From Frying Pan into Fire

When we left Mr. Tommy last week, he was stuck in Riverton, Wyoming, stuck in a low-paying, long-hours journalism job.

The weeks went by. High school basketball, football, track and baseball still held no allure for Tom, who had been hornswoggled into an assignment reporting on the central Wyoming sports scene. Here’s what Mr. Tom did:

I called my friend Gary, who had just landed a job as a reporter working for United Press international in the Cheyenne office.

Gary said there was an opening there in addition to the one he had just filled. On his recommendation, I telephoned Jeff Grigsby, a UPI executive in the Dallas corporate office.

Mr. Grigsby suggested I send him my résumé and said to include personal facts. I did so, and in a week or 10 days he called me back and said the company was willing to hire me – to work in Cheyenne alongside Gary, a college buddy of mine.

I was elated. Bob and Roy Peck weren’t so happy with me, though. They resented the idea that I gave them two hours notice, instead of the customary two weeks. I said hey, I’m not a sports writer. Goodbye.

Annette and I and our three baby girls packed up all the stuff we had just unpacked a few weeks earlier, and made some phone calls trying to find an apartment or house in Cheyenne.

Dad and Mom – to the rescue again – came to Riverton to help us move. We had three babies and two vehicles and quite a bit to do. Without them . . .

I went after the U-Haul trailer and when I got back to begin loading it, the phone rang. It was Mr. Grigsby in Dallas, informing me that things had changed.

We wouldn’t be going to Cheyenne after all. We would be assigned to Little Rock, Arkansas. Oh, and moving expenses were up to us. “UPI doesn’t pay moving expenses,” Mr. Grigsby said.

What’s a cub reporter to do? We borrowed money from the folks. Dad paid for a 17-inch truck tire that blew out at Muddy Gap. (Ever been to Muddy Gap, Wyoming? Grim.) Arriving in Colorado, we left our three daughters, Jaye, Tammy and Monica, with Mom and Dad in Brighton.

Towing our ’64 Econoline van with our ’50 F-4 Flathead, we crawled to Little Rock. We rented a house, found rats in the alley, rented a second house. The folks soon brought the girls to us on a Braniff Airlines flight. Remember Braniff?

The UPI office was in an otherwise empty fifth floor of the Arkansas Gazette building downtown.

We were definitely second best at the Gazette – The Associated Press was favored. We felt it and resented it. But we were in truth only Number Two.

Seldom did I leave that office during my shift. My main job was to write scripts for radio news, and to use a balky teletype system “live” as it were. I had to re-write everything hourly for the hick town AM stations all over Arkansas, and I had to be fast.

An operator could use the teletype “direct” from the keyboard, in which each key had to be pushed with considerable pressure. Speed was not an option. A later invention was a ticker-tape setup which greatly improved the speed of the device. The operator would “cut” a yellow paper tape with coded letter images.

I got so I could compose in my head and type faster than the yellow ticker-tape could run through the stodgy machine. Once again, sorry Mom, I couldn’t catch on to the piano keyboard, but the typewriter? I’ve got it down.

After six months sweltering in unfamiliar environs, my bureau chief Lloyd Holbeck discovered that I was handicapped. He said I had concealed that fact from him in my application. Ahem. My physical health had been reported in full, and when you meet me in person my condition is immediately apparent. It took him six months to see that I limp?

I was obviously being shanghaied. Again. An appeal to Mr. Grigsby failed, and we started packing up to move.

Does this story begin to resemble a recurring nightmare? Does it look like Mr. Tommy is really building a success-filled résumé and reputation so soon out of college?

By good fortune, I quickly found a job at The Blackfoot News in Blackfoot, Idaho. Feature writer and photographer. It was to pay $120 weekly, plus a gasoline allowance.

I also found a hero there – Publisher Drury R. Brown, a cigar-smoking Kansas newspaperman who had bought the faltering News without fully investigating the demographics of Blackfoot.

I was an additional member to his reporting staff. He had bought a million-dollar offset printing press and had begun publishing daily. The News was weekly or bi-weekly before he bought it.

Mr. Brown actually paid me what he had said he would, and assigned me to do the kind of work he said he would. How unusual, so far in my career. An honest and candid publisher.

Immediately, I began to have delusions of living in Blackfoot for the rest of my life. What a nice Methodist man, DRB.

Silly me. I did last 15 long years there but lots of dynamics came between me and the dream of “the rest of my life.”

I became Blackfoot’s Vern Shelton. (You’ll remember him from Laramie, the Ace Reporter at the Boomerang.) I went after eastern Idaho scandal like a wolverine on acid. I did not become Bingham County’s most loved celebrity. My résumé  began looking better but my friends all worked at the newspaper. A clue I didn’t get.

Remember those “demographics?” This can be explained in two words: The Mormons.

The population of Blackfoot at that time was about 80 percent “Mormon,” or more formally, a cult called “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Living as a minority member of a population of 80 percent of any majority group is difficult, but the Mormons were and are especially hard to deal with.

Their faith structure is founded in a fraud. Although the words “Jesus Christ” appear in their very name, they aren’t Christians. They disdain the Holy Trinity and the Holy Bible takes a distant second to the Book of Mormon, a fabrication by one Joseph Smith.

Mormons do believe in baptism – not Trinitarian, though. Baptisms take place in a room closed to the public, and baptisms are done in behalf of the deceased who weren’t Mormon when they died. Mormonism is like a combination of Islam and Freemasonry with falsehoods and fictions of its own.

The population included large numbers of hypocritical, devious, cheating, lying double-dealers. The Mormons know instinctively that their beliefs are based in fraud, and it has an impact on their moral conduct.

Non-Mormons weren’t necessarily exclusive targets. The Bingham County folks would cheat each other just as quickly as they would cheat an outsider.

They talked big about not smoking and not drinking alcohol. It was all talk.

So why did we stay so long in Blackfoot? Partly because Mr. Brown kept on paying me, and partly because of our fear of change. Moving might mean jumping from the fire back into the frying pan.

But the main reason for our longevity – for me anyway – was the corruption. Finding “news” was as easy as picking apples off a low tree.

As parents, Annette and I were painfully slow to figure out what my prominence was doing to our children. They (son Ben had been born in Blackfoot, 1968) suffered socially, scholastically, physically. They are tough now, all of them, but I wish they hadn’t had to learn toughness the way they did.

Watch for a report on life-after-Blackfoot another time.

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Word of the Week: Vernacular. It’s from Latin vernaculus, belonging to home-born slaves, or native, indigenous or domestic. Today it means to us the use of the native language of a country or place, as a writer.

The vernacular is the language commonly spoken by the people of a particular country or place. The vernacular is peculiar to a particular locality, as a vernacular disease.

Here’s a sentence in the Eastern Idaho vernacular: “Pet thet harse en th’ born.” That means, “Put that horse in the barn.”