Front Porch: Scrapbook brings flood of newsroom memories

I was just a pup in 1968 when I joined the staff at The Spokesman-Review. I was fresh from Florida, a bride of one year and someone who had only been west of the Mississippi River (coming to Spokane) once in my life.

I had worked briefly for the Miami News when I walked into the newsroom here. And it was here that I had fascinating professional experiences, including covering the Sunshine Mine disaster in 1972, interviewing the famous and infamous and having the strange experience of reporting on the showing of what was considered by city officials to be a pornographic film (“I Am Curious Yellow”) at the Fox Theater. Along the way, firm and lifelong friendships developed, and my husband and I found our place in the world – Spokane.

I had the occasion recently of revisiting, in a fashion, those days and some of those people, especially the small group of same-aged reporters, who, like Bruce and me, had come from elsewhere, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, to establish our lives and careers in a new city. Without other family here, we made family among ourselves – sharing holiday meals, celebrating birthdays and births and, sometimes, sorrows.

While on another task two weeks ago, I came to be aware of a newsroom album, a group of photos – mostly in black and white – going back to the 1950s, candid shots of reporters, editors and others, people now mostly gone from the planet, but people who were important in my professional and also personal life. Libby Kamrowski, newsroom archivist and photographer, kindly let me browse through it.

It was a dose of nostalgia, delivered like drinking from a firehose. So many faces and names, names I’d forgotten until suddenly, there they were, and my memories of them once again fresh. Several of the men – and it was mostly men in those days – were middle-aged when I met and worked with them.

One was news editor Roger Conley, who had a mischievous hobby of creating a scrapbook of headlines which should never have appeared in print, but somehow made it past all editors and actually saw the light of day – at least for the early edition, which went out to Montana. They usually got pulled for the Spokane edition, so readers in the Lilac City never got to see those beauties.

I remember Jim Bracken, managing editor, a formal man who would never appear in the city room without his suit jacket on, even when the temperature there was 103 degrees (we measured it one summer night) and who was most definitely not noted for his sense of humor. One time we were both walking silently toward the city desk during the porno movie episode, and just before he turned off to go to the composing room, he dryly turned to me and said, “See any good movies lately?” I was dumbfounded and completely left without words.

I remember, too, that after having struggled through a wheat field to cover the crash of a crop duster – navigating those big clods of overturned earth wearing high heels and hose and a dress – I determined the next day, dress code be damned, to wear a pantsuit to work. Mr. Bracken (as everyone called him) never said a word. It was the early 1970s, after all, and even a man of his starch recognized that an archaic dress code could be allowed to slip away.

There were a lot of behind-the-scenes editors and production people in the album – John d’Urbal, Seabury Blair, Jack Phillips, John Reid, Ed Triplett, Linda Stein and more. Happy to report, some are still alive. However, those senior reporters and photographers like Jack Roberts, Jim Smith, Harry Missildine, Joel Ream, Jim Shelton, Frank Parker and Spokane’s pioneering woman journalist, Dorothy Powers – are all gone now.

But among the tight circle of young upstart reporters that I inhabited – Tom Burnett, Larry Reisnouer, Kent Swigard, Bill Morlin, Ed Coker, Les Blumenthal and others – we are mostly still out there in the world – all of us senior citizens now. Some have died, but, as life would have it, I am not in contact with most of them anymore, though two of the spouses remain very close friends. Time moves on and away from us.

As I flipped through the pages, I recalled and relived in my head so many of the experiences, remembered so many of the quirks, outrages and wicked senses of humor that inhabited the newsroom. And the pranks. I felt again the late-night drives back from covering a tragedy with another reporter, the laughs over the habits of one editor (better remained unnamed) and I remembered how we pulled together.

One evening – way, way before cellphones and the digital age (we were still using manual typewriters) – I was calling in a story from Kellogg for the Montana edition during the Sunshine Mine disastert, which took the lives of 92 miners. But something was going on, so I broke off the call. I did a little fast legwork and learned there were survivors. When I called back to city editor Paul McNabb, he gathered the troops, dispatched additional reporters and photographers and geared up. We witnessed and chronicled in the newspaper that came out the following morning what happened when the only two survivors walked out of the mine on a dark and misty night.

Sure, the reporters and photographers were out front, but I knew what it took to get that edition out, the teamwork of professionals behind the scenes who coordinated and put it all together. There they were – all in the album – frozen in time as young and middle-aged men and women.

For a moment, it was good to be that young reporter again, visiting with friends and colleagues from long ago. To see their faces. To remember them. To remember the me that I was back at the beginning.