News!

By Dan Smith

It is 1969 and young newspaper sportswriter Eb McCourry’s world is about to change. He is pushed into emergency service by the newsroom when an airline crashes near Asheville, North Carolina, and his first real news assignment is like a drug. With mid-sized American cities facing dramatic cultural makeovers, Eb leaps enthusiastically to the front lines and front pages in the newspaper industry, which has gigantic challenges of its own.
He faces looming deadlines, intricate and difficult cultural stories, investigations of murder, drug dealing and social justice. Abortion is still illegal, but demand is steady. The Vietnam War is intensifying as body counts increase. The Civil Rights movement has become violent and pervasive.
And Eb is learning as he goes, leading his young colleagues to affect internal changes at the newspaper as they learn the business and react to the realities of daily life.
The stories are real, based on people and events that made being a journalist one of the most exciting professions open to young, hard-driving idealists. NEWS! tells their stories in an unvarnished, straight-ahead narrative that reflects the urgency of beating the deadline with accuracy, fairness and truth—the way newspapers operated all the time, 50 years ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Propertius Press
• Release date: Jul 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005117269

Dan Smith

Dan Smith is the award-winning and bestselling author of books for both children and adults. His children’s titles, which include My Friend the Enemy and Boy X, have won him numerous accolades including the Coventry Inspiration Book Award, the Essex Book Award, and nominations for the Branford Boase Award and the Young Quills Award. Dan lives in Newcastle with his family.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Wednesday, July 17, 1969, 6:45 p.m.

‘IT WAS LIKE A WAR ZONE’

By Eb McCourry

Staff Writer

The tiny pink ear, a child’s ear, rested on the broad leaf of the mature fiddle fern, about six inches off the forest floor. It was streaked with fresh bright crimson blood that glinted in the morning sun. The ear looked like a presentation piece, lovely in the abstract.

Managing Editor Willis Osborne looked up from the four-page, double-spaced news story into the ashen face of young Eb McCourry, the boy he’d sent hours ago to write about this major airline disaster at the Asheville-Hendersonville Airport. Willis's brow was wrinkled, his bald head glowed with perspiration, his blue editing pencil was poised and scribbling, slashing.

Nearby a man’s arm, sleeved in an expensive charcoal wool suit, its stiff white shirt cuff pushed up, lay at the base of a large pin oak. A white tan-line around the wrist showed where a watch rested before someone stripped it and ran away.

Nearly 50 yards distant, the small white board and batten cabin appeared to have two chimneys. One was a chimney. The other was the lower half of what must have been an East Coast Express stewardess in white go-go boots and red hot pants, the new sexy look. Her legs reached straight for the sky as if she were posing in a water ballet. She had been thrown from the falling, gutted airplane through the roof of the house, head-first and buried up to her waist.

Willis stopped again, shaking his head and he emitted a sound… a groan, Eb thought. He made several sharp, swift marks across the page.

All around there were bodies, most of them not whole, none of them alive, some piled on top of one another, several strapped into airplane seats, one tangled hopelessly in a barbed-wire fence, a fence used to keep the cattle in. Curious cows sniffed at the body.

The acrid air was filled with the smells of motor oil and burning tires, jet fuel and death. The air burned eyes and nostrils. The emergency workers—firemen, rescuers, and policemen—wore aqua-colored surgical masks. Newspaper and late-arriving TV reporters, huge cameras atop their vans, covered their faces with whatever they could find. A photographer moved in close, getting shots of emotion, chaos, swirling smoke, desperate searches for life, aftermath.

It was a scene of war…

*

Willis Osborne, the veins in his brow swollen and red, picked up the pages and slammed them down on his large green metal desk, looked straight into Eb McCourry’s vacant eyes and shouted, You stupid sonofabitch, we can’t run this shit! What the hell do you think we have here? It’s a goddamn newspaper and it’s read by people who don’t want to get this close to anything in their lives.

Willis, a World War II Marine who knew war looked like this, threw the four-page story—one he specifically ordered in the morning rush to get a team on the scene—into the gray metal trash can beside his desk. 

With police response codes toning on the newsroom scanner shortly after the crash, he had instructed Eb to "get in that van and write what you see when you get to the crash site. I want it clear and plain and I want detail. Your skinny young ass is the best writer we have, and I want that crash on paper so everybody can see it. Capisce?"

Eb didn’t know what capisce meant, but he figured it out quickly. He wasn’t sure whether to be mortified, terrified or flattered. He was a sportswriter, a near-rookie sportswriter who had never covered anything more violent than a football game. 

He had no idea how to cover a real news event, no hint of what questions to ask, what details to gather, whom to approach, what to say, what to report. And for gruff, crusty, profane Willis Osborne to call him the best writer we have when he’d been a newspaperman—a sportswriter— for less than three years was hard to chew at this moment.

Get your ass back to your desk and write something I can run, Willis barked to the shell-shocked twenty-three-year-old whose nose was still covered with freckles and whose short red hair and muscular body said jock. 

Now, kid! We’re on a deadline here; this is not a high school annual, barked Willis, picking up another story from his desk to edit.

Eb’s knees were on the verge of buckling, his brightly colored Madras shirt soaked with sweat. He turned away, a hangdog posture outlining him, and trudged slowly toward the close-quarters sports department and his 1917 Royal typewriter, the oldest one in the Depression-era building, the one always assigned the rawest rookie. He had put plastic racing stripes on the back of the old machine and called it his Royal GT, his youth and enthusiasm spilling onto even the most mundane elements of the job.

Eb didn’t know what else he could write, how to approach an event of this magnitude: eighty-two people dead, all those families missing loved ones, a story of huge national significance, one that won small papers Pulitzer Prizes. He wasn’t old enough or experienced enough to have even the most cursory understanding of its width, breadth, and depth. And Willis Osborne was demanding a precise, full-color account that balanced real detail and family-publication sensitivity. Right now. This minute.

His heart was smashed on that paper now in the trash can and his stomach was in his throat, filling his mouth with acid. His hands shook uncontrollably as he recalled the crash site’s gruesome details. He wanted to throw up again, as he had several times at the scene. There was nothing left in his stomach except bile.

*

Eb had never seen a dead body before this day and now he had seen an entire acre of them, mostly dismembered. He hadn’t known the smell of death, the horror of seeing people’s lives suddenly and violently erased.

The baby’s ear had folded him, and he sobbed and vomited until gangly six-foot-seven-inch photographer Hanson Pinder grabbed him by the right arm, pulled him to his feet and said, Get to work, rookie. This ain’t no fuckin’ pajama party. We got stories to tell, not bawling to do. Save it for later. 

Pinder ran his fingers through a mop of scraggly dirty-blond hair, combing it off his face and put the Nikon F1 eyepiece in place. The camera snapped and whirred, its motor drive advancing the film instantly. His long fingers constantly adjusted the f-stop as he shot, bracketing for light, not wanting to take time to use his light meter, lest he miss something—a vital instant.

Eb was working with experienced professionals, some of them award-winners. They were covering the biggest story of their careers. It was a date that would linger for years in questions: Where were you on July 17, 1969? Eb was attempting to gather a coherent sentence through the overwhelming emotion of the moment. He was covering what the Fourth Estate called the first draft of history.

*

Long minutes later, Eb McCourry sat at the black steel typewriter and nervously wiggled his fingers on the keys for a long moment, like a piano player warming up. His mind centered on the blank copy paper feeling a story. Then he began to type:

‘IT WAS A SAVAGE MOMENT’

By Eb McCourry

Staff Writer

At 11:58 on a steamy Wednesday morning in the lush, summer-green Western North Carolina mountains near Hendersonville, an East Coast Express Boeing 727 was split open along the belly like a gutted rainbow trout by a twin-engine Cessna 310. Eighty-two lives, all those flying into ultimate darkness, ended and many hundreds more lives were transformed in that instant. It was a savage moment, one far beyond the comprehension of all but combat veterans…

Meanwhile, Willis reconsidered the paragraph about the stewardess’s body embedded in the roof. It was a strong, memorable image that encapsulated the violence of the explosion and crash without resorting to the raw piece of a baby’s ear. He retrieved it from his trash can, cut it apart from the remainder of the story and pasted it into the rewrite. 

The story remained violent, but as acceptable as it could be for a newspaper. It would, he decided, go on the front page of the paper. Above the fold.

CHAPTER 2

Monday, February 10, 10:22 a.m.

Just call me Ella, said the strawberry blonde, speaking in a near monotone that seemed to be coming from somebody else. She was uncomfortably close to Eb as she spoke, looking up at him. The ‘Ella’ of my byline is short for Eloise, which I hate. My mother called me ‘Weezie’. Sounds like a lung condition.

Eb self-consciously moved back half a step, chuckled, and investigated her open face. Can I ask you about being deaf? he said.

Yeah. You get right to the point, don’t you? she said. My deafness is often a social barrier, but I don’t mind. The more you know, the less of a problem it is. Ella moved closer, taking back Eb’s step.

People think I have all kinds of disassociated conditions, but I’m just deaf. Mostly I can have conversations with anybody as long as they face me and let me read their lips. They don’t even have to speak out loud if they’ll mouth the words.

Ella put a hand on Eb’s arm. I can talk on the telephone, using a TTY machine. I ‘listen’ to music, feeling its vibration. I love good jazz and rock ‘n’ roll with a solid bass line.

She didn’t sound at all defensive and as she talked Eb forgot about her accent.

Eb hesitated for a long moment, wondering if he should tell her. Then he jumped in. I know some American Sign Language, he said, trying to sign along with his words. It’s not a lot, as you can see, but I got permission in high school to take it instead of the foreign language the school required to graduate. All it offered was Latin and I saw absolutely no use in that. When we played North Carolina School for the Deaf in football, I really wanted to talk to the kids on the other team during that game and afterward but couldn’t. ASL seemed a hell of a lot more practical to me than Latin, unless I wanted to be a doctor, which I didn’t.

You didn’t want to be a duck? said Ella, laughing at Eb’s signed interpretation of doctor.

I told you I wasn’t great, said Eb. Maybe you can help me.

Maybe, said Ella. 

OK, maybe. Anyhow, have you had any problem adjusting from your college paper to a regular newspaper?

"Not really. I got a vivid introduction as an intern and then a stringer for the Washington Post. I’m told I talk differently than you do because I’ve never heard a human voice and I am forced to guess at what I sound like."

He had introduced himself as Eb, so she followed his lead. Where does Eb come from?

Elbert, he admitted, looking down, embarrassed. And no, I don’t much like it, but I was named for my mother’s brother, a good man, she tells me. He died before I was born.

Ella followed his eyes to his shoes. You don’t have any socks on, she said. Is that professional?

Don’t know. But that’s the way everybody wears Weejuns: no socks. You from out in the sticks or something? He patted her cheek. Ella pulled back.

She spun around to go back to her desk and Eb looked at her round bottom, tiny waist, dancer’s legs and feet that turned slightly outward. He almost said something else but knew she wouldn’t hear it. Boy, she’s pretty, he thought, considering her smooth, fair skin, hair from a Breck shampoo ad, and electric blue eyes. 

Then he caught himself. She’s not Lizetta.

*

1968

Monday, November 25, 3 p.m.

Executive Editor Dick Wemmer received orders from the publisher nearly a month ago, dictating a plan of action for integrating and diversifying the news staff at the paper. He was all over it because he believed in creating a workplace that mirrored the community he lived in. It would lead to a better newspaper, he insisted, if a wide variety of backgrounds, races and religions were represented among the two-hundred-fifty people in a variety of professions who worked at the Post-Tribune.

Wemmer was a Roosevelt New Deal Democrat, a war veteran and Southern Liberal, the kind who acted more than he talked. He was real, not a bullshitter who told you what you wanted to hear if you were a different color, ethnicity or from another community. He didn’t patronize, didn’t talk down and would fight for you when he wasn’t fighting with you. Wemmer called himself a liberal with a gun.

There was one glaring spot where Wemmer didn’t fully recognize what was coming: the status of women. He was perfectly fine with women in Society and would tell anybody who would listen that the paper had a woman reporter in Raleigh, covering the General Assembly. But he knew he was going to have to deal with women in the newsroom in the near future—whether or not he wanted to—and he was about to begin that process.

Wemmer had been on the road three days a week looking for recruits and was on his way to D.C. the first week after he got the memo. He found Ella Sikorski at Gallaudet College in D.C., the lone college for the deaf in the United States. She’d been pointed out to him by an Asheville used car dealer and long-time Post-Tribune advertiser who had a son at Gallaudet. 

Wemmer played golf with Rex Belmont and the last time they were on the course, Wemmer brought up the memo. Belmont told him straight-out, "There’s this kid in my son’s class in college—you know he’s deaf. She is a whiz of a journalist. She’s editor of the newspaper at Gallaudet and the Washington Post has picked up several of her stories. They even had her work with their reporters on one of them, the story about a girl who got raped at the school. She did some incredible reporting. Embarrassed hell out of the school but made quite a name for herself."

Wemmer ran his hands through his thin flat-top haircut, nodded and said, I think that’s what we’re looking for, but I would have to put her in Society for now. We’ll see how she works out if she takes the position we have open.

Two days later, Wemmer offered Eloise Sikorski a job. He awkwardly placed her in the Society Department where she couldn’t possibly be anything but unhappy. He made a solemn promise, holding his hand on his heart for emphasis, that she’d get the next newsroom vacancy. He wanted her that much for reasons good (she was capable) and marginal (deafness made her a minority). He offered $82.50 a week, two weeks’ vacation, moving expenses, and health insurance. Yes! she almost yelped. When do I start?

Ella was born deaf to a family in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Her early life was a struggle with poverty, neglect and abuse because of her father’s alcoholism. She educated herself informally, constantly reading, and becoming one of the brightest, most creative and resourceful students in public school. But her foray into mainstream education eventually came up short of her expectation. Most of the teachers and students didn’t understand that being deaf is simply a matter of not being able to hear and has nothing to do with intelligence. She endured the looks, the laughs, the whispered remarks.

A former neighbor, whose deaf child was killed by a drunk driver at the age of three, taught Ella to read lips and she became good at it almost instantly. Ella was crushed by the little boy’s death, a child for whom she babysat often. The boy had started teaching her American Sign Language before he was hit by the car. She got the sign language down pat, but when she talked, she sounded different from the other kids in school: a deaf person who's had speech therapy. The students didn’t want to spend the time learning ASL. Ella had never heard anybody pronounce the words she was learning, so she had no point of reference. But she learned. She repeatedly had to all but shout, I'm deaf, not dumb.

It wasn’t, however, until she was enrolled as a freshman at the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind in Morganton—the same high school Eb had played football against—on the recommendation of that same neighbor that she began to fly free, to expand both her skills and her interests. She was able to go South because NCSD offered her an academic scholarship, what the dean of the school called a full ride. Ella read voraciously, absorbing a wide range of books, talked to anyone who would listen, learned American Sign Language fluently and read lips almost flawlessly. She studied French and became conversational, speaking and signing it.

Hers was a story she hesitated to relate to her new colleagues at the Post. Would they understand? Would they care? She held back.

But Eb was interested, and he pressed. 

*

1969

Monday, March 10, 2:08 p.m.

Eb saw Ella at the water fountain and approached. I apologize for being a jerk earlier, he said after laying a hand on her shoulder to get her attention.

Jerk? she said. "I didn’t see a jerk, just an interested colleague. The question I have is, why do you want to know about me? Deafness isn’t a side show. I can do everything you can do, as long as you remember that I can’t hear you and make allowances by talking to me, not around me or behind me. It’s not that hard." Her pronunciation was crisp and clear, though thick-tongued.

Eb was embarrassed. I’m not being nosey, he said. I like you and I want to know about you. Is that so hard?

Her face softened. It’s just that I get so tired of being different, having to explain everything.

OK, said Eb. Tell me what you want me to know when you want me to know it. Understand that I’m interested, but I ain’t pushin’ you. That’s a pretty dress, by the way. You look good in red.

It’s pink.

Dick Wemmer leaned out the door of his office and said, Are you two about through flirting? I’m trying to get some work done here and I’m sure you both have work to do. Get to it.

 Ella didn’t hear the first part but saw Eb turn toward the office door and pick up the last of Wemmer's instruction. Yes, sir, they said in unison.

Eb investigated Ella’s embarrassed face and said, Were we flirting?

CHAPTER 3

Thursday, July 18, 8:15 a.m.

Eb ran to the elevator and said, Hold on! A hand reached around the closing door and held it for him. Thanks, Ella, he said, out of breath. He’d run from his racy black 1964 Oldsmobile 442, late for work again. Slept through the dang alarm.

Ella smiled and held out the morning edition of the Post. You’re up front, she said. Eb’s eyes opened fully and his brow wrinkled as he reached for the paper and opened it. 

Jesus! he said. Front page byline. My first. 

It will be your last if you don’t start getting to work on time, Ella said. Two hours late is pretty late. Can you still get your section done before nine o’clock.

Yeh, said Eb. No sweat. I did all the local stuff yesterday and all I gotta do is rip the wires, lay it out and get composing on my side. He smiled. Where did your crash story go?

My story?

Yeah. You went out with the news vans, didn’t you?

No. I wasn’t asked. She looked embarrassed.

Willis said everybody went, said Eb. Then he thought about his response. He hadn’t seen any of the women reporters from the Post. Ellen Martin, the only mainstream woman reporter, was in Raleigh covering a special session of the General Assembly and couldn’t be at the crash, but there was the whole Society Department, four women reporters, all professional.

‘Everybody’ means all the men, said Ella. We’re too fragile for real news stories. She wasn’t smiling. 

The elevator door opened and Eb motioned for Ella to step out ahead of him. He mumbled sonofabitch, so Ella couldn’t read his lips. 

What’d you say? she asked sharply. 

"Nothing. Nothing. I don’t understand. I’m a