En anglais cette fois. I worked on a small weekly from around 1977 to 1985, more or less, before coming to the St. John Valley Times. There I made a lot of friends.
But one man, older than me, probably in his mid-50s or so, stands out. I don’t remember his name, but he was an old-style reporter. At least to my mind, that’s what old-style reporters did. Let me explain.
He wore a rumbled tan overcoat, a la Columbo, almost all the time. He wasn’t from around here. Where the publisher found him, I don’t know. Maybe the same way he found me — I walked in the door looking for work.
I know he was divorced because, as soon as he’d get paid, he’d call his ex-wife, laughing and always saying the same thing, “The Eagle has landed.”
Sometimes he would disappear for days. No one knew where he was. We all assumed, probably correctly, that he was on a drunk someplace.
But he would suddenly come walking into the newsroom just before deadline, rumpled overcoat, bleary-eyed and a big smile on his face. Unshaven for a few days. Hair ruffled. He’d start digging in all the pockets of that overcoat and the sport coat he wore underneath it, pulling out crumbled bits of paper here and there, laying them on the desk, using his hands to try and flatten them out.
He also often had a very wrinkled reporter’s notebook that looked like it had been mugged and beaten up. He’d flip pages back and forth impatiently until he found what he’d been looking for.
He’d sit down in front of a typewriter and begin typing furiously. Key strikes like a machine gun: “pak pak pak pakapakapak pak pak pak,” then repeat. “Pakapakapakapakapak pak pak pak” — staccato. He’d glance down at the crumbled pieces of paper, pick one up, look at it closely, then slam it down on the desk and pick up another one.
In the end he’d regularly come up with a very good news story.
I’m re-reading “Town and the City” by Jack Kerouac and this memory came up.
It’s mainly these mad people that made me love journalism so much that I stuck with it for almost 35 years.
Don Levesque is a Grand Isle native who worked in community journalism for almost 35 years. He was the publisher and editor of the St. John Valley Times for 15 years prior to retiring in 2010. He wrote a weekly newspaper column, called Mon 5¢, in the Valley Times for more than 20 years. He has been inducted into the Maine Journalism Hall of Fame and the Maine Franco-American Hall of Fame.
