The lesson went like this: Reporters have to go places other people are trying to flee. They have to interview people on the worst days of their lives. They have to observe things that would cause most people to avert their eyes.
Keep your mental distance, the veteran reporters would tell novices. Pretend you’re recording the situation through the lens of a camera — whatever trick it takes to hold it together until after deadline.
But later, after beers and bravado and a very dark brand of humor-as-coping-mechanism that reporters seem to share with cops and emergency room docs, someone would lower his eyes and begin talking about a story he couldn’t shake, an image that kept returning.
This week, as nearly 50 colleagues pack up the mementoes of decades of stories, memories are rising to the surface and stories pour out with little prompting. A bit of bragging about big, breaking stories. Self-deprecating grins as professionally humbling moments are recalled. But the most vivid memories are of stories that got under the skin despite sharply honed reporter defenses.
The stereotype of the hard-boiled reporter keeping the world at arm’s length doesn’t work when the reporter is 26-year veteran Sharon Schmickle, a grandmother, staring down at starving baby girls in a hospital in Afghanistan, their mothers too malnourished to nurse them. “I’ve seen a lot of grief, suffering and even blood over the years, but looking into those mothers’ eyes moved me so deeply I can never forget them,” she said.
It turns out the job of impartial observer is really very personal. When most of the journalists who took voluntary buyouts as part of the Star Tribune’s downsizing leave Friday, some intense memories and deep bonds to the community at crucial moments go with them.
Three years ago, Delma Francis was in Chicago, trying to piece together the sequence of events that led to the death of Vickie Evans, 18. The south Minneapolis kid was visiting a friend, chatting on the front porch, when she was caught in a drive-by gang shooting. The story of this inner-city girl’s death hadn’t gotten nearly the attention from the media as the murder of a suburban Twin Cities executive’s son that same spring.
“As I stood on the porch where her life’s blood flowed from her neck on that fateful night, I felt a tremendous responsibility to tell readers who this young woman was, what her hopes and dreams had been, to let readers know her worth and the depth of her mother’s loss,” Francis recalled. She’s been in the business for 32 years, but that’s the one “I will never forget.”
Chuck Haga has the gift of seeing grand stories in everyday lives and writes them with an authentic Midwestern voice of restrained emotion, humor and affection. “The story I most enjoyed doing was in 1988 when I talked editors into letting me follow John Steinbeck’s route in ‘Travels with Charley.’ ” For weeks his dispatches from travels through 36 states appeared in the Sunday paper. He recalled playing bingo with the Mohawks in upstate New York and dancing at a Cajun music hall in Houma, La., “with a woman who startled me by saying she had buried three husbands and was looking for a fourth.” Working on that project, he said, helped him know “Steinbeck, our country and myself better.”
But at this point in a career that started at his junior high school paper in 1963, the image that lingers in his memory is the father of Dru Sjodin. She was 22 years old when she was murdered in 2003. “It broke my heart every time I listened to Allan Sjodin smile and talk about his daughter,” Haga said.
Wander Kay Miller’s yard and she can tell you the birch tree out front was planted while she was writing a story on ex-prostitute Merilee Common. A brick patio went in while she profiled former Archbishop John Roach. Her life’s timeline is punctuated with consuming stories that dug deep into interesting lives — and followed her home at night.
One of those was the life of Susan Zanin of Spicer, Minn. Her sister, Aggie, had died in 1971 in one of the worst train wrecks in German history. “Zanin’s life had been defined, plagued really, by that loss,” Miller said. She had recurring nightmares “that Aggie suffered and, worse, that she had died alone.”
But in 2002, Zanin went to Germany and “through a series of improbable coincidences met the German man who had carried her sister out of the train, alive and comforted by his bulk.” Miller recalls the story as “healing not just for them, but for everyone who heard the story.”
Metro columnist Doug Grow has carried the story of Kathi Vonderharr in the back of his mind for a decade. At 15, Vonderharr was sexually assaulted by some members of a youth hockey team. At 18, she committed suicide. Grow said her parents turned the case over to juvenile authories, but “the boys never missed a practice.” Kathi, on the other hand, was verbally abused at school until she ended her life. “She never could get over the irony: Her assailants were heroes, and she was ‘a slut.’ ” Grow said he always thinks of her when he watches coverage of the “worship of celebrities, no matter their behavior.”
Other enduring memories of Grow’s long career, which started at his high school newspaper back in 1965, are not so grim. One of the state’s grand characters, the late Gov. Rudy Perpich, was in Zagreb, Croatia, after his election loss to Arne Carlson. Grow’s phone rang one day and “it was Perpich, who said ‘Grow, all journalists are dinks. But I have some hope for you.’ That was his way of inviting me to come do several days of interviews for a series of stories.”
It’s a tough business known for delivering some humbling lessons to reporters along the way. After more than 40 years of covering stories, including some major news, Dan Wascoe laughs when he recalls the story that brought the greatest reader reaction. “It was a consumer-finance column about the mysteries and costs of duct-cleaning,” he said. He got so much response he did a follow-up story. “Those two columns cast a bit of light into places that most readers seldom see for themselves — not a bad explanation for what we should try to do most of the time,” Wascoe noted.
Humbling. Moving. Fascinating. Fun. Personal. How we’ll miss their stories.
