Wonderful Room Read online

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  Texas Memoir

  In 1955, when Bryan Woolley was 17, he said goodbye to his family and went to El Paso to become a newspaper reporter. He attended college too, but it was his education in the Mexican border newsroom of The El Paso Times that really prepared him for the rough-and-tumble life he would live and love for 50 years. The Wonderful Room is a lively story of the cantankerous, boozy, cynical and somehow heroic characters who once inhabited the newsroom of a great American town.

  Woolley is the recipient of numerous honors for his writing, including the PEN West Literary Journalism Award; three Stanley Walker Newspaper Journalism Awards, and one O. Henry Magazine Journalism Award (from the Texas Institute of Letters); four Texas Headliner Journalism Awards; and the Spur Award for Best Historical Novel from the Western Writers of America.

  Other Books by Bryan Woolley

  Nonfiction

  Texas Road Trip

  Where I Come From

  Mythic Texas

  Generations

  The Bride Wore Crimson

  The Edge of the West

  The Time of My Life

  Where Texas Meets the Sea

  We Be Here when the Morning Comes

  Fiction

  Sam Bass

  November 22

  Time and Place

  Some Sweet Day

  For Children

  Home Is Where the Cat Is

  Mr. Green‧s Magnificent Machine

  The Wonderful Room: The Making of a Texas Newspaperman

  © 2010 by Bryan Woolley

  The Wonderful Room first appeared in 2006 in

  The Dallas Morning News. Used by permission.

  Illustrations by Dean Hollingsworth

  © 2006 by The Dallas Morning News

  First Edition

  Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-916727-74-1

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-000-2

  Kindle ISBN: 978-1-60940-001-9

  PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-002-6

  Wings Press

  627 E. Guenther • San Antonio, Texas 78210

  Phone/fax: (210) 271--7805

  On-line catalogue and ordering:

  www.wingspress.com

  All Wings Press titles are distributed to the trade by

  Independent Publishers Group • www.ipgbook.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Woolley, Bryan.

  The wonderful room: the making of a Texas newspaperman / Bryan Woolley. -- 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “The Wonderful Room first appeared in 2006 in The Dallas Morning News”--T.p. verso.

  ISBN 978-0-916727-74-1 (hardcover: alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-000-2 (ePub.) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-001-9 (Kindle) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-002-6 (library pdf.)

  1. Woolley, Bryan. 2. Journalists--Texas--Biography. I. Title.

  PN4874.W6933A3 2010

  070.92--dc22

  [B]

  2010004347

  To the memory of Ed Engledow

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Section A: I Begin

  Section B: The Wonderful Room

  Section C: My Career in Peril

  Section D: Famous People …

  Section E: The Burglar

  Section F: Bodies

  Section G: I Am Promoted

  Section H: Juárez

  Section I: Rosa

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  One late night after work in the 1950s, John Moran and I were sitting in the Stag Bar, drinking beer. He was the assistant city editor of The El Paso Times and I was its 18-year-old cub reporter. Moran was a fine editor and a lapsed Irish Catholic. Sometimes when he had had a few beers, he would become religious. The more beers, the more religious. One time he led me out of the Stag at closing time, took me home with him, woke up his wife and dragged us to the six o‧clock Mass at the cathedral. A sobering experience for a Baptist kid from the wilderness.

  On this night, we were discussing the Times and our work there, and Moran said: “Woolley, being a newspaperman is like being a priest. It‧s a holy calling.”

  During my nearly 50 years as a newspaperman, I considered my job that way, except in secular terms – finder of truth, fighter for justice, swashbuckler for freedom – rather than priestly ones. Many of the reporters and editors I‧ve known over the years have felt the same way. What we were doing was special and essential.

  So I was startled some 25 years after that night at the Stag to hear an editor at The Dallas Times Herald speak of the paper as “our product.” It‧s a phrase I would hear more and more often during the rest of my career as corporations took control of family-owned newspapers and the bottom-line mentality seeped into newsrooms. We weren‧t so much intrepid truth-finders and swashbuckling crusaders anymore. We were “content providers” making a “product” to be marketed like Cheerios or Bud Light, complete with focus groups to tell us what the consumer wanted.

  Yes, my view is romantic and old-fashioned. I know newspapers have always been a business, and sometimes even a rotten one. But always there has been that thing that John Moran called holiness, that First Amendment thing, that holding of the mirror up to the face of government and culture. No other news medium – radio, TV or now the Internet – does that. Often they just shrink and repackage what they get from the newspapers.

  Now the daily papers that the country has read for the last 250 years may be fading away, to be replaced with the electronic gadgets and the video screens that most Americans now spend their lives staring into. I‧m afraid our democracy is in big trouble.

  This small memoir is a gathering of a few memories of my early days as a kid reporter in the cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, on the Rio Grande in the 1950s, when the world and I were young and learning to be a newspaper reporter was the finest adventure I could imagine. It was a rough-and-tumble life, but yes, there was something holy about it. It sent a tingle through the mind and heart that I fear not many young people get to feel these days.

  The book originally was a series that ran in The Dallas Morning News during the summer of 2006. My editor, Mike Merschel, had been listening patiently to my old war stories for years. He suggested that I write some of them down and ofer them to our readers as a light summer entertainment. Maybe he thought that once they were in print I would stop inflicting them on him. In any case, I thank him for the opportunity to do the series and for his always careful and excellent editing of it.

  I also thank The Dallas Morning News for its permission to reprint these words and Dean Hollingsworth‧s illustrations of them, and especially Editor Bob Mong and Deputy Managing Editor Lisa Kresl for their help in obtaining that permission for me.

  The stories come entirely from my own memories, so there may be a few factual errors in them. Nearly all the people who could correct me have passed on, and their memory probably wouldn‧t be any better than mine anyway.

  I‧m fiercely grateful to that holy El Paso newsroom gangito, as some of us called it. They taught me everything.

  Bryan Woolley

  Dallas

  October 2009

  SECTION A

  I BEGIN

  One spring afternoon in 1953, my sophomore year at Fort Davis High School, I fell into a quarrel with my algebra teacher. She was handing back homework papers she had graded. She didn‧t give me one. I asked why.

  “You didn‧t turn it in,” she said.

  “Yes I did.”

  “No you didn‧t.”

  “Yes I did.”

  “Are you calling me a liar?” she asked.

  “If you‧re saying I didn‧t turn in my homework, you‧re a liar,” I said.

  The teacher grabbed my wrist
and led me to the office of George Roy Moore, the school superintendent. As we entered, she burst into loud sobs.

  “What on earth…?” Mr. Moore asked.

  The teacher — a young woman not long out of college -- blubbered incoherently. One sentence, however, rang through like a gong: “He called me a liar.”

  Mr. Moore asked no questions. He told the teacher to return to her classroom. She departed, snuffing.

  To me, Mr. Moore said, “Shut the door.” Then he said, “Empty your back pockets and bend over the desk.”

  I remember the contents. My right rear jeans pocket held my wallet and a white handkerchief, used. The left held a black pocket comb and a folded copy of Glory to Goldy, the school play we were practicing. I situated myself as Mr. Moore had instructed. He took of his belt, doubled it, and whacked my backside with it exactly 20 times. “All right,” he said. When I turned around, Mr. Moore was putting on his belt. Now tears glistened in his eyes, too.

  His family and mine had been friends for generations. We were not-too-distant kin. Mr. Moore had gone to school with my mother. My grandmother had been his sixth-grade teacher. Now she was a member of the faculty he led.

  I didn‧t mind the whipping much. Tough I had turned in the algebra homework, I had been wrong to call the teacher a liar in front of her class. Whippings were a common punishment for schoolboys in those days. Among a boy‧s buddies, a whipping was even a badge of honor, evidence of badass toughness.

  But Mr. Moore‧s tears made me ashamed. I knew they were for my mother and my grandmother, not for me.

  “There‧s no point in your going back to class,” he said. “Sit down. Let‧s talk.”

  I eased my tingling backside into the hard wooden chair beside his desk. Mr. Moore was a quiet man with calm blue eyes and prematurely gray hair, respected by everyone. He rested his elbows on the edge of the desk and laced his fingers together in here‧s-the-church-and-here‧s-the-steeple fashion. The blue eyes gazed at me for a long time. I remember the slow tick of the pendulum clock on the office wall. Finally, he said, “You‧re a smart boy, Bryan.”

  I silently agreed. In those days, I believed myself a lot smarter than I was, a self-delusion that experience eventually would correct.

  “What are you going to do with your life?”

  “Sir?”

  “After you finish school. What are you going to do with your life? Have you thought about it?”

  I hadn‧t. Not for an instant, unless you count my childhood yearning to be a cowboy like my Great Uncle Bryan. “No, sir.”

  “Why don‧t you be a writer?” Mr. Moore said. “I have a friend who became a writer for Newsweek. I‧ve always envied him. You have the talent.”

  He talked for the rest of the period.

  After the passage of 55 years, I still consider that conversation one of the three or four most important in my life. I wonder where I would be now and what I would be doing if that algebra teacher hadn‧t lost my homework and dragged me to Mr. Moore‧s office.

  I took his advice seriously. Themes and essays had always been favorite parts of my English and history classes. Now I wrote them as I thought Robert Louis Stevenson or Mark Twain might have done. I won an honorable mention medal in an essay contest sponsored by The El Paso Herald-Post about soil conservation, a subject about which I knew nothing. I entered the essay competition in the district University Interscholastic League meet. I won third place. (In my junior and senior years, I would win first place at both district and regional. As a junior I also won second place at the state meet in Austin.)

  About a year after my whipping, Mr. Moore approached me in the school corridor between classes and told me to come to his office immediately. My heart beat a little faster. I thought I had done nothing wrong, but I expected punishment. Why else the summons?

  He offered me the same hard chair and sat down behind his desk. An envelope lay on the green blotter. He gave it to me. “Read this,” he said.

  It was a letter from Ted Raynor, editor of regional news for The El Paso Times. Mr. Raynor wanted a stringer correspondent for Fort Davis. He wondered if Mr. Moore might recommend an appropriate person.

  In those days, stringer correspondents were the way city newspapers got news from the little towns in their circulation areas. Typically, a town‧s stringer would be the editor of the local weekly newspaper (Fort Davis had none) or some other citizen in a position to know what was happening in the place.

  The stringer didn‧t have to be a writer. He could just gather the facts of an event, call the Times and dictate them to whatever reporter wasn‧t busy at the moment, and the reporter would organize them into a news story of the appropriate length.

  At the end of each month, Mr. Raynor measured the number of column inches of news that the correspondent had contributed during the month. This was the correspondent‧s “string.” If he had a slow month and produced only 20 inches of news, that month‧s string was 20 inches. In a good month, his string might be 60 inches or more, especially if he covered one of the larger towns in Mr. Raynor‧s territory, such as Carlsbad, N.M. or Pecos, Texas.

  For each inch of his monthly string, the correspondent was paid 15 cents. For each photograph he provided, he received $2. If he provided 30 column inches of news and two photographs, for example, the Times sent him a check for $8.50. (The minimum wage then was 75 cents an hour.)

  Of course, I knew none of this at the time.

  “Would you like to do that?” Mr. Moore asked.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Fine. I‧ll write to Mr. Raynor.”

  In a few days I received a letter from Mr. Raynor, offering me the job. The letter said I would be a “correspondent,” a word that decorated my imagination with images of trench coats and fedoras and mysterious meetings in the rain. Mr. Raynor enclosed a printed sheet in which the newspaper told its stringers what kind of information they were expected to submit: Who, what, when, where, why, how, etc.

  Under separate cover, Mr. Raynor sent about a dozen large yellow envelopes. The address of The El Paso Times was printed on them, and in big red letters: RUSH: NEWS DISPATCH. In my mind I pictured an excited editor (Mr. Raynor, probably), waving one of these envelopes and shouting: “A dispatch from Woolley! Stop the presses!”

  In them I was to send Mr. Raynor news stories that weren‧t urgent enough to require a long-distance phone call, plus any accompanying photographs I might offer.

  I brought home an old Underwood typewriter from my mother‧s office at the courthouse (she was the county clerk) and set it on the library table in my bedroom. I placed packets of typing paper and carbon paper on one side of it and the stack of Mr. Raynor‧s envelopes on the other. The Fort Davis Bureau of The El Paso Times was open for business.

  But business was slow. In Fort Davis, a village of maybe 800 people in the isolation of the Far West Texas mountains, news was a rare occurrence. The “Fort Davis News” columns in The Alpine Avalanche and The Big Bend Sentinel, our neighboring towns‧ weeklies, were brief accounts of children‧s birthday parties, meetings of the Study Club and Sunday motor trips of Fort Davis citizens to Valentine and Balmorhea to visit relatives.

  I wrote a vivid account of a chicken-house fire and our volunteer fire department‧s quelling of it and mailed it to Mr. Raynor. He didn‧t print it, so I was paid nothing. Ben Bloys, a member of a prominent local family, died and I rushed a fulsome obituary to the Times. Mr. Raynor slashed it to three column inches, but he ran it.

  It was hidden among the back pages with the other obits. My name wasn‧t on it. It earned me only 45 cents. But those black words on that fragrant newsprint were mine and they were published. Thousands of people in West Texas and southern New Mexico could read them. I clipped the obit, read it over and over and over, and pasted it in a new scrapbook. Under the clip I wrote: “My first newspaper story.” Next day, I took it to the courthouse to show to Barry Scobee.

  Mr. Scobee was about 70 years old. In his youth he had bee
n a lumberjack and a merchant seaman and a soldier. In the 1920s, he was a reporter for The San Antonio Express, but came to Fort Davis for a vacation, fell in love with the place and stayed. “After Fort Davis, all that‧s left is heaven,” he used to say. Since he didn‧t know how to drive, he walked or hitched rides. In his brown fedora and brown cardigan and red bowtie he was a familiar and beloved sight about town. He was slightly deaf, but too vain to wear a hearing aid.

  He was the Jeff Davis County justice of the peace and coroner. His office was up the stairs from my mother‧s. His job didn‧t require much of his time, so he wrote short stories and novelettes for Ranch Romances, Masked Rider Western, Trilling Western and the other pulp magazines that made our drugstore newsstand such a gallery of blazing six-shooters every month. The pulps paid Mr. Scobee two cents a word for this work.

  He also was the town historian. He had published Old Fort Davis, a history of the frontier Army post on the edge of town. And he was the stringer correspondent for The San Angelo Standard-Times and my newspaper‧s rival, The El Paso Herald-Post.

  Mr. Scobee never had much money. “I never saw a coffin with saddlebags,” he used to say. He was the happiest man I‧ve ever known. Mr. Scobee welcomed me into his office. His roll-top desk and swivel chair were almost lost among wooden file cabinets, cardboard boxes, and piles of old newspapers and magazines containing his work. The narcotic aroma of musty paper permeated the gloomy air. Birdsong flowed through the open window from the trees on the courthouse lawn.

  To me, Mr. Scobee always had been an elder of the town, a man who had lived a long time in the mysterious adult world that I was trying to enter. Now, suddenly, I saw him in a new way. He was what I wanted to be: a writer. He became my friend and mentor and a sort of surrogate father, even though he was older than my grandmother.

  He praised my obituary, but agreed that Fort Davis didn‧t provide much news of interest to city newspapers, aside from the scores of our high school‧s six-man football games and the occasional murder trial. “Features,” he said. “You have to write features.”