War and Politics by Other Means: A Journalist's Memoir

The Making of a Journalist: Blue Sky, Blue Water

THE MAKING OF A JOURNALIST BLUE SKY, BLUE WATER L I F EON MER C HAN T S HIP S in blue water is like a marriage without love. The seaman is intimate with all the sounds, smells, and details of his partner-the vessel, crew, and water-and wed for the length stated in documents signed before the voyage. But the union loses its passion and becomes monotonous. The sea itself is a giver and a taker. One comes to accept it, more with resignation than joy. The romantic embracing such an experience journeys toward disillusionment. My first ship, a rust-bucket Liberty, from the fleet of homely vessels that carried our war against Hitler and Tojo to Europe and the South Pacific, was reclaimed from a graveyard for surplus vessels on Budd Inlet near Olympia, Washington. Boarding it fulfilled an ambition that began years earlier on the rolling alluvial plain of West Tennessee. Having hunted and explored the Obion and Forked Deer river bottoms of that country, I aimed to see for myself the world beyond. As a lad I fantasized about being kidnapped and pressed into work as a cabin boy on a steamboat on the nearby Mississippi . That I would come to see the world through the narrow I I 12 / THE MAKING OF A JOURNALIST focus of a porthole, instead of from the vantage of a leisurely traveler or a working journalist, was an insight I had yet to gain. I was 18 years old, naive, and romantic. I made a furtive stab at remaining in that native place, a tryout with a Class D farm club of the beloved St. Louis Cardinals. Baseball was an alternative for boys of un-landed gentry as well as uneducated country boys. I failed, unable to hit the breaking curve balls-at that time we called this pitch a "drop"-hurled by my teenaged peers, all white boys like myself, some no doubt destined for careers on the diamond. "Good field, no (! ! !) hit" might have been the report to St. Louis, if a scout bothered to note my inadequate performance. So much for the Cards. I hit the road west to fulfill my dream of discovery by working as a merchant seaman. The road was roundabout. I hitchhiked across middle America . Wherewithal came from farm jobs, usually driving a truck or tractor in the wheat harvest as it flowed from Oklahoma through the Texas Panhandle, and up through Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska . The work was strenuous, sunup to sundown, the pay $8 a day, three meals a day, and an army cot on which to sleep at night. I moved westward over the great tapestry of our central plains, sometimes sleeping at night under the stars and a Rand McNally road map-beautiful but chilly-or, more comfortably, riding a Greyhound bus. The freedom rivaled the landscape in beauty. The auto drivers were a cross section of lower-brow American culture, captives of whiskey, or hard-shell religion and the classic-as yet unrivaled-American songs of Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, and Bob Wills, the Gershwin, Kern, and Cole Porter of our lonely, agrarian interior. I loved the music, but remained impervious to the religIOUS messages. The road stopped in Bridgeport, Nebraska, ranch country in the Sand Hills where the Oregon Trail, indelibly marked by ruts, once traversed. A traveling salesman dropped me with good wishes and apologies. He was going back to Denver. I was stranded for lack of traffic. For 40 cents I got a cot in the backroom of the town tavern and slept, despite the racket of drinkers and a jukebox playing the great Ernest Tubb's lament for vagabonds, "The Freight Train THE MAKING OF A JOURNALIST / 13 Blues." ("All around the water tank, waiting for a train, a thousand miles away from home just-a sleeping in the rain.") Before sleep I had thoughts of quitting my ambition and going back to Tennessee. A church bell, not a jukebox, awoke me shortly after dawn. "Fire at the implement dealer's!" a young man shouted as I stumbled out of the tavern, half dressed, half asleep. He was standing on the running board of a volunteer fire truck. "Get on," he commanded. I joined other townsmen and roared off to find a blaze in the implement dealer's shop a garden hose could have extinguished. It had sent off a lot...