There is a second inspiration for my blog--Ed Wall, my first editor and the best editor that a young reporter could ever hope to have. Most of what I know about good reporting and editing I learned from Ed. I can never repay him for all that he did for me, except to try to help other young people as they are starting out as writers and editors. I've tried to do this all of my life, in honor of Ed.
Arthur Edward Patrick Wall is 85 years old now and suffering from some serious disabilities, and yet he's still not just writing, but writing very well. Good journalistic writing has become a lost art. Just try slogging through the Washington Post on any given day. If you care about good writing, be sure to visit his blog, Wall's Paper, at http://aepwall.blogspot.com/.
Ed came into my life in 1965. I had left the Catholic seminary (two years before I would have been ordained a priest) and been hired as a reporter for The Catholic Review in Baltimore, Maryland. The editor who hired me left three weeks later and Ed replaced him. He left an important position with the Honolulu Advertiser, and those of us on the staff wondered why he would leave Hawaii for Baltimore of all places. It turned out that Ed was a convert to Catholicism and wanted to give something back to the Church.
Most of us on the editorial staff were a bunch of twenty-somethings who were still wet behind the ears. Besides myself, there was Bobby Keller, Dennis Henderson and his brother Gordon, and Gerry Parsigian. Tom Lorsung, our news editor, was a few years older than us, and was married with young children.
Finally there was Eddie Kearns, the city editor. Eddie was about 55 years old and had been with the paper since high school. Eddie edited the back-of-the-paper stuff, such as announcements from the parishes about events such as spaghetti dinners, bull roasts, and crab feasts. How he managed to keep from being bored to tears, I'll never know. I'll also never know what he thought about the changes that Ed Wall brought to the paper because Eddie kept his own counsel about such matters. But we never had to worry about the back of the paper.
This was during the waning days of the hot-type era, when type was cast, one line at a time, on Linotype machines, dropped into a metal form called a chase, and eventually molded into metal pages, which were mounted on a rotary press. The paper was printed on Thursdays, and the entire staff would spend all day at the print shop, proofreading galleys of type, double-checking corrected lines of type as they were inserted into the metal form, and performing a last-minute check when the first papers started coming off the press.
We were all hungry to learn as much as we could from Ed, and he never brushed us off. He also seemed to understand that we were all greeenhorns and would make mistakes from time to time. I never heard him utter a cruel or unkind word to anyone on the staff. He was--and still is--a true gentleman.
We would all go out to lunch at a deli near the print shop and start asking him questions. Later, as we were waiting for the first copies to come off the press, we would ask him even more questions. How did he manage to accomplish a certain goal? What was the direction in which he was trying to take the paper? Why can't we be more like the Delmarva Dialog, a liberal, groundbreaking Catholic paper in nearby Wilmington, Delaware?
In answer to that last question, Ed told us that he intended to move The Catholic Review in that same direction, but that he intended to do so in an orderly way over the next two years. Two years later, The Catholic Review had become one of the most-respected Catholic papers in the United States and the Delmarva Dialog was nearly bankrupt.
In 1968 the editor who had hired me for The Catholic Review took over the Delmarva Dialog and I went there to work for him. Under his editorship, the paper continued to hemorrhage money. After I did a short stint with the News-Journal papers in Wilmington, Ed took me back.
The thing about Ed Wall was that he was not a "Catholic newspaperman" like most of the others at the time, but rather, a newspaperman who happened to edit a Catholic paper. He gave us all good assignments and the opportunity to write about subjects that mattered to us. I wrote about the plight of migrant workers on the Eastern Shore. Dennis Henderson wrote an excellent series of articles on motorcycle safety. Practically no other Catholic newspaper of the time was doing these things.
He was also very competitive--a newspaperman first and foremost. He particularly liked to scoop the Catholic Standard, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Washington--which wasn't very hard to do.
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council, which dragged the Catholic Church into the 20th Century, was in full swing in Rome. Monsignor Joseph Gallagher, the Executive Editor of The Catholic Review, was also the editor of the English-language translations of the council documents and was in Rome while the council was in session.
Ed was determined that The Review would be the first publication in the United States to publish the translations. When they were all completed, Monsignor Gallagher found a friendly airline pilot who flew them overnight into Friendship Airport in Baltimore. Tom Lorsung, our news editor, met the plane at 7:30 the next morning and brought them to Baltimore. The Review published them over a period of time.
When I came back to the paper in 1970, Ed assigned me to cover the Maryland governor's office and General Assembly on a full-time basis, the type of assignment that no other Catholic paper was doing at that time. The state capitol is in Annapolis, which is within the Archdiocese of Washington.
In 1971 there were two major pieces of legislation coming up in which the Archdioceses of Baltimore and Washington had a strong interest--legalization of abortion and state aid to private education. There I was, sitting with reporters from the Sun papers in Baltimore and reporters from Baltimore radio and television stations--but no reporter from the Catholic Standard.
Supporters of the education bill had lobbied the governor, Marvin Mandel, to support the legislation in 1970, which was a gubernatorial election year in Maryland. Mandel, who was Jewish, asked them to hold off until the next year, when he promised to support the bill.
True to his word, when the bill came up before the House of Delegates in 1971, Mandel pulled out all the stops in support of it. People from his office came out of the woodwork to lobby the delegates.
The bill was scheduled to come up for a vote in the House on a Thursday--deadline day for The Catholic Review. The day before, I wrote three stories, each exactly 20 inches long. 1--The bill passes. 2--The bill fails. 3--The vote came too late for our deadline. For the first two, I even got my sources to give me quotes both ways.
This was long before cell phones came on the scene. Somehow or other, we managed to get a landline phone to my seat in Annapolis. Things were moving slowly in the House of Delegates that day, and as the afternoon session started, the bill still hadn't come up for a vote. It seemed that every 15 minutes, Ed would call me on the phone and ask for an update. As it got later in the day, I could hear the tension in his voice building. He could have taken the easy way out and used the "too late for our deadline" story, but it would have killed him to do this. Fortunately, the bill came up for a vote--and passed--just in time to make the paper.
I'm so glad that Ed is writing his blog and showing us some shining examples of good journalism and captivating writing. Ed, to quote from Mr. Spock of Star Trek: May you live long and prosper.
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