Wages: Pit Bulls and Liver Tots

[This is the ninth of 14 excerpts, running Tuesdays and Thursdays, from John Armstrong's memoir of the working life: Wages.]

When a cement truck lost its brakes on a hill and ploughed through someone's backyard, you needed the parents and relatives of the dead and wounded, the name of the driver, the owner of the company, the neighbours (to fill out the background and describe the terror they faced daily with Big Trucks roaring though their neighbourhood) and someone from government licensing to comment on why he and his department hadn't checked this truck's brakes.

It was also important to get the Opposition critic for that department who would describe how the government had failed so tragically in this case, despite his repeated warnings that such a disaster was coming, and how his party would do things differently if they were in office....

The same was true of any local tragedy whether it was the man who hacked up his wife and mailed her postage due to her parents or an immigrant woman who spoke and read no English and bled to death in the emergency room because she couldn't fill out the admittance papers.

"Get comment from the family," the assignment editor would bark as he flung the assignment sheet across the desk at you. Accounts, circulation, the library and morgue, the reporter's desktop terminals -- everything was done on computer except for the assignment desk. There the editor banged the assignment and what scraps of fact or supposition he had out on a chipped metal, manual typewriter, onto beige sheets of newspulp about half the size of a standard letter.

And don't forget to name the tree

They read like this: "Man on E14th (chk?) was cutting down a tree and it fell on his toddler's playpen and crushed the kid. Let's get comment from neighbours -- drunk? Also did he need a permit? What kind tree??? Don't forget pix, scene and kid. Get the EMT's if poss."

What "chk?" meant was check that the tragedy had truly occurred on East 14th. It could easily be West 14th or even a different street entirely. The details and facts listed in any assignment were highly suspect; all or none of them may be right and what was there could be so garbled as to render the event a non-story. (A man threatening to blow up himself and his neighbours with a barbecue propane tank might turn out to be a worried, elderly neighbour lady who thought an unattended barbecue smoking away across the fence was in imminent danger of exploding in a raging ball of hellfire....)

"Get the kind of tree" -- was it a pine? A spruce? Dwarf maple? Our duty to the public demanded facts, although the difference between being crushed by a larch or a Japanese cherry was largely immaterial.

The last line in the memo was a reminder to get the emergency medical team's comments. A kid squished flatter than piss on a plate by his father was a good story, but it was a better story with the ambulance driver's description of the kid under the tree, one tiny foot visible under the deadly branches -- and if the little sneaker had cartoon characters printed on it, make sure to get that in. Talk to the neighbours and find out if Dad was drunk or had a history of drinking. Then get the father, either at the door or on the phone, for comment.

Sobbing parents sell sell sell

We needed a picture of the kid as well as the tree in the yard. First you tried by phone, adopting the same deeply saddened, reverential and supportive tone a funeral director might use with a grieving client. You gave your condolences and arranged for someone to pick up a picture of the little fellow in happier times. If that failed you needed to go there in person, and if they still balked at handing the snapshot over then the photographer distracted them while you swiped it off the mantel. Then you got the father and as much detail as you could get from him. Lastly you hit him with what the editor wanted,

"And how you did you feel when the tree squashed little Whoozits into raspberry jam in front of your eyes?"

Well, in almost every case he felt pretty bad. If he could, he would do it differently but it was too late now, wasn't it? His wife felt lousy, too. It had ruined their whole day, and likely the next few as well.

Fortunately most people were smart enough not to let the grieving parents anywhere near a reporter and family members and friends ran interference. So you got them telling you that the parents were devastated and whether or not they had been sedated by a doctor. The editor was always saddened when we couldn't get the weeping and sobbing parents for a direct quote. You could see a little of the light go out of his eyes and his shoulders slumped a bit. We had failed him again and he wasn't so much angry as disappointed, weary of the endless inability of reporters to deliver the story.

"SOBBING FATHER BLAMES SELF: Alcohol And A Chainsaw -- Recipe For Horror" is a much better headline than "CHILD KILLED IN GARDENING MISHAP (see B4)" and makes the difference between your story being placed on the front page or buried somewhere inside. In this case it was so good that even without the father you were guaranteed to make the front page, maybe not at the top but at least below the fold. It all depended what else happened between the time you handed it in and we went to press. But not much would knock that story off the front page. It could only be improved if Elvis showed up and gave mouth-to-mouth to the victim.

Spells for pimps and hookers

I had always thought that getting on the front page meant a reporter had uncovered something important and brought it to light, or had sifted through all the information and presented the facts about an important event in a manner that allowed the readers to become informed quickly and efficiently so as to make their own minds up.

That was not how it worked at all. The paper had momentary enthusiasms -- for a spell pimps and hookers would be a priority, then marijuana farms in suburban houses. Then something else would take our fancy and suddenly the paper would be full of that for a few weeks until the next infatuation. But the two constants we never tired of were children's transplant operations and mad-dog attacks. The editors called the former Liver Tots and the latter Pit Bulls, whether they were pit bulls or not. If it wasn't a pit bull then it was a mixed breed with pit bull in there somewhere. It had to be -- it had bitten someone. Res ipsa loquitur, as the Romans said: the thing speaks for itself.

Either one got you on the front page. You could write the story in crayon on the back of a paper bag and still get congratulations from the ME and the city editor. A Liver Tot attacked by a Rabid Pit Bull was the Holy Grail of local reporting. If it ever happened the lucky reporter assigned to it would be able to string the story out for a solid week on the front page and never work again. He'd be given his own office, a chaise lounge to lie on and assigned an intern to feed him grapes and fan him with palm leaves.

Sometimes the desk would fall in love with a story and be so obsessed with it that no one could convince the editors the facts were otherwise. One night I arrived to start my shift at 5 p.m. and found among the evening's assignments in my cubby hole one marked for special attention. The others could hang fire while I concentrated on this scoop: "Fleener says his house on the North Shore is under siege by crows, thousands of them. Can't see his lawn for birds, crows on fences, in trees, roof etc. Get expert opinion on this -- why crows, why now? Danger???"

A murder of crows

I looked up the university ornithology and natural science departments and got the home numbers of some likely sounding professors, then called them up and pried them away from the dinner table. I described the alleged crow horror to them. They all agreed they had never heard of such a thing, crows being one of the more stable bird populations and rarely going up or down in their numbers. The idea of thousands of them descending like a black cloud on one piece of property was a head-shaker. You might get a few hundred who returned at night to a common roost, in a heavily wooded area, but never in a suburb. They weren't buying it and advised me not to, either. I typed up my findings, attached them to the assignment and handed it back in to the desk before I moved on to the other stories on my list for the night.

The next night it was back in my slot: "Fleener royally pissed. Says it's a goddamn Hitchcock movie, croaking, rasping and cawing day and night and covering the landscape like a plague. Also covering landscape in bird shit. Get better experts -- MUST RUN TOMORROW! See pix at graphics desk."

I went to the art desk to see the evidence. There it was -- maybe not the hordes described in the memo but a fair number of them, mostly on the lawn and the back fence. It was a pretty fair gathering of crows, and a number of different birds as well. In terms of horror it was a little lacking, though. I wondered if the assignment editor had looked at the photos. But why would he? His boss had told him he had pix of a million or so crows attacking a suburban home and a reporter was assigned to the story. As far as he was concerned the thing was handled.

Back to the phones and more bird professors, environmentalists, bird-watching societies -- I was ready to call the Crow Indians and see if they had an angle. When the shift ended I memo'd the thing back to the desk with the same findings as the night before, which was nothing.

Day three and the assignment was back. "Fleener furious -- don't know what experts you talked to but get story in tonight or else."

I'd exhausted the society of bird academics, not just locally but everywhere I could track them down. No one believed it for a minute and quoted statistics; it was beyond unlikely and on the borders of impossible for such a thing to take place. The city health officer said it was probably messy but crows carried no plagues or serious disease and he advised hosing the guano away.

Aerating a mystery story

I banged the thing out as my shift ended: "Experts Worldwide Baffled ..." and got comments from Fleener's neighbours, none of whom had noticed a particular abundance of birds lately. When I got to work on the fourth day and picked up a paper the story was nowhere to be seen, until I got to the D section, where non-stories were run as filler. The art was less than gripping -- assorted birds on a lawn, beady-eyed surely but looking something less than criminal. A few hours later the phone rang. It was a neighbour I'd left a message for the previous night. Nobody cared anymore but I asked him anyway. Had he observed any of the biblical signs of the apocalypse, such as a plague of crows?

He thought for a second and said, "I think it may have something to do with the fact Griffin just re-seeded his lawn and aerated it so there's lots of seed and worms on it right now."

Well, that would account for it, too. Spread seeds all over your backyard, punch holes in it and water heavily so the worms will all crawl to the surface, and you might attract a few birds. But it hardly mattered -- the thing was written, it had run and now it was time to write something else, maybe even something that had actually happened.

Liver Tots came and went, pit bulls bit and were put down, politicians were voted in and out, and now it was the former Minister of Whatever who I called to criticize the policies of the current holder of the portfolio. It didn't take long to learn that there was precious little in the newspaper that was really new; the longer I was there the more often I wrote the same story.

On Thursday, enterprising reporter John Armstrong meets an angry children's entertainer, a sex-mad octogenarian and a coked-out two-bit actor.