Wordslinger: The Life and Times of a Newspaper Junkie

By Leonard Novarro

I didn’t decide to write this book out of some noble dedication to the field of journalism.

Or to revitalize “the good old days” by recapturing the past.

Or tell a great story or two while singing the praises of newspapers.

God knows, the newspapers didn’t always get it right, although they did get it right more than they got it wrong.

Now, in this era of the Internet and social media, the opposite often is true. How else would you explain the fact that millions in the United States and abroad believe in a conspiracy theory that a ring of Satanworshipping pedophiles, cannibals and sex traffickers are working to unseat the president of the United States and take over the world -- a theory that began at President Trump rallies in 2018 and one that he clings to, along with many of his Facebook and Twitter followers?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665560467

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© 2022 Leonard Novarro. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  10/12/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-6024-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-6025-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-6046-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022909589

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

This book is

dedicated to Rosalynn Carmen, Ellen Burns, and Frances

Kupidlowski Novarro for their inspiration, insights, and strength

and to the Asian Heritage Society and County

of San Diego for making it happen.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1     Based on Actual Events

Chapter 2     Fiorello and the Funny Papers

Chapter 3     There’s a Flying Saucer in the City

Chapter 4     Facts and Counter-Facts

Chapter 5     The Death Blow

Chapter 6     Endings

Chapter 7     Words Matter

Chapter 8     My Favorite Year

Chapter 9     By Any Other Name Would They Smell as Sweet?

Chapter 10   A Beatle, a Don, and an Ace

Chapter 11   Roots

Chapter 12   Good-Bye, New York; Hello, Florida (Or Best Friends and Other People)

Chapter 13   Of Migrants and Madmen

Chapter 14   Anything Goes

Chapter 15   Here’s the Rub

Chapter 16   Mayhem in Miami

Chapter 17   Back to the Future

Chapter 18   Hell Hath No Fury as a Woman …

Chapter 19   Taking to the Streets

Chapter 20   What a Way to Start a Movement

Chapter 21   Another Big Show

Chapter 22   A Delightful Interlude

Chapter 23   Recovery and Reaganomics

Chapter 24   America’s Finest

Chapter 25   Some People

Chapter 26   People and Places: A Fertile Field

Chapter 27   A Friend for All Seasons

Chapter 28   Places and Faces

Chapter 29   A New—ERR, Well, Chapter

Chapter 30   Day of Days

Chapter 31   We Get Letters

Chapter 32   Aftermath

Chapter 33   Loose-Hanging Fruit

Addendum

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Photos

References and Background

PREFACE

L ate in the afternoon on a muggy Miami day in the middle of May, with two hours of waiting accumulating in a sweat beneath my shirt, a black Cadillac sedan pulled up on the narrow side street and a voice from within beckoned, Get in. We drove off—but not before the man with the voice accompanying the driver wrapped a bandana blindfold around my eyes.

Twenty minutes later, as we pulled into a vacant lot, he told me, You can take the blindfold off and get out of the car.

As the sun left a sliver of late afternoon behind, the driver, bodyguard, and I entered an abandoned warehouse. In the middle of an open space, bereft of any furniture, a diminutive man sporting a short, precise moustache above a shirt of exaggerated colors and floral design slowly rose from a folding chair and motioned for us to step forward and join him. We each took a seat as I placed my tape recorder on top of a wooden crate separating us and introduced myself as a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel.

Do you know who I am? asked the man we were meeting.

I was told that you can give me some background on anti-Castro activity in Florida. Especially in Miami and Orlando, I replied.

I can certainly do that, he said. I can also tell you who was behind the assassination of Letelier, he added, referring to the September 1976 fatal car bombing of Chilean diplomat Marcos Orlando Letelier as he rounded Sheridan Circle on Embassy Row in Washington, DC. The assassination carried the scrutiny of every intelligence agency in the US, but no leads had been turned up—yet.

I pressed the record button on the tape recorder.

OK, please go ahead, I said, hoping that my uneasiness was not detected. Can you begin with the assassination and who organized it?

After ten seconds, the weight of a pregnant pause still in the air, he looked at me straightaway and said, I did.

Expect the unexpected.

When I started out in the newspaper business, editors must have recited that adage dozens of times. Surprises can be as delightful as actress Mitzi Gaynor, the star of South Pacific, stopping in the middle of a song as she sees you and yelps out your name during a sellout performance in Memphis, or as unsettling as Beatle Paul McCartney threatening to punch you in the face on a Staten Island ferry ramp. With some surprises, you narrowly escape death as a nearby cargo ship explodes, or you are touched deeply by the reaction of Rudy Jones conveying the reaction of an ill father to your profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov, I want you to know that you made a tired, sick, old man very happy and his dying a little easier.

INTRODUCTION

The really frightening thing about totalitarianism

is not that it commits atrocities but that it

attacks the concept of objective truth.

—George Orwell

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself.

—Coco Chanel

I didn’t decide to write this book out of some noble dedication to the field of journalism. Or to revitalize the good old days by recapturing the past. Or to tell a great story or two while singing the praises of newspapers.

God knows the newspapers didn’t always get it right, although they did get it right more than they got it wrong.

Now in this era of the internet and social media, the opposite often is true. How else would you explain the fact that millions in the United States and abroad believe in a conspiracy theory that a ring of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, cannibals, and sex traffickers were working to unseat the president of the United States and take over the world—a theory that began at Donald Trump rallies in 2018 and one that he clung to for the duration of his presidency, as did many of his Facebook and Twitter followers? But that was mild compared to what soon followed: the claim that this president won the 2020 presidential election when he was soundly defeated by almost 8 million popular and seventy-four electoral votes.

Before he became president of the United States, this soon-to-be giant scab on the political and social climate of our times was regarded as a loser and a huge joke in his native New York, where I grew up. Except for the New York Post’s Page Six, its gossip repository, he was reviled as a conman, carnival barker, and hanger on to people like Jeffrey Epstein, who actually did run a child pedophile ring.

Yet here he was, for four years, the most powerful individual on the planet, running a country of 330 million people into the ground.

It’s like watching Elvira host Santa Claus Conquers the Martians or being trapped inside a movie theater watching an endless loop of Reefer Madness.

The aim of practical politics, said writer and journalist H. L. Mencken, is to keep the populace alarmed by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Which is certainly the case here. As a result, before this book is complete, the United States will probably lose more lives than World Wars I and II and Vietnam combined because of a pandemic hailed as a hoax and an aversion to vaccines by an element of the population who doesn’t like being told what to do—unless like-minded conspiracists are doing the telling. We used to revere the First Amendment to the Constitution. It’s important. That’s why it is the First Amendment. While it guarantees freedom of speech, press, assembly, and the right to petition the government, we have almost half the population believing legitimate discourse to be fake news and legitimate assemblies to be threats to the government needing to be met by local and federal resistance. Indeed, to paraphrase the words of Willem Dafoe’s character in the movie Platoon, the world has definitely turned for us.

Wear a mask, don’t congregate in large crowds, and keep a safe distance—simple steps to avoid contagion during a pandemic, according to science and medical experts. So 250,000 bikers flock to Sturgis, South Dakota, without masks, hundreds gather in like manner throughout the country, and the leader of the country stages one rally after another in states where this devastating virus surges. At the same time, while declaring a hoax Trump readily admits otherwise to journalist Bob Woodward in recorded conversations, thereby giving new meaning to Mencken’s assessment of a democracy as the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage.

So why am I writing this book? Indeed, you could say, Trump made me do it.

But there are other reasons.

Pieces of history abound here, including the exploits of a man who flew into battle aboard what can be best regarded as a rickety crate to emerge as the main soul behind the most important plane in history.

It is sociology, in its attempt to unravel the dizzying array of emerging factors—technological, cultural, and economic—that could bring to its knees a publication like the New York Daily Mirror that produced almost a million copies a day.

It’s about unknown heroes, including my close friend Charlie Thornton, who became the first journalist killed in Afghanistan, and a publisher whose fortune eclipsed Rupert Murdoch, making him the most important media mogul of his time. And no, he was not William Randolph Hearst.

And it’s about individuals who at every turn were thwarted by powerful forces—governments, big corporations, and tradition—yet persisted.

Some revealed their so-called true character when the public spotlight was not on them. Others forged ahead and moved beyond danger, pathos, and even death because it was in their character to do so.

It is about change—fostered and opposed—and the heroes and villains behind both. And it is a mirror to those people and events who helped shape our future. Above all, it is a celebration of true heroes and a castigation of failed ones.

There are the famous, like Mitzi Gaynor and Paul McCartney, both of whom headlined The Ed Sullivan Show the same night in 1964 and both of whom appear in these pages, and the entrepreneurial spirit of a man who paid $1 for a warehouse of thousands of bricks once belonging to Wyatt Earp, then converted them into one of the West Coast’s signature hotels.

Des McAnuff changed Broadway, John Paul Rogers tried to change the Ku Klux Klan, and anti-Castroites failed at changing Cuba only to convert the streets of Miami into a scene out of Al Pacino’s Scarface.

Here, ordinary citizens became Don Quixotes battling more than windmills as they confronted a powerful force bent on wreaking carnage on their families, and a young freshman congressman named Al Gore Jr. emerged as their leader.

Dirigibles, plastic surgeries, Heimlich maneuvers, and massage parlors. They’re here, too, as are assassinations, attempted murder, and organized crime.

While newspapers today are reviled, there was a time when they were revered. In 1962, the largest city in the US was virtually shut down for months with their absence. This is the story of the industry they represent, but more so, it is representative or reflective of those like me who labored in it and what that industry left behind.

Today there is no semblance of honor in protecting the truth. Social media makes it impossible.

The whole landscape is too big, Megan Squire, an Elon University professor and computer scientist who studies online extremism, told me. The number of people you would need to truly police this on the platforms is inadequate right now. The resources just aren’t there.

With no semblance of honor in protecting the truth and protesting its abuses, this is the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley.

But while newspapers may be dead, writing isn’t.

The essence of solid communication is good writing, which I hope to share here as well.

Writing helps move others to your position, although admittedly harder and harder to do in this era of fierce tribalism. But done well, it can help sell products and ideas, move others to action, or enable them to share and benefit from your experiences or the experiences you write about.

Nothing builds a wall between you and your reader more quickly than poor grammar. Nothing breaks it down more than an effective use of tools, such as description and imagery, simile and metaphor, allegory and storytelling, and the predominant use of active voice. These devices should be part of a toolbox you can draw upon every time you tell your story. So this treatise is also a guide to what used to be regarded as good writing.

I use the second person you and your in addressing this topic, obviously to draw the reader into the discussion. This method may not be appropriate to use all the time, but it can enable you to reach accord with your reader and put you both on equal footing.

Tearing down walls or erecting new ones is your obligation as a writer. And your tools to achieve this are these literary devices.

I have used them all in my career as a journalist, correspondent, and writer. And they have earned me well over 150 awards, both national and local, including one of the most prestigious awards in America. The ethnic newspaper I founded along with my wife, Rosalynn, was also the only one of its kind to be honored by the San Diego Press Club—several times. I do know writing, which I also taught for ten years at San Diego State University and UCSD.

All of this is a lead-in to why I include articles and excerpts from my own writing as a major part of this book. (As a matter of style, I have set complete or nearly complete articles in blocks and excerpts from articles in quotes.) The articles are meant to reflect the times but also to acquaint readers with what was generally regarded as good writing—the kind you will rarely find on Facebook but may find in well-established publications. If you are a writer or inclined to be one, I hope that you benefit from this tool to navigate your own personal path to effective communication.

In compiling this personal record, I came across a file folder of dozens of letters saved over the years. I had forgotten that I even had them. One was partially cited in the prologue, and another will be included toward the end.

What struck me most was the trio of qualities that most of these letter writers cited in referring to my work: empathy, truth, and forbearance. Whether any of these words will return as a guidepost to future human endeavor is something we may never know.

But let us toast them anyway.

CHAPTER 1

BASED ON ACTUAL EVENTS

We’re a newspaper. A dying breed … Hell, we’re

already dead … But we keep coming to work.

You know why? Because it’s in our blood.

—H. L. Sudler, Night as We Know It

I t is a bygone age, this newspapering, and difficult to believe that this medium was the most powerful in the country only a few short years ago. But habits change. And people change.

There came a time when the general population would rather assemble its own news or views on the world from fragments on the internet or in the blogosphere, or whatever spheres were out there. Ingrained with a mistrust for just about anything official, including the government and legitimate news organizations, the public has been easily swayed by cries of fake news as well as claims they were being fed hoaxes, never mindful and in spite of this medium’s willingness, in general, to be tested in the arena of truth and to be held accountable for every word and claim that took up residence on its pages.

A lot of what passes for news today, mostly on nontraditional media, is pure fakery. But that’s the way the public prefers it. That’s what it is willing to pay for. The fault of the newspaper industry was in not recognizing this turn of events soon enough to determine how to combat it and forestall the inevitable. So today, when less than 30 percent of the American population turns to newspapers for its news, the majority of the public prefers an unsound footing on questionable sources as a vehicle in understanding the world around it.

It is too late to do anything other than determine the importance of what this medium once was and the role it served. Now, while this long-established medium is being tested and attacked on all fronts, may be the time to celebrate the lives of those who labored in it, for this is not just reminiscences; it is history. Those who plied the craft obviously didn’t do it for the money when the average salary for journalists and reporters was akin, in most cases, to the wages of a Walmart clerk or just a notch or two below the worst-paid teacher.

So why did we embark on this crazy career of newspapering and continue to do so as the signs of foundering grew deeper? Why persist in a career in which you are criticized, cursed, ostracized, screamed at, cajoled, and condemned for conveying just the facts? And that’s from your editor!

As Cassius once said to Brutus, The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.

I suspect that many did it for the same reasons I did. Out of love—for adventure, for writing, for tapping the best in humans, and for exposing the worst as best we knew how. I did it believing in the underdog. I did it to shine a light, however small, on hope emerging from the darkness of misunderstanding, prejudice, intimidation, and misrepresentation. I did it in hopes of inspiring and elevating one’s view of the world and what he or she might achieve. I did it believing that focusing on the worst would somehow inspire us to do our best.

If you asked those journalists who, like me, plied their craft during this period, from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, I believe they would answer with some variation of the above. I wrote this book not just to recap my career but to show how it reflected the times in which it occurred. To embark on an untraveled path, prevail in purpose, await in promise, and celebrate in revelation can be all encompassing.

And an adventure worth sharing.

Newspapers, obviously, are not what they used to be. But for anyone fortunate enough to have labored in the field between the late 1950s through the 1980s, when investigative reporting and colorful writing defined the landscape, it was truly a golden age.

It was a time when the New York Herald-Tribune boasted writers like Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Gloria Steinem and editors like Clay Felker. The Washington Post had its Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and the Louisville Courier-Journal, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer had their crusades. The squabbles of Gore Vidal and William S. Buckley, the columns of Robert Novak and James Reston, the satire of Art Buchwald and Herb Caen, the colorful reportage of Gay Talese and Truman Capote—they all dominated the scene.

But the man who dominated New York undeniably was Jimmy Breslin.

Breslin started his career in the sports department of the Long Island Press, where editor Mike Lee once told him, You’ll never make it in this business. Breslin left the Press for the New York Herald-Tribune and went on to become one of the most honored journalists in the country. He was especially known for his different approaches to a story. While most journalists would focus on main participants to an event, Breslin chose the unexpected aspects of a story and how they affected peripheral participants. One of his most memorable pieces viewed the tragedy of the John F. Kennedy assassination through the eyes and viewpoint of the man charged with digging the president’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery. The story that ran in the New York Herald Tribune became a classic taught in almost every journalism school in the country.

Imagine this: New York City, by