Thirty years ago, as the Louisville Times’ newest reporter, I set out in my best dress and high-heeled shoes to cover my first assignment. I carried my camera and a determination to show my new bosses what I could do.
I succeeded too well.
My assignment was to do a feature story and pictures on a new swimming team practicing at Central High School. I interviewed the coach, then, to photograph the swimmers, I stood on the narrow walkway between the swimming and diving pools. As the children splashed, I took one step back to keep my camera dry.
I looked up and saw water closing over my head.
Staying on the pool’s bottom seemed like a good — and certainly the most dignified — choice. I opted instead to save my camera.
The immediate result of that decision to resurface was the largest collection of wet-behind-the-ears jokes known to an American newsroom.
The long-term result was a 30-year career that ends with this column today.
I am retiring from the newspapers that have given me an extraordinary opportunity to watch this community grow and celebrate, writhe and change through 30 tempestuous years.
During those years, the community has wrestled with the consolidation and racial integration of the Jefferson County school systems. It has accepted — with some resistance — women into most areas of business and public life. The people of Southern and Southwestern Jefferson County have developed clout and nurtured development. Our economy has weathered a wrenching transition from manufacturing to service. We have struggled to build bridges between Kentucky and Indiana and between the city and its more rural neighbors. Refugees from around the world have sought to resume their lives here. We’ve made refugees of hundreds of good local folk so the airport — and our economy — could grow. Out-of-town companies have bought local institutions, accelerating a transition in civic leadership. The city and county have voted to merge governments. The population has aged as well-educated young people moved away. And a strained, distrustful relationship between people who are white and those who are black has bracketed the entire period.
Preparing for retirement, I’ve looked back on all those changes from the perspective of a reporter and editor who helped cover them, musing on what they all mean and searching for a lesson the community can draw from this slice of history.
I haven’t found one. Instead I recall a series of events and images that speak powerfully of an age of conflict and change.
Indeed, I had hardly dried out from my swimming pool christening when the conflict began.
As the education reporter, I covered the events that led a federal judge to order busing to desegregate the Jefferson County schools.
Today, among some, it’s fashionable to recall the glories of all-black education. In the early ’70s I didn’t hear much about that, although I spent a lot of time in schools. The city’s crown jewel, Atherton High School, was overwhelmingly white. The schools with stinking restrooms, inadequate supplies and sagging academic achievement were resoundingly black.
In the wake of the busing order, many white families resisted sending their children into those formerly black schools. Some kept their children home. Some turned violent.
Shortly after school opened in 1975, I found myself outside Fern Creek High School waiting for the school day to end. Around me, a seething crowd of white adults shouted obscenities and taunts as an ordered line of poised black students walked to their buses. I watched in helpless horror as the crowd used sticks to beat on the passing buses filled with children and as some people in the crowd gathered rocks to throw. The next morning, I saw a bus pull into Fern Creek Elementary dripping with eggs thrown by protesters.
I did not understand then — I do not understand now — how adults could do that to children.
Of course, there was a lot I didn’t understand in those days.
I hadn’t understood when a Courier-Journal editor said the newspaper didn’t hire women for its newsroom because there were too many places you couldn’t send a woman. I didn’t understand why women in the Times newsroom were paid less than men. I didn’t understand when the Kentucky House of Representatives approved a patently unconstitutional bill to deny women the right to sit at a bar, but I wrote the story nonetheless.
Later, as business editor, I would learn that denying women and black people equal opportunities to accumulate capital cost this city dearly over history, that it may have allowed cities like Cincinnati to overtake us.
But in my early days, the discrimination was personal.
My approach was simply to do as many things as possible that people doubted I could do.
So it was that I climbed an Eastern Kentucky mountain to cover doubting forest-fire fighters and held my own as the fire burned in grass near my feet and in the trees above.
But when the fire was tamed and one of the firemen summoned me to come down the steep slope, my hiking boots failed to give me traction. I arrived at his feet centered squarely on my posterior — precisely on top of the lovely rare wildflower he had summoned me to see.
That mixture of grace and tenacity led me from reporting to editing in an age when newspaper editors were still expected to drink their coffee black, their whiskey straight and maybe to smoke a cigar for good measure.
If breaking into the male-dominated newsroom culture was hard, weathering the changing corporate culture was harder.
In 1986, the Barry Bingham family sold the media empire it has assembled over 70 years. The Courier-Journal went to the Gannett Corporation. The adjacent Standard Gravure printing operation and the WHAS television and radio stations went to other owners.
Suddenly we faced corporate owners whose culture was foreign, whose familiar words had different meanings, whose orders seemed disconnected from the region we immodestly thought we’d served pretty darn well.
Banks and corporations all over town were facing the same culture wars, but that was no comfort. When it comes to their own business, newsmen are wonderfully myopic.
In that stressed atmosphere, things suddenly got much, much worse.
Joseph Wesbecker, a Standard Gravure pressman with a history of mental health problems, took an AK-47 into his workplace, which was connected to The Courier-Journal, and began shooting.
The voice on The Courier-Journal’s emergency public address system that day told us to evacuate the building, but didn’t tell us why. From a fourth floor window, I’d seen a bleeding pressman on the sidewalk, but no one had any idea that eight good people would die and 12 others would be grievously wounded simply for coming to work.
The newspapers’ editors gathered stupidly on the curb across Broadway from our building, in easy range of an AK-47. We watched as ambulances parked crosswise on Broadway and EMS techs ran, pushing stretchers through the little park where we liked to eat lunch.
Finally Wesbecker ended his carnage by shooting himself. Publisher George Gill walked across the street and told us “He’s dead. I saw him. He’s dead.”
Few of the people who criticized the newspaper’s coverage of that day understood that the newspaper staff lacked the dispassion journalists are expected to bring to a big story. When we were allowed to return to our office to put out the paper, we crossed a line of police crime-scene tape, passed bullet holes and skirted a line of gurneys awaiting the dead. I directed my staff of business writers as hearses lined up outside my office window. And, as word of the shooting spread, I took a call from my young step-daughter’s school and struggled to explain to my child that someone had come into the safe office she had visited since birth and shot people we knew.
That day remains clear in my mind because I see it all again every time I hear a siren as I cross Broadway or eat lunch where the EMS techs ran.
Many others in Louisville remember it, too. As public editor, I’ve answered dozens of questions from people who recall that the next day’s newspaper ran a large, black-and-white photograph of a dead pressman on the front page. The editors wanted to show the effects of a gun in the work place; the readers recoiled and felt for the victims’ families.
Even when readers disagree with the newspaper — as they frequently do — listening to the people of this state for the past five years has been one of the great pleasures of my career.
Thousands of people have called or written or invited me to meet with their organizations. They’ve given me hell — and glimpses of how they live and think and dream for the future.
I’m deeply grateful for those opportunities to listen, to try to understand others’ points of view. I wish more people could have a similar chance to meet people and hear the stories that shape them.
Listening to the people of Jefferson County, Southern Indiana and the region that surrounds us has convinced me that the people of this community don’t understand each other very well.
We may have ridden the same boat up and down through 30 tempestuous years, but we still struggle with differences of geography, race, religion, economics, sexual preference and corporate origins.
We don’t trust each other yet.
As I look back over the 30 years, I can’t find a lesson, only an all too obvious question: Will we ever learn to work together?
I’m not sure, but this fall I plan to start a new career as a college teacher. I’m hoping the answer is in the next generation.
