Becoming a journalist

You’ll never forget your first job. When you earn your first real salary for doing real work is the day you validate your right to exist. Parental support can only go so far. Scholarships and emergency loans cannot go on forever. Never count on part-time employment or the generosity of strangers striking more than once.

My luck finally ran out in the fall of 1976 when I finished my master’s program in journalism at  New York’s Columbia University. I was in my late 20s and I became a rookie reporter for the Trenton Times  in New Jersey. My starting  weekly salary was a measly $170.

My friends in the Filipino exile community were far from impressed.

“You’re wasting your good education,” the most senior guy in our New York group told me point-blank as he took me out to lunch in Manhattan. “Nobody gets rich in journalism, even if you’re white in America.”

Another self-appointed adviser weighed in a day later at dinner, saying portentously:  “You’ll earn barely enough to pay your rent and you’ll be miserable in godforsaken Trenton.”

I did not have to be told that newly-minted MBAs drew salaries at least five times bigger than beginning journalists.  I knew I had zero market value in the corporate world. My Philippine passport had been canceled four years before and I was an overstaying alien facing a most uncertain future. 

For all that. I  was proud to get hired as a reporter. Journalism as a profession had never been more prestigious than in 1976, just two years after the Washington Post exposed  the Watergate scandal that brought down the disgraced Nixon presidency.

The paper that was taking a chance on me was no ordinary paper. It was the “farm” of  the Post itself  or where fresh and eager recruits were tried out before they moved on to  national reporting jobs in the American heartland, say, Wyoming or Detroit. Only after a few years more of “seasoning” would they be considered for a slot in the flagship paper in the nation’s capital.

My adviser at Columbia, once a crack UPI correspondent in Germany,  was brutally frank about my bleak prospects. “Make sure,” he said, “that you can stand small-town America or, if you wish to try your luck overseas, you won’t mind being a lowly stringer in some distant country where you could get asylum.”

Lightning wouldn’t strike, I was repeatedly told, unless I could hold out long enough to find some lucky break or opening somewhere.

But if  I was going to sacrifice personal comfort and sanity for a journalism career, my only non-negotiable term was that I wouldn’t move any place beyond three hours’ driving distance from New York, my preferred home in America.

The lousy pay did not matter. I was used to penury from the time I got stuck in the States  in 1971. Having given up my New York apartment and bravely moved down to Trenton, I was jolted back to my senses on the first day of work.

After the pleasantries with the urbane editor-in-chief  Dick Harwood, I was handed over to the news editor, a crusty old Trentonian  whose name I cannot now recall. He never smiled and barked orders like a pit bull at cowering reporters and copy boys alike.

“You sit here next to me at the desk,” he said gruffly. “You will do rewrites but I’ll have you started with obituaries.”

I had been forewarned that obits or death notices were mandatory for beginning reporters. It was a test of accuracy and pressure. In Trenton, a city with a large Polish population whose names had tricky consonants like Zs and Ws, you had to triple-check  names,  addresses, and heirs. You had to watch out for pranksters who called in hated relatives or neighbors as dead. You scoured the paper’s “morgue” or automated files for any material on the deceased, just to put in some color. You had to cultivate sources in hospitals, funeral parlors and hunt after heirs and next-of-kin. Often, you chased deadlines for late-reported deaths or accidents.

Far from being demeaned, I took the obits as a challenge or a way of understanding the ethnic mosaic that was Trenton, the state capital. I learned where the Poles, Italians, Irish and  Afro-Americans lived or congregated. Also why the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) had long fled northward in droves to country-clubby Lawrenceville, Princeton and the verdant horse country  of  Mercer and Hunterdon counties.

Within a month, my slave-driver news editor turned fatherly, perhaps because I never picked a fight with him and counted to 100 every time I was tempted to punch his nose. My next assignment was to rewrite police, City Hall, State House, and  community reports,  features on family pets, local gatherings, even garage sales.

We were an afternoon paper so we were at the desk before 7 a.m. and we would be closing pages by 11 a.m. Unless there was breaking news, a long lunch awaited in some Italian restaurant a short drive away. At 2 p.m. we were back to work on features, enterprise stuff or extra work to earn a byline. We called it a day at 4 p.m. It was high-pressure work in the morning, but a walk in the park after that.

My living arrangements, however, left much to be desired.

I took a room at the YMCA a few blocks from the paper, right in the heart of Trenton’s inner-city slums. This spared me from a daily commute from and to the suburbs, more so because I had no car and still couldn’t drive. My immediate priority after work was to take driving lessons in preparation for the day when I could save enough money to make a down-payment on a second-hand car.

On my first day, the instructor taught me the basics of starting the engine, fixing the rear-view and side mirrors, applying the brakes, noting the following distances, giving signals, etc. Then he ordered me to the driver’s seat with him on the other front seat with controls similar to mine.

“Move forward,” he said as I nervously pulled out of the curb. “Keep going, that’s fine, okay take the right lane and accelerate.”

I almost froze with terror. He was nonchalantly telling me to enter the freeway. I held my breath and just followed his instruction. Before I knew it I was getting a hang of the tempo of the traffic. Then he said to take the next exit, turn right at the next light and go into the first gas station and park.

“That was great for a first lesson,” he said as I managed a tight smile, not wanting to let him know I was trembling and about to pee in my pants.

The next nine lessons were a breeze, after which we went on to the state’s motor vehicles center for the driver’s test. Everything went well until I got to what I dreaded most: parallel parking. I took a deep breath and nailed it.

In two days, I was headed for a car lot to pick up my very first car, a light blue Ford Vauxhall. This was to be my chariot for the next three years of my life in Trenton.

Having the car took me out of rewrite and to a prized beat assignment in Mercer County. I was on my own and had full control of my time. My main task was to attend township council and various board meetings — planning, zoning and school. All were held at night after work since elected officials held day jobs. Articles were written early next morning for the afternoon paper. Most of the day I was free to drive all over the lovely western corner of New Jersey, only divided from Pennsylvania by the mighty Delaware River, to hunt for feature or Sunday stories.

My beat was a historic part of the nation. This was where George Washington crossed the Delaware in the darkest days of the Revolution of 1776. Here the saying “winter soldier, summer patriot” was coined, meaning it was easy to love your country in summer when it was bright and warm and victory seemed imminent; it was a test of character when the weather was frigid cold in winter and defeat stared you in the face.

Finally having wheels liberated me from my state of denial about the miserable life I had been leading at the YMCA. I could no longer bear the thought of coming home as late as possible and never leaving my drab room  except to go to the loo or take a shower. I hated to sound age-ist but I felt oppressed in the company of old men, mostly whites in their 60s and 70s.  At night, they would fart as if in unison in some demented symphony orchestra I was condemned to suffer just by being there, unprotected by paper-thin walls.

I made it my business to scour the want ads for an apartment share around  Princeton University, the epitome of Ivy League snobbery. I was interviewed by a nice guy my age, also an anglophile journalist and accent to match, with whom I bonded instantly. We split expenses, had separate rooms, shared kitchen and bath, and kept friendly distance from each other. Privacy was never an issue.

Our otherwise grand residence was a big cut of one of the Princeton’s historic red-brick mansions along Nassau Street, the impressive main drag that led up to New Brunswick, the next big town, and out to New York on weekends. We were on the second floor, my room right above the big entrance parlor downstairs. Century-old trees and a manicured lawn gave the place an air of old-world charm and respectability.  

Having a nice place to come home to was a great blessing. But I had plenty of free time and nothing to do after work from Monday to Friday. I spent quiet evenings at home going through the entire opera records collection of the town’s library. For the next 10 years I was a subscriber to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, watching all the great singers in the best opera house in the world.

What did I get out of my three years with the Trenton Times?

In so many words, I got the best introduction to American politics, government and way of life that any foreigner or outsider could possibly get.

The most important lesson I learned was that Americans take politics most seriously at the local level. They rant and rave about whoever is in the White House or the state capitol, but they zero in most of all on affairs at the township or borough level. They care about how the local elementary school is run, the condition of the streets in their neighborhood, and what houses, buildings or factories are being built in the vicinity. With taxation always came demands for proper representation and service to the people.

I attended many board meetings jampacked by residents who did not hesitate to confront elected or appointed officials about matters they felt aggrieved about. People really bothered to turn out after work or in the middle of a snow storm to have their voices heard. It was democracy in action, sometimes heated and confrontational but always civil, the kind of dynamic interaction between government and citizens that I never saw in the Philippines. Nobody came to blows. Opponents always shook hands after impassioned clashes. Fair play was built into the rules of the game.

Journalism at this level mirrored this admirable state of affairs. Phones at the office would ring as soon as our paper hit the streets about some misstatement, lie or even just wrong spelling. We had staff to read and answer letters of complaint, which came by the sack.  In small cities like Trenton, tabloid gossip could only be tame and non-sensational; in handling even the most scandalous developments we had to be extra careful about people’s feelings and any collateral damage.

If in business the customer was always right, in our newspaper the reader was king. Subscribers outnumbered newsstand buyers and every cancellation of subscription was dreaded like the plague.

Indeed, New York City seemed like a distant planet, although it was just 60 miles away. I met a septuagenarian lady, Dorothy Bayless, a community gadfly who attended every board or council meeting I covered and became my good friend. She proudly told me she had never been to Manhattan. Her lifelong advocacy was to keep the earth from being completely covered by asphalt and concrete.

“We have to save this earth from greed and ignorance,” she never tired of saying. “We have to keep our environment forever clean and green.” She was anti-development, anti-tax and anti-big government and proud of it.

Dot Bayless’ somewhat eccentric activism proved to be a bracing tonic to the awesome corporate, imperialistic and idyllic America that Hollywood and the mass media had imprinted in my mind long before I ever set foot in the United States.

The tradition of a free press I could not have learned more deeply than in otherwise slow-paced Trenton and its liberal environs. Every cent I earned seemed a bonus to the splendid education I got in the true and untrammeled libertarian spirit of the great people who took me into their keeping when I was young and angry and down on my luck.