(Sunday, April 7, 1996)
BUT PLEASE DON'T SHOOT AT MY WINDOW
By Paul Harral
Mom always thought I was going to be a preacher despite what I thought were some rather obvious hints to the contrary as I was growing up.
And then I called her one day from college and told her I was going to be a journalist. The announcement was met by stony silence.
I don't think Mom really understands what newspaper work means, but she's pretty sure it is some distance from being a preacher.
And then there was the day she was visiting in Denver, where I was Colorado editor for United Press International. My wife took her past the Denver Post building where the UPI office was located, and both of them noted the ambulances and police cars with their flashing lights.
There were bullet holes in the window and James D. "Mad Dog" Sherbondy dead on the pavement. He was an escaped convict who had been killed in a shootout with an off-duty police officer outside the newspaper building. Mad Dog, by the way, had a bomb strapped to his body when he died.
Mom's opinion of my profession did not improve.
She was especially shocked at the number of people hanging out of the windows, watching what was happening below.
I was one. I'd shout details of what I could see to a UPI staff member standing in the office doorway who then dictated the story to the teletype operator, who was filing it paragraph by paragraph on the Colorado radio wire.
One of my reporters recorded it something like this:
"James D. `Mad Dog' Sherbondy, a tough kid from a tough part of Colorado, died the tough way on a Denver street yesterday."
It was wonderful. The adrenaline flowed like water that day.
And there, in one word - adrenaline - you have the primary reason for my recent job change from editor of the editorial page - what many journalists consider the best job on a newspaper - to metropolitan editor. Metro editors seldom have a nice day.
All of this rating of best and worst is based on factors like hours spent, the regularity of those hours, the amount of headaches generated by the job, and the wear and tear on the body from constant stress punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
The metro editor is responsible - in our structure - for the hard news coverage of Fort Worth (excluding business and sports, which have their own separate editors). That's stuff like schools, city government, county government, politics, and all the bits and pieces of information that make up the rest of the news report.
Mostly journalism is detail work and relatively routine, and in some cases boring.
The days with Mad Dogs in them are few and far between, and despite what Mom thinks, the work is seldom dangerous unless you draw one of the few war correspondent jobs when there is conflict - and there's always conflict somewhere - in the world.
But even in its routine, the work is interesting and challenging and - on occasion - exciting.
Some people get that thrill by driving fast cars. Some get it from jumping out of airplanes. And some get it from trying, every day, to cover the news that is of interest and importance to the readers of a newspaper.
It's frustrating because it is so hard to get it exactly right. But there's always tomorrow and a new day and all those thousands of yards of blank newsprint just waiting to be filled with details and facts and figures and stories great and small.
And every so often, along comes a Mad Dog.
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Harral is vice president and editorial director for the Star-Telegram. His e-mail address is harralstar-telegram.com. You may telephone him at (817) 390-7836 or write him at P.O. Box 1870, Fort Worth, TX 76101.
(Copyright Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Posted by permission.)