Free Buying the Night Flight by Georgie Anne Geyer Page B

too, taught me very special things: It taught the girl who thought she could will anything and everything that she could not; it taught her the patience that people must have who cannot raise their hands higher than one inch more each month; it taught me respect for patience. And I thought a lot. The Chicago Daily News that I joined in the winter of 1960 was still considered one of the great papers of the nation. What's more, it was the "reporter's newspaper." Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, John Gunther, Ernest Hemingway -- all of them and many more had passed through its generous and creative doors.
    Ben Hecht's description of this unique and scurrilous and wondrous band in the twenties held up still when I arrived forty years later. "We were a newspaper tribe of assorted drunkards, poets, burglars, philosophers, and boastful ragamuffins. We were supermen with soiled collars and holes in our pants; stone broke and sneering at our betters in limousines and un-mortgaged houses; cynical of all things on earth, including the tyrannical journal that underpaid and overworked us, and for which, after a round of cursing, we were ready to die." It was a heady and wonderful atmosphere in which to start work. My dear friend David Lazar many years later perhaps expressed to me best why we were all so enthralled with newspaper work. "I used to stay up until two a.m. on the old Sun-Times when the first bulletins came in," he said. "It was so damned exciting, because I knew that I was the first one in all of Chicago to know those things." That was it--that was the addiction, the bait, the hooker: "knowing" things before anyone else did.
    The Daily News was a feisty paper, a little raw like Chicago itself, but one that revered and spawned and showcased good writing. It was, in its way, quite literary. But it was not, in those days, for women. Despite my minimal experience (only four months on the Southtown Economist, a neighborhood paper), the city editor wanted to put me on the city desk, but the staid old managing editor, Everett Norlander, flatly told me, "We've had two women on the city desk and we'll always have two women." Within a year I became the third, thus breaking a real quota and the first taboo to irritate me.
    But the Daily News was also a paper quite unlike papers today; it was journalism quite unlike journalism today. We quite simply "reported" what was going on. We did not write columns or our own personal interpretations on the news pages. We reported fires and murders and investigations and the statements of institutions. It was a much straighter and much more honest job then, and it was also a hell of a lot of fun.
    We loved one another on the paper--and for a very special reason. We competed brutally with the other papers (there were four then!) but we didn't compete among ourselves. We were out to get the world but nobody was going to divide and/or conquer us. It was another bit of the Chicago tribal morality perhaps, but it was grand. So when one reporter got a prize, everybody celebrated because everybody shared in it; it reflected well on everyone. It was very, very different from journalism today, when The Washington Post's "creative tension," in which everybody is pitted against everyone else and everybody ends up hating everybody else, has become more the dreary norm.
    In those days we also called ourselves simply "reporters." No, not even "journalists" and certainly not "media" or "media celebrities," good God! Nobody came into journalism in those days for power or to be celebrities; they came in because they wanted to write, or walk the streets, or booze around and raise hell with the world. But those reporters knew the city; they lived in it, not the suburbs, like the editors today, and they loved the city. It was our clay and we were its.
    The Daily News reporters were almost caricatures of themselves: Ed Rooney and Bill Mooney, the tough-talking reporter's reporters; my longtime boyfriend, Harry Swegle, and Bill