By Herbert Goldstone
There also aren't that many openings for this kind of work these days, nowhere near the great many opportunities that existed some years ago.
But you'll have a ball doing this job. You'll feel that you're important and contributing something to this hectic society of ours.
The job I'm talking about, and I'm justified in calling myself an expert because it's how I made a living for close to 40 years, is a newspaper reporter.
I should tell you my mother-in-law didn't think much of that kind of work. She kept hoping I'd get a real job someday.
I got interested in journalism in my student days at New York University before World War II. I was on the sports staff of the Heights Daily News at NYU and I did well.
Then after the war I went to the university established by the U.S. government at Biarritz, France. I wrote features and editorials for the daily newspaper at Biarritz American University and was chosen the journalism honor student.
Well, I thought, if I'm that good, maybe I can do it for a living when get home. Through a friend who knew one of the editors, that led to a job as a reporter at the Long Island Daily Press, a lively local newspaper published in Jamaica, Queens.
I started out as a beat reporter, covering police stories and local government, then graduated to politics and covered elections, local, state and national, including a couple of presidential elections. I wrote about Dwight Eisenhower beating a candidate I admired very much, Adlai Stevenson, and Richard Nixon clobbering George McGovern.
The next step was being assigned to do a daily political column with my byline (name) and a small photo of myself.
I guess I must have done a good job. I had both parties, Republicans and Democrats, furious at me from time to time, each accusing me of favoring the other.
Unfortunately, the L.I. Press is one of the really good New York dailies that went out of business. Its major circulation area, the Jamaica Avenue commercial district, changed from one of the most lucrative shopping streets in New York City to a rundown area. The paper lost a lot of advertising, which is what really pays the bills, not the cost of a subscription or the nickel or dime you plunk down on the newsstand.
The Press didn't have any grandiose ideas about being a major international force like the New York Times. It had offices in City Hall, Albany, the state capitol and in Washington, with staff members in each.
I tried to talk the Press into sending me overseas once, but the powers that be weren't interested.
Like most beginning reporters, I covered the courts and wrote about lots of trials. A memorable experience was covering the first-degree murder trial of a chauffeur butler named Ward Beecher Caraway, found guilty of murdering Marjorie Church Logan, a Flower Hills, Nassau County socialite.
The state still had the death penalty in those days and it was a really dramatic moment when the jury came back with a verdict that meant the electric chair.
One nice thing about being a newspaper reporter is that you meet all kinds of important people. Included on my list was Nelson Rockefeller, when he was New York governor; Averill Harriman, another governor; John F. Kennedy, when he was still a Massachusetts senator; his brother Robert F. Kennedy, when he was attorney general; their youngest brother, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, when he was a young senator.
Then there was Nixon, whose Long Island campaign manager invited me and my wife to a private luncheon with him; New York Assembly Speaker Joseph Carlino; Eleanor Roosevelt; John Kennedy's mother, Rose, who was on Long Island campaigning for her son in his presidential bid; and famed singer Beverly Sills.
I was in the audience when Stevenson spoke but didn't get a chance to meet him personally.
I met and interviewed movie star Sal Mineo, and when it appeared in the Press, I received a nice personal letter from him thanking me.
I also met Paul Newman among a lot of other reporters when he was a young actor just getting started.
Another drawback to working as a newspaper reporter is that newspapers are a dying breed. News is electronic now. You get your news these days on radio, TV and computer. By the time you read something in your morning paper, you've heard it a dozen times the night before.
I remember when I started with the Press there were a lot of newspapers in New York. They included the Journal, the Sun, the World-Telegram, the Mirror and PM. Today a city as big as New York has three newspapers, the Times, News and Post.
Most people find out what's going on in the world by watching television, which means they get just a brief account of an event, not the depth you get in a newspaper
Well, while the job lasts, it's still a lot of fun.
