Front-Page Girl , livre ebook

Front-Page Girl
DORIS O’DONNELL
Front-
Page
Girl
THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Kent, Ohio
© 2006 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2005036455
ISBN -10: 0-87338-846-1
ISBN -13: 978-0-87338-846-7
Manufactured in the United States of America
10  09  08  07  06   5   4   3   2   1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Donnell, Doris, 1921–
Front-page girl. / Doris O’Donnell.
p.  cm.
ISBN -13: 978-0-87338-846-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ∞
ISBN -10: 0-87338-846-1 (pbk. : alk paper) ∞
1. O’Donnell, Doris, 1921–
2. Journalists—United States—Biography.
I. Title.
PN 4874. O 46 A 3 2006
070.92—dc22            2005036455
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
In memory of two great newspapermen and editors, Howard Beaufait and Nat Howard, and my newspaper colleagues— smart, funny, tough, compassionate men and women. We had it all.
-30-
Contents
Foreword
Prologue
1 Zigzagging into Journalism
2 New Girl on the Block
3 Hare-brained Assignments
4 Gals in the Newsroom: The Way We Were
5 The “Cabbie” Assignment: Breaking through the Racial Divide
6 “Bad Boys”: The Mafia and Crime in Cleveland
7 Confession Time
8 Sam Sheppard Murder Case: Summer, Sex, Suburbia
9 To the Soviet Union
10 Me and the Cleveland Indians
11 Reporters and Politicians
12 Where Stories Come From
13 JFK—The Murder of the Century
14 “Burn, Baby, Burn”
15 On the Trail of Martin Luther King’s Assassin
16 The Glenville Shoot-out
17 Johnny Gay’s Federal Commutation
18 The Gun That Killed Bobby Kennedy
19 “What’s it like being a reporter?”
20 Investigative Reporting: The Difference between Cops and Reporters
21 Career Change: Time to Move On
22 Me and the Mayor
23 Newspapering in Pennsylvania and Beyond
Epilogue: Back Where I Started—Cleveland, Ohio
Foreword
T o people who know about journalism from Superman or The Front Page , Doris O’Donnell’s book will come as a real surprise. Here’s young Doris, straight out of parochial school, wearing heels and stockings with seams, suddenly in a world without women. No, she does not become a “sob sister” like Lois Lane; she turns into an ace reporter.
She had to earn her spurs to become one of Cleveland’s top reporters with such stints as being a cab driver and working in the county jail. You don’t win a story like the Dr. Sam Sheppard case because you happened to be in the newsroom when the story broke. You win it because you have become known as a top police reporter.
And her reporting counted. When Cleveland was hit by the Glenville race riots in 1968, managing editor Ted Princiotto refused to clear his front page the following Sunday for a story written by Jim Naughton, Joe Eszterhas, and Bill Barnard. “I’ve got a big Doris O’Donnell story about a big murder in Michigan,” he said. Hearing this, the three men quit (two later retracted their resignations). Such was the power of Doris’s byline. And over the years, the big stories fell to her: Cyrus Eaton, Anastas Mikoyan, and Mayor Carl Stokes.
Yet she still had to grind out her share of shorts that really were nothing but short paragraphs for ethnic events or stories being planted by advertisers or stories the city desk got from the promotion department, plugging the publisher or members of his family. Those, too, are what reporters have to do, even when they are stars.
Through the telling of all this, Doris serves up a taste of what life is like in that unnatural universe called a newsroom, where everything you thought you knew about life on a newspaper turns out to be myth.
S TEPHEN C. E SRATI Copy Editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer
Prologue
O n the morning of September 11, 2001, eyeing the television from the kitchen, I saw a black oily fire engulf the upper walls of one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. I gasped, amazed that a wild movie was on so early in the day. Then a plane swung low and smashed into the south tower, and I realized it was no movie. This was reality, and suddenly my old reportorial self snapped into action. I stripped off my gown, stuffed arms and legs into pants and jacket, cut the stove heat, raced to the bank, withdrew $500, filled the gasoline tank, and then sat there in the gas station. Where did I think I was going? To cover a story, naturally. Then reality jolted me—I was retired. Slowly I drove home, where, like every other American, I breathed in the television drama for hours, numbing myself in the process.
After that terrible day I saw an Associated Press story that quoted retired CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite: “When a big story is breaking, you want to be there. Not being on the air, that’s not important. But I’d like to be in the newsroom.”
My first fledgling publication was a handwritten neighborhood newsletter of events happening on Stickney Avenue, stories about the Kuntz twins, and the bootlegging operation of the Irwins. Dinner table conversation invariably focused on city politics, because my mother was entrenched in Democratic Party candidates and elections. I was a staffer on my high school newspaper in my freshman year and editor in my sophomore year, and I wrote editorials for daily newspapers on school bond issues. In the summer I worked on a suburban newspaper. Later I took night classes at college and worked on the college paper. Without the means to attend college full time, I went to work at a bank and later a war plant before I landed my first genuine newspaper job on a daily paper.
My dream has always been aimed at the newsroom, the heart of newspapers. This is a story of my dream, which began more than six decades ago when I became madly, insanely obsessed with becoming a newspaper reporter, influenced strongly by newspapers my father brought home from the firehouse, papers from Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dublin, London. I read everything I could about the women behind the bylines—Annie Laurie, Ishbel Ross, Nellie Bly, Imogene Stanley, Irene Kuhn, Lorena Hickok, Dorothy Dix. Their journalist lives, as mine would be, were shaped not by gender but by personal and economic needs and what freedom editors gave inside the city room. I saw a woman’s byline and fantasized that one day mine would be in newsprint. “By Doris O’Donnell”; I knew this was my destiny.
I am telling this story not as an ego trip but as a look back at the great life of newspapering. While it is a woman’s story, it is not sexist or antimale. In fact, without the encouragement of many men I would never have made it. But male competition did force me to work two, no three times as hard. (One day I had sixteen bylines in the paper; the managing editor blew a gasket.)
My generation of female reporters had the best of the profession, warts and all. Take it from a survivor—the past years in the newsroom were glamorous, frivolous, and deadly serious. The idea of being at the apex, the nerve center of everything happening in town, was enough to make your head spin. We loved the pace, deadlines, risks, challenges. We were in love with a dream, sometimes to the detriment of our personal lives. It was a career then tailor-made for those who wanted it all, who wrote about life served up daily in courts, city hall, schools, the street, the debutante’s ritzy ball. I was there every minute, totally consumed by getting and writing the story. When I fantasized as a child about what would someday happen to me, I never foresaw me in the presence of world leaders, talking with them, taking notes, and covering historical events.
For fifty-eight years I worked as a reporter for the Cleveland News and Cleveland Plain Dealer as well as the suburban Heights Sun-Press, News-Herald , and the Tribune-Review in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I hung up my hat at the Plain Dealer on February 20, 1996. Today, as I write these stories of the past, my memories, my history, lie in a configuration of boxes and cartons full of newspaper pages, carbon copies of stories, and steno books filled with miles of shorthand and longhand and half-finished sentences smashed down on paper with thick black copy pencils. My journalistic journey took me from the police beat to the Soviet Union, to courthouses and city halls, to murder scenes, to assassination sites. I was lucky. I got great assignments even though I worked with many men and women I knew were more talented than I was. But my special talent was working hard, producing copy on deadlines. I was like a whirling dervish when it came to pursuing a story, always conscious that being a reporter did not mean I was a one-man band. When I was on the bottom of the news chain—on the street where the action was—I was also on the top, because without the street reporter, the editors had nothing to work with and circulation had nothing to peddle.
I was lucky to work in the ferocious climate of circulation battles between three Cleveland dailies, where scooping the other paper was a daily challenge. Lucky, too, that we women who came into newsrooms during World War II weren’t fired when the men came marching home. Instead we were folded into the news business with the men and found our niches covering, among other things, food, kids, music, theater, sports jocks, business entrepreneurs, citizens of all economic and cultural status—from the homeless to millionaires. Although I handled my share of obituary writing and soft stories on octogenarians, I somehow carved out a niche from the police beat to investigative reporting.
Looking back at this rich tapestry of reporting, I recall most vividly my fellow reporters, editors, circulation guys, and the fantastic variety of people I met on the beats, from the top executives of Cleveland’s big steel plants and industries to the hustlers and hoods that hung around Short Vincent (a short street between East 9th and East 6th streets in Cleveland, where flashy restaurants were the m