In 1969 I got a job as a general assignment reporter at the Passaic (NJ) Herald News. I had no background - I had taken no journalism course, never worked on the year book, never wrote for the school paper. But the editor, Art McMahan, decided to give me a chance and hired me.
When a new reporter showed up in those days - perhaps it's the same now - the old timers razzed him a bit. My name at the time was Mary Clarke but the guys in the composing room set my byline as Mark Clark for a week or two and I got some interesting comments from my colleagues. The compositors tended to have interesting nicknames and for some time I thought the guy who set my work was called Boldface Bodoni. I think it was Dave Carlisle who led me into that error and nobody told me otherwise.
My editor was Gene Murphy. Really great newspaperman. And a bit of a wag. My first serious assignment was to interview a lady in a local nursing home who was about to have her 100th birthday. She was suffering from dementia and her granddaughter had to answer my questions. But she didn't really know what had been going on 100 years before when her gran was born and the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves in the south were just a few years in the past.
So I came back to the office with a pitiful notebook filled with ??where was she born?? and ??was her father a farmer?? No idea. I did know she grew up in Virginia.
There was only one thing to do. I started with the lede: "Hard by the Rappahannock, Mary Smith was born to a humble family . . ." and wrote a lyrical reminiscence of Virginia long ago with a romantic description of tidewater Virginia and the hardships of life as a tobacco farmer. My editor loved it and I thought maybe I'd passed the test and the impossible assignments might be over. But my next assignment was to cover the story of a deaf woman who worked for New Jersey Bell. She turned out to be a brilliant and creative engineer who was helping the phone company find ways to aid deaf people to use the phone. The interview wrote itself.
A few weeks later Gene sent me off to interview a visiting speaker at a college in Wayne. I had never interviewed anyone in my life (except the lady with a hundredth birthday). The interviewee this time was Barbara Walters.
It didn't take her more than 30 seconds to figure out she had a novice on her hands. She could have just blown me off - she was perhaps the most famous American TV interviewer going. So when I stumbled along with, "Um, where were you born?" she decided to take charge. The rest of the interview went like this:
"Well, Mary, you probably want to ask me about growing up visiting my father's New York City nightclub and meeting famous people when I was a small child. I think that was part of what gave me confidence to approach prominent people." And, "I'm sure you're about to ask me . . . " And "Let me tell you about the time . . ." And "I was very lucky when . . ."
And on it went. She handed me a terrific interview on a silver journalistic platter. I went back to the office and wrote up the best interview Gene Murphy had ever seen. He always leaned his chair way back and put his feet up on his desk and when he started reading this he almost fell over.
None of it was my skill or charm. I had no idea what to ask or how to get someone to talk about her past. The story was a gift from a famous woman who took half an hour and made it a delight for a 20-something would-be reporter at a small and insignificant paper.
I confessed the next day what happened. Everybody got a laugh out of it. But for about 24 hours the Herald News thought it had discovered the 20th century's greatest reporter-interviewer.
