpoint of the big picture, where cloak and dagger political intrigue made it next to impossible to get to the core of truth. Instead he took the demise of Peronism as Perón had defined it to a tiny town in Buenos Aires Province, where everybody knew everybody else. Into that microcosm, he injected the poison of political avarice, added the catalyst of petty jealousy, sowed the seeds of gossip and doubt, and fanned the flames of a witch-hunt that would turn a quaint and even comic village into a tragic nightmare of civil strife, torture, revolt and murder.

Thanks to this incredible portrait of the Peronist phenomenon following the death of populist strongman General Juan Domingo Perón, the question of what happened in Argentina in the nineteen-seventies becomes graphically crystal-clear, with never a mention of any of the major players, except, of course, for the all-pervading, omnipresent name of Perón.

But even though the story could not have been more Argentine in every sense, it was, I realized, also brilliantly universal. As universal, say, as Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Huxley’s Brave New World, or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was an allegory on politics gone awry, a regime’s running rampant, movements placing themselves above the people in whose name they acted and above systems that sought to guarantee the rule of law. It was about an ideal turned caricature, a political thought gone psychotic. It was about human foible—complacence playing into the hands of dictatorial design, rebellion providing an excuse for free-wheeling repression and about what happens when two extremes come full circle and see each other in near mirror image. It was about how no one wins, but how power is retained, at least for a time, by whomever swings the biggest club. But it was also about how moral victory can only belong to those who maintain their principles at all costs, even at the cost of their very lives.

The next day I told a guy I knew in the shop about the book. He was what one might call a closet Peronist revolutionary. He had been, rumor had it, a leftist activist before the 1976 coup. He and I often discussed politics while putting the paper to bed. He had read a lot and I asked if he had ever read anything by Soriano, since this was my first encounter with the author. He said he didn’t think so. Would I lend him the book to read?

“Sure,” I said, “but I want it back.”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’m a fast reader.”

The next night when I went down to the shop and said hello to him, he grunted, glanced over both shoulders to see if anybody was watching, reached into a dark little cupboard, where he also hid his little brown bottle of Bols Ginebra and retrieved the book from the darkest recesses. I couldn’t help laughing aloud when I saw that he had very carefully covered it in heavy black plastic sheeting, obviously to keep the title from showing through.

“Here, jefe,” he said. “Get it out of here.”

“You didn’t like it?” I laughed.

“It was great,” he whispered, “but not worth dying for.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

“You know the security guy at the front desk? He said that if I didn’t want the milicos to "give me a ride in their truck", I’d better get that subversive book under wraps, because the author was a terrorist and the book was banned.”

I lost that copy of No habrá más penas ni olvido in a move some time back, but for all of the years that it remained in my library, right up to the beginning of the nineties, it wore that black shroud. That cover, like the book itself, was a symbol of those times and of the exile from which Soriano so aptly described them.

I recently came across a picture of me when I was a news editor and foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires in the seventies and one of Soriano when he was exiled in Paris. I couldn’t help but reflect that the historical phenomenon that had forced him to flee for his life from the country he loved was the exact same one that had inspired me to remain in the Buenos Aires that he had left behind. We had both chosen to become expats because of the same thing, but for opposite reasons. Just one of the ironies of dangerous times.  

Soriano in Paris

In the early nineteen-nineties, several years after I quit my post as managing editor of the Herald and went free-lance, I had the honor and pleasure of sharing an office in Buenos Aires with a brilliant journalist and writer by the name of Claudio Iván Remeseira. We did a lot of talking, mostly about fiction and writing, when we should have been working for a living, and in the course of those conversations, Soriano’s name came up. I ended up telling Claudio the story about how Soriano’s work first came into my hands. He thought it was a great story and that a guy like Soriano would probably like to hear it. I said that chasing after a big name like Soriano (he was indeed big by then) seemed so sophomoric and unprofessional. He would surely think I was a jerk.

Years later, when I had already moved from Buenos Aires to Patagonia, and when Remeseira was about to pursue his own brand of self-imposed exile in New York, he again approached me on the subject, saying he had told my story to a guy who sort of knew Soriano and the fellow had said he was sure Osvaldo would be delighted to hear it. I said I’d think about it, because to me, hermit that I tend to be, it just seemed like a too extroverted, off-the-wall thing to do. But Remeseira managed to get me Soriano’s home phone number and made me promise that the next time I was in Buenos Aires I would give the best-selling author a call.

And I did, repeatedly, always getting an answering machine with the voice of Soriano’s French-born wife on it. Some time later, I met up with Remeseira in Buenos Aires and casually mentioned over drinks that I’d tried Soriano on numerous occasions but none of my calls had been returned.

“Haven’t you heard?” he asked. “Soriano’s got lung cancer. He’s only seeing a few close friends. They don’t think he’s going to make it.”

Even this seemed like another of his universal images, a passage from his last book, Piratas, fantasmas y dinosaurios (Pirates, Ghosts and Dinosaurs), the book’s first image, in fact, where he writes: “Every New Year’s Eve, I remember, if only for an instant, the last one my father was alive. He was wrapped up in a threadbare robe, on the doorstep of the house he rented in Santo Tomé. There was still a butt between his lips, but by now it was killing him. He raised his arm to wave good-bye to me as firecrackers and colorful roman candles burst around him. We had quarreled, I think, because I hated the holiday season as much as he did and couldn’t figure out what stupid custom made us get together to toast one another and wish each other things in which neither of us believed...”

It seemed to me a universal portrait. His father’s. My own father’s, some years later when he was dying of that same disease and I couldn’t help hating myself for having quarreled with him so often. Perhaps it is, in a way, a scene from the lives of nearly every father and son. And, in the end, a self-portrait as well.

That, I realized, was the universal genius of this author, whose life had run parallel to mine for a time, and whom I would never know.

 

SMALL MIRACLES

 

My bedtime reading the last few nights has been very pleasantly occupied with a book of essays by Ann Patchett entitled These Precious Days. I was struck in one of the essays, The Worthless Servant, by the truth and wisdom contained in a quote by Robert F. Kennedy that she includes. It goes like this:

Robert F. Kennedy

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

I’ve had first-hand experience with this. When I first started working for the Buenos Aires Herald as a young idealistic writer-wannabe in my mid-twenties, believing in “the power of one” was a mere act of faith—a platitude that I repeated as a high ideal but that was, in the end, hard to seriously believe in at any practical level.

Former Buenos Aires Herald Editor Robert Cox

But as the difficult years of my earliest days in South America went on, and as I watched Editor Robert Cox take on first the right-wing death squads working undercover with the elected government of Isabel Perón and then, the ruthless power of the military regime that was to follow, I began to see that one small voice, one small newspaper, one small but courageous editor, could make a difference. He could, single-handedly, change minds. He could influence foreign policy in Europe and the United States. He could, in the end, save lives and shine a spotlight on something heinous and morally wrong. He could defend his rights and the rights of others simply by not being too afraid to raise his voice in their defense, while accepting that the risk to his own life was worth it in the larger scheme of things.

In this essay, Patchett was telling the story of an assignment she once accepted to write about a saint. At first she rejected the offer because she couldn’t see the value in writing yet another glowing tribute to some long-dead individual, canonized by the Vatican and afforded the official honor of sainthood. She told the editor making the offer that if she were asked to write about someone she considered a living saint, it might be different. But one more story about a long-accepted saint? It seemed like an overkill to her.

To her surprise, the publication acquiesced, asked her to submit the story of “her saint”, and Patchett took up the challenge. She decided to write about a Nashville priest whom she’d known since childhood. This priest, this man, was someone who had devoted his entire life to helping the troubled and destitute in any way he could.

Ann Patchett

This was a lot more than mere “thoughts and prayers.” This was about finding homes for the homeless, lifting people out of abject despair and hopelessness, helping the destitute, the forgotten, the addicted, the morally and spiritually crushed to take a first step in a series of baby steps that could lead them to “something better” even when a smashing success might never be a possibility.

Father Charlie, Patchett’s priest friend, refused to throw up his hands and consider certain social situations hopeless. He settled instead for the small miracles that could be worked by doing something even when it was next to impossible to do everything to solve the problems of the world—his world. You had to start at your own doorstep in exercising humanity. You chose to help or not to. But you couldn’t be a true Christian if you failed to love your neighbor, no matter how “undesirable” that neighbor might seem to you. That was his message.

Patchett’s Nashville priest reminded me of one I’d known in Buenos Aires, back in the late 1970s. His name was Padre Argentino. Or at least, that was his nom de guerre. He was, at the time, the subject of persecution, which began in the mid-seventies when the Triple-A, a far-right splinter of the vastly eclectic Peronist movement, in the person of former policeman José López Rega, had usurped the government of an all too accommodating President Isabel Perón, and was purging just about everybody left of Adolf Hitler from the party of Perón. They considered Padre Argentino—along with scores of other so-called “third world priests”—to be dangerous Marxists, who were seeking to incite revolt against the “Western and Christian” far-right.

Father Carlos Mujica, murdered by the Triple-A

A Triple-A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance) thug had already murdered unabashed third world cleric Father Carlos Mujica, whose work in the slums of Buenos Aires and his philosophy regarding empowering the poor had caused him to run afoul of not only López Rega and far-right Peronism, but also of Buenos Aires Archbishop Juan Carlos Aramburu, long a champion of Catholic conservatism, to whom Mujica’s fraternal relationship with the poor and his chapel’s unfettered service to them he found dangerous, distasteful and offensive to the Church hierarchy. The Triple-A would also, shortly before I met the padre, slaughter seven priests and seminarians of the Pallottine Order while they were at prayer at Saint Patrick’s Parish in the Belgrano neighborhood on Buenos Aires’s North Side. 

For his part, Padre Argentino had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while running a soup kitchen for the homeless in midtown Buenos Aires. He was no more a communist than I was. He was merely a priest doing the job that he felt God, not the Church, had set out for him. He identified with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and with the likes of Saint Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, not with those of the upper-class, conservative, Argentine Catholic hierarchy and their friends in the military establishment. And as such, he found himself consistently threatened with death at the hands of the Triple-A and with being defrocked by the Church leadership, which was equivalent to a death warrant in the climate of the Peronist far-right’s war on leftist ideals.

After the failed assassination attempt, friends helped him escape to Bolivia where he hid out for a short time, but his mission to the poor in his native Argentina seemed far more important to him than his own safety and he slipped back across the border under the radar. He set up a new mission in an impoverished industrial suburb of Buenos Aires, where he was never known as anything but Padre Argentino. It was a neighborhood where overcrowding, incest, chronic alcoholism, poverty and ubiquitous toxic industrial waste tended to foster an inordinate number of birth defects and cases of retarded brain development in children. Padre Argentino saw that these were kids who simply fell through the cracks, who had no place to go, were rejected by the education and social welfare system, and seldom received sufficient care and guidance at home.

He took the bull by the horns, commandeered an abandoned, shot-up, half-burned house that had once been the hideout of a gang of delinquents summarily wiped out by the provincial police, fixed it up as best he could with the help of a few friends and scant cash and material donations, and created the Little School of St. Francis of Assisi. The school’s main lesson was love and caring. He fed the children and taught them whatever their distinct capacities permitted them to learn. He also became the spiritual leader of that interurban subsistence community, creating his own ad hoc parish for people disenfranchised and disdained by the official Catholic community, performing marriages, funerals, confession and any other services and rites his presence called for, ever assisted by a Down Syndrome boy called Minguito, who was his loyal superhero acolyte—and who, whenever he wasn’t occupied with ecclesiastical matters, was busy being El Zorro or Batman.

He did all of this in a climate of abject poverty in which every plate of soup, every loaf of bread, every pencil and sheet of paper, every storybook depended on his ability to effectively beg every day of his life in the very best of Franciscan traditions. His days were eighteen hours long and utterly exhausting, but he did it all without complaint, though with not infrequent fits of rage at the injustice of the system and at the complete apathy of Mother Church.

A few years back I wrote a series of pieces about how I was responsible for wrecking Padre Argentino’s mission. I can’t recall right now the titles I put on those essays, but collectively they could have been called No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. It’s a long and complicated story, but the long and the short of it is that, in the brashness of my youth at that time (I first met and wrote about the padre when I was twenty-nine), I thought I had all the answers. I could solve everything. It was easy. I’d just go to the people with the money and get them on board. Nobody better for this, I figured, than the American expatriate business community.

I took Padre Argentino’s case to the American Society of the River Plate, enthused a critical mass of the community and we set to work forming a foundation to fund the Little School of St. Francis. Thing is, nothing like that happens in an expat American community without the US Embassy finding out. And since the wife of the military attaché was one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the project, it wasn’t long before the ambassador’s wife was involved, and then the ambassador himself.

When I told Padre Argentino what I’d been up to, he looked worried. “This could backfire, m’hijo,” he said.

He was right. It wasn’t long before I got a call from the military attaché, Colonel Skip McDonald. Skip said the ambassador had wanted to get involved.

“Great!” I said.

“Well, maybe not. He’s not going to be able to get personally involved. When we ran a background check on the priest…”

“Background check?”

“Well, yeah. You know, Dan, the ambassador can’t be associated with anybody we don’t know anything about.”

“So, tell him not to get involved,” I said, starting to get irritated.

But it wasn’t that simple. The background check had been done already and it seemed that Argentine military intelligence had the padre on a list of “suspected subversives”.

I was like, well okay, so no ambassador. Who cares? But Skip was quick to make me see the light. “Before, the Argentine Army didn’t know where this guy was. Now they do. We’ve shined a light on him. If he’s your friend, you might want to give him a heads-up.”

So off went Padre Argentino to exile again and furious with me for my infernal meddling. But not without telling me that it was my responsibility to fix what I’d broken. I told him I had no idea where to begin. He told me not to worry, that God would provide. I rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, right.”

For a while the fate of the school hung in the balance. The folks at the American Society were still willing to back the project if I would run it or would find somebody else to do it.

Almost on cue, a young Canadian woman called Martha Thompson showed up at the newspaper where I worked. She was living with her Argentine boyfriend in Buenos Aires now and was looking for something to do involving social issues. I said perhaps she could do some writing for us in that area and asked what her background was in the field of social work. She said that although she had most recently been recovering from tuberculosis, which she’d contracted while working in India, she’d gained a lot of previous experience there. What was she doing in India, I wanted to know?

“Working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta,” she said, as casually as she might have said, “Working at Burger King.”

I said, “Girl, do I have a job for you!”

So things sort of worked out in the end—but not for Padre Argentino, whose mission I ended in one fell swoop. The point being, that sometimes a willingness to help isn’t enough. You have to know how to help without ending up being a bull in a china shop.

That was the lesson that this experience taught me, and from then on, I’ve taken a much humbler approach to helping when I think I can make some difference. And I’ve learned too that those tiny ripples that Bobby Kennedy talked about do indeed have an effect. But the more thought you put into each pebble of care you cast, the more effective those tiny ripples will be.   

Juan Bautista Bairoletto

I have a neighbor in Patagonia with whom I’ve been friends since he was fourteen and I was forty-three. Back then, he was a wild kid riding a horse bareback and raising hell with his other roughneck buddies everywhere. They liked to think of themselves as modern-day Billy the Kid type characters, or, more accurately, as the new embodiment of Argentina’s legendary Juan Bautista Bairoletto, who roamed the pampas as an outlaw after he shot and killed a rural policeman in a fight over a prostitute whom both men were courting—an almost mythical character known to the rural rich as a dangerous bandit and killer, and to the poor as a Robin Hood hero.

The young adolescent had it rough, growing up without a father and having to help his mother make ends meet as she struggled to bring up his seven younger sisters and brothers. Despite being barely more than a boy, when I first met him, he was already an extraordinary horseman and was working, whenever tourism allowed, out of the riding stable of a well-known member of the Anglo-Celt community. In spite of his youth, he was leading tourists on long horse-trekking excursions along mountain trails that he already knew like his own backyard, for fees that were meager, to say the least.

As I got to know him, he admitted to being very nearly illiterate, never having had time to attend more than a few years of school, despite federal laws making grades one through six compulsory, and only on a hit and miss basis even then. The majority of his time was devoted to survival—his own and his family’s. As the eldest male, he was the man of the family at fourteen, and then as now, he commanded the respect of his siblings.

He started doing some work for me when he was seventeen. But he always came as the assistant of a Chilean boy of the same age who hailed from a farming family, was much better educated, and had accumulated considerable skills working with his far older stepbrothers who were all handymen and proficient as carpenters, brick masons, gardeners, lumberjacks and fence-builders.

The better I got to know him, the more I realized just how intelligent my young neighbor was. He wasn’t just smart. He was unimaginably bright, a careful critical thinker, a super-quick learner and a guy with a highly creative mind. What he lacked was confidence in himself, often describing himself as “an ignorant jerk like me” and fairly content (or perhaps relieved) to let others lead while he labored under their orders.

After my experience with Padre Argentino, I found myself being highly critical of my first impulses. Who the hell was I to meddle in other people’s lives, to tell them how to improve themselves, to grab them by the scruff of the neck and drag them kicking and screaming to “empowerment”, whether they liked it or not? I mean, after all, was I such a smashing success that I could now devote my efforts to giving others life-lessons? This kid already knew many times more about life and survival than I would ever be able to learn.

Still, if I knew I could make suggestions that might change his life for the better, wasn’t it wrong and selfish of me not to get involved? So one day when I saw him alone, I struck up a conversation with him. I told him that I’d watched him work. That I couldn’t understand why he was always the assistant when he had skills of his own. Fence-building, rustic construction, lawn care, land-clearing, logging, painting…he seemed to be as good or better at them than the people he worked for. But he didn’t seem very convinced that I was right.

Nevertheless, I started hiring him directly for certain jobs, both at home and in the seventy acres of natural forest for which I was the private warden. He responded to my confidence and did an excellent job at everything I assigned him. He created a team with his two younger brothers. I recommended them to the handful of other neighbors that I had at that time. Back then, there were no services of any kind in our area except electricity. People had to heat with firewood. And there were only a few of us who gathered, sawed and chopped our own. The rest bought theirs from providers elsewhere. My young friend and his team got in on the unloading and chopping but were not equipped to handle any other stages of the firewood process because they didn’t have a chainsaw, this despite the fact that they often were given firewood as part of their pay on land that they cleared for construction. But they had to saw in situ only as much as they could use, because they had to borrow their clients’ saws to cut it. And then they had to pay somebody with a truck to haul it to their homes.

I couldn’t afford to buy him a truck, but I could indeed buy him a chainsaw and did. I gave it to him unconditionally. Suddenly, he was an entrepreneur, cutting and selling firewood, pruning dead branches from trees in people’s yards, cleaning up fallen timber, cutting rough-hewn lumber from felled trees and doing just about any job that called for a chainsaw and the skill to use it. My recommendations to anybody who asked me whom they could hire for firewood, lawn care, fence-building house-painting and so on, placed their minds at ease about hiring him since most of them only knew him as a wild little bandido-wannabe who ran with the wrong crowd.

As he got more and more work, he invested in the other tools of his trade. He improved himself personally as well, taught himself to read and write, learned to drive, bought a car with a hauling trailer and then a full-sized pick-up. Soon, I no longer had to be his promoter. His work and his seriousness spoke for themselves and he and his team eventually had more work than they could handle.

I’ve watched over the years as he has grown from an underprivileged kid putting on a brave face as he struggled to help his mother make ends meet, into a skilled handyman, with a family of his own and a thriving rural services business in which he is now seconded by his eldest son, and hires others to work for him. At forty-two, he is a respected member of our growing mountain community, where every new family that comes to settle here is a likely new name on his satisfied clients’ list, since everyone who has used the services of him and his family is sure to recommend him above any outsider.

He owes nothing to anyone for this success. But I have the tacit inner satisfaction of knowing that when I saw someone I knew had the potential to overcome the insecurity into which he was born—to leave behind a path that could only have led him to delinquency, to seek to improve himself in every way imaginable and to build a life of dignity for himself and his loved ones—

I stepped out of my comfort zone and gave him the tiniest of nudges in the right direction. Little ripples that cross over each other and exact inexorable change for the better.

These are the ingredients that small miracles are made of, and observing how the ripples from one small pebble I once threw into the water had such a far-reaching trajectory, I never again doubted the wisdom of reaching out wherever I could make the tiniest of differences. I haven’t done much. But I’ve done something on one occasion after another. And doing something because you can always seems to have a multiplying effect.

The point that Ann Patchett makes in The Worthless Servant is that the person who truly benefits from every act of service we perform out of love and/or empathy for our neighbor— simply because we can—isn’t the receiver but the giver, whose life becomes so much richer every time we realize how lucky we are and share our abundance instead of clinging not only to all of our stuff, but also to the idea that we need so much more.

 

INK IN MY VEINS

I think I was about nine when I visited a newspaper office for the first time. It was the editorial department of the Wapakoneta Daily News, my hometown paper. I can’t recall the occasion, but I clearly remember the scene—a small office bay crammed with standard desks. It was an off-hour when one shift was over and the new one had not yet begun. The desk-tops were littered with notes and typed sheets as well as paper cups stained with black coffee, some still half-full, the coffee gone cold and oily. There were ashtrays jammed with butts on some desks. Utilitarian manual typewriters were the centerpieces of each work post, some with pages still in the roll. Windows at the back let in slats of light through Venetian blinds, and the stagnant coffee and stale tobacco combined with the all-pervasive and pungent smell of printer’s ink to create what was, for me, a fragrance more delightful than that of any fine Parisian parfum. It was instinctive. A very clear thought that this was where I wanted to be.

On assignment with Argentina's Coast Guard, 1987

Even before I started delivering newspapers when I was twelve, I had been reading them for several years—the WDN and the Sunday edition of The Lima News, published in the nearby industrial city of Lima, Ohio. I was also delighted when our teachers introduced the Weekly Reader into our school curriculum as a current events aid to our social studies courses. This was a news magazine for children in glossy newspaper-like format—an Ohio invention, as it turns out—designed to open a window to the world for kids through compelling stories developed for a variety of age groups.

I eventually would read the papers that I delivered—first the Dayton Journal Herald, and later, The Lima News. On Sundays I was treated to the weekend editions of some of Midwestern America’s most traditional dailies—The Toledo Blade (for which, as fate would have it, I would write op-eds about South America for a couple of years in the 1980s), The Columbus Dispatch, and the Chicago Tribune among others—as a member of a motley crew of newsboys working for Russell McLean, who owned Wapakoneta’s only newsstand (which, because of its unique nature in town, was called just that, The Newsstand). I would read a few pages while stuffing supplements in the backroom of The Newsstand before starting my Sunday route, and finish my perusal of this paper or that sitting on the porch steps of one or another of my customers’ houses, when I knew the family to be away at church.

My interest was piqued still further by the fact that, from the time I was nine until I was twelve, we lived on the west end of Wapakoneta’s main drag, Auglaize Street, and our big old turn-of-the-century house in the seven hundred block was cattycorner across from another large house from about the same period, half of which was rented by the then-managing editor of the Wapakoneta Daily News, Mr. Summers. His daughter Mitzy was friends with my sister Darla, so if I accompanied Darla across the street to see her friend, I might see Mr. Summers coming or going (he always seemed to be working). But although I wanted to be able to corner him and ask him what it was like to earn a living writing and reporting, I was too shy to ask—a problem I would have to overcome even as an adult when I actually got my first job in big-city journalism. And Mr. Summers was, himself, a quiet, rather taciturn man who limited his response to a perfunctory greeting whenever I waved and said, “Hi, Mister Summers!” Plus the fact that Mitzy mostly came over to our house rather than the other way around.

Despite my shyness, it wouldn’t have been above me to make friends with older people. Already from a very young age, I had gathered a collection of friends from my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ era, like a septuagenarian couple called John and Pearl who had moved to town but still lived a country lifestyle in their little house across from the place where we had lived before moving to West Auglaize Street, or an elderly retired justice of the peace whom everyone knew as Judge Kent, or another lady in that neighborhood whose name was Bonnie, and who, so I thought, was as beautiful as movie actress Loretta Young and just as distinguished. They were all adults with whom I could while away hours asking endless questions and listening to their anecdotes of other times, since I was always a sucker for a good story, which made me a natural for writing and reporting.

But when, delighted by her drawling Southern accent, I once got “talky” with Mrs. Summers on the phone when she called to talk to my mother about something and I thought maybe that would give me an in with the editor, she later asked my sister who the yackety person was whom she’d gotten on the phone when she called.

“My little brother Danny,” Darla told her.

“Brother?” she said to my sister. “Huh, he sounds like a little girl with mush in her mouth!”

So scratch that contact. However, I did end up inheriting a typewriter from Mr. Summers. What the circumstances were, I have no idea, but my mother, Reba Mae, who was a really deft typist and perhaps wanted to practice so as not to lose her skill, bought a used Smith Corona portable that Mr. Summers was selling for five dollars, and I almost immediately commandeered it to write stories on. I was still using that bulky “portable” typewriter in high school and my first and only year at Ohio State before I joined the Army and, only after Basic Combat Training, bought myself a more modern Olivetti because I needed a much more portable-portable to drag around the States and Europe with me.

From the outset, I was a news junky. From that tender age, when we lived on Auglaize Street, I was already hooked not only on papers and magazines but also on TV news. My two TV news heroes of those times were Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, both of CBS Television. Although most of us never knew it, my two idols—and those of just about every other would-be newsman—were also bitter rivals for most of their lives.

Murrow already had a reputation as the unofficial “dean of American newsmen” by the time he reached television due to his high profile as a war correspondent during World War II. His first glimpse at fame was largely a fluke since until the outbreak of war, he was not on-air personnel. His job at the time was to develop contacts for the CBS Radio news division that was trying to expand its influence in competition with NBC. He had been doing this job since 1937, when, in March of 1938, Adolf Hitler led Nazi Germany’s annexation of his native Austria.

Edward R. Murrow during World War II

Murrow had by that time hired a reporter, William Shirer, who would be the first of a group of newsmen dubbed “the Murrow Boys” to develop CBS coverage in Europe. Shirer was in Austria but the Nazis were censoring any information being reported through state radio facilities, so Murrow sent him to London where he was able to report on what he had seen. Shirer also received news from other reporters in Austria and read their stories over the airwaves from London in an innovative pool type operation.

In the meantime, Murrow chartered a plane on CBS’s dime and traveled from Warsaw, where he had been working, to Vienna and there found a way using short-wave technology to make a live broadcast. In a style that was novel for its day and immediately popular, Murrow’s first lines from Vienna were: “It’s now nearly two-thirty in the morning, and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived.”

From that point on, and based in London, Murrow, Shirer and the rest of the Murrow Boys newsmen would provide some of the most dramatic coverage of the major events of World War II. Murrow would begin his broadcasts with, “This...is London...” and ended them with what was to become his signature sign-off, “Good night, and good luck,” something Londoners often said to each other in the days of Hitler’s blitzkrieg on that city, since with constant bombings they never knew if they would see each other again once they parted.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Marguerite Higgins

As an aside, let me just say that I use the term “newsman” advisedly. Like in just about every other field, women would have to strive harder than any man before them to make their mark in hard-news journalism. In TV news, they would have to wait decades for professionals like Susan Stamberg, Jessica Savitch, Barbara Walters, Leslie Stahl and Katie Couric to smash through the glass ceiling of what was basically a boys’ club up until then. And while women war correspondents like Pulitzer laureate Marguerite Higgins—who reported authoritatively on World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam—or Martha Gellhorn rank among some of the most courageous, professional and incisive of writers on twentieth-century wars, one is hard-put to find a list of Greatest American War Correspondents that includes them. Indeed, Gellhorn is much better known for her tempestuous five-year marriage to novelist Ernest Hemingway than for having covered virtually every major world conflict that took place during her sixty-year writing career. Hemingway, meanwhile, had no problem creating a veritable legend around his stints as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, or during World War II, which, by all accounts, Gellhorn shamed him into covering.

But when I was fantasizing about my future as a writer growing up, those who reached national stardom were indeed “newsmen” and while “journalist” would have been a far more politically correct and inclusive a term, those who ran the show still clung to Mark Twain’s alleged dictum that “a journalist is a newspaperman who’s out of work.”

Veteran war correspondent Martha Gellhorn

Walter Cronkite also first made his name as a World War II correspondent. Not, however, in broadcast journalism. He was a writer—a fact that shone through when he later wrote the scripts for his documentary programs, You Are There and The Twentieth Century. Throughout the war he was a correspondent for United Press International (UPI). And it was during this time that he and Murrow had their falling out.

It seems that Murrow had become aware of Cronkite’s extraordinary skill as a reporter and craft as a writer and decided to try and recruit him for the Murrow Boys. He offered Cronkite considerably more money than he was earning at UPI and, at first, the reporter agreed to join the CBS team. But the UPI management wasn’t willing to give up a reporter of Cronkite’s talent and stature without a fight. They offered him a raise, not equivalent to the CBS offer but apparently the best that a news agency could do, and Cronkite, a writer at heart, backed out of the deal with Murrow and decided to stay at United Press. Murrow never forgave him for it. Even less so when, after the war, Cronkite finally came into the CBS fold and became Murrow’s rival for the top billing among the network’s viewers. Their clashes are legendary among broadcast historians.

Nevertheless, both men had similar reputations and styles—paragons of truth, ethics and right-mindedness. Although I was quite young, I remember watching Murrow’s deadpan yet drama-charged editorials and his grave delivery. It was radio-turned-television, austere, honest, bereft of props. Unfortunately, by the time I was old enough to understand the issues he talked about, Murrow’s See It Now show was already suffering from slipping ratings as TV turned to entertainment over information in the post-war years and a quiz show called The Sixty-Four Thousand  Dollar Question started knocking his prime time slot for a loop.

Murrow in the fifties.

But I never missed documentary re-runs of his best reporting and found him the quintessential newsman. As soon as I was old enough to understand the phenomenon of McCarthyism, I gained even greater respect for Murrow, since, at a time when everyone in the media was terrified of being touched by the “red scare” and being branded a “communist” by the then-all-powerful Un-American Activities Committee, Murrow did what was right and systematically opposed political and ideological persecution as being against everything that the United States stood for.

Although many brave people took a stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy and his political witch-hunt that ruined the lives of so many Americans, and particularly of those in the arts, no one did it more effectively than Edward R. Murrow. He hammered away at the topic and at McCarthy until he was able to swing the tide of American sentiment from an unreasonable degree of fear of a “communist takeover” toward an even greater and entirely logical fear of the loss of civil liberties in the face of Orwellian state intervention in people’s right to freedom of conscience and expression. Murrow saw it for what it was—a modern-day version of the Salem witch trials. And he had the moral authority to take McCarthy down.

When I was about ten, Murrow resigned from CBS. I didn’t know it then, but President Kennedy offered him a job that he considered “a timely gift”. This was in January of 1961, as soon as JFK took office and the post was as the head of the United States Information Agency (USIA), which would later be renamed the United States Information Service (USIS). Kennedy had first offered the job to the president of CBS, Frank Stanton. Stanton turned it down and suggested the president offer the post to Murrow. In the Cold War era, it was a smart suggestion and a smart move to have a tried and tested newsman at the head of the agency instead of a corporate executive, and may well have been the difference between having a government news agency that was really about news gathering and having one that was merely an American version of the Soviet Union’s Tass, which at the time served merely as a propaganda mill.

The USIA had gotten a bad reputation during the McCarthy era of persecution and false patriotism, and Murrow was seen as a breath of fresh air to get it back on track. To show that he knew why he was there, one of the first things he did was to re-hire veteran journalist and writer Reed Harris, who had been sacked during the McCarthyite purges.  His passage through the USIA was clearly transformational and long-lasting. His “regal” reputation in the world of journalism additionally gave the agency a higher profile and garnered it more government funding for improved coverage.

But Murrow’s stay was short-lived if durably influential. A chain-smoker who had averaged three packs a day throughout his career, he was already suffering the symptoms of lung cancer, and although Lyndon Johnson asked him to stay on at the agency following JFK’s assassination, he was already too ill to continue, resigning in 1964 and dying in 1965, two days after his fifty-seventh birthday.

I had the good fortune to work on several occasions as a special correspondent for the now-defunct USIS in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties. The influence of Murrow and other news professionals who followed him was still in evidence. When I was first approached about an assignment, it was by Andrew Lluberes, who accumulated a four-decade long career in state communications under presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. But despite his long government service, Andrew was more newsman than bureaucrat and it showed in his treatment of the reporters who worked for him.

Lluberes said that I had come highly recommended by a former boss, the award-winning journalist and editor, Robert Cox. He understood that I’d left my post as managing editor of the Buenos Aires Herald and was now free-lancing. Would I be interested in doing some work in South America for the USIS? I told him that I appreciated the call but that I didn’t do government work. A guy who was nothing if not straight-forward—he began the conversation by asking if Cox “had taught me to drink”, to which I answered that, after three years in the Army, I had come to Cox with an already well-developed elbow—Lluberes asked me why the hell not? 

“Because I’m a newsman, not a government agent,” I said.

“Dan,” he said, “take my word for it. It’s just like working for any other news agency.”

I was dubious. “You mean, if I write a story that might put the country or the administration in a bad light, you guys won’t censor it?”

“As long as you’ve got your facts straight and are doing the assignment we sent you to do, your story will stand. We don’t do censorship,” he said.

The per diem rate that the agency paid was better than any private media firm had ever offered me for free-lance reporting, so I decided to believe him. It was good money. Mostly it was very straightforward reporting: a press conference by some US dignitary in Buenos Aires, an inter-American drug-enforcement conference in Montevideo hosted by the president of Uruguay, and so on. It was only on my last assignment for the USIS that I got to test what Lluberes had told me. At an international conference of defense ministers, held in 1994 at a luxury hotel, just across the lake from the home I had just moved into in Patagonia, I asked US Defense Secretary William Perry about news that had recently broken regarding a chapter on torture—and how to perform it—that was included in a training manual at the country’s military School of the Americas. This facility was already known in South America as “dictator school” since many of the leaders of coups in the region had, at one time or another, trained there.

Perry was taken by surprise, especially since the question came from a conference-accredited USIS correspondent. He said that he had only recently heard reports about this and that the matter was being investigated. (Subsequently, both the manual and the training program were revamped under the Clinton administration). I wrote a terse, facts-only news story, quoting Perry and detailing the nature of the controversy, and submitted it, figuring that it would never go on the wire. I was wrong. Just as Lluberes had promised, the story ran. And the only reason that it was my last reporting assignment for the agency was because Lluberes was tapped to run its radio operations at Voice of America, and no longer was assignment editor for the print division.

Walter Cronkite as UPI war reporter

Unlike Murrow, who, for my generation, was a legend from the past, Walter Cronkite was a household word, and a guest in our home throughout my childhood and youth. After his stint at UPI as one of America’s top reporters on World War II, Cronkite had all the credentials he needed to land a major post at CBS. He had made a name during the war by delivering some of the most trenchant copy available on Operation Torch on the Northern Africa front. He was one of only eight war correspondents chosen to fly on bombing raids over Germany with the US Army Air Corps. He boarded a glider to land with the 101^st Airborne during Operation Market Garden launched in The Netherlands and also covered the history-making Battle of the Bulge. Following the war, he continued working for UPI, first covering the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals and later serving as the agency’s bureau chief in Moscow.

His career at CBS began in 1950, when he took a job reporting for the network’s affiliate TV station in Washington DC. From 1951 to 1961, he anchored a fifteen-minute Sunday night newscast that followed the wildly popular quiz show, What’s My Line, hosted by John Charles Daly.

But already in 1952, his face and voice were connected with major US events. He anchored coverage of the 1952 presidential election for CBS. And he handled election coverage for the network for the next decade. In the 1964 elections, CBS decided to try some new faces and handed coverage over to a team formed by Roger Mudd and Robert Trout, but ratings proved it to be an error of judgment. People trusted Cronkite and he was once again the iconic face of CBS coverage for many elections to come.

I vaguely recall—just flashes of scratchy black and white images—some episodes of Cronkite’s You Are There, which ran until 1957, when I turned eight. And I remember how at the end, he would always say, “What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times ... and you were there.” But that’s about it. What I recall much better was his Sunday evening program called The Twentieth Century. It was an historical series made up almost entirely of documentary film footage with Cronkite scripting and narrating the stories. It was a hit for nearly a decade, and I tried never to miss it, unless it meant fighting Whitie for control of the TV because he was watching some sporting event. If Jim Brown was Whitie’s favorite quarterback, Cronkite was mine, but the TV belonged to the ol’ man.

Over the years from the fifties to the eighties, it was Cronkite’s voice that announced major historical events to a majority of Americans. He anchored the first trans-Atlantic broadcast that hosted a collage of video images from the US and countries throughout Europe. He reported on the first manned flights to outer space from Cape Canaveral Florida. We Ohioans listened to him to know how our state’s native son John Glenn had faired when he became the first astronaut to orbit Earth. And we Wapakonetans were glued to the TV screen as Cronkite covered our hometown boy Neil Armstrong’s first step on the surface of the moon.

Cronkite announces JFK's death

When President Kennedy was assassinated, it was Walter Cronkite who told us that he had been shot in Dallas, and he too who broke the news that Texas Governor John Connally had also been wounded. And when the president was pronounced dead, it was Cronkite who, in his clear, authoritative voice broke the news, before stopping, swallowing hard, wiping his eyes and only then putting his glasses back on and continuing with his ever-detailed and professional reporting. It was in his clear and distinctive voice too that we learned that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had also been felled by assassins’ bullets. He added nothing new to the extraordinary reporting in Washington Post and New York Times coverage of the Watergate scandal that led to President Nixon’s resignation, but Cronkite pulled all of the reports together, boiled them down and made sense of them for Americans who depended on prime time news for their understanding of current events. But perhaps the hardest truth ever for the US also came from Walter Cronkite’s lips, when, after traveling to Vietnam himself and finding a very different story there than the one the government was trying to sell us, he returned home and told Americans on nationwide television that the war was unwinnable and that perhaps it was time to bring American boys home.

Cronkite reporting from Vietnam

I had a local hero as well, Don Wayne of Dayton’s WHIO TV. WHIO was owned by the Cox media empire, begun by James M. Cox, owner of the Dayton Daily News and WHIO Radio, who governed Ohio in the early part of the twentieth century. Cox also famously ran for president in 1920 with Franklin D. Roosevelt as his vice-presidential running mate. He lost to fellow newspaperman and Ohioan Warren G. Harding of Marion.

Wayne was a former dance band drummer who had later become a WHIO Radio personality. When James Cox Jr. (son of the former Ohio governor) first opened WHIO TV in 1949, his news team was headed up by an anchor who insisted on reading the news with a pipe in his mouth, thinking, perhaps, that, like Murrow’s ever-present Camel cigarette, this prop was his trademark. The management told him that viewers were having trouble understanding him and that he would have to lose the pipe during newscasts. The anchor refused and Cox fired him and his team. Don Wayne’s increasingly popular radio personality made him a shoo-in.

So at the turn of the decade, Wayne found himself being the “entire team” at WHIO TV News, Dayton. And he would continue to be the sole representative of the TV station’s news department for nearly a decade. Like all newsmen of old, Wayne wasn’t a “news reader” but a jack of all news trades, reporting, writing and delivering the news to his audience.

Don Wayne on WHIO Radio

As it turned out, he was a natural, and quickly became a newsman that locals trusted. He was, furthermore, a TV pioneer in Ohio since, when he took over the news anchor’s spot at WHIO, there were hardly more than four thousand TV sets in the Dayton area and surrounding counties. Fortunately, in TV culture, Whitie, my dad, was also a pioneer and had one of the first sets in town. I never remember a time when we didn’t have TV news, since I was born the same year that WHIO began transmitting, and Whitie already had a television set by then.

Cheryl McHenry, who would years later be part of the WHIO news team—by then well-established under Wayne’s leadership—once said that Don Wayne’s voice was “equal to Cronkite’s” in the minds of local viewers. “Just the way he carried himself, there was something very reassuring while being very credible,” McHenry said. “He asked questions when he felt something wasn’t clear and he wanted to make sure his delivery was clear.” Wayne’s pioneering honesty and straight-forward delivery helped mold WHIO’s news team into one of the most respected in the state and the region.

I remember when I was about ten or eleven my father coming home from work at the Teddy Bear restaurant that he and two of his brothers owned and saying, “You’ll never guess who came in for lunch today. Don Wayne!”

We couldn’t have been more surprised if he had said Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne. It was as if he had served lunch to royalty, and I was upset that I hadn’t been there to witness it and was only getting the story second-hand.

Wayne was WHIO’s news department until 1958, when the station started building a full news team. Wayne was first accompanied by Chuck Upthegrove, with whom he covered not only local stories but also traveled to Europe and Vietnam on special assignments. Upthegrove became another veteran of the WHIO team, remaining at the station for thirty-eight years.

Don Wayne (left) hosting a visit from Cronkite

For two years, Don Wayne was accompanied on the WHIO news desk by Phil Donahue, who would later go on to boast a long career as one of network television’s most popular daytime TV talk show hosts. Wayne retired in 1988 after nearly forty years as the face and voice of WHIO News.

Over the long years of my own career as a journalist and writer, in which I’ve had the honor of writing for some major US and British publications and reporting for national network radios in both countries as well, the lessons that these and other great newspeople have shared by their example have helped me to forge my own code of ethics and my own democratic principles. They’ve imbued me with an insistence on putting facts before “beliefs” and the story as it is above the story as I might rather it would be. Thanks to them, and to other great journalists that I’ve met along the way, doing the right thing as a news professional has never been hard. You either do what’s right in describing current events to your readership or audience, or you find something else to do with your life.

In a broadcast that was to prove the death knell for the McCarthy era, Edward R. Murrow left Americans with this thought:

 “We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

That was his credo, and as a journalist and writer, I’ve always made it my own.

Never has that been truer than it is today.