Mendel stopped in the Midwest and listened to its music.
When I was 18, a regional editor for our area daily paper sought me out and asked me to work as a correspondent. I jumped at the chance. I was a reporter and photographer for five years. I started when I was 18. In those five years, I aged 20 years. In between the mundane school board and borough council meetings were fires, accidents, murders, drownings and other acts of natural and human violence that made a huge impression on a teenager with raging hormones who wanted to be a famous writer and felt in general that he didn’t fit in with society. I’ve written about a lot of things about those experiences and I’ll post them one day. I found out that most accidents, fires and other scenes of human suffering happen mostly at night. So, in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s I would find myself in a college class during the day studying, say, Keats’ “Ode To A Grecian Urn,” and then jumping out of bed to answer a 3 a.m. phone call and race to cover a head-on collision on a two-lane highway. I spent my college years trying to incorporate the genteel college world of literature and campus life with siren screams, death and political intrigue. I had a real problem for several years. It’s one thing to read about Achilles killing a hundred men in a heated battle. It’s another to the reddish brown splotches of human blood in a car traveling 60 mph that’s hit another car going 60 mph. That’s 120 mph and it leaves a lot of blood and misery. I learned quickly that you report on the accident, not the misery. The newspaper years were good years. The experience put me into the thick of life – good and bad. I had deadlines and learned to write clean, lean, fast and accurate. I did good features on good people and was thanked. I did exposes and was kicked out of towns and told never to come back. I grew a beard in 1969 and my editors threatened to fire me because I was “going hippie.” I did a feature on men with beards that included college professors, truck drivers and farmers and the paper was good enough to run it and not fire me. I still have the beard. It’s gray. Click here to read Chapter 3 Skip to a specific chapter below:
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