EXCERPT 7 FROM ‘VOICES IN THE STORM’ — COURTING THE HERALD

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Three of the autobiographical book I’m currently writing, entitled Voices in the Storm: A Journalist’s Memoir, about my early days in Buenos Aires.

Inexperienced, under-confident, if well-traveled twenty-four-year-old that I was at the time, I don’t know, to this day, how I plucked up the courage and audacity to unmercifully pester an editor and writer of the international standing of Robert J. Cox for months on end until he gave me a job, but somehow, I managed it. Maybe it was just the brashness of youth and the fact that I had a personal vision of my future as a writer laid out neatly in my mind. That, and the fact that back then, in 1974, the only show in town for an English-language 'wannabe' writer with a hankering for some experience in the trenches was the Buenos Aires Herald.

Cox looking very much as he did when I
met him, in a portrait on the cover of
son David's 2009 memoir, "Dirty Secrets,
Dirty War".

Born and reared in England, Cox had started working in provincial newspapers while still in his teens. By the time he was recruited to the ranks of the Buenos Aires Herald in 1959, he was already a street-tested twenty-six year old reporter for the Hull Daily Mail. He was brought into the Herald on a three-year contract and was promised that after his first three years in Buenos Aires, he would be granted three months of vacation and passage on a steamer to return home to England for a visit. He was hired as a copy-editor, but it wasn’t long before his writing ability and news sense moved him up the ladder to general news editor.

Founded in 1876, the Herald was one of Argentina's three oldest surviving newspapers out of about a dozen dailies that the city boasted. Originally created as a single-sheet maritime shipping paper, but later having grown into a full-fledged news daily, at a time of all but sovereign British power over Argentina's trade and transport interests, the Herald had since entered into a state of gradual decay, following the days of rekindled nationalist fervor that emerged in the 1940s and '50s, with the rise to power of autocratic popular nationalist leader General Juan Domingo Perón. Despite the best efforts of its latest two editors—both respected international newsmen—it had settled into being a rather pokey little daily that served the interests of what was left of an aging and shrinking English-language community. But its editorial and international pages belied that destiny, reflecting the professionalism and higher interests of Bob’s predecessor, Norman Ingrey, and then of Cox himself.

In Buenos Aires, Cox would meet and marry Maud Daverio, a young lady of considerable connections in Buenos Aires society, with whom he would have five Argentine children while rising to the post of Editor-in-Chief and, eventually, Chairman of the Board at the Herald. Such strong ties to Argentina had already made the English-language daily his most viable source of full-time news work. He would, however, also gain international prestige as an honored stringer for such renowned news organizations as Newsweek, the BBC, The Washington Post and The New York Times, among others.  So it was that, by the time Ingrey retired in 1970, Cox was pretty much ensconced as a credible, savvy, foreign observer of political and social life in Argentina. His professional presence, in turn, was what kept the Herald from sinking further and further into oblivion and dying what could only have been considered a natural death. As natural, surely, as the one the 'old school tie' Anglo-Argentine community was dying as its youth decided that they were less Anglo than Argentine and began wanting to “mingle with the natives” in what clearly seemed to be shaping up as a post-colonialist age.

Bob Cox with wife Maud Daverio. (Photo published in Perfil.com)

Cox was aided in this task by the fact that, at around this same time, the Charleston Evening Post Publishing Company (Charleston, South Carolina) acquired a controlling share of the Herald, which, since the 1920s, had been an (Anglo) Argentine family-owned concern. There must surely have been some speculation at the time as to why on earth the Charleston group would want a foreign white elephant like the Herald, but if so, it was only among observers who had never met Peter Manigault, then President of that expanding media group and son of the wealthy family that controlled it. A true Southern gentleman and former naval officer of urbane tastes and education, Manigault was also a bit whimsical and off-beat. Add that to the fact that he dabbled in Spanish-language studies and loved South America, and this was enough to provide him with all of the justification he needed to purchase a quaint, colonial-style 'gem' like the Herald, even if cynics must surely have asked themselves if it wasn't, perhaps, a tax write-off.

Although when Bob first heard about the sale he worried that he might be fired and replaced by someone Charleston would choose as editor,  when Manigault and Cox met, they hit it off almost immediately—since if Manigault was an truly uncommon businessman, Cox was genuinely iconic in the world of old-school journalism. And he would very shortly evolve into the stuff movie-hero journalists are made of: the editor of a small paper fighting major battles in defense of authentic justice, human rights and the rule of law. And the bond between him and Manigault would clearly come in handy in the future when his authority was called into question by one of the local owners of the other forty percent interest.

When I first met him in early 1974, Cox was the clearly over-extended managing editor of a paper with plummeting advertising revenues and a shrinking readership. It could barely afford its skeletal staff and the third floor offices it rented in a shabby building (that also housed the down-at-heel English Club) in what was then, as I mentioned earlier, the red-light district near the old port. As such, Cox could ill-afford the time or money to make any major changes in the paper itself. The result was a rather quirky, provincial, outdated, ill-proofed little twelve to sixteen-page tabloid with an international wire-copy front page and translated local-wire news page, a sports section that featured international cricket and soccer—as well as rugby, bowling on the green, equestrian sports and field hockey—a few really good columns and stories provided by good-willed, ill-paid contributors and staffers, and an extraordinarily high-quality editorial page that made the rest of the paper look like a mere frame in which to publish it. And that, in fact, was what it was fast becoming.

Not that Cox wouldn't have liked to have professionalized the Herald. He tried as often as he could to impress on his tiny staff the importance of dedication to objectivity and professional care, but he was obviously overworked and just as obviously much more of a writer and investigator than a hands-on editor, so he dedicated more and more time to chronicling the nightmare that was unfolding in Argentina on his editorial page and less and less to trying to extricate the rest of the paper from the malaise of routine mediocrity into which it had slumped and now wallowed.

After struggling with myself for some time regarding how to go about getting an introduction to Cox, I one day simply decided to call the Herald and ask for an interview and, somewhat to my surprise, was given one for the following evening. When I arrived at 6 p.m., the advertising and administrative employees were bidding each other good night and leaving, as the editorial staffers were just arriving. There was no waiting room to speak of, just a worn green leather armchair wedged in at the end of the classified ads counter partially blocking the door to the editor's office and just a few feet from two big metal and translucent glass swinging doors that bore lettering reading Editorial Department. I was asked to take a seat and wait. When the last of the clerks and advertising staff had said good night and taken the elevator, a very prim, very English-looking middle-aged woman with whom I had spoken on my arrival shut off all of the lights except for one just over my head and said, “I’ve let him know you’re here. He'll be with you in a moment.” And then she added, “Good night,” and followed her fellow workers down on the elevator.

I sat there alone for quite a long time with just the buzzing drone of the neon light to keep me company. Eventually, however, the double doors to the editorial department swung open and a pleasant-faced, rotund woman bustled through on her way to the restroom at the end of the hall past the elevators. When she saw me, she stopped and said, “Hello, I'm Maggie,” and extended her hand. I stood, shook it and said, “Hi, I'm Dan Newland.”

“Are you waiting for Bob?” she asked. I nodded. “Does he know you're here?”

“I think so,” I said a little dubiously. “He's been told.”

“Have you been here long?”

I checked my watch. “About half an hour,” I said.

She said, “Just a minute,” and went back the way she had come, through the editorial department. I could hear the teletypes and manual typewriters chattering away in her wake, before the heavy doors swung shut again behind her and wanted nothing more than to be in there already doing a job I just knew I was made for.

I sat back down to wait, but within an instant after Maggie had gone, the editor's door burst open and through it rushed a man with an almost wild look about him. His brow was furrowed in an expression of genuine worry, His quality white dress shirt was wrinkled and perspired. He wore brown loafers that were in dire need of a shine and one was split along a seam so that you could see a glimpse of bright red stocking through it, in sharp contrast to his pricey conservative pinstriped trousers. He was slender and tallish and his thinning dark-brown hair swirled in erratic tentacles around his head as if he were in the habit of running his fingers through it repeatedly—or had just been in a gale-force wind. All in all, it was a look that combined an aristocratic air with the devil-may-care nonchalance of a talent too busy to be concerned with outward appearances. 

Cox at his desk in the Herald. (Photo published in Perfil.com)

“So sorry, so sorry...must be Dan...Dan, isn't it? Yes...lost track of time, please come in...Terribly sorry.” he muttered almost under his breath as we shook hands.

His uneasiness was somewhat contagious and I nervously launched into my pitch as soon as we were seated, telling him my life story in five minutes or less: former professional musician, just out of the Army, three years with the US Army bands, a little over one in Europe, married to an Argentine, always been a writer, what I want to do with my life, need a chance in journalism, fast learner, hard worker, etc., etc.

My uneasiness was hardly quelled by the surroundings. Cox's office was a truly extraordinary, but almost horrifying place. The room was cramped, hardly executive dimensions, perhaps twelve feet by seven feet, if that. The only light came from the bluish neon ceiling tubes, one of which had a bad starter and hummed nerve-rackingly. Every square inch of counter, desk and table space was trembling under mountains of books, papers, magazines, wire copy, radio-photos and files. Stacks of them, piles of them, heaps of them, in no apparent order, almost as if a dump truck had simply avalanched it all into the room. There were heaps of papers on the floor against the wall, a stack on the chair in front of his desk that he had cleared away for me to sit down, a mound on top of the radiator by the Venetian-blinded window, a veritable landslide on the overstuffed green leather couch along one wall, which, I noted, was the other part of the suit the armchair I’d just been sitting in outside belonged to. These lopsided heaps that leaned against one another for support dominated the tiny office and made Cox, at his desk behind chin-high bales of paperwork, look rather as if he had been bulldozed into a corner along with a load of wastepaper. The office bore no personal touches, no mementos, no hint of residence or proprietorship, except for the predominant influence of paper of just about every kind. En lieu of wall decorations, too, there was paper: rough drafts, printed articles, syndicated columns, notes, messages, invitation cards, scribbled reminders, underscored phone numbers and names, all scotch-taped to the plaster and all obviously pieces of information that were somehow more important to the editor than the general mounds of miscellany that were heaped all over the rest of the room, and thus deserved a place of privilege on the wall, where he was sure to see them and perhaps recall whatever action it was that they merited.

Finally, there was his “workstation”—a weighty, battered Olivetti Lexicon manual typewriter. Parts of the machine's housing had been stripped away, obviously so that the user could tinker with it and make it work whenever it decided to pack up on him. It sat atop a ramshackle wooden typing table on wheels that had probably once been a fine piece of office furniture but that now listed in two directions, slightly west and dangerously north, so that it had to be propped against the only tiny piece of empty wall in the room in order to prevent it from simply keeling over and dying, taking the moribund Olivetti with it. 

Cox had a polite and humble manner, not at all the kind of hard-nosed, disdainful cynic I had rather expected to meet. He listened patiently to my plea for a chance to “come in on the ground level” and “learn the trade”. I added that he wouldn't be sorry, that I wanted to be a writer more than anything on earth and that I would be as dedicated as a monk. But while he was cordial and sympathetic, I noticed that sweat was beading on his brow, that he was almost compulsively scratching both of his forearms beneath the rolled cuffs of his shirt. He kept glancing furtively over at the piece of letter-size, yellowed newsprint rolled into the Lexicon, where he had obviously been working on something when I arrived. It was calling him even now and he had to get back to it.

“Okay,” I said, at last, “I've taken enough of your time. Please, just tell me you'll give me a chance and I’ll be on my way.”

“Perhaps you could contribute...” he tried.

“No, Mr. Cox...”

“Bob, call me Bob.”

“Or rather, yes, I will contribute, Bob, but what I want is a full-time job. I want to be a newsman. I want to write for a living.”

He looked a little pained, shook his head and said, “Look, Dan, this is a slave job. Nothing like what you'd expect. We do a little of everything here. And we all have to do other things outside the Herald to survive. We write for papers abroad to make ends meet. This is very hard...a lot of sacrifice, and frankly, I simply don't have anything for you—for anyone—right now.”

“Can I stop by now and then to see if something has opened up?”

He looked doubtful but said, “Yes, of course. Perhaps next time we can have a coffee at the bar around the corner. I'm just a little, uh, busy at the moment and um...”

Back then the Herald was a ramshackle frame for Cox's

extraordinary investigations and editorials and was upheld by his 

growing international reputation. Here Cox (center) talks with 

then-US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Argentine political 

commentator Mariano Grondona.  (Photo published in Perfil.com)

That was enough for me. I had his permission to come back. And come back I did—once every week or ten days for several months. Even though he sometimes had trouble restraining his irritation at my simply showing up unannounced, he seemed to admire my persistence. I would camp outside his office door for as long as it took. Sometimes he would stick his head out and say, “Sorry Dan, but I'm just too busy today,” and I would smile and say, “No problem, see you in a few days,” and leave, only to return as promised. It seemed to make him feel guilty when he rejected me and the next time he would be extra polite and we would nip out for a cup espresso at one of the bars nearby and talk for a while about journalism and what was going on in Buenos Aires, how Perón's return was affecting the country and about our favorite authors, among other varied topics. I told him that it was reading Hemingway and reading about Hemingway’s life that had made me want to be a newsman as well as a fiction writer, since Hemingway claimed he had learned everything he knew about succinct writing and economy of words when he was a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. At this, Cox lit up and said, “Back when I first started, we all wanted to write like Hemingway: ‘He sat by the window. The light streamed in.’ Wonderful stuff!”

Suddenly, I felt we were kindred spirits.  

I eventually contributed a couple of very lightweight vignettes to a weekend editorial page section called Saturday Sidelight, where just about anything went—although that was also where Bob, under the guise of light weekend reading, often got in some of his meatiest investigative work. Despite the frivolity of my first contributions, Cox liked them, liked the writing and tone, and assigned me a research article on the quagmire of identity documents, work visas and travel permits—government-invented bureaucratic stumbling blocks to foreigners, about which I was accumulating abundant personal experience. Still, alas, no fulltime job.

This went on for about five or six months, and although I felt that, to a certain degree, he and I had become friends, I eventually lost all hope that Robert Cox was ever going to give me a job. So I quit going to visit him at the Herald, simply resigned myself to having to continue to issue car rental contracts for Avis Rent-a-Car while working on my writing, contributing where and what I could, and hoping for a future break.

It wasn't three weeks after I quit visiting Cox, however, before the phone rang one evening at my mother-in-law’s home, where we were staying until we could afford a place of our own.  My wife answered, and told me with no little excitement in her voice that it was Robert Cox on the line.

“Hello, Bob,” I said when I picked up the receiver. “What a surprise!”

“Yes, uh, Dan, um, just calling to see if you're all right.”

“Well, of course I'm all right. Why wouldn't I be?”

“Yes, well, bad times and all, so dangerous for foreigners, you know, and you haven't been by lately, I thought perhaps something...” he trailed off.

“Listen, Bob,” I said. “I really like visiting you but, pleasant though it was for me, I wasn’t just dropping by for coffee and a chat every week?”

“Yes, of course, Dan, I uh....understand, but um...”

“I want a job in your newspaper,” I interrupted. “I want to be a journalist.”

There was a pause. I could almost hear him thinking, deciding. I held my breath.

“Uh, yes, well,” he said finally, “Pop by next Monday, then...may have something for you. Cheers.”

And there I stood still holding the receiver and thinking, “Hey! Was this a dream, or did I just land a newspaper job?”

EXCERPT 6 FROM ‘VOICES IN THE STORM’ — LIFE IN ‘EL BAJO’

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Three of the autobiographical book I’m currently writing, entitled Voices in the Storm: A Journalist’s Memoir, about my early days in Buenos Aires.

I had started trying to find a job as a writer almost as soon as I started getting to know Buenos Aires well enough to get around by myself. I went after this goal with an attitude of entitlement based more on sheer ignorance than on any inflated opinion of myself and my budding craft. What I lacked in know-how, I made up for in unbridled enthusiasm, and pushed ahead blindly on the perhaps delusional notion that I was owed a chance to prove myself, to show what I could do, to demonstrate that I had what it took to write for a living. After all, I’d been writing pretty much all my life. What did it matter that I was basically the only person who had ever read or evaluated any of my stuff?

As soon as I knew the streets of Buenos Aires well enough to get 

around on my own, I starting knocking on doors looking for a job

as a writer.

So, while still working as a night bellhop at the Hotel Salles in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires, I had begun haunting the offices of correspondents from the major US publications and agencies—Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, AP, UPI, the New York Times and others—but to no avail. Most of the correspondents were not nearly as unkind as they could have been. As reporters, they obviously valued enthusiasm and persistence, even if they must have considered me at least impudent and a pest, if not insane.

All of them either asked about my 'experience' or wanted to know what “j-school” I had gone to. Ultimately, to a man and woman, they asked me if I had talked to "Bob Cox over at the Herald" yet. But for some reason, I kept avoiding this option, perhaps because my mind was full of stories about Hemingway’s cub reporter days with the Kansas City Star and his later work as a young reporter for the Toronto Star. I guess I wanted to get in on the ground floor with an organization whose name people knew, and who knew the Buenos Aires Herald? Many, I would later learn, since the Herald did indeed enjoy a privileged reputation among international news people dating back to the time when its editor had been Norman Ingrey—who had made a name for himself reporting in China and elsewhere before settling in until retirement at the Buenos Aires newspaper—and one that was being vastly underscored by its current editor, Robert J. Cox.

In the meantime, I had managed to land a slightly better job than the one at the hotel, this time as a rental agent for Avis Rent-a-Car, working out of their office at Calle Charcas and “el bajo”, a section of town which, today, is touristy and full of shops and cafes, but which, back then, was on the down-at-heel edge of a shabby red-light district frequented by sailors from around the world whose ships sailed up the River Plate from the Atlantic to call at the Port of Buenos Aires a few blocks away. If the hotel, with its colorful cast of characters, had been an interesting enough place for a writer to work, the Charcas office of Avis Rent-a-Car was a gold mine of street scene impressions. And the best part about it, to my mind, was that it was located only a few blocks from the offices that the Buenos Aires Herald rented at that time in the very heart of that colorful, if unsavory, deep downtown area. That made it easier than ever to go bother Cox after work whenever the spirit moved me, something I had finally started doing, at first reluctantly, on the advice of just about everyone in the news business, while I was still working nights at the Hotel Salles. 

The Avis office was at Charcas and 25 de Mayo, a street that

was then part of the redlight district that began only a few

short blocks from the Cathedral, shown here in the 1970s. 

Mornings in the cramped little auto rental office were breathlessly busy pretty much all year around, since most clients picked up their rental cars during the hours from nine until noon. Returns straggled in throughout the day, but there were lengthy lulls, as well, veritable workday doldrums. Early afternoons were the worst and could drag endlessly if you didn’t have a pastime other than tracking the incoming and outgoing movement of the rented cars that we recorded in a big ledger book using a No. 2 pencil and an eraser—which our English-school educated Chilean boss, Mariela, delighted me by referring to as an “Indian rubber”. Luckily, I had a pastime (or vocation as I preferred to think of it): writing. And I made endless notes on the scenes unfolding beyond the floor to ceiling window and glass door that made up the tiny office’s facade.

A sort of continuous everyday drama was taking place right across that street. There was a dingy, nameless bar, worse than most others in the area—which was saying something—frequented (invaded, one might say) by derelict drunkards, most of them erstwhile street people, who took the place as both a home and a watering-hole for the hours that it was open each day. And, to be sure, it was only closed for a few. Above the bar there was a flophouse of sorts where those who worked occasionally and had a bit of cash could rent a room for as long as their money held out.

Watching the bar from my high stool behind the rental desk was a bit like having what today might be a wide-screen reality show on all day long. A lot of what went on was about who was “in” and who was “out” at the establishment. I got to “know” the patrons by sight and could tell when one of them was “in the money” and another was down and out by changes in that tavern society’s pecking order. The ones who could walk in and not be unceremoniously escorted out by noon had hit it big. The ones drinking outside out of shared bottles purchased at the grocery store around the corner had been marginalized from the indoor population but still cruised the fringes of that society with hope springing eternal that they would soon be invited back in. The ones slouching against the ramshackle front of the building just past the big front windows, glancing wistfully inside and toward their erstwhile drinking pals who still had the money to at least chip in and invest in a bottle from the store around the corner, were veritable exiles. These would only hang around until it became obvious no one was going to take pity on them and buy them a drink, and then they would shuffle up the hill from the bajo toward nearby Calle Florida to begin the hard, humiliating work of panhandling the price of a day-long drunk.

At the top of the societal pyramid were, of course, the drunks who could afford to both drink in the bar and pay for a flop above it. When days were sultry, the upstairs windows were flung open and I could see some of those skinny, sickly men drifting back and forth in the shadows of those dusty rooms, looking more like ghosts than flesh and blood humans. And yet, I reminded myself, these were the lucky ones, who didn’t have to worry about whether it would rain that night and, if so, which doorway they could curl up in without being rousted out or picked up by the cops for vagrancy. But no matter what downtrodden position they all held on the skids of this lower downtown society, they were all recognizable satellites of this bar, a social complex repeated in other neighborhoods and other similar bars around the city.

Sometimes there was a bit of excitement: boisterous arguments, bum’s rush evictions, the occasional shoving match or drunks’ slow-motion fight, events that enlivened my workday, especially during the dragging hours of the siesta when I was usually left alone to man the Charcas office. But as in any society, there were also landmark events, and I witnessed one of these.

Mid-morning of a dreary autumn day, the low sky ominous, the air dense and damp with drizzle off the River Plate, it was easy to see there was something afoot. The drunks were uncharacteristically anxious, standing out in front of the bar in little knots of four or five men, not drinking, but talking in hushed tones among themselves. As they talked, they would glance from time to time rather expectantly down the block toward el bajo, the direction from which traffic came on the one-way Calle Charcas. And then, alternatively, they would glance into the penumbral interior of the bar through the open door or windows, as if to see what was going on inside.

This "colectivo", the 119 line, was the one I often caught to 

go home, 80 blocks away on the West Side. 

At first I thought perhaps there had been a fire and that this was why the patrons had cleared out into the street. There could be little doubt that the place was a fire trap, especially when the owners cranked up the grill at noon-time and the smell of old grease burning off laid an odiferous pall in the air along the entire block. But there was no smoke, nor did the drunks seem to have the attitude of people escaping from a fire...although, they were, after all, I reasoned, career alcoholics, the kind of guys who could sleep through an earthquake on the steps of a crumbling cathedral and not be shaken awake.

Then, however, from the direction down the block toward which the gathering kept glancing, I heard the hoarse blare of a siren and in a few seconds, a dark blue, paneled, Federal Police morgue truck pulled up in front of the bar. And right away, I knew what had happened. For several days, I’d been missing one of the resident regulars, one whom I referred to as El Conde (The Count), a figure who lived permanently above the bar and seemed to command the respect and deference of the rest of the patrons. But I figured, as did the owners of the place, evidently, that he was either bingeing and too drunk and sick to leave his room, or that, perhaps he’d gone away for a few days, since a weekend had fallen in the midst of the three or four days that he had been absent from the scene. Now, however, two uniformed cops were being let in the side entrance by one of the bartenders, who handed them a pass key, rather than accompany them, and then they headed up the stairs, carrying a folded canvas stretcher between them.

By this time, my workmate Paul and I had stepped out of the office into the street to get a better look at the procedures.  We knew immediately when the police had opened the door to El Conde’s room, not merely because all of the patrons on the other side of the street quickly moved away from the stairway entrance and shuffled down to the other end of the front of the bar, but also because it wasn’t more than a minute or so before the stench emanating from the upstairs of the bar washed over us like a tidal wave, so strong and dense in the humid air that it activated our gag reflexes and prompted us to glance down at our own clothes, as if we might actually be able to see it soaking into the fabric.

Now the two policemen were exiting the building with the stretcher between them. The cadaver hadn’t been placed in a body bag but was merely covered with a blanket, and the stretcher left a trail of evil, slimy liquid on the pavement as they stepped down off of the curb and hoisted the body into the back of their truck, slamming shut and latching the doors behind it.

The drunks on the sidewalk stood staring at the trail of body fluids on the pavement, most looking sicklier than usual, some holding hankies over their noses and mouths, others turning away and gagging. The cops, in an apparent hurry to be rid of the decomposing corpse, hopped into the cab of their morgue truck, cranked up the siren and immediately sped off, hell bent for leather, sailing into the intersection at the end of the block without even bothering to slow down. But that was as far as they got, because just at that Murphy’s-Law moment, a five-ton truck loaded with bricks was also sailing from the left through that same intersection, also without slowing down, and the two collided with such a tremendous crash in the middle of the crossing that the bed of the freight truck with its five-ton load of bricks was knock up onto the sidewalk and the cab of the Federal Police morgue truck was accordioned against it. The driver of the police truck was hanging halfway out of the sprung-open door. He was covered in blood and appeared to be unconscious or dead. The other policeman had gone through the windshield and was lying halfway out of the cab with his torso on the crushed hood.  He too appeared unresponsive. The rear doors of the closed truck had burst wide open on impact and the stretcher with the body on it was hanging precariously out of the back end a couple of feet.

When it was all over, there was an incongruous silence as we all—drunks, bar and shop owners and employees, Paul, myself and passersby—all stood open-mouthed in disbelief, staring at the grisly scene we had just witnessed. But then we all recovered and sprang into action, some people rushing away, not wanting to get involved, others dashing toward the two trucks to see if they could help, Paul and I hurrying back into the office to call the police and then back out onto the street to wait for the squad cars to arrive.

It was then, standing there in the street that was now bustling with cops, photographers, curiosity seekers and neighbors, that I realized what I had been thinking the entire time that this incident had been unfolding. No matter what other feelings or reactions I’d had, at the back of my mind, I had been writing the story, describing the scene, seeking a hook for the first paragraph. I was, I realized, made to do this, to write what I saw and heard and felt. I was born to it. And now I was more desperate than ever to find a place to publish my stories.

HEARTFELT THANKS FROM ME TO YOU

As often happens to free-lancers, for the last couple of months I’ve been very busy. That’s a fact, not an excuse.

But then again, no excuse (or fact) is worthy when it means taking for granted the kindness and loyalty of the people who support you, and one fact that comes home to me every time I check my blog stats is that the readership I’ve gathered for this blog is loyal and kind beyond all logic. The facts speak for themselves: In the past eight years, this blog has burgeoned from a mere handful of readers to peaks of literally thousands of hits for certain particularly popular entries. But what inspires me the most—as well as shames me—is that, during long periods like my latest hiatus, when I fail to publish a single line for  weeks on end, the stats show that a faithful core readership checks in here between six hundred and seven hundred fifty times a month to see what’s new! Furthermore, many of those who find nothing new go back through the index and read pieces they might have missed in the past.

I just want you all to know that I am overwhelmed with gratitude for this, the kindest gesture any writer can ask for—that people are eager to read his/her work. That’s why I decided this week to impose a twice-monthly blog deadline on myself, and I will give those deadlines for The Southern Yankee priority over any other activity, not for the sake of self-discipline, but to reward the extraordinary persistence and loyalty of my readers. That said, as of today, The Southern Yankee will present a new entry, at the very least, on the 13^th and 27^th of every month...as well as whenever else the spirit moves me to post additional pieces.

When I started this blog in 2008, I really didn’t have very high hopes for it.

For one thing, although I became a professional Internet user very early on, in the mid-nineties, it was out of necessity rather than choice, since I had decided to leave the big city (Buenos Aires), where I’d been making a living in journalism for twenty years, to take up a life that my wife and I had long dreamed of, in the relative wilds on the outskirts of a Patagonian ski resort in the Andes Mountains. Though we had actually wanted to make our new life in an even more remote area, this was as far away as we could get from civilization and still have access to at least barely adequate communications.

The Internet (in a timid dial-up version) arrived, only shortly after we did, through the local electric power cooperative and I was one of the first customers for it. Before that, I had to send work I did for a magazine, a news agency or other publishing operations via fax, first through a telephone exchange five miles away and, a little  later, from my own mountain home, after a long, uphill battle with the phone company—that convincingly reached the office of its president in Buenos Aires, a thousand miles away—until they finally agreed to put up twenty-five posts and string cable over a mile in from the highway along a twisting, climbing mountain lane to my cabin.

So it wasn’t like I was a nerdy Internet enthusiast. On the contrary, everything I learned, and continue to learn, about life on line is basically intuitive and via trial and error, since I have never been able to muster the interest or wherewithal to sit through any sort of course on computing, cybernetics, apps or the Internet per sé. For me, all of that is merely a tool—if an absolutely marvelous one—for sharing my work and my writing with my clients and with the world. And were it not a matter of necessity, I would surely still be writing this on one of several sturdy desk model manual typewriters that I’ve owned over the years.

For another thing, I had no knowledge whatsoever of the effectiveness of the social media in getting out the word about what you’re doing. The fact is that I only joined Facebook and then started a blog to placate a New York writer friend with whom I had worked in Buenos Aires, who was trying to help me find a literary agent and/or publisher for my fiction and non-fiction creative work. His point was a valid one: namely, that I would have to be a really egocentric ninny to think that anyone would remember my days as a Buenos Aires editor, columnist and foreign correspondent when I hadn’t had any serious visibility in the mainstream media for over a decade and a half. Blogging and Facebook were, he insisted, good tools for rebuilding my writing reputation after years of anonymous editing, research and translating.

So, applying a strategy called “controlled folly”, as suggested by brilliant if controversial writer Carlos Castaneda, I set out to write a blog, and the first article was on the subject of precisely the question I’d been wrestling with: Why blog?  (http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com.ar/2008/07/so-why-blog.html)  My answer, sifted through Castaneda’s sieve of the ridiculous, was the same as that of John Updike, who was quoted in that first entry: Why not?

At first, it was just a matter of getting the material out there. Having a blog gave me an “excuse” to write for myself instead just for hire. It challenged me to come up not only with new topics, new angles, new creative ideas, but also to revisit old memories and issues that had haunted me for years. It further challenged me to dig long lost manuscripts out of their hiding places in drawers, closets and disused briefcases and re-read them with a judiciously self-critical eye to see whether they were truly the serious works I’d thought they were when I wrote them or if they were, in the end, no more than random doodles of little or no value.

And so I started publishing. At first, practically no one read my blog. But I was also learning the ropes of communicating through Facebook and once I figured out how to post a link to the blog, things started looking up. Having written, back in the day, for a daily paper with a readership in the tens of thousands, and having been a stringer for major mass circulation newspapers and magazines in the US and Britain, the paltry early results of blogging seemed hardly worth the effort. But like a novice writer, despite a thirty-five-year career as a wordsmith, I found myself beaming when I would check my stats and see that a piece in my blog had gotten fifty or sixty hits. And when I started getting my first comments from readers, I was ecstatic. Why? Because this was all mine—the ideas, the words, the medium, the writing and, above all, the readers.

In short, I just want to say a heartfelt “thank you” to all of you for reading me, for identifying with what I write, for telling me how you feel both here and in Facebook, for taking the trouble to register as regular Followers of this blog, and for giving me the key element every writer needs to keep turning out stories and ideas: a faithful and responsive readership.

Many thanks, and I’ll see you here every 13^th and 27^th from now on.

EXCERPT 5 FROM ‘VOICES IN THE STORM’ — MARRIED LIFE

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Two of the autobiographical book I’m currently writing, entitled Voices in the Storm: A Journalist’s Memoir, about my early days in Buenos Aires.

Virginia (left) partying with exchange student friends at Bowling 

Green University. Why would she want to leave to be an 

Army wife?

By the time Virginia arrived in LA for spring break, it all seemed so clear to me that I took it for granted she would feel exactly the same as I did. I was so sure of this, that I almost figured I’d pick her up at the airport one day and marry her the next. When I drove to LA International in the Ford Bronco I’d borrowed for the occasion from my Army buddy Dave Zeiss—my car, a ’63 Chevrolet Nova 400 I’d bought the year I was at Ohio State, had remained back in Ohio with my little brother—we were, as always, overwhelmed to see each other, and so much in love that it was a feeling not unlike hunger. But as soon as I brought up the subject of marriage, she said we had to talk. She wasn’t all that sure that Door Number Two was that great of an idea right now. She had a full scholarship to the university! That wasn’t something you just threw away. And how would we live on what I was making in the Army? And what would happen to her if they sent me someplace overseas where she couldn’t go? Besides, if she left school, she’d lose her student visa. Then what?

Reception for 4 at Shakey's Pizza and a couple of 

days of sightseeing around LA. That was our 

honeymoon. But I was ecstatic.

Without having any idea what I was talking about, I told her that all of these things would work themselves out. Love would will out. Everything was going to be okay, nothing to worry about. Besides, who could know the future? If we were this much in love, shouldn’t our first priority be finding a way to be together and let everything else take care of itself?

Eventually, after much talking, she agreed. We were wed at the LA County Courthouse. An Army buddy of mine and his wife were our witnesses, and the only guests at our “reception”: lunch at Shakey’s Pizza, a place that had a great pepperoni pizza and a palatable dark draft, and that showed classic silent movies on the wall of the dining room all day long. It wasn’t much, but it was the best we could afford.

Marching in LA with the 72nd Army Band. I'm the one with 

the bass drum. 

Our all-consuming love for each other was about all we had that first year with the Army, living in LA—in the port district of San Pedro, actually—on my Spec 4's pay. I was paid a hundred and sixty dollars a month and our rent for a rundown apartment was a hundred and twenty, so that marriage and the pittance paid me for “dependent support” was almost a survival move. Still, we were together, getting to know each other more intimately, and everything we did together seemed special—the breakfast rolls we bought from the local Italian bakery, the ninety-nine-cent bottles we selected from the “wines of the world” basket at the grocery, walks together at Royal Palms on Western Avenue,  on oil-stained Cabrillo Beach at the mouth of the Port of LA, or in Averill Park on Dodson Avenue, and the occasional carry-out pizza from Nuncio’s, where when you called in an order, it was Nuncio himself who answered the phone and always ended by saying, “Sheeza ready tenna minute.”  I gave percussion lessons after work at a place called The Grey Institute of Music to help make ends meet. It was a difficult but romantic year, in which we played grown-ups and visited friends and had friends visit us as a married couple, and saved what we could, despite our poverty, for the occasional luxury. Like when we put a jar on the nightstand in our bedroom and tossed in whatever coins we had at the end of the day, until it was full. All totaled, about ten bucks in pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters, enough to dress up and go out to a little Italian place in San Pedro for spaghetti and a couple of glasses of house claret, a meal that still sticks in my mind today as an uncommon event.

On leave from the Army in Buenos Aires, here with Virginia's 

mother Teresa and sister Alicia in December of 1971.

But for making it through that first hard year with our love intact, for our second year of marriage we got a treat: The Army sent us to Europe. Before I shipped out, however, I took thirty days leave and Virginia and I went to Buenos Aires for a visit, my second to her city. After that, I was more convinced than ever that, someday, I wanted to spend a lot more time there. General Alejandro Lanusse was president and the country was breathing a new and vibrant feeling of impending freedom following the rigid dictatorship that Onganía had imposed. Lanusse was a military moderate who was in charge of planning for future elections. He was walking the jagged edge between promoting a return to constitutional democracy and finding a way to leave Perón and Peronism out of the mix. And doing it all in the face of the rising violence bred by leftwing and neo-Peronist guerrillas who were rendering Buenos Aires a dangerous place for multinational business executives and local military officers. It would be, clearly, a democracy dependent on the permission of the Armed Forces and extorted from the military through armed terrorist violence, but a sort of fledgling democracy all the same—and, with the glaring exception of a Peronism led by Perón, a highly pluralistic one, with over a score of parties participating, some of them branches of Peronism by another name.

In a palace coup, moderate General Lanusse (right) replaced

hard-line General Onganía (left) as President.

Largely ignorant of these details at that time, however, what it all meant to me was a feeling of renewed vigor and vibrancy in the city, and I basked in those thirty days of military leave, pretending I was already living in that European-style metropolis and that I was a civilian again. It felt, for all the world, like a dream come true. And the welcome I got from Virginia’s friends and family was even more heart-warming than on my first visit three years earlier. Now I was part of the family, a brother, a son, a full-fledged friend to be embraced and integrated into the fold.

The only sour note was provided by the United States Consulate. Wanting to make sure that my new bride’s legal status in the United States was taken care of before returning to California to pack and receive my orders for the trip to Germany, I took Virginia with me one morning to the consulate’s offices that were then downtown, and was almost immediately dissuaded of the old myth that if an alien marries an American, he or she is immediately given a green card. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Virginia on the California coast. It didn't matter that she

was married to a soldier. If she wanted a green card, she had 

to leave the USA and petition to get back in.

It quickly became clear that this was a complex process that would take, not days, but months. In the meantime, if she was no longer going to the university, her student visa would automatically expire. She would, in any case, have to leave the United States and petition from abroad to be let back in, if she was to be granted a green card—subject, of course, to presentation of all pertinent documentation and to the outcome of our interviews with consular officials.

The more they talked to us—in that superior, we-have-the-pan-by-the-handle tone that consular officials are wont to take—the angrier I got and at one point a vice consul and I were arguing so loudly that a couple of Marine embassy guards came over and stood behind the vice consul staring fixedly at me as if to say that they would like nothing better than to bounce my Army ass onto the sidewalk outside, so better I lower my voice a notch.

“Look,” I said, “I’m serving in the Armed Forces, I only have thirty days leave and we have to resolve this before I go back because they’re shipping me overseas.”

The vice consul, who looked to be only a couple of years older than I was and fresh out of college, set his jaw and shrugged. “Sorry, rules are rules. She’ll have to petition for re-entry. She can do it from here, or, if it’s more convenient for you, from Mexico, some place closer to your base. But she’ll have to go through the entire process, like any other alien. There are no exceptions for the dependents of Armed Forces personnel.”

“She’s not my dependent,” I said. “She’s my wife. And she goes where I go.” Again he shrugged, as if to say, “So what are you going to do, desert? Because she’s not going anywhere without my say-so.”

Virginia on the German-Austrian border: She wasn't about to 

wait around on the US Consulate. She went to the Germans and 

had 

a visa in a week. 

And so we began The Process—a little like death by a thousand cuts—by which foreigners must thoroughly humiliate themselves in order to (perhaps, if the shave-tail vice consul on duty so decides) eventually, almost arbitrarily, merit a green card. There was no word from the consulate by the time my leave was up, and, once again, we were separated, as I was forced to return to LA alone and leave her waiting for her visa in Buenos Aires.

A wise and resourceful big-city girl, however, Virginia wasn’t about to sit around waiting for Uncle Sam to decide her future. She simply went to the German Embassy in Buenos Aires and asked for a temporary residence visa there. And almost immediately, they gave her one. Amazed at her success, she asked a helpful German consular official why it was so easy to get a visa from them when her husband’s own consulate was making things so complicated.

“Vee don’t know,” the man said. “Vee are not Amerikan, vee are Cherman.”

In the end, I arrived in Germany in late January and Virginia was there by mid-February, minus her green card but with a shiny new German visa stamp in her passport. When did her green card finally come through? It arrived about a month or so before we were shipped back to the States, after my fourteen-month tour of duty in Germany was up.

Luckily, there’s more than one way to skin a consular geek.

THE BOHEMIAN LIFE...ALMOST

On tour with the 30th Army Band in Europe.

Army bands don't do much. And I made Spec 5 (sergeant’s pay) fast, so my salary wasn't bad by the European standards of those times. We did concert tours and then got a lot of compensatory time off. As newlyweds, Virginia and I made the best of it, traveling, seeing the sites, hanging out weekends in Paris and Heidelberg, using comp time to visit Switzerland, France, Italy and Monaco, reading everything we could get our hands on and enjoying life thoroughly. Except for having to wear my hair short and dress up in my soldier suit a few times a week, I might have been just another bohemian writer and musician, on the lam in Europe. I was writing short stories and playing with a little jazz group on the side. The sort of life you get use to fast.

On the lam in Paris.

Then my tour of duty was up and it was back to Ohio. After living what could only be described as a free-wheeling lifestyle in Europe (and living it as a musician and writer), Ohio seemed less than attractive. This was especially true for Virginia, who quickly found herself being treated—in a part of the country then unaccustomed to seeing so-called Hispanics (in fact, she is of Italian descent on both sides of her family)—as an “alien”, something that had never been the case in Europe or in her days as an exchange student, when she was treated as “a guest”. And as I say, it also wasn't made better by the fact that, while I had been away “at war”, the steel and automotive belt of northern Ohio and Michigan had fast been turning into “the rust belt”. The Vietnam War was winding down after a decade of providing support to the American economy. 

Feeding the gulls in Monaco. Except for the Army, 

a generally bohemian life. Ohio was a return to 

cruel reality.

Formerly accustomed to playing four to six nights a week in house bands at posh night clubs, I came home to a cruel recession in which there were no longer any steady gigs for musicians. So, it was back to one-night stands, weddings and VFW dances on weekends, and whatever work I could get during the week—loading dock and maintenance hand, then department-store carpet salesman for Montgomery Ward, and finally, shoe clerk at K-Mart. To make matters worse, Virginia was terribly homesick and depressed, and loathed the only job she could get as an administrative clerk in the cardiac care ward of a Catholic hospital. Neither of us had the money to go back to school, not even with the help of the GI Bill.

So that was how, on a certain morning in the summer of 1973, I found myself in the midst of a panic attack, struggling for breath at the wheel of my VW, and quickly decided on my next move.

When I arrived home that evening I turned to Virginia and said: “Hey, what do you say we go to your country for a year?”

She looked at me as if I had gone completely insane and said: “What are you going to do in Buenos Aires? You can't even speak Spanish!”

“I'll learn,” I said, and within a month, we had sold our Spartan houseware items, furniture and car, and were heading south.