Chapter 2: I've Got Ink in My Blood

Me and my grandfather

​My paternal grandfather, who worked as a commercial printer until his retirement at 75, used to tell me people who worked in the newspaper/printing business had "ink in their blood." He was right.

My long career in newspapers started, believe it or not, in the sixth grade at Eastland Elementary in Fort Worth, TX.  That year, my teacher championed a project to launch a school newspaper, printed on a mimeograph machine. I quickly volunteered to join it.

We named it the "Eastland Eagle," and my first job was hand-draw an eagle that would be on the paper's masthead. Even though one of my other early aspirations was art, this eagle was not going to win any prizes. But I did get to contribute stories about what was going on at the school, and really enjoyed the whole process, especially seeing my name in print for the first time. Hey Mom and Dad, look what your son did!

Little did that teacher know he had planted the seeds for what would become a life-long pursuit.
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My first efforts at creative writing was poetry. English was always my favorite class, especially literature. In junior high, we were sometimes tasked with memorizing a poem which we then had to recite in front of the class -- a frightening experience that could easily leave one scarred for life.

But as I was introduced to the great poets, there was something about that form of writing that drew me in. It could so beautifully and powerfully capture feelings and emotions in rhyme and cadence that was akin to composing music. A great poem could stir the soul. For a young, would-be writer, it seemed the perfect vehicle for distilling all the joy and angst that comes with those early years.

I vividly recall my teacher reading aloud Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and listening with rapt attention to the plight of sailors on a becalmed sea:

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Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

One of my other favorites was Edgar Allan Poe. While best known for his tales of the macabre, his poetry could open rabbit holes that almost dared you to fall down, like his "Dream Within a Dream"

All that we see or seem,
Is but a dream within a dream.

Me on the left, my father and brother Ron

As a writer, poetry was appealing for its wide range of styles. You could follow rigid rules of structure, like iambic pentameter (lines of 10 syllables), or haiku (a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five); it could rhyme, or not; it could be short or long. I experimented with all the different forms -- I especially loved the challenge of haiku -- but mostly settled on a free form version that sometimes rhymed and sometimes didn't.

In those quieter moments, when I wasn't playing sandlot football or baseball, bicycling or mowing lawns to make money to buy superhero comic books (I don't even want to think what those would be worth today), I wrote poetry. But the more I wrote, the more evident it became writing in long hand was not ideal. Not only did my hand get tired, but also the bigger issue was reading what I had written.

People took one look at my cursive text and asked if I was practicing to be a doctor. It wasn't pretty, or legible. So I came to the decision that if I were serious about writing, I was going to need a typewriter.
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After making a convincing argument to my father worthy of a Perry Mason summation, and a lot of begging, he agreed to get me one. And he did. It was a used Smith-Corona that he picked up at a pawn shop in downtown Fort Worth for $35. The kicker? It was formerly owned by a reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, my future employer. But let's not get ahead of the story.

I couldn't believe it -- I had a typewriter! But there was still one problem: Learning to type. Since typing classes were not part of the 7th grade curriculum, there was nothing to do but teach myself. I mastered the keyboard one stroke at a time, and with practice, achieved decent speed using the tried-and-true "two-finger" approach, which I still use to this day. I discovered once you're programmed to type that way, it's very difficult to change.

Today, I'm proud to say I can hit 45-50 words a minute with minimal mistakes. But the 7th grade me did buy a lot of "White Out" to fix typos.

My obsession with writing poetry hit a zenith when my middle school asked students to submit their creative writing endeavors for a chance to appear in the school newspaper -- for me akin to waving a red flag in front of a bull. I got to work and wrote my longest poem to date, an epic I called "The Talk of the Frenchman." While the details of the poem are long ago lost to history, I think it must have been my homage to "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." When it was published in the school paper, it took up four pages of print.

I continued writing poems into high school, while expanding my efforts to essays, short stories and even a one-act play. My last real attempt at poetry came as a freshman at the University of Texas at Arlington, which held a creative writing competition. I'm proud to say my poem earned first place.
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While I got a lot of personal satisfaction from writing poems, it was pretty clear that wasn't likely going to pay the bills. Plus, by this time, things were moving fast in another direction: Journalism.

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Post Script

While most of my efforts at poetry have disappeared over the years, I did keep one folder of work from 1964 that I called "Summer Verse," written in the summer before my junior year of high school. Reading them again, the themes were mostly melancholy, the verses heavy with pathos -- reflecting a young teenager trying to make sense of it all. Much like his older self still does.

Here's one of my efforts, entitled "The Glove":

The Glove

The glove that knew a beggar's hands,
That hung in tattered rags from a lowly soul,
Now served a king, now felt pride,
Now felt a coin of gold.
But riches were not for this purple gauntlet,
And it withered with the lust of a ruling fool.
The cold of winter bit into the earth,
In the snow, a faded purple piece of cloth
Lay half-buried.
A wanderer plucked it from its place,
And it helped to warm an icy vagrant's hand.