Perspective
50 years a peripatetic journalist
By ARTHUR JONES
Fifty years ago I sat down before an
old Remington typewriter and typed the phrase: “News in Brief.” It
was my first day on the job as a cub reporter.
Six years later after an obligatory stint in the Royal Air Force,
I arrived in America with $58, no return ticket and no job. A 14-hour
transatlantic turbo-prop flight brought me to Ildewilde Airport (now JFK). No
Ellis Island for me.
The airport was beautiful. Everything, from the sweep of
Idlewilde’s façade to the design of its swan’s neck
streetlamps presented a unified architectural vision of welcome hard to
duplicate. I’d come to visit my pen pal, Bobby Hopp. We’d
corresponded for 11 years.
By nightfall I was asleep in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill
Apartments, from where -- with the windows open -- one could hear the rattle of
the Myrtle Avenue El (elevated line).
Next day I job-hunted. But this was America. My clips, competently
enough written, spoke another language -- engines, lines, points and
guard’s van for locomotive, tracks, switches and caboose.
Plus, I had far too much experience for my age. I was 22.
I came out of an education system now vanished even in Europe. My
generation was the last to obtain its professional and craft qualifications
under the old medieval “City and Guilds” method.
In the England of 1952, to become a reporter or a lawyer, a baker
or a chartered accountant, one had to find a firm to take one on as an
apprentice.
Formal indenture papers were signed. I was indentured to the firm
of Mackie & Co., publisher of a dozen newspapers. A three-year
apprenticeship -- modified if conscripted into the military. My high school,
which had awakened in me a love of history, particularly economic history, and
very little else except open rebellion, was certain it could function better in
my absence. Point made, I signed the apprenticeship papers. I was 16. And a
very cheerful chap.
The apprentice pay was miniscule, all income depended on
one’s skill as a freelance. It’s why Brit journalists of my
generation always write for more outlets than just their employer -- habit born
of economic necessity.
Education was Wednesday at the “Institute” for
one’s profession or craft. (In Gilbert and Sullivan’s “HMS
Pinafore,” the man who polished up the apple on the big front door has
“a pass examination from the Institute.”) Other than Wednesday, one
worked.
I was thrown straight in.
College was for later -- after one had qualified as a reporter --
common law, libel law, 75 words a minute typing, 125 words a minute shorthand.
I always knew I’d go to Ruskin College in Oxford. To be a Ruskin Fellow,
where I grew up, carried cache. I waited until after the RAF and my first visit
to America.
It’s the only college in Oxford founded by an American.
Students had to be over 21, and activist in some way. Radical? Oh my dears, you
have no idea. Anti-apartheid practically started there. We had so many African
students that if a student from Worcester College next door popped his head
over the wall and saw a white Ruskinite, he’d shout: “Dr.
Livingstone, I presume.”
To be a socialist at Ruskin was to be middle-of-the-road.
By Ruskin I was considered slightly right-of-center, and far
left-of-center by my parents who presumed I was a changeling.
To America I’d brought a ready wit, a decent vocabulary. I
was a cradle Catholic and had very disciplined work habits -- when at work.
What more could an editor want? Alfred J. Ball of the Woodhaven (in Queens)
Leader-Observer wanted it for five weeks, then canned me for absenting
myself on New Year’s Eve.
I opened 1953 out of work again.
But I had my American vocabulary by then, jumped twice and landed
on Gannett (publisher of USA Today) in Plainfield, N.J.
All that needs to be added to get where we’re going here is
that most of my reporting and writing since then (overlapping with NCR)
has been for New York magazines, or for the readers of several London papers.
My American wife, Margie, our children and I have lived in Europe three
times.
I know what I brought to America. What did I get? Ah!
I met the Americans who’d gone through the Depression. We
clicked.
I’ve watched generations of Americans arrive. I’ve
chronicled refugees and who’s new in print. Sometimes I’ve simply
noted which ethnic group was currently driving New York cabs or staffing the
newsstands. I love the coming-to-America stories and watch with admiration
those newcomers who start all over and build something.
I’ve been bolstered in many ways by my 40-or-so American
years. I’m a better writer, though obliged to use a smaller vocabulary,
because of American editors. I’m a more imaginative thinker because of
American stimulation and open exchange. Better informed culturally by the great
gifts to U.S. life, arts and music, essentially by American Jews, particularly
in New York. And acutely aware of Catholicism’s great social justice
traditions because of the stature of the Catholics I’ve met in every walk
of life.
No group has shaped my Catholicism more than America’s black
Catholics, whose story remains unrealized and whose strengths and joys remain
outside the mainstream church.
In America in 1958 I’d met racism. I came from a white
country. All the English had was anti-Irishism and anti-Semitism. They
didn’t have any blacks to practice that brand of bigotry on until the
1960s. Then they caught up quickly and for the most part became quite good at
it.
I brought with me my concern for the poor and the role of women,
but the reasons for that must wait for another time. However, the exposure to
racial bigotry in the first six months of my initial one-year sojourn in
America has shaped my social views and writing more than any other single
factor.
And I’m telling you all these things for a reason. Bigotry --
against whomever directed -- is cancerous. And ever-present.
So, if you get sick of me writing, for example, on the bigotry
meted out to Arabs, “Middle-Easterners” or Muslims simply because
they are Arabs, “Middle-Easterners” or Muslims, you’ll know
why.
You Americans, you strong, good, solid, sensible Americans, who
for 40 years have encouraged me in these things -- blame yourselves,
you’re the reason. And you Catholics and other believers I meet along the
way, you and my faith continue to bolster my resolve.
I thank you for that.
It’s because of you I can say “God, bless
America.”
Often enough it’s “God, bless the America-to-be.”
But there’s plenty of thanks for the America that is.
Fifty years along, that’s my news in brief.
Arthur Jones is NCR editor at large.
National Catholic Reporter, October 18,
2002
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