Last To Leave

We sat around a table in a nice hotel restaurant wondering if we should order lunch, and, if we did, who would pay for it. The man who had invited us there as new employees was 15 minutes late. At that table with me was Aaron and Patrick and Tania and Mike, I think.

We had been invited to lunch as part of an odd ritual of team building and, I guess, for the Managing Editor to welcome to the newspaper. I wondered why I was there – I was just a 31-year-old intern and didn’t expect that my employment with the company would last longer than the five months my internship would last. I was probably the oldest one there even though I was the least experienced in the workings of a newsroom.

There was no complaints from me. I was happy to be there and felt I had been given an opportunity. That was pushed aside, though, over fear that someone might suggest I pay for the lunch. I didn’t have enough money to cover my own lunch let alone anyone else’s. A phone call was made to the office manager who said the Managing Editor was running late but was on his way.

We ordered and our food came and still no Managing Editor. I ate slow and Aaron and I joked about the situation. We started talking amongst ourselves, eventually just sort of telling the rest of the group who we were and how we ended up at the newspaper. We’d just about finished that conversation when the Managing Editor showed up.

He sat but didn’t order anything. He talked about the company and the newsroom and about how excited he was about the future of newspapers. Then he turned to us:

“So, let’s go around the table and you guys introduce yourselves and tell everyone how you came to the newspaper.”

As you age, you tend to attend more funerals than happy hours. Time isn’t static and people die. Friends die. Parents die. Colleagues die. For the services of those who die too young, there are large halls and lots of people in attendance. The older the deceased, though, the fewer people attend the services. The services of those who die very old are only attended by family and a smattering of folks who are friends of the family.

That’s the danger in growing old – your peers all die before you, leaving no one to attend your funeral except family members who may or may not have any realization of the person you once were. I suppose it’s natural to want to be remembered when you throw off the mortal coil, but in the end it is all meaningless – you are dead after all and have other things on your mind.

It’s the same with a career. If you stay around too long, nobody really cares when you leave. There’s no one around who remembers the “times” when you did this and so-and-so said that and whatnot. When you walk out you are surrounded by unfamiliar faces that are more interested in the sheet cake than with you. If you are lucky, you get a gold watch, but in these days that happens less and less. That’s the nomadic nature of the American workplace these days.

On my last day in the newspaper industry, no one was there to wave goodbye, there was no sheet cake and certainly no gold watch. I did one quick circuit of what was soon to be my former office to make sure I didn’t leave anything behind. I stashed the post office box key, office key and credit card in a drawer, turned off the lights and left. I was surprised that there was no emotion in my quiet egress and the only nostalgia I seem to be able to muster is forced. When it came to leaving that job, there was very little to be sentimental about. The profession I entered 23 years ago is not the same. It hadn’t been the same industry I had entered quite some time. My last job in the newspaper industry wasn’t even in a newsroom – I’d been laid off from one of those about three years ago. There was little about that last job in the industry that I enjoyed. It was time to leave.

No cake, no watch, no wave goodbye? No big deal.

It was early Sunday morning and I was so new to the newsroom that I didn’t know you shouldn’t answer the phone on an early Sunday morning.

“Hey Rory, this is Jim,” the Sunday editor said, it was too soon for him to be at work. “You’re the only reporter I could get hold of. I need you to go to the Hollywood Video at San Mateo and Zuni. The morning shift found three bodies in the store. I’ve got a shooter on the way and I’ll get Frank over there as soon as I get hold of him.”

I got there in minutes to find the store surrounded by yellow crime tape. Inside the tape was the store and the police department’s mobile crime lab. A media circus putting up its Big Top outside the tape. The TV people were there already, as usual. Jake, our photographer showed up not long after I did. This situation commander came out and gave everyone a briefing. Three bodies found by the manager who opened the store that morning. No other information, no names or nothing, but we all knew it was bad.

Over the next several hours, people who knew the three dead people showed up at the scene to be hustled behind the tape by the police. Soon, we had names of the victims and I was sent to their homes to talked to their loved ones.

The next day, my byline was on the biggest story in the state in the largest newspaper in New Mexico. Not a bad thing for an intern who would soon be looking for a full-time job.

I wasn’t sure if this was something I wanted to do.

The climatic scene in the movie “Blade Runner” provides probably my most favorite line in a movie. The replicant Roy Batty has just saved Deckard from falling off the roof of a building after having just spent the previous 15 minutes beating the crap out of him. Batty is “more human than human” except that he has a four-year life span and he is trying to find out how to extend his life. He has finally come to the realization that he has no other option than to accept his fate.

Sitting down in the rain and holding a white dove, Batty reflects on his life:

”I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in the rain… Time to die.”

That line has always gotten to me, even when I was 19 years old and watching that movie for the first time in a movie theater in Las Vegas, Nevada. It took me years to really understand existentialism – if anyone really can – and that the things that make my life meaningful are, for the most part, only meaningful to me and to anyone else I can convince.

It’s saddening and difficult to think that once I’m gone, all the memories, all the things I have seen and done and learned will all be gone, like tears in the rain. That’s why I write; not only to tell stories and entertain people, but to prove that I exist. In a thousand years none of what we are doing now will have mattered, but maybe a thousand years from now someone will be reading these words. In a small, sad way I will have extended my existence.

That was one thing I loved about being a newspaperman. I loved writing that first draft of history.

The booking log at the police department didn’t make much sense. A fellow had been charged with theft because he hadn’t returned a rental video in a timely manner.

I asked the police chief what that was about. Wouldn’t the video store simply charge the guy’s credit card for the cost of the video? The answer was baffling because the chief said the non-return of the VHS tape of “Fargo” constituted a property crime.

I knew this was the kind of story that people would like to read about. Sure, I’d been working the cops beat for a couple of years, covering murders and mayhem and their consequences. This, however, would be fun. My editor agreed and I got on it.

The police chief gave a good interview and the guy at the video store did too, although he wondered why I would want to do a story. The fellow who had been charged even wanted to talk and he was mad at the police department. With so much more the police department could do, it was ridiculous that it would be coming after him.

The written story, I thought, flowed pretty good. Sure, it had an element of absurdity and I thought simply conveying the facts was enough. My editor disagreed, encouraging me to highlight the absurdities and add a little snark. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with that, but I followed the advice of my editor – that’s just what you do.

Sure enough, the story was on the front page and it was the talk of the city for a news cycle. Throughout the day, talk radio hosts were putting the story front and center. In a way, I had provided my paper with attention for the story I had identified, reported and wrote.

Not everyone was pleased, though. The subject of the story – the fellow who had neglected to return “Fargo” was angry. He thought I had written a story in a way that opened him to being mocked in a very public way.

“You made me look like a fool.”

I once tried to add up how many articles I had written at the 20-year point of my newspaper career. Early on in my career, I had written more than 300 stories a year, but most years it was about 250 articles under my byline. At that amount, in 20 years I probably wrote close to 5,000 stories and if I averaged interviewing two people per story that would be more than 10,000 people I had talked to in that time.

I don’t remember every story I wrote. In fact, I’ve forgotten most of them. A few have stuck with me, but not the ones you would think. Like everyone else, I’ll occasionally do a Google search on my name. Mostly I want to see if anyone is saying anything about one of my books. This time, though, I saw a link to a Wikipedia article on the Rio Grande. That didn’t make sense to me, I’d never really written about the river.

Following the link I discovered a story I had done about the 20^th anniversary of the opening of a bridge. It was a pretty decent story, I thought, but I had no recollection of ever doing it.

Mike McKinney was the first man on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. He had the clipping from Stars and Stripes – as well as a bunch of medals – to prove it.

When the movie “Saving Private Ryan” came out, I went searching for a veteran who might have been involved with D-Day. I didn’t anticipate that I would end up sitting at the dining room table with the first guy on the beach that day.

He was a very nice and humble man and it was difficult to pull the story out of him. During a break, his daughter had told me that Mike had never really talked about the War with her or any of her siblings. Truthfully, I wasn’t getting much of anywhere with him, either. He was either as humble as he was presenting himself to be, or he just really didn’t want to talk about it.

At that point in my career, I was still learning the subtleties of conducting an interview. I admit I was a novice and had not yet really learned that old people and young people give the worst interviews. With the young, it is nearly impossible to pull out anything more than a yes, no, or I don’t know answer. With the old, they tend to go off on odd tangents; so you have to work at keeping them on topic. Mike McKinney was somewhat of a combination of both. When it came to D-Day, he was full of yes and no. However, when it came to his time on the police force after the war (or was it the fire department?) he went on with all sorts of stories.

I had decided that his attitude was one of great pride in what he had done in the war, but that it was mostly a matter of circumstance and luck that he was sitting in a tract home in Rio Rancho, New Mexico talking about it instead of in a grave in Normandy.

Finally, I started asking him questions about mundane things. What was in your pack? Did you have any clean clothes? Did you think much about how your clothes were wet? He enjoyed those questions and he started to reminisce about the life of a soldier. The question that really broke through, though, was simple – what did you have to eat when you finally had a chance to eat? He talked about how things had calmed down enough for him and his best friend to finally sit for a moment and eat. While they were sitting and talking and eating, his friend was shot by a sniper, dying instantly.

At that point, I knew I had broken through the emotional barrier he had erected and I came to idolize this man who had been the first American on Omaha Beach on D-Day.

As I was leaving, he showed me to the door, a small smile on his lips. I thanked him for the sacrifices he had made.

“Thank you,” he said through the screen door of his modest home, “for letting me be a hero one last time.”

There are certain skills you develop as a newspaper reporter. Writing is the most obvious. You can’t write 2,000 words of copy every weekday for 20 years without developing some acumen at it. Young reporters used to be amazed when I would blaze through a 15-column-inch story in a matter of minutes.

“How do you do that?” one asked me once.

“After seven years of doing this job you finally get to the point where this is the easy part,” I replied.

Writing fast is a circus trick, though. After so many swings on the trapeze you get hang of it.

Among the other skills you develop is an ability to talk to people and get them to tell you things. You learn how to listen to not only what is being said, but the way it is said. You start to notice things about people that indicate what is important to them. And you develop a skill at being able to tell when people are lying. That last one usually comes about after the first time you get burned by someone lying to you.

There is a trope among old reporters – believe everything someone tells you, but verify.

I was talking to Dave on the phone for the first time ever. It was an interview for the job as the editor of a small weekly newspaper the company owned. I’d worked there as a reporter and my old editor was leaving.

I was worried that I wouldn’t have a shot at the job. I was coming off a year’s probation for several specific reasons but mostly because I had become a shitty employee. I sucked it up, though, and took the advice of my bosses, my therapist and my conscience and was fighting my way back to respectability.

I asked Dave about this; asked him if he was aware of my troubles and the promise the newsroom editor had made that I would never be promoted to a leadership role in her newsroom.

“It’s not her newsroom,” he said. “You’re the person for this job.”

On the floor of an obscure closet in my house, under old Christmas wrapping and cassette tapes is a footlocker that once belonged to my grandfather. With a few exceptions, that footlocker contains my military career, including a medal.

You may think that the idea of the participation awards they hand out to kids who play soccer these days is something new, but the military perfected the art long before the idea made its way into the mainstream. In that footlocker is numerous certificates of achievements, a couple of plaques and an Air Force Achievement Medal.

While the military does hand out really meaningful medals earned in valorous duty, most of what I have I got for simply showing up and doing what I was told. My discharge papers lists those awards: Good Conduct Medal, Small Arms Expert Marksmanship Medal, AF Training Ribbon, Longevity Service Ribbon, Outstanding Unit Award, Overseas Service Long Tour Ribbon and AF Achievement Medal.

Some of those awards I didn’t even know I had earned until I saw those discharge papers, which is funny because I could have gotten in trouble for not displaying those ribbons when in my dress uniform. The Training Ribbon is earned by everyone who manages to make it through basic training; the Longevity and Overseas Tour ribbons are just about how long you were in and where you served. Good Conduct is given to you if you manage to stay out of trouble and I honestly never realized that I had earned an Outstanding Unit award. I’m not sure which unit I had served in had earned that distinction, although I’m pretty sure that award was a bigger deal to my unit commander than for me.

I’m unsure if I really earned the Marksmanship Medal. Sure, I had always been a pretty good shot with a rifle, but I think the guy next to me on the firing line was shooting at my target.

Which leaves us with the Achievement Medal. You would think that would be something to crow about, but it really is just a “fuck you” from my last supervisor in the Air Force. Normally, someone with a good record separating from the service would be awarded the more prestigious Commendation Medal. You notice I didn’t list that because I had managed to piss off my supervising sergeant. She was probably right to be mad, time has dimmed the issue that made her angry with me but I think it had to do with a rating I had given one of the airmen I was supervising.

So, I got Achievement instead of Commendation and the medal is in the bottom of a footlocker that once belonged to my grandfather. It’s meaning is tied to the arrogance I once had as a young man.

I had grabbed a Mountain Dew and a gas station ham sandwich to consume quickly before the meeting started. I was going over the school board meeting agenda and getting my notetaking tools in order. My notebook was opened to a blank page and my pen was ready. The battery on my camera was charged in case I needed it.

The school board usually had a work session before its meeting to discuss the things that were about to go on during the meeting. It sounded like a demented approach to doing things, like a meeting for the meeting, but in its own way it worked just fine. The work session was looser and usually where you got the good information.

I knew the school board members fairly well – I’d been covering them for close to a decade. The relationship was cordial and board members came and went. I got along well with the superintendents who were there, even when I was giving them a rough time in the paper. They knew I was going to give them fair coverage, which is all anyone can truly expect.

The work session went quick – it was nearing the end of the school year and much of the discussion was about the upcoming high school graduation ceremony. I was half listening, gathering wool and wondering how it was that a 50-year-old man was spending his evenings at countless meetings.

“One final thing,” the school board president said. I lifted my head to see what he might have to say. “Mr. McClannahan …” What was he up to? “… on behalf of the school board and the high school, I would like to invite you to give the commencement address at the graduation ceremony one year from now.”

A year later, I gave that address to a graduating class that included my son. What an incredible award I had been given.

Career websites and recruiting professionals will tell you there is a difference between a resume and a curriculum vitae. A resume lists your work experience but a CV goes to great lengths to let potential employers know what a great and accomplished human being you are.

The real difference is that one is for the kind of employees who have to take a drug test before getting hired and the other is for management types. When you are asked for your CV, you know you’re in the big leagues with nice benefits, a guaranteed salary with bonuses, long hours, stress and a severance package when “organizational changes” are made.

I got fired from one of the first jobs I had. I would spend an hour or so cleaning a bar every morning before I went to school. The owner had told me there were red painted quarters in the cash register that I could use the feed the juke box while I cleaned. There was no more than five dollars of these quarters there and I never used them for anything other than the juke box.

Then one day, the quarters had disappeared along with some other cash stashed elsewhere in the bar. I was blamed and fired, although I didn’t find out until weeks later why. My father, who got me the job, wanted to know why I had stolen the money from the bar. I’ll hand it to the old man, he believed me when I told him that I didn’t steal any money. I’m not sure what happened after that, but I imagine that Dad and the bar owner got into a discussion in which they determined that it was the drunk morning bartender who stole the money.

With one of the last jobs I’ve had, I was called into the administrative suite at the company. Sitting in a room where the previous year I had been told that as long as the company existed I would have a place there, I was told that there was going to be organizational changes – a term that was used several times as if to avoid any legal ramifications of firing anyone over the age of 50 – and that I could pick up my severance package information downstairs in human resources.

The results in both of these instances were the same; I had to go look for another job. The circumstances were seemingly different, but the similarities are shocking. The one that that strikes me the most, though, is that my unemployment in both was due to people talking shit about me in an effort to get rid of me for their own gain.

Some things will never change, except that now I have a curriculum vitae instead of a resume.

I sat by myself sipping a beer in the dark on the patio at the Tamaya Resort, the ever-present Native American flute music keeping my thoughts company.

I didn’t feel like socializing with anyone. I was exhausted after three long days of a newspaper industry convention that had just wrapped up. I was the guy who put this thing on. I had help from the office manager, but all the decisions, all the problems, all the complaints fell on my shoulders and I actually pulled it off. This should have been a moment to bask in my success, but all I could feel was the dark cloud of depression creeping over me. Granted, part of this funk was that my marriage had fallen apart, a victim of my newspaper career.

At my core, though, I knew I was done. I had suspected a year before that I was done, but was still unwilling to admit it to myself. That’s why I took the job as the director of the press association. It kept me close to the industry I’d given more than 20 years of my life to. There was still a chance I’d get back into a newsroom. But after three days of the convention and weeks of long hours preparing for it had finally come to an end the realization struck me. Maybe it had been hidden in that damn flute music.

Was this what I had spent more than 20 years in a newsroom to end up doing? To be a party planner?

In the background, I could hear the party on the other patio going on. I could have sworn I’d heard my name being spoken a couple of times, but that was probably my own ego mocking me into thinking my sacrifices had made a difference. Exhaustion does funny things to a person’s mind, or maybe it was that damn flute music.

Regardless, I knew I was done. If I were to find a bit of peace and sanity, I would have to leave newspapers forever and for good.

I finished the beer in a gulp, wiped the tears from eyes and went up to my room to try and sleep.

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