The Greatest Newspaperman
I became a newspaperman in 1973.
That was the term we used back then, accurate as both a job description and, at the time, as a designator of gender. In my first newsroom, there were only two women on the news side. Of course, that changed shortly thereafter, and for the better.
The old newsroom was a loud, smoky, smelly place. Real typewriters. Wire machines that clattered endlessly. Old-style rotary phones with loud rings. Boisterous rough housing, crude jokes, and tough insults, none taken too seriously, at least most of the time.
For a year after I moved into the main newsroom from a bureau office, I would come to work in the morning to find a tight little dog turd in my chair, an overnight gift from the outdoor writer’s pooch. I know he thought that was funny. I do too – now.
My first real newspaper boss was the managing editor of The Register-Guard in Eugene. He was a World War II veteran as were many of my older colleagues. He had been a Marine, had fought through the South Pacific and, as I was told later, was a survivor of the horrific battle on Iwo Jima.
In short, he was tough. Hard talking. Hard drinking. A master of profanity. If he did not like something his reporters did, he would let loose with a torrent of obscenity as creative as it was loud. He was known to throw things at people. I always believed his philosophy for young reporters was as simple as “if you can’t duck out of the way you don’t belong here.”
He scared me to death. He was a pretty good newspaperman, but not the best for whom I ever worked.
The best would be Deborah Howell, my editor at the Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minnesota. And when, during this Women’s History Month, I think of the contributions of great women, the first name that comes to mind for me is that of Howell.
I once wrote a column in which I called her a newspaperman. She did not take offense, never saw the term as sexist. For those for whom newspapering was life, the term had become gender neutral. And trust me on this, in my experience, there was no better newspaperman.
I met Howell when I worked for the St. Paul Dispatch, a scrappy afternoon paper that shared a newsroom with the more respectful Pioneer Press where Howell was managing editor.
Though we occupied the same newsroom, she paid me no mind the first year I was there.
That changed one morning when the University of Minnesota announced that legendary football coach Lou Holtz had been named to lead the Golden Gophers.
I was working a fill-in city desk shift and there was no one in the room to write the story for the Dispatch first edition. In a frenzied hour, I managed to cobble together a report for that led the front page. It was a close call.
After things settled down, Howell came by my desk to congratulate me. From that point she became the most influential person in my professional life.
A few months later, when the Dispatch merged with the Pioneer Press, Howell was named top editor. Soon after she named me to a low-level editing job, my first major move into management. I would never be a reporter again.
As a newspaper editor, she had an unfailing eye for a great story. And she was courageous, never flinching in the face of power, often represented by taller, louder men.
She oversaw production of two Pulitzer Prize winning projects at the Pioneer Press, an exceptional accomplishment for a mid-size metro daily. And no one in that proud newsroom enjoyed more our sticking it to the competition in Minneapolis.
Howell was a tiny woman. She had been raised in Corpus Christie, Texas. I was told her father was a stevedore on the docks there. She grew up around hard Texas men – hard talkers, hard drinkers.
In terms of profanity, she made my first managing editor seem a minor leaguer. At almost any point during the day, she might stand in her office door and let loose a string of profanities aimed at one of her subordinates, summoning the target to her office for a royal butt chewing or maybe a congratulatory conversation. It could go either way. In any event, it was a point of pride to be on the receiving end of such a summons, an indication that you had arrived, could take the verbal deluge.
She was constantly writing notes to her staff. Compliments were always on white notepaper. But if you saw a blue note in your office box, you knew it was a criticism of some sort. After one particularly egregious temper tantrum on my part, punctuated by a pissy note left under her office door one evening, she left a blue note that said only “Take Responsibility.” I still have it, framed. It was the best management advice I ever received.
Of course, even the best mentors can impart questionable habits.
When I moved to the Wichita Eagle as a senior editor, a job Howell engineered for me, I tried to emulate her management style. For the first week or so, I swore constantly. I wrote notes, too, on white or blue paper.
After a week, one of my subordinate editors, an older man, took me aside, put his arm around my shoulders, and in a soft drawl said “Son, we just don’t talk like that in Kansas.”
It was no blue note from Howell, but it was still a pretty good dressing down. I cleaned up my language, in Kansas at least. But I continued to write notes in all my newsrooms.
Howell was tough, plain spoken, brutally honest. She knew how to deliver a tough message as you would serve a drink of fine single-malt Scotch – straight up, no watering down. But those of us who worked with her loved her and learned from her. She made me a better editor and a better boss in every way.
I stayed in touch with Howell long after we both had left St. Paul. My dear Carla and I had lunch with her in Washington, D.C. in 2009. I was looking for work and needed her advice.
A short time later she was dead. She and her husband were vacationing in New Zealand. She had crossed the highway at a scenic viewpoint, forgetting that traffic moved in the British style, opposite our system. She was hit by a truck and killed. She was only 68.
If there is a genetics of bosses, as I believe, I carry a good chunk of Howell DNA, all of it good. Of course, I can still swear in a way that would make her proud.
She was not my first boss. But she was certainly my best. And years later, I still miss her counsel and her voice.
