A high-wire act

By Mary Ann Gwinn

My first encounter with the Columbia Daily Tribune took place across town, in the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian. On my first day as a student reporter, I was assigned the city hall beat with Mark Shepherd. Shep, my future Tribune colleague, and I enjoyed five minutes of triumph (it was a plum beat). Then we found ourselves in the long, long shadow of Virginia Young, Columbia Daily Tribune city hall reporter.

We were outgunned. Mark and I would trade off covering City Council meetings, and on my nights I would grab a front row seat, eager not to miss anything. Virginia would sit in the audience, calm as a buddha, taking the occasional note. When the public performance was over and the gadflies had had their say, Virginia would walk out into the hall and take city manager Ray Beck aside. Or it might be Clyde Wilson, the mayor. Either way, I knew I was sunk. I slunk back to the newsroom and awaited my fate: following whatever scoop of Virginia’s was in the Tribune the next morning, enduring the scorn of whatever TA was manning the desk.

Well, humility is a good baseline for learning, and I learned a lot. A year later, journalism school was winding down and I found myself in need of a job. Steve Friedman and I had become friends, and Steve had been hired at the Tribune. More or less on his recommendation, I got a job as an intern there (for that, and for introducing me to avocado and cheese sandwiches, thank you again, Steve). I figured I would spend the summer of 1979 figuring out where to go next. I stayed for three years. 

If our minds are a memory palace, the Tribune years inhabit a room I can walk into as if it were yesterday. Every person there is larger than life, because in those early, uncertain days in journalism, I viewed everyone at the Tribune through a lens of admiration, affection and not a little fear.

The rhythm of a workday in those years never varied.  Earliest to arrive, often at dawn, was wire editor Phil Gottschalk, smoking a cigar, ripping away the yellow copy spitting out of the AP wire machine. Chris Conway often swam before work, and he arrived early too, with wet hair and total focus.  Chris sat behind me. Listening to his interviews – direct, insistent,  determined to tie up every loose end - was an education in itself.

Andy Maykuth would lope in, backpack slung over his shoulder, looking like he had a secret, soon to be divulged on the front page. Paul Roberts, the Boot Heel philosopher, sat across from me. Paul and I were both tormented Southerners. We got along.  Shep, who had migrated over to the Tribune soon after me, stared down his typewriter and willed it to produce. Friedman tossed a tennis ball from hand to hand as a sort of creative meditation, pushing yet another deadline. Ed Dorian, with his starched white shirts and dapper gray slacks, sat next to Steve. Sometimes Ed seemed like the only adult in the room.

Ken Fuson sat at the head of my row. He occupied the prized territory of Virginia’s desk – she had been promoted to the state government beat. Kenny smoked too much and he ate too much, and his hand trembled as he typed. He was tightly wired and wildly insecure, but he churned out fantastic centerpiece features day after day (I often imagined Jan Winburn, our city editor, saying to herself: why can’t everyone be like Ken?).  Catty-corner to us sat another row of talented, tormented and unpredictable reporters:  David la Gesse.  Jeff Leen. Kevin Gerrity, John Schneller, and later, Forrest Rose.  

Carolyn White had assembled us, skimming the cream off the J-school graduating classes. Carolyn was a mysterious, galvanizing presence, in and out, pulling people in for conferences, cabals and pep talks. Jan and Mike Jenner enforced the discipline of budgets and deadlines. If you did something to please these three, you felt like you had hit one out of the park. Carolyn’s praise was a prize above rubies.  Sue Weston and Nancy Pate and Hal Boedecker and others manned the copy desk, made us all look and read better and helped lighten the mix with features and entertainment coverage. The photographers had their own room, their own stories and their own language. What a congregation of geniuses they were. Every trip I took with a Tribune photographer was its own memory.

The troops settled in, the gears engaged and the clock ticked forward. Nine a.m. Ten a.m. Grab a doughnut. Pace the carpet.  Stare down at the yawning hole in your story and will the phone to ring. The keys of the IBM Selectrics went off like little machine guns: ratatatatatatatat DING. Ratatatatatatat DING.  The smoke from a dozen cigarettes filled up the room, clouding the eerie amber light from the octagonal windows. The noise, punctuated by ringing telephones and the occasional curse, built toward a kind of crescendo that peaked around 11:45. Last phone call. Last chance to make it sing.  Then noon, the last deadline. The room went quiet, the air went slack and the place emptied out. The driven and ambitious would leave, bolt something down, and return by later in the afternoon, back at it, fueled by Dunkin Donuts coffee and selected mysterious substances. We worked into the night, and sometimes night bled into the next day.

It was a high-wire act, driven by our own lofty expectations for ourselves, our longing to please and our belief that there was nothing more important than carrying the cross of journalism. In the small town of Columbia, we were our own tribe. This made for interesting and complicated friendships, but we were excellent company for one another, and for a while that was enough, endless, galvanizing conversations fueled by beers at Booches and the Blue Note. Then, I almost took it for granted. Now I realize what a gift it was, to work with people who you admired, adored and shared a passion.

But Columbia was a college town, and we had to jostle for the best spots at the bar with mobs of plastered frat boys and sorority girls. We were far, far cooler than they were, of course, but there were a lot of them, and one night I looked around and realized I was pushing 30. A dark little plume of doubt begin to occlude my rosy view, and one night, joyriding down by the Missouri River, Chris and Forrest in the front, me in the back, I had a drunken epiphany. I wanted this to last forever, and I knew it couldn’t. It began to press in on me that this was not a sustainable life.

 It didn’t last; indeed, it was over way too soon. In one of those budget boomerangs that would become all too familiar in the newspaper world, publisher Hank Waters slashed the budget and laid off staff. Carolyn left, and the Philly exodus ensued, followed by the Miami Herald exodus and the KC Times exodus. I remember the day Chris, headed for the Inquirer, walked out of the newsroom for the last time. Everyone was gutted. Irene Haskins, our den mother receptionist, looked around, observed our sorrow and said something to the effect of – why is he going? If he really doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t have to go. But he did, and a year later, so did I.

I went to Seattle and made another life, and it’s been mostly a good one. But little of it has been as immediate and vivid as the Tribune years. Maybe it was my age. Maybe it was the company.  Maybe it was even Columbia. I still miss the roll of the landscape, the blue of an autumn sky and the primitive, comforting feeling that around any corner was probably someone you knew. We really did get to know one another, and that has made the losses even harder. Kenny, Kevin, Forrest. How can they be gone? What I wouldn’t give to hear Kenny’s explosive laugh. What I wouldn’t give to see Forrest gripping his double bass, plunking the bottom line on “The Hobo’s Song,” singing the refrain too late to feel sorrow, too late to feel pain – one more time.

I guess losses are the flip side of having had something you really prized. Today I talk to young people, including my own sons, about their struggles to connect in the digital-COVID age, and I realize that what we had at the Tribune was a rare, rare thing. We worked and played and loved and competed together, and we all believed in the same thing: the pursuit of facts, the goal of excellence, the belief that the truth mattered. It was hard when it ended. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.