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1963

Growing up, Mom always told me if I couldn’t say anything nice about someone, don’t say anything at all.  Maybe it was natural then that I went into journalism.

I fought in the Great Media Revolution right from the start, almost. You may think it was a long time ago, but not so ancient a time that I can’t remember some of the details. For those were times of great change in the world, and in the business of gathering and telling people The News.

During my watch, thirty years man and boy, the pictures changed from scratchy stills, burned into newsrooms on the Associated Press photo wire; from black and white film to colour, then to video tape.

The words of the television news business changed too – from reciting the formal news-speak of newspapers on television (then an imitation of newspapers, considered to be real reporting), to the conversational; then, changed again, from impersonal, straightforward facts, to ego-centred Me journalism.

Those were dark days at the start and not just because film shaded events in black and white only, and not because any of the first newsrooms I worked in were in the bowels of the building and had no windows. No, dark because there was a war coming on, both overseas and at home. Wars to test the conscience of the country and the young fodder needed for it.

So, in the spring of 1963, I travelled on a Greyhound bus from the Midwest into the Deep South, filled with anxiety and naiveté, teenage certainty and awkwardness. It is remembered present day as a fractured series of incidents, each vivid enough to permanently brand my memory.

I trespassed on the reality of the times that included segregation, lawlessness, good cooking and colorful characters that central casting had never heard of, but wished they had.

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