the editor talks with you

It was a day much like today in 1969. We had just received word that another local boy had died in Vietnam. We needed to talk with the boy’s family and ask for a photograph of him. It is a tough assignment. Families are racked with emotion. They have lost a child. Some do not want to talk. I looked around the newsroom. Most of our reporters were out on assignment. Roger Beirne was working on a Sunday feature at a typewriter a few desks away. I handed him the few details we had. It was the boy’s name, his parents’ names and where they lived – a small town on the other side of the county.

Roger was a veteran, a tall Irishman with a graying mane of hair and a tentative smile. He looked out at the world with inquisitive eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. He did not want to become an editor. He was a reporter who wrote stories that made you think of Yeats and other Irish poets. He read the details and looked at me. “You want me to go?” he asked. “Yes, if you feel comfortable doing it.” “No, I don’t” he said, “but I’ll go.” The boy’s family lived 45 minutes away. I figured Roger would be gone at least 2 hours. He was gone twice that. He returned with the boy’s photo “I promised to return it,” he said.

He went to his desk, rolled paper into his typewriter and started typing. Then he stopped, took the paper out of the tpewriter and wadded it up. He put fresh paper into the typewriter and began again. After this happened twice more, I sat down beside him. His eyes were teary. “I’m having trouble with this,” he said. “Want a suggestion?” I asked. He nodded. “Just write it the way it happened. Let your readers see the neighborhood, the house where the boy grew up. Describe who came to the door, what they said. Take the reader inside with you.” He began again. It was a long story and moving. It required little editing.

You felt you were there in the living-room with the boy’s mother. You could see she had been crying but she wanted to do this for her son. She wanted his friends to be able to read it in our newspaper. His kid brother was outside bouncing a basketball in the driveway. The walls of the little house vibrated with the sound. “He idolized his brother,” she said. “He’s feeling frustrated and helpless. He’s bouncing that ball to let off steam.” Roger put the sound of the ball in the story – Bam! Bam! Bam!

Roger was writing for his readers. His words were carefully chosen. His sentences were lean, short and powerful. By the time you finished reading his story, you felt you had been there with him and the grieving mother he interviewed. Not many reporters can bring this off. What the boy’s mother did not know – and few of our newspaper colleagues did either – was that Roger had lost a son of his own to drug addiction. He never talked about it. It’s not something you talk about.

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