Things I’ve done that would be really impressive if someone else had done them
When I was 4 years old, I climbed under the stairs into the basement of an empty apartment three doors down from mine and retrieved a Dick and Jane reader. Before I entered kindergarten, I read it from cover to cover.
When I got to school and they dragged out the 3-foot-high Dick and Jane book, I told the teacher I’d already been through that book. That set off alarms. “You’ve ruined our entire program for you,” they said. “Do you know that when you grow up, you’ll have to work for a newspaper your whole life?”
School was like that for the next 13 years. Luckily for me, I discovered science fiction, so it hasn’t just been about journalism.
Semper paratus is a laugh, we joined to beat the draft
Once I was a sailor.
My first year of college was the year they were shooting college students. The dean at my engineering school suggested I quit school and join the Army, which I didn’t take well, since we were in the middle of a shooting war. But there I was, months later, with a low draft number.
When it comes time to sign up for military service, there are several choices. If you’re a conformist, you join the Army. If you’re a conformist with a college educatoin, you join the Air Force. If you want some adventure, you join the Navy. If you want to burn things and blow stuff up, you join the Marines. But if you want to do something no one you know or heard of has ever done before, you join the Coast Guard — and they put you on a ship in the middle of the North Atlantic with a hundred people who felt the same way.
On my ship, I had the same job as Radar on M*A*S*H. (Younger readers will have to look that one up.) Information technology was my job — and that meant a typewriter, a bunch of filing cabinets, official forms, and everyone’s service records (on paper and bound in a heavy cardboard folder). But I was a real sailor. I put in two years of sailing around the North Atlantic — with stops in St. Johns, Newfoundland; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Bermuda; Guantanamo, Cuba; the Bahamas; Hoboken, N.J.; Baltimore, Maryland; and a big tour of northern Europe, including Plymouth, England; Hamburg, Germany; Aalborg, Denmark; and Liverpool.
Five weeks out and five weeks in. We stood duty on Ocean Stations — 270-mile square pieces of sea thousands of miles from New York City, Charlie in the north, Echo down between Bermuda and the Azores, Bravo up between Labrador and Greenland. Our job was to find the bad weather — 40-knot winds and 30-foot seas — because that’s where people would need us. We’d come back from those trips and ride the subways without holding on.
Lots of adventures, lots of sea stories. I once helped fly a kite off the flight deck of the GALLATIN while we steamed up the middle of the English Channel.
The original ink-stained wretch
Being a reporter is a lot fun. You go places, talk to people, sit in on meetings, take notes, and then you write it all up. And you get paid for it.
I had a few reporter jobs. The first one was for the Connecticut Daily Campus. That’s where I got to cover the 1980 presidential primaries — every campaign from Jerry Brown to John Anderson to Bush and Reagan, across New Hampshire and all the way out to Chicago. The next summer, I got press credentials for the first space shuttle launch through the Norwich Bulletin, where my former journalism professor was working as an editor.
Eventually I got a gig at the Hartford Courant, where I was a correspondent and got paid by the story. Then I worked for a statehouse news bureau at the Capitol, covering the legislature. From there, I went to working for the New York Times, where I got paid by the story again.
That was how I got to interview Paul Newman. I wrote for the weekly Connecticut section and Newman lived in Connecticut. I called his publicist and asked for an interview about his summer camp for kids with serious medical problems (also in Connecticut). They said they’d take my number.
A couple weeks later, my editor from the Times called me to tell me Newman was having a press conference at the camp with 15 other news organizations and they were inviting me to come along. So I got five minutes with Paul Newman so I could have a unique quote for the Times. (“Life is whimsical. Some of us get to be movie stars, some of us aren’t as fortunate.”)
After a year of writing for the Times, I realized that I couldn’t make a living writing two stories a week if they were going to hold one of them every few weeks, so I surrendered to the inevitable and sent my resume off to the Journal Inquirer, one of the last afternoon tabloids. You know how they tell you in journalism class that you shouldn’t expect it to be like “All the President’s Men”? Well my first assignment at the JI was to meet with a confidential source in a janitor’s closet at the state police academy to get the goods on the executive director, who was playing cop and pulling people over on the highway (he wasn’t a cop).
One year, I headed off to New York City for what was then the annual Authors and Editors Reception of the Science Fiction Writers of America, where I met astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Buzz was working with my friend John Barnes on a few science fiction books. A few days later, I covered a big presentation by NASA where one of the guests was Buzz Aldrin. And once again, I spoke to him for a few minutes to get quotes that no one else had.
After a few years as a reporter, though, you start to get too surly to be allowed out in public — so they make you an editor. (Reporter: “You didn’t like my story and you want to talk to my editor? All right. But you know, I don’t want to to talk to my editor.”)
And that’s what I’ve been doing for 25 years … writing science fiction and making newspapers with my bare hands.