learned that the job wasn't about journalism, it was about grunt work. I swept up and helped with small printing jobs by stapling pages together. And to my great honor, once a week I washed the ink off the lead slugs in the flat page molds after the ancient press ran off a few thousand issues, wheezing and clanking all the way. If there is printer's ink in my blood, it seeped in the hard way. It took two or three days of steady washing to get that ink off my hands.
The good part happened when there was a breaking story and I got to cover it. One day it was a prairie fire west of town, and the editor let me race out with a notebook and a camera. I gave him a look so youthfully intense that I'm sure he smiled once I was out the door.
After graduation from the journalism school at Northwestern University, I went from being a newspaper reporter in Miami, Chicago, Omaha, and Milwaukee, to TV reporter in Milwaukee and then Minneapolis. My break was being hired by the Los Angeles Bureau of CBS News in 1978. I was the rookie correspondent, and that meant if a story developed in Portland at four on a Friday afternoon, I was the guy ready and eager to fly up and cover it. I would leave town at a moment's notice, which meant leaving my then-wife behind with shattered weekend plans ⦠again. It didn't take long before she grew convinced that she was always going to be second best to a good feature story that might get on the Evening News.
It takes a combination of blindness and arrogance to destroy a marriage. I had both with my first. We made it through thirteen years, had two wonderful girls along the way, and made several lawyers richer in our angry parting.
This was the state of disrepair I called my life when I met Jan, and I didn't think I had a lot to offer. I was broke and sharing in the raising of two young children with an ex-wife. Not prime material for one's dating profile. But Jan didn't see it that way, and I decided that my best plan would be to prove her right.
In reality, we didn't have that much in common. Jan spoke French (fluently) and Italian (quite well), and I didn't. She studied European art history in college, and I studied journalism, American history and politics. She got good grades, I didn't. She was bubbly and charming and had a raft of friends. I was quiet and distrusted life too much to have many real friends. I think it was these differences that so attracted me to her. I relished taking care of her, and she felt safe in our love, that I would happily devote myself to making her happy.
And when she cared for me, the world melted into the background and I found my solace in her. I got the far better end of this bargain because I was the beneficiary of her enthusiasm for life and her spirit of adventure.
She had other chances. There had been a first marriage, but it ended in disaster. She mentioned once that a rich Seattle lawyer wanted to marry her, but she turned him down. She wanted more, and I was it. I teased her about how she could have had an easier, somewhat more predictable and certainly more comfortable, life if she had married the lawyer. To which, of course, she laughed.
I worked to prove her right, and a way of doing that was creating special surprises for her. One year CBS brought us back from Moscow to New York so I could be the vacation fill-in anchor on the morning show news block. The stint crossed over September 1st, her birthday.
This was my chance to pay her back for all the things she did for me, like just loving me, which always seemed pretty amazing. I relished planning a special night for her because it meant thinking about the things she liked doing with me. This evening was going to be about sharing those things between us, so I arranged for dinner at the Rainbow Room on top of Rockefeller Center. We ate dinner and drank champagne while the city below glistened only for us. The orchestra played while I danced with her (badly) over and over.
When we got back to the
The good part happened when there was a breaking story and I got to cover it. One day it was a prairie fire west of town, and the editor let me race out with a notebook and a camera. I gave him a look so youthfully intense that I'm sure he smiled once I was out the door.
After graduation from the journalism school at Northwestern University, I went from being a newspaper reporter in Miami, Chicago, Omaha, and Milwaukee, to TV reporter in Milwaukee and then Minneapolis. My break was being hired by the Los Angeles Bureau of CBS News in 1978. I was the rookie correspondent, and that meant if a story developed in Portland at four on a Friday afternoon, I was the guy ready and eager to fly up and cover it. I would leave town at a moment's notice, which meant leaving my then-wife behind with shattered weekend plans ⦠again. It didn't take long before she grew convinced that she was always going to be second best to a good feature story that might get on the Evening News.
It takes a combination of blindness and arrogance to destroy a marriage. I had both with my first. We made it through thirteen years, had two wonderful girls along the way, and made several lawyers richer in our angry parting.
This was the state of disrepair I called my life when I met Jan, and I didn't think I had a lot to offer. I was broke and sharing in the raising of two young children with an ex-wife. Not prime material for one's dating profile. But Jan didn't see it that way, and I decided that my best plan would be to prove her right.
In reality, we didn't have that much in common. Jan spoke French (fluently) and Italian (quite well), and I didn't. She studied European art history in college, and I studied journalism, American history and politics. She got good grades, I didn't. She was bubbly and charming and had a raft of friends. I was quiet and distrusted life too much to have many real friends. I think it was these differences that so attracted me to her. I relished taking care of her, and she felt safe in our love, that I would happily devote myself to making her happy.
And when she cared for me, the world melted into the background and I found my solace in her. I got the far better end of this bargain because I was the beneficiary of her enthusiasm for life and her spirit of adventure.
She had other chances. There had been a first marriage, but it ended in disaster. She mentioned once that a rich Seattle lawyer wanted to marry her, but she turned him down. She wanted more, and I was it. I teased her about how she could have had an easier, somewhat more predictable and certainly more comfortable, life if she had married the lawyer. To which, of course, she laughed.
I worked to prove her right, and a way of doing that was creating special surprises for her. One year CBS brought us back from Moscow to New York so I could be the vacation fill-in anchor on the morning show news block. The stint crossed over September 1st, her birthday.
This was my chance to pay her back for all the things she did for me, like just loving me, which always seemed pretty amazing. I relished planning a special night for her because it meant thinking about the things she liked doing with me. This evening was going to be about sharing those things between us, so I arranged for dinner at the Rainbow Room on top of Rockefeller Center. We ate dinner and drank champagne while the city below glistened only for us. The orchestra played while I danced with her (badly) over and over.
When we got back to the
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