Feb. 13, 1961. I boarded a Boeing 707 with only six other passengers in Scotland and headed west…leaving my homeland with my two cardboard suitcases for my journey to a new life and a new world. Fifty years ago today. It’s a significant date in my life.
I had made my decision to leave my job as a weekly newspaper editor in the north of Scotland because I felt confined by a union shop that insisted I could only do certain things in the production of a newspaper. I chafed under this when the union went out on strike – a strike I didn’t believe in. So I began looking around at the world’s possibilities.
I met a sea captain in my regular bar in Inverness, and he told me he would be sailing to South America in a few days. Did I want to sign up as crew? It was an exciting possibility but I hesitated and the ship sailed. At around the same time, I received a letter from the Hong Kong Police Department, offering me a position as sub-inspector of police in Hong Kong. They offered the position based on the simple fact I was British and white. That, in their view, automatically qualified me to supervise a bunch of Chinese policemen. Silly, silly people.
It was an intriguing offer for the lure of Asia was strong in my heart. But I also knew I’d be a lousy cop because my genetic makeup made me constantly question authority. And then the National Union of Journalist’s newspaper in Britain ran a story on its front page which told about a small daily newspaper in New Hampshire that was seeking to employ a British journalist in a reporting position. Pay would be $75 a week. Since I was being paid $20 a week I applied along with (I learned later) 284 other British journalists.
The paper’s editor picked an English guy, Larry Masidlover, who worked on Fleet Street in London. They liked him (even though ultimately they had a problem with him because of his unwillingness to bathe!) Three months later they decided to hire another Brit. I was chosen and three weeks later, I had received my green card and had bought my one-way ticket. Age 20.
Back in those days, if you were British you were considered a desirable immigrant and there was no impediment to getting into the U.S. so long as you had a job.
When I arrived in Logan Airport in Boston, I was met by the newspaper’s managing editor, Ray Brighton. He shook my hand but I sensed a moment of hesitation as he looked at me. “I can’t let you leave the airport without shaving off your beard,” he told me. “New Hampshire isn’t ready for a beard.” I stopped in my tracks. New Hampshire wasn’t ready for a person with a small Van Dyke beard? That made no sense to me. I had grown the beard in a desperate attempt to look older than my 20 years. But Ray was adamant. I negotiated with him that he would pay for the shave. We stopped into a barber shop in the airport and the barber made me acceptable to enter New Hampshire.
Fifty years on I have my beard. It’s much, much greyer now. And, I’m also happy to report that Ray Brighton grew a beard in the late 1960s. So America can change. America did change. And it needs to change much, much more.
In 50 years, I have lived through America’s golden years, as well as its darkest hours. I was a reporter in Rochester, N.Y., when President Kennedy was cut down in Dallas. I watched my managing editor marshal his newsroom resources with quiet skill moments after the news flash announcing the president's death. It was on my watch that Rochester, N.Y., riots erupted in 1966 and I went into the ghetto with a Canadian reporter and was spat upon and rocks were thrown as we made our way into the heart of the war zone. I had just put the newspaper to bed, as we called it, and had gone home when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. It was the only time I ever issued the order to "Stop the presses." I drove back downtown in Rochester to remake the newspaper that night. I was the editor in charge the night Apollo astronauts circled the moon and sent back the astonishing picture of earth-rise with the blue marble of earth rising above the grey moonscape. I remember the struggle of convincing a group of union engravers that I wanted to remake the front page with the earth-rise picture covering the top half of the front page.
I still think of my decision to come west as the most important decision of my life. All good things have sprung from that fork in the road.
I would not have met my bonny Jo.
We would not have produced two beautiful and talented daughters and, now, they have produced four grandchildren.
I would not have had the agony and ecstasy of working on some of the best newspapers in the U.S. – as well as some of the worst.
And I would not have been able to work with some of the finest writers, best editors, world-class photographers, designers who have worked in the U.S.
I would never have met my first news editor, Bob Norling, a brilliant, irascible editor who loved to stir the pot and make The Portsmouth Herald better every day.
Nor would I have been touched by sparkling, raw talent like Bill Duryea, now national editor of The St. Petersburg Times. I gave him his first job as a reporter and then manager editor of our principal weekly newspaper in New Milford, Connecticut.
How would I have found the sparkling writing talent of Michael Marzella, with whom I worked in St. Petersburg and, later, at The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His prose was poetry. His ability to grab a reader and illustrate bizarre concepts like the history of bricklaying or the creation of a time capsule entertained and dazzled readers. He is a diamond.
And I think particularly of the utter unmitigated brilliance of Jose Azel, a young Cuban-American photographer whom I hired for The Miami Herald. He was a diamond in the photographic firmament - and remains so to this day, running his own photo agency.
My particular friend, Richard Curtis, my assistant newsfeatures editor at The St. Pete Times, grew into a design giant as the managing editor of photography and design at the founding of USA Today.
The best - definitely the most courageous - journalist I have ever worked with is Gwen Lister, editor of The Namibian. I worked with the people in her newsroom three separate times for a total of more than 10 months. She is without peer as a leader, an ethical, moral force in her country. She has been imprisoned, her newspaper has been fire-bombed. But she pushes ever onward. She is respected by her readers as is no other journalist I have ever met. And she has trained black men and women to be excellent in their craft. My beloved black brother, Oswald Shivute, has been my primary teacher to the ways of his people. He has been the door-opener to the horrors of apartheid, to HIV-AIDS, to the raw brutality of unjust tribalism. I love this man for opening so many doors for me on my journey into the heart of Namibia. And I have great admiration for a brilliant white reporter, Maggi Barnard in Swakopmund, on Namibia's west coast. She was the one who introduced me to the cultural shock of a black enclave called the DRC, outside of her pretty town. The poverty and humiliation of life in that township was so overwhelming to me that I could not get out of the car to talk with the people. But Maggi wouldn't let me shrink back from this. The next day, she gave me a sheaf of used paper and we returned to a kindergarten in the DRC. I gave the used paper to the teacher and the teacher introduced me to the children and then their mothers. The dam was broken. My eyes were opened to the spirit of those who lived in abject poverty but who retained the sense of pride and self.
At the top of my list, though, is a petite Burmese woman, Hla Hla Htay, whom I taught in Cambodia. Hla Hla was shockingly shy but made of titanium. She was strong 'way beyond her 95 pounds. I received a call from the news agency Agence France Presse bureau chief in Bangkok, asking if I knew of any Burmese journalist who might be a candidate to run their bureau in Yangon (Rangoon). I said I was thoroughly impressed with the strength and brain-power of this diminutive woman who was currently in the journalism class I was running in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I arranged for Hla Hla to meet with the bureau chief when she passed through Bangkok on her way back home. I sat down with Hla Hla in my office and spent hours teaching her how to interview for a job with a western news agency. I taught her about eye contact, about projecting competence and self-assurance - all of it counter-intuitive to Hla Hla who was astonishingly shy. She set out for the interview and the bureau chief gave her the job on a trial basis. Her pay jumped from $50 a month to $1,000 a month. Hla Hla is still out there seven years later and I had the pleasure of being able to look at her pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi when she was released from house arrest earlier this year.
All of my work years were preparation for becoming a teacher/mentor/guide to journalists in every corner of the world – perhaps the most worthwhile endeavor of my life.
Had I not struggled to make newspapers better in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Connecticut, I would not have had the training to go into the most interesting places in the world – Bhutan, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Borneo, Nepal, Singapore, Colombia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Namibia.
When I flew to Bhutan, tucked into the snow-covered peaks of the Himalaya, I remember the editor of the only newspaper in that country, Kinley Dorgi, tell me about auspicious moments. He saw everything through the lens of auspicious moments. I had brought him a book called China Wakes by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryll WuDunn. Kinley had just read a review of the book that very morning in his precious copy of The Economist. “This is an auspicious moment, Robert,” he told me.
So Feb. 13, 1961, is my auspicious day. It is that moment Robert Frost wrote about in “The Road Not Taken”. This is what he said:
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Not many have taken my road. But one has. I gave Lisa Schellinger, a new graduate back in 1981, her first job as a rooky reporter in Warren, Ohio. Today, Lisa remains my friend and she followed my path by going out into the world to give of her skills. She has taught/worked in Fiji, Cambodia, Afghanistan, among other places. She still is making all the difference in Afghanistan where she is a guide/mentor in the creation of a news agency, as well as creation of a school.
Now we look forward to new adventures. You may remember the Monty Python skit in which they are making fun of the Black Death in England. "Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead," was the cry onstage. A skinny guy in a white nightshirt is thrown onto the death cart. "I'm not dead, yet," he calls out. And so it is.
