How I Became My Father...a Drunk by Borchert William G

Author:Borchert, William G. [Borchert, William G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Story Merchant Books
Published: 2015-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Becoming My Father

Even in the heyday of journalism, young newsmen like me didn’t make all that much money. It didn’t matter how hard you worked, how creative you were, how many hours you put in or how many exclusive stories you broke. Salaries and pay increases were usually based on a contract negotiated between each newspaper and The Newspaper Guild which was a union affiliated with The International Federation of Journalists.

As I said, no matter how good you were or how bad you were didn’t make much of a difference. Salaries were set by the union wage scale and increases were based on longevity.

My dad belonged to a union as did most of my uncles and many of my older cousins like Albert. They were called trade unions and generally covered workers in manufacturing and construction and other types of industrial and commercial occupations where there had once been serious worker abuse. But I could never understand why a creative business like the one I was in had to be unionized.

Perhaps that’s why I began to feel cheated sometimes when I’d cover a major event or come up with an exclusive interview or have a banner front page By-Line story. I was making a lot less than some gray-haired beat reporter nearing retirement who slept on his desk half the night and turned in maybe one or two stories a week. It didn’t seem fair. I learned later on they called the kind of thought pattern I was developing self-pity.

That thought pattern first began to weave its way into my immature subconscious brain when I was given the opportunity some months earlier to work with one of the Journal-America’s most popular columnists, Dorothy Kilgallen, better known to most people then as The Voice of Broadway.

She had gone to Cleveland, Ohio to create some gossip stories about the famous murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard. He was the handsome young orthopedic surgeon accused of brutally murdering his attractive wife, Marilyn. She was four months pregnant when found in a pool of blood on the staircase of their stately home in Bay Village, Ohio overlooking Lake Erie. I was assigned to take Dorothy’s notes every afternoon and write a feature story under her By-Line for the next day’s paper.

I had never met the respected columnist who later starred on the TV show, WHAT’S MY LINE , but we became very friendly on the phone. Not only that, she was always very generous with her compliments about me to Eddie Mahar and others at the paper concerning the feature pieces I wrote for her.

As it turned out, the jury refused to believe the young doctor’s alibi that his wife was killed by a bushy-haired, one-arm intruder who had knocked him unconscious as they fought on the stairway in his home. He was convicted of second degree murder in January of 1955 and sentenced to life in prison.

Dr. Sheppard’s family hired a well-known attorney, F. Lee Bailey, to appeal the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

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