In May of 1963, the original sentence was to be served working in the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation corrugated container factory in West Monroe, Louisiana, courtesy of my father’s nepotism. The summer would be spent earning enough money to return to college.
For a 19-year-old, just drummed out of the U.S. Marine Corps officer and a gentleman flight school (MarCad), before my unreliable kidneys ever got into the air, this was an adventure on a different road. As a confirmed observer of people, it was a chance to see a world I had tasted only briefly with a hasty school trip to Atlanta. So what if I didn’t fly jets and kill in the Vietnam War, I would instead pilot words and influence people. I just didn’t know it at the time.
I checked in to the high-rise Penn Hotel in greater downtown Monroe, Louisiana where the rooms were nice enough, and cheap. Air conditioned, the neon glow from the rooftop assured. It was a building of a certain character that still exuded Thirties, although there had been sporadic attempts at modernization. Sleep, after two days and one night amid the odors and borderline personae on a Greyhound bus, came like a theater curtain over my eyes.
I was in America, the Deep South that is; where everything was black and white still, just the way it had been for generations, thank you. The only border delineations I noticed immediately on my way south were an increasing number of condom machines in public toilets. “We got a venereal disease problem, son,” I was told when I asked. The deeper the South, the more the condom machines, only now I could see Colored Only/White Only signs on public toilets and nearby water fountains.
It was during this summer of 1963 that Dr Martin Luther King was in Washington DC. During the Civil Rights March, in front of 200,000 people, Dr King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
In the morning, I was greeted by a shiny, deeply ebony African face, really no older than mine. James, the elevator “boy” who, coached by the front desk staff, had been apprised of my name.
“Moanin, massalooy,” I can still hear him say as he opened the elevator on that first morning. “Morning,” I replied, not really sure of what the rest of his greeting was. The slow, strangled speech had a tune about it, as though he were forcing the reluctant words out of his throat and they objected. I politely asked him to repeat what he had said and got the impression from the explanation that it was: “Morning, Mister Louie.”
Later, when I got a better hold on the local speech patterns, James and I had several long conversations about life in the South, but only in the elevator because he was not allowed to fraternize with the customers, especially white customers – and they were the only kind allowed.
It took time but I learned not to reply “I can hear fine,” when people said “Y’all come back and see us now, yuh-ear.”
♦
If I missed out on Vietnam, I did not miss out on Vietnamese weather, for, working under a rippled tin roof, tying up bundles of corrugated containers, the temperature sometimes reached 110 degrees, and the work, while well-paid by 1963 standards, was sporadic, consisting only of vacation replacement hours. But I became adept at the use of a pinkie-finger razor knife, a talent I have yet to use again.
I decided to seek work elsewhere, something more in line with my gentler side, like the local newspaper, since I had some real-life newspaper experience as a desk-bound sports reporter while in high school, and some college experience on the school paper. “No thanks,” I was told. “Try the television station.”
I did and was told I’d have to talk to Governor Noe. I was ushered into a scene in which only action heroes find themselves. I was standing in front of a big, expensive, panoramic desk, facing a rounded, red-faced Southern gentleman, book-ended by two huge German Shepherds who had picked up my scent.
I remember Governor James A Noe, proprietor of KNOE-TV, told me I looked more like “a preacher’s boy than a reporter“ but that I “did have an announcer’s voice” so, ok, I was hired. “We‘ll pay you $1.15 an hour,” he said. I nodded an agreement, this being the days before multi-claused, exclusive services labor contracts negotiated by an agent. I did not want to argue the case that I was making $2.00 an hour in the sweatshop.
The News Director, Mack Ward, was informed of this personnel decision by the Governor’s secretary, and I was shown around the set-up of a real television station. Hiring minor minions such as me was a job that normally would fall under Mack’s remit, but he apparently was used to the “Governor” making those decisions for him.
I asked Mack about the “Governor” and was told he was a former governor of Louisiana – the name sticks when you’ve got a good title, ask any of the many colonels in the South. Only later, when I cared to look it up, was I surprised to find that he was governor by default, as the incumbent had been kicked out of office for something criminal and, as Lieutenant Governor, James A. was the next best thing, serving out only six months of the term. The fine people of Louisiana never had elected him directly for the job and never did again, but the title stuck.
Indeed in the year 2000, a call to the switchboard at KNOE-TV still found the old hands referring to him as Governor Noe, quick to qualify that he died in 1976 and Jimmy Junior ran the station after that (as a title, Governor does not pass from father to son, only television station properties). Jimmy died of cancer in 2005 and two years later the family sold the station.
♦
Mack told me I’d be writing items for the news broadcasts, how it was to be written, and added, if I was any good, I might be able to get out and actually cover a story. 
To begin my first TV job, I wrote the many short items that were included in the evening news; The Esso Report, as it was called, sponsored by Esso, and anchored by one Ed Marten, nee J. Edward Martensson as I later found out, who had worked his way up from radio in Monroe. I would meet him later on my career ladder.
Canary yellow, second sheet was the paper of choice at the time, with copy typed on a black manual Remington, in all caps, pica, one story to a page in case stories needed to be dropped. The regional and national news from the Associated Press and United Press International news wires clattered with precision all day and into the night from the teletype machines fed with continuous run paper held in big, heavy boxes. I was given personal responsibility for the news wires, which included seeing they were properly fed with paper, properly clothed, as in heavy black inky ribbons changed about every two or three days, and properly displayed, as in separating stories and stabbing them on the appropriate overhead metal spikes on the wall.
♦
One day, when the time was right and staff shortages were evident, I was sent out to cover a story and shoot some silent film. I was given a quick course in f-stops with a rotary lens 16mm Bell & Howell (“Shoot it at f-16 or f-22 in sunshine, f-8 or 5.6 in the shade”) and putted off on my recently purchased motor scooter to the scene of an accident.
I came upon the kind of scene that has you kecking, trying to retch, but in dry heaves, at the horror of it all. The twisted metal of what once was a Volkswagen Beetle formed almost a perfect ball shape after it went under a big semi-truck. The driver was killed outright, but her earthly remains were sticking out in living colour all around the sphere – an arm at 10 o’clock, brains in the centre and spilled on the pavement, a thigh at nine o’clock, a foot at six o’clock. And this new reporter (and photographer) was trying to make sense of shooting film while trying to stop the spasms of dry heaves from ruining the stability of the pictures.
I was actually invited to get ‘up close and personal’ by the police. None of this yellow-black POLICE tape around the accident scene. It hadn’t been invented yet. Just mention the magic words ‘KNOE-TV’, or brandish a camera or tape recorder, and it was your invitation to be an eyewitness to death, mayhem, misdemeanour and felony. Only when you had to deal with the much bigger state police did you have to show a press pass, and then you were accorded the same rights the local authorities would dispense.
It was all part of the game that was news in those days. Reporters were allowed access and nobody, ever, in those picayune-sized markets anyway, looked any deeper at police procedure or excesses, of which I would find later there were plenty. Murder suspect? No problem. We’d get a call saying they would be transferring them at 2:30pm at the side door of the jail. Get there at 2:25 and right on schedule, the manacled suspect would be paraded before our camera. No one in the news game ever asked about cuts and bruises and, before the era of ‘rights,’ no prisoner ever complained aloud, knowing the media would not take up his grievance, because that was not how the game was played back then.
It wasn’t a game that was taught but, rather, assimilated. No news director ever told me not to report something. Not at first anyway. It was all learned behaviour and I was like a sponge absorbing every facet of the game I could. Ethically neutral, just like my copy was supposed to be. Like the new college student who wants to join a fraternity, beginning reporters do what everyone else does to fit in, and do not think of the alternatives, no matter how creative their minds are. And once a full-fledged member, they tend not to rock the boat if those alternatives ever crossed their minds.
Or, maybe I just didn’t get it until now.
I had three months of indoctrination in Governor Noe’s Federally licensed parlour of television pictures, when along came a job offer from the Associated Press newswire service in the state capital, Baton Rouge.
I asked around about Baton Rouge amongst my friends in Monroe and found it to have a sterling reputation as the gateway to New Orleans, the sin city of the South, and so The Promised Land to any respectable journalist. It also had Louisiana State University, a place where I might continue my chequered academic career at an astonishingly low price of $80 a semester.
I said no to the AP job; I felt my future was in television. But said yes to Baton Rouge.
