World Film and Television Progress (1938)

I PICKED the note up from the dresser. It read: "Dear Jack — I am taking this way out so you can go back to your four-bit whore, you bastard, you. Mary." On the bed, writhing and squirming, was a good looking 22-year-old girl. She had taken poison. I, a police reporter, was there with the officers. She was shot to the emergency hospital for treatment, but it did no good. She died. Can you imagine such a note from one who is about to die? Even if she was the prostitute she was, even if she believed her life was a shattered wreck, she was still good looking. She could have gotten by without much trouble. Yet the workings of the human mind are peculiar to the layman (and, I suspect, to psychiatrists, too, after hearing scores of them offer contradictory testimony from the witness stand). Here this girl, her mind bent on suicide, takes her last moments to write a note to her pimp, hoping it will hurt him more than anything else she could do. Maybe that is why she wanted to die. Whether it hurt the pimp is another question. I doubt it. There probably was a story behind it all, but I did not have the time to investigate. A police reporter has an odd, nerve-shattering job. To the morbidly curious, those who love to stand in the way over a dead body, those who must stop in the highway to see the mangled remains of some automobile wreck, those who crowd the criminal courtrooms to take one look at some poor devil about to be sentenced to death and then go home and tell the family about it at the dinner table to a chorus of "Oh's" and "Ah's", it must be grand. Maybe to the cub reporter it is grand, too. But one does not have to be on the job long before blood, dead or mangled bodies, automobile wrecks, fires, emergency hospitals, suicides, crime in all its fantastic forms, jail bars and human beings behind them, begin to drop a curtain over the mind, a curtain of hardness which is not good. It becomes nothing but work. The sound of a siren coming to me through the open window of the press room in police headquarters did not indicate a means of satisfying any morbid curiosity of mine, it just meant more work. I saw mothers' tears, wives' tears, husbands' tears, the tears of all the loved ones of the thousand and one victims. I, like a ghoul, had to get a story about, a story to be read by thousands of morbidly curious, a story which meant more circulation for the newspaper which employed me. The city editor and the managing editor were demanding. They, of course, did not have to see those bodies, they did not have to talk to parents, wives, husbands, or sweethearts of the victim; all they had to do was sit at a desk in the office and demand more gruesome details, details which the reader would gobble up in the evening. Reader interest, they called it. They are right in a commercial sense, of course. The more blood which can be scattered on the front page, the more papers will be sold. But the police reporter, talking to some woman freshly widowed by a suicide husband, with three or four children to support, and no one to support them, does not think of sales. He cannot help, no matter how long he has been in the business, thinking of 68 The Police Reporter the problem the woman faces, let alone her grief. True, he casts it off when he gets back to police headquarters and begins dictating his story, but only for the time being. When he gets home in the evening, supposedly to relax, what does he think of? He thinks of the widow and her children, he thinks of the reasons a man sought death from his own hand, he thinks of the hundreds of incidents he had witnessed throughout the day, broken bodies on the hard table in the emergency hospital, wounded bodies, pain-wracked bodies. He tries to throw it off and cannot. He finally gets to sleep, only to wake up in the morning and go through it again. It's just the same, only the names and faces are different. Back in journalism school I was told that blood, women and prominent names were the requisites of all good news stories. They are. Gather all three in a story and you will probably get a slighter grunt from the city editor than you would if nothing happened to "break" throughout the day. In other words if someone commits a sensational suicide, kills his wife or someone else, the city editor is pleased. The managing editor probably told him it was a very good story. If some too ardent sweetheart shoots her inamorato on a down-town street and the story gets to the office a few minutes too late for the next edition, the police reporter gets hell because he missed the edition. Of course he used up all of his time at a pace his friends, if they could have seen him, would have said he was crazy to travel. It often seemed to me the city editor gloated over the fact I had missed the edition, but, in truth, he was sorry the girl did not shoot her boy friend soon enough. I spent ten years as a police reporter in West Coast cities, seven more as a political reporter. I do not know which was the worst. I can sit around now and think of the lives I have ruined, the scandal and turmoil I have directly caused, the private tragedies I have spilled out to the world. While in Fresno, California, I can recollect how I altered the tax rate a nickel on the hundred dollars of assessed valuation. I brought it down that nickel in the face of hypocritical, churchgoing politicians. That seems like a ray of sunshine in the gloom. But why did I do it? I did it to make a hit with my city editor. Why would the city editor like it? Because the managing editor would like it. And why did the managing editor like it? Because it would make people, the readers and potential readers, think the only thing between them and the grafting politicians was the dear old newspaper. Therefore they would give their support to the newspaper, subscribe for it, advertise in it, all of which meant cash in the cash register in the newspaper's business office. 1 have to laugh now when 1 think of one of my city editors. When I worked for him I used to gnash my teeth, even have bad dreams about him. He was a small-town city editor, henpecked at home, but a devil in the office. A bridge-playing, courteous gentleman at home, with very little experience on what we called "the street", entertaining the very doctors, dentists and attorneys, he gave me hell for not printing more fully some little incident which came to the public notice, but which would ruin the practice of any one of them. To them, at his home, he was a wonderful host, but in the office he demanded their blood. Sometimes he got it, and in his home he offered the most abject apologies, blaming it all on the police reporter. He was that sort of a guy. Another city editor, one in Los Angeles, knew his business from A to Z. He had, however, the same cold-blooded characteristics all city editors have. He demanded his blood. But he knew what the police reporter was up against. He had been one himself in his younger days. . . . All this is not conducive to the sleep of a police reporter. God knows he has plenty of things to dream about other than the vagaries of a city editor who never had experience covering police but who demands news. The reporter generally is equipped with a police badge. What he does with this badge is very much his own business. The police are afraid of a police reporter. He uses the badge to get news. He uses it to bulldoze the people he interviews, to frighten them with the authority of the law despite the fact there is no more authority under that badge than there would be behind a book salesman's business card. Often he goes with the police, in a police automobile, on calls involving shootings, suicides, riots. He muscles into a private home on the heels of the officers, looking much like an officer himself, and the citizens promptly think he is an officer and tell him things they would not dream of telling if they knew him for what he is. If there is a photograph of the victim or of some member of the family, he steals it and slips it in his coat pocket, or under his belt. Any complaints about the theft to headquarters, he knows will be quashed. Any complaints to his newspaper office after the photograph is published, will mean but a compliment from the city editor. This is journalistic enterprise. In his story he freely uses the names of the officers he accompanied. Those names in the newspaper cover all his crimes against the citizen. Every police reporter, every police officer and a few citizens know these to be facts. Why, it concerns the freedom of the press, and everyone knows the freedom of the press under the constitution is inviolate. The freedom of the press goes a little farther than the matter of news. Among other duties of the police reporter is the fixing of traffic tags for himself, the other reporters on the paper, circulation trucks, the city editor and his friends, the managing editor and his friends and the publisher and his