Up from Haggerty Hill: A Journalist's Journey

By Jack Moseley

I want to share with you the publicized and the unpublicized people and events that for the most part have given me a life filled with fun and satisfaction. From my best recollections, I want to take you behind the scenes of both big and little news stories and tell you things you never saw in print or on television. --Jack Moseley.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 14, 2006
• ISBN: 9781477166680

Jack Moseley

I want to share with you the publicized and the unpublicized people and events that for the most part have given me a life filled with fun and satisfaction. From my best recollections, I want to take you behind the scenes of both big and little news stories and tell you things you never saw in print or on television. --Jack Moseley. As a newspaper reporter, editor and columnist, Jack Moseley and the newspaper he edited for more than a quarter century have been the recipients of more than 100 state, regional and national writing awards, including two National Mass Media Awards from the National Conference of Christians and Jews for the advancement of brotherhood and human understanding, two Media Awards for the Advancement of Economic Understanding from Dartmouth College, the top writing honor of the American Political Science Association and dozens more. During more than 45 years of journalism at every level, he became known as “the voice” of western Arkansas. While advocating economic, educational and social progress, his first concern always was the honest, hard-working people of the region his newspaper served. He continues to live, write and “enjoy people” in Arkansas.

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Copyright © 2006 by Jack Moseley.

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Contents

PROLOGUE: GOD BLESS THE HARACTERS

PART I: ORIGINS

PART II: DOING JOURNALISM

PART III: THE POLITICIANS

PART IV: SHORT SNORTS

PART V: IN MY OWN WORDS

Epilogue

DEDICATION

This book is for my daughters Dixie and Charlotte, two uniquely different people who have given me great pride and joy—each in her own way. My girls have made my life worthwhile, and I am so very proud and grateful to be their dad and to have lived to see the strong, beautiful, caring women they have become.

PROLOGUE

GOD BLESS THE CHARACTERS

There was a time in this business of newspapering—and not so long ago—when individual human beings were more important than statistics. When reporting news was a calling instead of a job, when underdogs always could find someone to listen in a newsroom, when newsmen and newswomen had a fierce spirit of competition and pride but still could be the best of friends and the people were not polarized into left and right, Democrats and Republicans, red and blue states.

News people were healthy competitors who respected one another and would even congratulate the opposition when they were bested on a story, then work like the devil to see that it didn’t happen again.

They were a special minority with an us against the world attitude. A strange combination of profane, romantic optimists, characters, oddballs and eccentrics who lived in a world of commoners and kings, who understood something of human nature, strengths and weaknesses. To them, The Front Page was not just an amusing little play; it was a way of life. Saints and sinners both had feet of clay, but news people knew and cared and understood.

Today in many of our hygienic, smoothly-operated, computerized newsrooms, those wonderful people have all but disappeared. But whenever news people gather, the characters always are remembered.

The gourmet managing editor, who ate sardines with cantaloupe at his desk for breakfast. Management never won the war with the cockroaches that this habit spawned, but he also was the fellow who had himself committed to a state hospital for the insane in Oklahoma, with only one state official knowing his true identity. Then that fellow died. By the time the newsman got out, he had more of a story than he bargained for, and mistreatment of patients was stopped. C. L. Douglas also was the man who wrote the most appropriate lead on the terrible New London tragedy when an exploding natural gas pocket beneath an East Texas school wiped out an entire school system—more than 200 kids from six to 18, teachers, administrators, everybody. It was short, simple, sweeping and powerful: NEW LONDON, Tex.—This town today lost a generation.

The woman reporter whose desk was just outside the men’s room. Caroline Hamilton always was very helpful. If your phone rang while you were in the john, she would open the door and say, You’ve got a call. Do you want to hurry up, or shall I take a number? That same gal came up with exclusive notes written by Lee Harvey Oswald less than a week after the assassination in Dallas.

The Fort Worth mayor’s wife who wrote for what in those days was called the women’s section of the newspaper. Edith Deen refused to jazz up the Bible as her editor suggested. Her idea was to run little, daily profiles of various women mentioned in that best selling volume of Sunday reading. Great idea, Edith, but you’ll need to make it interesting, not dull and biblical. You know, say Jezebel was a painted, dance-hall floozy. Shocked, she refused and wrote the series her own way. A New York publisher saw it. The ultimate outcome was a whole series of books about all the women, all the men, all the children, all the families, etc. of the Bible. Each sold in the millions.

Charlie, the sportswriter who drank a bit. Badly hung over, he showed up at the office three hours late one morning. The poor slob who had gotten out the sports pages for the first edition alone was not in a happy mood. Hell, Charlie, it’s almost noon, he snapped. Is it really? Charlie replied. I haven’t even had breakfast. I’ll see you later, he added, turning and walking back out the door. Still, Charlie could make grown men cry with his stories and columns on the trials and tribulations of athletes, who like him were only human.

The photographer who had been instructed to get an emotional shot of two sisters who had not seen one another for 40 years. But the sisters had the giggles, and the cameraman lost his cool. That’s enough, he shouted at the women. Our Father who art in heaven… The shocked expressions were just what his editor had wanted. Gene Gordon knew how to work with people in tragedy and triumph, and his pictures gave insight into the life of an entire city, from the awe of a child on Christmas morning to a raving Louisiana Gov. Earl Long, a pillow case over his head demanding a gun with which to kill all the reporter bastards.

The one-legged city editor who threw his crutches when he lost his temper, but took time to visit retired fancy ladies at an old folks home. Those conversations led to a National Headliners Award. Delbert Willis also went back to Japan years after World War II to find his former enemies who had riddled him with machine gun bullets so they could have a drink together and share war stories.

The woman who became one of the first females on the police beat when most of the men were drafted or volunteered during World War II. Every inch a lady, Mary Crutcher was feared and respected by lawman and the underworld alike. When either stepped over the line, she wrote it. She knew almost every local gambler, hit man, check bouncer, bandit and bully personally. She was known for being tough but fair—so fair that aging criminals came to her and gave her exclusive information when they asked that she alone write their obituaries when they died. Oh yes, she also literally had chased Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow after they killed two Texas motorcycle officers between Dallas and Fort Worth one Easter Sunday in the 1930s.

I’m sure there were members of that special breed in your business, too. But what has become of them?

Sure, there were some dirty tricks and some humdingers of character flaws, but for the most part, the hearts of the characters in your business and mine were in the right places.

I can’t speak for your business, but in mine, I don’t think just remembering is sufficient. Too many of us have allowed the machines and computers and cell phones to run the people, just the opposite from the way things are supposed to be. That cannot be allowed to continue. Dedication, calling, purpose, service, caring, fairness, compassion, forgiveness and optimism are still essential.

PART I

ORIGINS

All in the Family

I was born on an East Texas cotton farm while my father was out bird hunting, and from my earliest beginnings, very little in my life has been planned. The last of six children, I came along 20 years after my oldest sister and a decade after my nearest sibling, my only brother Bob. One sister enjoyed telling how Mother confided to her that she was pregnant while they were picking green beans in the garden. My sister replied, Oh, Mama, that’s wonderful.

What do you mean wonderful, Mother snapped. At my age, I could very well die. That was me they were talking about.

Good or bad, everybody needs to know something more than the biology of how they got on this earth. Without some understanding of the people and events that shape your life, there must be a mighty emptiness somewhere down deep inside.

Me? I’m the great-grandson of a Mississippi Riverboat gambler and a Cherokee princess, Miss Susan Anna Coche, on my paternal grandmother’s side. Miss Suzanna’s brothers were true Indian warriors, who headed west after the fall of the Confederacy so we can fight some more.

Granny never would discuss being half Indian, since respectable ladies of the Old South were only of French or Anglo-Saxon stock. We just don’t talk about that sort of thing, the finishing schooled Episcopalian would say. Maybe that was understandable, since Native Americans were not officially recognized as human beings in this country until well after the arrival of the Twentieth Century.

Still, I understand my great-grandmother actually was the one who did the proposing, and Francis Parker Smith, who went on to become a judge in Mississippi, told the Memphis beauty and future mother of their 16 children that he loved her dearly but could not marry her because he had gambling debts amounting to $500.

I’ll pay off your debts so we can get married, Miss Suzanna reportedly replied, but you’ll have to pay me back.

Miss Suzanna is said to have never objected to having a large family. Having babies isn’t all that much bother, and as long as you have a mammy who gets pregnant about the same time you do, she can nurse your baby and care for it as well as hers. It’s really no problem at all.

My paternal grandfather was an ordained Presbyterian minister, a lawyer, a school teacher and graduate of several of Tennessee’s finest private academies for Southern gentlemen. His family, which traced itself to the Bishop Moseley in England who helped force Prince John to sign the Magna Carta, also had owned slaves on a plantation somewhere around Phillips County, Arkansas. Young Mr. Moseley was a spoiled and miserable provider for his family. He proceeded to lose everything to a carpetbagger partner following the Civil War.

That sad state of affairs ultimately brought Grandmother Mary, her unemployed husband William Hillery Moseley and their children to East Texas, where she had inherited a sizable amount of land from her father at the East Texas community of Smithland, which the judge had established in 1843. They even brought along the family school teacher.

Alexander Augustus Moseley, my dad, never attended a public school a day in his life and had to drop out of the seven-student, family school at about the sixth grade to support his aging parents. Every one of the other students completed his basic schooling and went on to become a doctor, a lawyer or a banker. As a teenager, my father buckled on a gun, rode the mail, collected delinquent taxes, cut timber, did any honest work he could find and began buying raw, briar-patched land for $2 an acre. Ultimately, he would develop five small cotton farms and see that a proper education was available for every one of his children.

My mother was a Missouri school teacher who spent summers in East Texas with relatives. Dad was a handsome, dirt farmer with a fine team of horses, and he devoutly courted Miss Ethel—you dare not call any true lady by just her given name—for five summers as they shared box lunch socials, community dances, quiet buggy rides and row boat excursions on Caddo Lake.

Dad was a perfect gentleman—after all, he had dreamed of becoming a respected physician before economics shattered that hope—and he always bowed from the waist, tipped his hat and never so much as uttered a damn or hell in the presence of any lady.

Each fall, my mother would invite him to Missouri for Christmas, and Dad would write his one letter of the year, professing his undying affection for Miss Ethel but explaining that there was new ground to clear and chores he could not neglect. And of course, he looked forward to them being together once more the following summer.

After the fifth such letter, Miss Ethel wrote back, explaining that she likely would never be in East Texas again since she was dating the school superintendent.

Dad caught the next train headed north. He kicked open the school house door, sailed his hat over the heads of a room full of frightened children and announced: Jesus Christ, woman, I never said a goddamn thing I didn’t mean, and damn-it-to-hell, you’re going to marry me.

The wedding took place the following August. My mother always did have a way of getting my father’s attention.

When he announced he was going to buy a fancy automobile like his brother’s, my mother put her foot down. We’ve got an unpainted house full of children to rear and educate. Cars can come later. My parents never owned an automobile, although Dad bought several cars for relatives.

Dad continued his own education by reading and listening to my mother read the Harvard Classics aloud to her children in front of a crackling fireplace. He loved to quote Shakespeare.

In the late 1920s, he held back his cotton until he had 1,000 bales. This was to provide the cash that would make life secure, educate his children and allow the purchase of a shiny, new car or two. He wanted to sell that cotton for 50 cents a pound. After the Depression hit, he sold it for two and three cents a pound, then proceeded to lose the money he had in two separate banks that failed. But like Scarlet O’Hara, he always held on to the land.

He knew his Bible but refused to attend church because of the hypocrisy he felt his father displayed in daily prayers on his knees while his family did without. Dad would go fishing with the preacher, of course. Still, I remember hearing him pray sometimes late at night.

A segregationist, he called the black man who owned a little farm adjoining one of his pieces of land my friend. They hunted and fished together, helped one another with plowing and cotton picking. When his friend died, Dad even hired a lawyer to keep a white man from taking that farm away from his friend’s widow. But that’s different, he would say.

He believed Negroes—as he called them—were inferior, but white people had a responsibility to see that they were treated fairly. As a young man, he refused to join the Ku Klux Klan.

When I enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin in 1957, some people stopped speaking to my parents because the school was integrated.

Do you have any Negroes in any of your classes? Dad inquired when I came home for Christmas.

Yessir, in one class.

How many?

Oh, three or four.

And how many students are in that class, counting everybody?

Two or three hundred, I said. It’s a big chemistry lecture hall.

Hell, that won’t hurt you, Jack. You knew more than that on the farm.

Dad truly loved Christmas, which meant having family and friends for a big dinner, homemade eggnog, white fruitcake with fresh coconut, ground almonds and cherries as well as the traditional black version. One of the great joys of my childhood was traipsing after Dad holding my little hatchet as we headed for the home place to cut a Christmas tree for our family, plus one or two for the widow women in the neighborhood.

Dad didn’t give presents, but the invited Christmas guests always took home a ham or a side of bacon or half a five-layer cake. He did enjoy doing secret little things for people at that time of year. Things like anonymously delivering several Manhattan shirts to the schoolhouse janitor he had heard say he had never owned one but wished he had a starched, white shirt that he could wear to church. Dad even threw in a couple of neckties, which he left in a shopping bag on the man’s back steps. Seeing Mr. B. in one of those shirts always made Daddy smile.

He had a hog farmer friend who made a weekly truck run to a big bakery in Shreveport to get throw-away bread, crackers, cookies and cakes for his animals. He and Mr. Johnny delighted in rescuing still eatable bakery goods and swinging through the river bottom to give them to poverty stricken, half-naked tots with bellies bloated from eating dry macaroni to stave off hunger pangs.

In my pre-school years, I was powerfully religious. In fact, everybody thought I would grow up to be a preacher. After all, during World War II when everything was rationed, I would get down on my knees on the floorboard of the back seat of whoever’s car we happened to be riding and pray the tread-bare tires would not go flat. And I knew back then that prayers really were answered, because we never had a single flat during the entire war.

However, my much anticipated life in the clergy was cut short the day my mother heard the stream of filth that poured from my lips when I bit down on a stink bug while eating wild blackberries. I suspect that’s the moment I became predestined to be a member of the Fourth Estate, which sometimes is better known as the bastard profession.

When I was in the first grade—before a teenage driver managed to stop a