It was about six months into working as a Substandard Press reporter when I first began to think I wouldn’t be fired the following day. Most gradually, I started to gain a tiny bit of confidence that it might be possible to make a living being a professional observer of humanity and recorder of obscure bits of it. I also, quite frankly, fell in love with Hoosick Falls. The more I grew familiar with the community, the more I liked it, a small town in upstate New York struggling to get by but very willing to share what it had. Over 40 years later I still think I couldn’t have picked a better place to learn about real journalism, and, on a much broader scope, what it took to be a responsible adult.
In many communities, I might have been hung from the nearest lamppost for my first six months of terrible blunders in print, or at least had my car vandalized, but then my crudely hopped up 69 Camaro wasn’t worth vandalizing, even when it ran, which it often didn’t. When the Camaro wouldn’t start, I travelled to many news events on a rat Triumph chopper, another dangerous, rusty and despicably loud mode of uninspected and clearly illegal transportation. That old Brit bike also leaked as much oil as it burned, which was a lot, and this common Triumph condition led to the now classic statement: “Old Triumphs don’t leak by accident. They just like to mark their spot.” If the street hasn’t been paved in front of my old apartment, I’d bet I could still find evidence of my “spot,” most apt testimony to me as a stain maker as much as the machine’s contributions.
My motorcycle also lacked a state vehicle inspection sticker, and this wasn’t due to just neglecting to present the two-wheel monstrosity to the appropriate official. The missing safety inspection tag was instead directly the product of so many serious mechanical flaws that even the most lenient of inspectors rejected the murdercycle the moment I pulled into the parking lot. The only worse motorcycle in my memory actually on the road at the time belonged to a friend who built his extended set of front forks out of used galvanized plumbing pipe. This same friend helped me keep my old Triumph running, so you get the picture. Because my job often involved a lot of contact with police officers, I always worried I’d get arrested when I arrived at a given news scene, instead of getting a story, but I can’t remember one negative comment when I pulled up in either of my rolling wrecks.
If I had to sum up Hoosick Falls in a single word it would be “unpretentious” and I’d follow that, especially in my case, with “forgiving.” I guess it would be fair to say Hoosick Falls was a working class town, but this is not to say there weren’t many very well educated and most sophisticated people, many I grew to know well as my job often brought me into contact with them. Still, Hoosick Falls was what is commonly called a “mill town,” a place heavily populated by blue collar workers in various industries and trades.
At the turn of the 20th century Hoosick Falls was an economic powerhouse with twice the population it had when I moved there in 1976. The industrial revolution brought the Walter A Wood Mowing and Reaping Machine Company enormous success due to demand for modern farm equipment that greatly increased food production. Wood’s innovative designs were extremely popular and sold internationally, and at one time over 1100 people worked at the factory. But when I showed up the big factory was long gone with many others following its demise and Hoosick Falls was very much a town in decline. Cracked sidewalks fronted many frowning vacant buildings with broken teeth windows, strangely haunting images all over town staring silently in testimony to better days.
In all fairness, Hoosick Falls’ economic woes weren’t unique or largely if at all caused by some sort of conscious error in leadership. At the time of my entry into the fake news world, the entire upstate New York region suffered from a steep recession caused in part by the Arab Oil Embargo that made energy prices skyrocket. Also part of the problem was the decline in government spending after the Vietnam War.
Another negative factor was businesses moving from the heavily unionized labor force of the North to more business owner friendly states in the South. This same movement of capital to even cheaper labor markets in places like Mexico also had its impact. While fairly oblivious to a lot of this at the time, I was quite aware of the less than good job market I met when I first left college and grateful I’d managed to find employment in the field I’d studied, unlike a lot of college educated friends who wound up running a cash register or pushing brooms in order to make any kind of a living in the area.
In many ways, Hoosick Falls was like a lot of small towns in upstate New York, down on its luck and struggling to get by year to year. One difference I greatly appreciated was an unusually large proliferation of fine drinking establishments, at least nine inside of the small village. I could walk out of my office in about the center of the village and literally hit three beer joints with a stone. Quite a few other fine booze providers were just past the town lines.
I’d guess part of the reason so many bars existed in a small village like Hoosick Falls was a combination of history, state laws and geography. Hoosick Falls was just about on the border between New York and Vermont and within easy driving distance from Massachusetts. With New York’s drinking age of 18 as opposed to 21 in the other nearby states, for many years hard-drinking groups of young people made weekly pilgrimages to Hoosick Falls where party time became a major business. This was how I first discovered Hoosick Falls myself as a teenager. A lot of people like me who weren’t 18 learned it wasn’t too hard to get a beer with the right attitude, and even easier if fake ID employed. Judging by the age of many of the bars, I’d also guess quite a few drinking establishments were holdovers from when the town was much larger, ownership passed down over a generation or two, the one now in charge just trying to keep the bar doors swinging for a few more years to pay the electric bill.
Friday and Saturday nights could be pretty rowdy and I suspect the size of the Hoosick Falls Police Department, larger than most other small towns, was staffed as it was just to keep the peace on weekends. Still, I can’t recall any major disturbance, and it was my job to record these.
One of the preconditions of my first reporting job was that I move to the community I was assigned to cover. Even though the mandate made sense to me originally, over time the requirement’s wisdom became even more apparent.
I lived in what I called “the cave” due to its lack of windows, a second floor apartment right over a bar, Saluzo’s. The bar became a most familiar place, the environment very much like the old program “Cheers.” Everyone really did know my name, and I always felt welcome, except one time I’m about to explain when I learned a most important lesson as part of my new job.
I generally never went inside Saluzo’s during the week because it was almost impossible to get out of it without a strong beer buzz, and I didn’t have time to be foggy as I already made way too many mistakes stone cold sober. Someone was always buying a round of beers, and then I’d eventually feel obligated to reciprocate, and before I could gracefully exit, the process rolled over again and again. Consequently, I usually only entered on Saturday or Sunday afternoons to watch a game on TV and visit with my new friends.
It developed into a regular routine. I’d drink beer and comment with the crew on whatever was on the tube and then walk upstairs to enjoy a fine feast, a cheap frozen pizza, and then off to bed. Sometimes I’d just settle for typical upstate New York bar fare, pickled eggs or kielbasa with a side order of saltine crackers, the salt content in each gourmet meal enough to raise anyone’s blood pressure by 10 points or more.
Just like Cheers, it was common to be announced like Norm, but seldom by given name. Often I’d get, “Hey, it’s scoop” or equally popular “Clark Kent” and occasionally “Bob Woodward,” the latter comparison I actually liked even though no where near Woodward’s standard.
One afternoon I met nothing but icy stares and the psychological chill overwhelmed and frightened me. I had no idea what I’d done, until someone told me.
“It was pretty lame you putting Chuck’s wreck on the front page,” one woman finally explained. “He didn’t do anything to deserve that.”
“Chuck,” not his real name, was a very popular guy because he really was a decent person. When I took the photo I headlined “Upside Down with No One Around” I thought I was being cleaver and knew I had a newsworthy shot.
Chuck rolled his VW Beetle right after a snowstorm, and when one of the windows shattered, a line of beer and wine bottles spilled out to lead up to the overturned Bug sitting wheels up in a ditch. I later compared the line of booze bottles to the tail of a dead armadillo, a common roadside scene all over the South, the creature’s legs stick straight up when dead on its back, often reminding me much later of Chuck’s VW. Sincerely, the photo would have made a great “Don’t Drive Drunk” poster, and based on the evidence, this sure seemed to be the case.
Chuck was never charged with DWI, however, and only with leaving the scene of an accident. People later told me the many bottles were from a bag of household garbage and that Chuck was sober when he crashed, the accident caused when he swerved to avoid hitting a deer, an extremely common problem in the area.
To this day I don’t know if the story many related to me was true or if Chuck really was bombed out of his brain, or just as likely, a combination of both beer and wild animal. What I do know is that I convicted the man before he had his day in court and neglected to provide an alternate explanation, or at least give the guy a chance to defend his actions before I crucified him on the front page of his hometown paper. Further, even if Chuck had been guilty as charged by me, I began to agree with the main objection most had, and that was putting Chuck’s misery on the front page when articles like this almost always were far less emphasized and in much smaller print somewhere inside of the paper. We averaged one or two DWI stories a week, and few of these ever included a photograph, and this disparity was critical to the situation.
Chuck’s story hit the front page because of the photo. I had a graphic element I knew would attract attention, and brother did it, but not what I expected.
Media people like me frequently go for the shocking image knowing it will sell papers and in my case I thought I also provided a graphic lesson of social importance. Forty years later, I still think I should have run the photo, but not on the front page.
Most fortunately, the worst photo I ever took never ran, thanks to my boss’s better judgement. Not far from the same place Chuck wrecked, I’d shot an accident photo in the early fall were a speeding motorcyclist lost control of his bike and rode it under a sign firmly supported by a sharp steel cross piece and two poles, one on each end. The bike and the man’s body came out from under the sign, the man’s head, still in a helmet, didn’t.
“You must be kidding,” my boss said as he took one look at the picture before tossing it aside. “We’re a family newspaper. We can’t run this crap.”
My boss was completely right. Often, I wonder if the bigger boys in the media world had the kind of close contact I had in my early days of journalism how much less “crap” we’d be forced to endure on a daily basis. Something tells me it would be a lot less, and I don’t think society would be any worse off for it and actually a lot better.
Oh, yeah, one more thing. A week later all was well again. Scoop drank more free Saluzo’s beer Saturday afternoon while everyone heaped derision on the Knick’s basketball game instead of me. Criticism is a lot more fun when it’s given and not received.