John Chambers: Just a memory, but, oh, what a memory it is

This is the last time I will be entitled to use that byline as a C-J employee. April 30 was my retirement day, the friendliest type of divorce you can imagine. It leaves me with the same kind of void as a marital split, though the decision to retire was my own.

One thing I have observed in 67 years of life, 47 years of marriage and 46 years of newspaper work: No matter how useful a person is in any endeavor, he/she is not indispensable. After I am just a memory, the work place, family and community still will be there and functioning as well as ever.

Memories is what this column is about, memories from my career. They hold vignettes of notable and ordinary people, comrades and changes in the work place, and events that were both significant and trivial. My career usually involved contacts with ordinary people, some of whom occasionally performed in extraordinary fashion. From my birth in a rural church parsonage in northern Illinois, reaching adolescence in a tiny northeast Missouri village, finishing high school in northern Indiana and attending a small college in my hometown, to beginning and ending my career -- the best part of my education has come from outside the formal classroom. I have learned more about newspapering from my mentors and colleagues in the business, and from hands-on experience on five newspapers in four states than ever I did from my college courses. I also learned more about people and life from observing, working with and interviewing them than from any sociology or psychology textbook. My best memories are of people: those with whom I worked, notables I have interviewed and photographed, ordinary folks I have watched overcome impossible obstacles, and people who have had unique stories to tell. All shall remain anonymous, for their protection and mine. Examples of newsroom memories abound, and many are humorous. In one work place, my wag of a managing editor was carrying a fist full of editor's pencils up the stairs from the storeroom. He was stopped on the stairs by the "expense-conscious" publisher. The publisher commented: "That is quite a bunch of pencils." The M.E. agreed, "Quite so. But I make them (the editors) turn in their stubs!""Good idea, good idea!" came the quick response. Then there was the eccentric fellow reporter on another paper who saved his cigarette ashes in several glass jars in his desk drawers. A sly fellow reporter surreptitiously mixed into the newest top layer of ashes some powder salvaged from firecrackers. When the smoker next tried to deposit hot ashes, there was a flash, and the smoker dove under his desk. (At least, that is the way the story came to me.) Over the years, I had opportunities to photograph and interview notables or cover their press conferences: Presidents Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon (I missed John Kennedy), either covered on the campaign trail or during personal appearances in the hinterland. Before my lenses came such figures as Bobby and Ethel Kennedy on a campaign whistlestop days before he was killed. I sat in an audience and took notes as Dr. Martin Luther King gave a college lecture shortly before his assassination. There were heart-warming gestures by such public figures as Gene Autry, who gave a crippled boy the thrill of his life when he set him astride his horse during a public appearance. Of course, I provided a photo for the boy. There was a photo session with boxing world heavyweight champion Joe Lewis in his dressing room at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, S.D. He was refereeing wrestling matches to work off his federal tax debt. There were state functions with Joe Foss, Marine fighter pilot, South Dakota governor and 1960s American Football League commissioner, and stops on my regular beat at the hometown office of then-Sen. George McGovern. There was the moment during an interview when aerialist Benny Fox offered to take my wee daughter atop an 80-foot pole and have her performing like a pro in a couple weeks (I declined the offer). Several notable entertainers revealed their humanness -- and often their loneliness -- on the road. I particularly remember the neighborly types from the Lawrence Welk show. Memorable events also flood my mind, particularly those connected with my years in police and general reporting assignments. There were the murders. The first murder and murder trial I covered involved me in a jail cell interview of the defendant (a practice no longer permitted). The man was confined to a mental hospital after he was found not guilty by reason of insanity of fatally shooting his wife. In another case, I was present during the prosecutor's questioning (again no longer permitted) of a Bible-toting deranged man in the home where he had killed his mother with a meat grinder and cut off her arms. There also was the shotgun murder in an elementary school of two teachers in their classrooms in front of their students. The killer: their principal, a World War II combat veteran, who later fatally shot himself in a nearby woods, apparently after he came to himself. One child I interviewed briefly after the murders could only focus on the murder weapon, a 12-gauge shotgun, saying, "and then this gun came in!"Another unusual murder I covered was the killing of a man, his wife and her blind aunt. The perpetrator was a young married man who had become enamored of the couple's teen-age daughter, despite her parents' objections. The killer waited in the house with the bodies until the girl came home on her school bus, then took her away in the family car. After his capture several states away, authorities brought back him and the girl. The murderer's own family had lived just a few blocks from me in a nearby small town. The murderer was identified when the small-town marshal recalled having seen the man shooting rats with the murder weapon in the town dump before the killings. My biggest news story was the crash of an Allegheny Airlines jetliner south of Indianapolis International. The airliner, on approach to the airport, collided with a small plane flown by a student pilot. Both plunged nose first into a soybean field. Nearly 100 bodies were scattered over the field, their positions marked with flagged stakes for recovery. Personal effects of the victims were scattered all around. The resident of a nearby mobile home told me of hearing an oxygen bottle from the plane explode through a wall of his trailer. He rushed from the trailer to discover on his front deck the severed leg of a passenger. During my early years in South Dakota in the 1950s, I sampled the effects of tear gas that lingered in the halls and cells after a prison riot was put down by officers in Sioux Falls. The lock-down followed a long, dark night of waiting outside while inmates broke anything breakable, shouted and jeered. Over the years there were fires, some fatal, in homes and businesses. There was a hotel fire with five fatalities. Grain elevators burned, some during bitter winter cold. A car dealership burned out after a single drop of gasoline dripped from a car onto a mechanic's trouble light, breaking the hot bulb and igniting gasoline in the gas tank. There were tornadoes, including the big Good Friday tornadoes in 1965 that wove their way across Indiana, causing scores of deaths. I photographed the path of the storm for about 70 miles, until I wearied of the destruction. My own car was damaged by baseball-size hail in that storm. I remember how my wife used to bear patiently my habit of pointing out locations of traffic accidents I had photographed whenever we drove anywhere. I remember helping an ambulance attendant remove from a car the body of a woman who had gone into the windshield during an accident at a foggy intersection before dawn. I still feel the dread that news photographers feel over the possibility of finding the body of a friend or family member at an accident scene. Then there was the Vietnam era terror on American streets that was a whole lifetime in itself. On a couple occasions, I went to photograph fire scenes and found firefighters ducking gunfire. All these calamities and catastrophes could turn a person cynical, were it not for the comic relief now and then, the camaraderie of news people, and the ability of people to turn tragedy into triumph. I think now of the horror on the face of a police officer I photographed as he carried the limp body of a young boy from the river. To the joy of spectators, the officer was able to revive the boy before an emergency crew arrived. Others weren't so lucky. I remember the two young men who stopped on the way home from working all day in a hot field to swim the cold waters of a gravel pit. Cramps caught one of them and pulled him down. I remember the little English boy who left the safety of a YMCA pool to swim at an abandoned beach at the nearby lake and stepped off a ledge into deep water. I remember an overloaded duck boat full of people that went down in the lake when the boat started shipping water, and two of the group were drowned. I marvel at the relaxed regulations of an earlier era when reporters had great leeway to enter hospital emergency rooms, jail cells and similar places with police officers, places they cannot go today. I watched from a hospital hall through the door of a hospital emergency room (not permitted now) while the doctors unsuccessfully tried to save the young squirrel hunter whose .410 shotgun had discharged accidentally and destroyed his lungs. On one occasion, I was admitted by the coroner to a funeral home to talk with officers in front of the slab where a post mortem was being performed on a shooting victim. The humorously freakish nature of some other events provided relief from the serious stuff. I think of the burglary and vandalism of a business office that was solved because detectives found a watch crystal among the papers strewn over the floor. The officers alerted area jewelers to watch for someone to come in for a new crystal. One jeweler did call the police, and investigators matched tape marks on the loose crystal to tape marks on the man's watch. Some of my most satisfying activities was covering 4-H fairs and state fairs, and encouraging the youngsters in their projects. I was happy to judge photography contests in a county fair for several years. It was heartening to see the efforts of young people to excel -- even though the conduct of some adults occasionally was less than admirable (two fathers even got into a fist fight near the sheep show ring at a county fair). There was one case at a state fair beef competition (not in Kansas). It was discovered after the grand champion steer had been sent to slaughter that the owner had produced optimum curves on his steer in the same way some young ladies have improved their curves -- by judicious use of silicone, in this case injected. From inside the newspaper offices where I have worked come memories connected with all the changes in the newspaper business from Jan. 1, 1953, when I started out in Mitchell, S.D., as a do- anything reporter, photographer, darkroom technician (a fancy title in my work) and photoengraver. That first newsroom was a "cubbyhole" atop a long, narrow flight of creaky wooden stairs. Desks were piled high with newspapers. Copy paper, news releases and notes were speared on wire spikes. Manual typewriters and teletype machines clacked away as if competing with each other. Long sheets of copy paper were strewn about the floor. Our stories in those days were sent to the "back shop" (print shop) to be "set" in type manually on Linotype monstrosities. Headlines that were too large to be set on a Linotype were "hand- spiked" by the printers on hand-held Ludlow tools. The first cameras I used were typical press cameras from the '40s and '50s and earlier. They used either sheet film (which I loaded into film holders in the darkroom) or film packs, which came preloaded from the supplier. Since the cameras were shared by several staff members -- all combination reporter-photographers -- something was always going wrong with them, usually flash problems. I developed film in a stinky, tiny darkroom with no air conditioning or heat source. The company did provide me a sort of dip-stick electric heater to drop in the developing tank. Eventually the company also provided chemical cooling in summer -- an antique G.E. refrigerator with the round condenser on top. In addition to doing darkroom work, I operated the old Scan-A- Graver. This marvel of technology in the 1950s etched photographs into curved sheets of blue plastic with a hot stylus to form the dot patterns required for the printing process. The resulting engravings were trimmed out and attached to the printing plates that went on the letter press. The engraver was provided an electronic microscope that was synchronized with the cylinder that turned the plastic. The operator would check the dot size and pattern through the microscope and make adjustments. The machine I used had a problem. The hot stylus frequently ignited the plastic and destroyed the engravings. Eventually, we discovered that a bird had built a nest in the outdoor end of the exhaust pipe that kept the coil and stylus from overheating. A small piece of screen stopped the birds' nest-building, and most of the fires. All of these adverse working conditions have disappeared. There are no more clickety-clacking manual typewriters and teletype machines; no more ungainly Linotype machines with their melting pots for type metal; no more Scan-A-Gravers; no more stinky hot and cold darkrooms. It's all computerized now. Reporters type their stories on computers. Film is developed in mechanical processors and the negatives scanned into computer images. Photos and some copy are scanned into computers. Pages are constructed on computers, rather than "dummied" on paper for printers who "build" pages with lines of metal type. It is better, despite the resulting loss of jobs in the print shop and the loss of some awe-inspiring attractions for visiting school children. The results are more efficiency, more effectiveness and a far more attractive product. We had no color in earlier years. Later, we could get color at great expense and some delay by sending away for color separations. Our black and white film was far "slower" than color film is today, and we had to resort to all sorts of developer manipulations to increase the effective film speed for sports action and available light photos. With all of the intensity, urgency and stress generated by deadline news reporting, there has been frequent comic relief, coming both from newsroom humor and from humorous news stories themselves. Such was my favorite all-time story of my career. It was about the pet monkey of a family in Indiana. The monkey was a regular member of the family. He thought he was one of the children. When the family gathered for meals, the monkey had to have his high chair at the table, complete with dish and spoon. When the children brushed their teeth, he had to use his own little toothbrush. When the children had a birthday party, he had to have his own piece of cake with a candle and a present to unwrap. The monkey became ill. He got sicker. The lady of the house took him to the local veterinarian, who was no monkey specialist. He recommended taking him to a specialist at Purdue University veterinary school. The trip to Purdue was to no avail, and the monkey died. The lady of the house brought home the body. She bought a baby casket at a local mortuary and carried it home, sat it on two folding chairs in the living room of their house, and laid out the monkey's body for relatives and friends to pay their respects (which is where I entered the picture). She folded the monkey's paws over a little New Testament on his chest. She hung a Rosary from the lid of the coffin. The lady told me she intended to bury the monkey at his favorite spot on a grassy knoll, under a tree. With that, she considered she had done her best to show her love for this beloved, albeit spoiled, member of the family that the monkey had become. "He was my baby," she mourned. "He was one of the family." Then she produced the type of line that a reporter always hopes to hear, a line that made the story for the readers:Said she, "I have only one regret -- I never had him baptized." My memory bank is full of stories about people. I will miss it all.

Copyright 1999
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