In stereotypical fashion, movies and television programs consistently portray big-city reporters as glorified paparazzi.
All of us can tell of rude reporters and camera operators asking questions like: “And how did you feel when you discovered your daughter had been kidnapped?”
But are the movies and television networks accurate in their portrayal of the media?
No!
My experience has been that the big-city reportorial legions are WORSE; the way they treat the competition would make a cakewalk of a trip through Dante’s Inferno.
Small-town news-editorial stints were my training in the fifties and sixties. Working in a town where you know everyone has its advantages. The pressure isn’t as great, the pace slower.
I became transplanted in 1961 to a Chicago suburb called Naperville. The day I arrived, the newspaper’s front-page photo showed city workers removing the old population sign of 6,500 and replacing it with one that listed about 15,000 residents. Today it approaches 100,000.
We were only 30 miles from Chicago., and because the Windy City had four major dailies, just about everything in suburbia needed to publish weekly. Small communities could not support their own daily.
John Kennedy had recently taken office, and his landing in Chicago was a big event. My boss at the Naperville Sun assigned me to cover the president’s arrival and speech.
For a young man who’d not even seen many three-story buildings or a metropolitan area larger than Albuquerque, the opportunity to cover the president was exciting.
Chicago is fed by a number of tollways and expressways. The roadway that links Naperville to Chicago was called the East-West Tollway. Many of the pay stations on the tollway were unpersonned and required exact change. Quite commonly, drivers who didn’t have the exact change begged the driver behind them for a dime.
It’s an eye-opener for a person whose big-city driving was restricted to Albuquerque’s Central Avenue suddenly to be faced with a spaghetti-like freeway system in which people drive 70, refuse to yield and willingly give you the one-finger salute. Seeing three lanes of traffic suddenly merge into six was daunting.
The traffic downtown, in the area called the “Loop,” consists of many thousands of vehicles, including buses, taxis, elevated trains and subways. Driving through the intersection of State and Madison, then called the busiest intersection in the world, demanded observance of several protocols: –If someone in front you hesitates for a nano-second, use your horn. –No matter the color of your light, if pedestrians start to cross invariably they do, one person spotting an opening and 50 people following. –Don’t even think of driving on the outside lane unless you enjoy inhaling bus diesel exhaust.
O’Hare International, where Kennedy landed, is some 25 miles from downtown. The agenda was for newspeople to meet the plane and then follow his motorcade to McCormick Place, a huge convention center.
Arriving two hours early during the time before electronic sensors or other security measures, I found a spot with perhaps 200 other reporters/photographers. One crew consisted of four burly men and a fifth, average-sized photographer. Inquiring from a fellow reporter, I learned that the quintet was the only group with powerful telephoto lenses. The four big men dragged out a two-foot-high podium for the photographer to mount, giving him a great vantage point. The four were there to outmuscle anybody who came close. As a result, the group got the best photos, which appeared on page one of the Chicago dailies.
Next came the procession into the city. McCormick Place had a bank of some 40 pay telephones along one wall. Because I was also a stringer for a daily newspaper in Aurora, I needed to file my report on Kennedy’s speech immediately after its conclusion.
I noticed that most of the phones carried an out-of-order sign, printed by Illinois Telephone and Telegraph. As Kennedy concluded his speech, all of us made a dash for the few remaining working telephones.
W-a-y too late I noticed that every “broken” phone was in fact in working order. Reporters had simply printed some professional-looking I.T.T. signs and hung them on the mouthpiece of the phones, as a way of reserving those phones for themselves.
My lack of big-city savvy really became apparent as I watched a slew of reporters removing the signs and putting them into their pockets for the next time they needed a phone. Remember, this was back in the days before cell phones.
For a while, on my way back to the less-crowded suburbs of western DuPage County, I felt good about having taken a photograph of the president, a wide shot showing him adjusting his buttons as he walked down the steps of the plane. Of course, in those pre-digital camera days, we didn’t really know what would show up until spending time in the darkroom.
The photo turned out fine, and the boss of the Aurora paper, with a circulation of 60,000, said he’d run it on page one. He did, but the text of the president’s arrival made the front page extremely crowded, and the result was a tightly cropped photo about the size of a thumbnail.
Fortunately, “paying by the inch” was a formula that applied to the length of articles, not the size of pictures. If it had applied to the final size of the photo, my stipend wouldn’t have even covered the parking meter fare.