Expressing thanks -- belatedly

The dog days of August aren't ordinarily days of Thanksgiving and, as I approach 85, they seem decidedly tardy to do what I'd like to do today -- express my gratitude to many whom, besides my family, have given me inspiration and insight to wind along the merry path of life:

I can't help but start with my father. At the age of 12, I was having emergeny surgery in a Dickinson, N.D., hospital. Apparently, I was overdosed with anesthetic. The nuns who were nurses came running out, crying, "We need a priest." I don't know if he used any profanity in replying, but he suggested, "Just get another doctor in there!"

In grade school, Mabel Planer, from Brainerd, Minn., lent her skills to carrying me through junior high in Mott, N.D., with high grades and current encouragement. Why do we always wait until it's too late to get these messages to them?

In high school, Allen Williams, counselor for the Albuquerque High Record, coached me from my first appointment as sophomore reporter (I had to give up drumming in the band to take it), though sports editor up to editor in my senior year -- basic training for my long wished-for career in newspapering. And there was Gertrude McGowan, who liked my essay on, "Driving in the City -- the Land of Dented Fenders," that kicked my tender ego upstairs again.

Colleg professors at the University of New Mexico took it from there. Dudley Wynn, who had left a university position in the east to recover from tuberculosois in New Mexico's sun, taught English literature with special talent in portraying the beauty of poetry. But when the final examination came along, I had to write an essay on what I''d learned.

I filled an entire notebook with the glories of the English countryside, extolling the land from that produced its talent -- but very little of what I'd learned in his class. Wynn cracked that the writing was pretty good -- but it went around the purpose of the essay wonderfully. Thus, he inspired even as he set me straight on how beating around the bush usuallly doesn't produce results.

Compare that with another professor, a stuffed-shirt fellow teaching neo-classical English lieteerature. I had arrived at his classroom late -- as usual -- one morning. When I sat in a folded chair, it collapsed and shot straight up the aisle to his desk I got my first "F" grade at the end of six weeks. I protested with a unique apology. Since I was working my way through college as the sports editor of The Albuquerque Journal, I was often late in getting home at night and had little time to study.

His expression changed magnificently. I was a writer! My grades improved perceptively thereafter. Oh, what fools these mortals be!

Editor H. P. Pickrell, at The Journal, had given me a big boost when he hired me on to the paper after I had covered my high school graduation night for him. Sittingthere in my mortarboard hat, I took copious notes from the longest and dryest graduation night address you could imagine. I had my notes folded properly as I knew reporters did it, and eked out five or six paragaphs that got into print. That did it.

When I heard of the man, Heywood Broun, who organized the Newspaper Guild, another reporter from the opopositiosition paper and I put together a meeting for all reporters at the Franciscan Hotel for a Sunday when no one would be working. Unfortunately, the management of the two newspapers called a staff meeting at the newwspaper offices for the same hour.

Alas, only the two of us showed up to organize the Guild. When my editor heard about my involvement in it, it broke his heart after all he'd done for me. To make up for it, he gave me a raise -- from $5 a week to $10 -- and evening working hours so I could go to college in the fall.

He's the same editor who, eight years later, was again saddened when I was offered a job on the Los Angeles Daily News for $77.50 a week while I was only making $40 at The Journal. He offered to meet the Daily News figure. I thanked him but declined. The News had a Guild. I've been an advocate of unions ever since.

The Daily News was a newspaperman's newspaper. Phil Garrison, who had been my PR officer in the Air Corps, offered me the job in the summer of 1946. I had another offer to join a publicity firm in New York City. I compared the two. In New York, I would have made far more money first -- and died earlier from ulcers. That's the way I looked at it.

The News was exhiliarating. And Garrison was good to me, although he differed from my politics. "A Socialist," he said, "is a Communist with a wife and two children." That well described me, I suppose. Although I saw a line that divides Socialism from Communism whether I had a wife and two children or not.

In the fading days as the newspaper was headed for bankruptcy, I said it would be a "cold day in hell" before I would go to work for Norman Chandler at the L,A. Times - Mirror. It was the coldest day of December, 1944, when I signed up with The Mirror, Chandler's afternoon newspaper, and found another man to express gratitude here: Managing Editor Ed Murray, who ran such a a liberally-bent tab that the Chandlers finally let him go.

Murry had me covering visiting delegations from the Soviet Union so often that I enrolled in a Russian language class to assist in my work. I learned how to ask where the bathroom was and when dinner would be served, but the responses often came to me in Spanish instead of Russian.

Once I ran into him when a p.r. man for a Skid Row property owner wanted to give me $500 to keep his boss' name out of an exposè another reporter and I were writing. Murray only laughed at me and sent me back to work. The next day the p.r. man came back again and went into Murray's office.

Raging Ed hustled the guy alll the way out of the cityroom to the enjoyment of all of us.

Ed is in the same class as Frank McCulloch, my managing editor at the L.A. Times after The Mireror collapsed. Frank is the guy who came to me and said, "We've done a good job covering the racial turmoil in Mississipi and Alabama, but what are we doing in our own backyard?

Given the job, I enjoyed a season or two of introducing the black propulation and its poblems into the erstwhile lilly-white columns of the august Times. After McCulloch left, the next managing editor didn't have the same outlook on the story, and pulled me off of it. Put him on the same list as the prof who got excited when my chair slammed into his desk.

In retirement, tired of watching the grass grow, I got re-introduced into the hum of things when my granddaughter, Erin, writing a school essay, asked me why I became interessted in civil rights. That, plus excellent encouragment and medicine from the greatest primary medical doctor on the horizon, Bruce Covner, got me writing again. And, as you can see, I'm still at it, with the best editor in the neighborhood, my spouse, Barbara, who keeps my commas in the right place and my sensitivity sharpened to good taste -- but never able to keep me from going on passed the place that ought to be the finish line.

Covner has taken over where psychiatry never finished up, keeping me with my eye on the prize instead of on the hopelessness of everything. Politics, religion, philosophy, international relations, he's ready to join in past my allotted time for appointments, in my vciew. His alertness when health alarms start ringing, he hears before I do, and he has seen me through some skirmishes I would not have won without him.

This is a never-ending list of people whom I owe much to. But I don't want to forget the lady who failed to throw my newspaper against the door as I demanded that led to my return to writing a column. (See, "Why I Write for the Stockton Record," in a previous blog.)

And did I mention what a lovely editor I have lived with for the past 15 years? The best years I've had. Twilights go on and on, and that's a good thing.