The Norman Transcript
April 27, 2008 12:21 am
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In any chosen career, there comes a time at the end of the day you can say you have made a difference and you are now part of a profession.
The grace period has ended. The training is over and expectations are high that you will perform as promised in the job interview.
A neighboring editor who cut his journalism teeth as a gumshoe reporter on fine Southern daily newspapers told my OU journalism students that each of them would have such a defining moment early in their careers. Some may have already had it on an internship or with the student newspaper.
Wayne Trotter, co-publisher of the Tecumseh Countywide News and Sun, recalled his moment came in the late 1960s in Memphis. It was at least a year after the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King. Trotter was assigned to cover a civil rights speech and march downtown.
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Trotter sat through a brilliant speech by the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, an aide to Dr. King and began walking with the marchers toward downtown. Police promptly arrested the march's leaders and bused them to jail, an action that was negotiated in advance.
The leaderless marchers and Trotter began walking back to the church where they had assembled. Before they reached the church, the situation rapidly deteriorated, Trotter told my students.
"The worst place you want to be is in a mob without leaders," he joked. He soon found himself between marchers throwing bricks and bottles and police firing tear gas at them.
His choice was to stay with the marchers or cross the police line and subject himself to the tear gas and somehow find a way back to the office and write the story.
He scratched and sniffled up to his copy deadline. Afterward, he took the longest shower of his life in hopes of getting the tear gas from his skin, all the while knowing he owned page one the next day.
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His recollection jarred my memory. What was my "defining moment" in my chosen career field?
It came on the police beat of the late Oklahoma City Times, a fine afternoon paper where police and city hall reporters wrote as fast as they could dictate into a telephone.
We carried a scanner, a two-way radio and a roll of coins for the pay telephone and drove around the city from 5:30 a.m. until our last deadline at 2 p.m. We went to the office to get our mail, weekly paychecks and an occasional woodshed visit.
Our desk was in the police department press room and we had the run of the building and its neighboring jail. We knew which officers to avoid. They didn't always appreciate our presence but most were respectful of the job we had to do. (It also helped to bring a stack of morning papers for the desk sergeant to hand out to the night shift guys heading home).
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Early one Monday morning, a child was kidnapped from her south Oklahoma City home and police feared the worst. My job was to write the daily search update with her family pleading for the safe return.
By week's end the family had nearly given up hope of finding her alive. The command post was ready to be moved out of her neighborhood when a call came in from the southeast part of the city.
"A retired man scavenging for aluminum cans near Lake Stanley Draper this morning found the missing child curled up under a carpet scrap on the side of the road. She was dirty, cold and hungry but very much alive."
It's been 30 years since I dictated that lead paragraph from the pay telephone at the lake's ranger station for the newspaper's final home edition but the words are just as vivid as if it happened this week.
Andy Rieger 366-3543 editor@normantranscript.com
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