Oh, the Humanity!

A scene out of Hitchcock...

“When Irene Lesterwick died last summer, her grief-stricken son could not face the thought of saying goodbye.”

“He kept her on a sofa in the cluttered front room of the dilapidated home they shared, and there she stayed as summer became fall and fall turned to winter.”

It isn’t always easy to spot a good news story in daily journalism. There is no blue neon light flickering in the darkness to say this is a story worth pursuing. A good tale can hide in plain sight, just waiting to be seen by the right pair of eyes.

At other times, there can be an earth-shattering story, but the only way to grab your own piece of it is to find an unlocked back door, one that nobody else thought to try.

Let me give some examples. Spoiler alert: I‘m afraid I look sort of clever in these. I’m really not that smart, it’s just that I got to pick and choose the examples myself. You are more than welcome to write about the really dumb stuff I’ve done. It won’t be hard to find, trust me.

It was the winter of 1979. My wife and I had been living in New York City for just a few months. I was watching for a chance to get noticed at Reuters, where I was the brand-new guy. Barbara had not even landed her job at the New York Times. We were fresh and finding our way.

One evening, we were in our apartment watching the local news and eating carry-out Turkish food. There was a bare-bones police report about this guy in Queens whose mother had died at their home, and he kept her body there for six months, until neighbors finally alerted police.

The TV news story gave no other details, but what a story! Barbara and I looked at each other and predicted a media circus in response to it the next day.

But there was no circus. Not a word in the morning newspapers. We were pretty surprised by this. Was this how journalism worked in New York? Everybody had to get together to agree something was a big story before it got covered?

I was off work that day, and I was restless. I headed to faraway Queens armed only with the home address and a reporter’s notebook. A lone cop, parked in front guarding the crime scene, was only too happy to have something to do.

He took me inside and we walked from room to room absorbing the ghastly scene. The police told me they had found Robert Lesterwick in a chair facing the sofa that held his mother. His deep blue eyes were the only features distinguishable on a face blackened with soot from the kerosene stove that provided the home’s only heat.

Police said Robert initially insisted his mother was in good health, until their flashlights illuminated a skull and traced a human form. Then, he admitted she was dead. They charged Robert with failure to report a death and took him away for observation.

Robert had been a hoarder, ordering looming stacks of books that turned every room into a confusing labyrinth. Of course, this was long before Amazon Prime made this a fairly typical way to live.

The plumbing didn’t work, and electricity and gas had been cut off long ago. Waste, wrapped in yellowing newspaper broadsheets, had been dumped into the sewer during furtive early morning forays, according to neighbors. As I looked around the home, it appeared some of it hadn’t made the trip yet.

The sofa, Irene’s final resting place, was about as bad as you would expect, with tufts of her gray hair still stuck to the grimy fabric.

While I was gathering details from the scene, Barbara worked the phones to piece together a picture of the Lesterwick life, which had deteriorated over the years. Robert, once a promising lawyer, had been disbarred, for “malpractice, fraud and neglect.”

Armed with all the information we had collected, I breezed into the Reuters office at 53^rd and Broadway and began writing. The editor didn’t mess with my story much, but he did add, in the third paragraph, that it was “a grotesque scene that belonged in Hitchcock’s horror thriller, Psycho…”

I thought this sort of cheapened the story, but he insisted that pop culture references could provide a recognizable shorthand that helped readers identify.

My piece went out to Reuters subscribers, and I went home and held my breath. Mid-evening, our Chicago correspondent sent what we called a “hero-gram” to the New York office, saying the Chicago Tribune had used the story spread across Page One, with my byline.

As it happened, a lot of newspapers around the world did the same.

I could get used to this.

* * * * * *

January 28, 1986, a numb nation watched as the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard,

We weren’t ready for this. Nobody had told us this could happen.

Of course, the main trunk story belonged to our reporters who covered Cape Canaveral as their beat, with a lot of help from Washington journalists plugged into the relevant agencies.

That all made perfect sense, but I wanted in. As I watched the video and heard NASA announcers come to grips with what they were witnessing, I heard faint echoes of another horrific disaster – the 1937 crash of the Hindenburg airship as it attempted to land in New Jersey, with 36 fatalities.

“It's a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. It's smoke, and it's flames now ... and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring-mast. Oh, the humanity and all the passengers screaming around here!”

That tragedy happened long before I was born, but I grew up seeing the fiery newsreel footage and listening to the announcer screaming frantically into the microphone.

“Oh, the humanity!” had worked its way into our language and never left.

I did some mental math. The Hindenburg had exploded 49 years ago, so that announcer could still be alive. It was worth a shot. Using a prehistoric digital research tool called Lexis-Nexis, which sat like a giant Wurlitzer organ in the middle of the newsroom, I learned that the announcer was indeed alive, and residing in West Virginia.

I called him, did a telephone Interview, and wrote a lead saying, “For the second time in his life, 80-year-old Herb Morrison watched stunned as a breathtaking spectacle of flight turned to tragedy.”

The retired broadcaster had watched the Challenger explosion from his home, and the parallels had not escaped him.

“I knew how the announcer felt, describing something routine, and then powee!” he said.

Since almost every American alive was familiar with that Hindenburg news clip, my sidebar seemed to resonate, and was widely used.

Our competition, feeling badly burned, did what we in the business call a “matcher,” one day later. They couldn’t ignore our story; all they could do was play catch-up.

* * * * * *

As a journalist, I hated news conferences. Everyone heard and saw the same thing at the same time. Why should I ask a good question when everybody in the room gets to use the answer?

As a young reporter for the Indianapolis News, I spent much of 1973 covering the return of our nation’s Vietnam War prisoners, many of whom faced the media for the very first time at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio. Massive press conferences, nobody got anything exclusively.

An Air Force colonel who had been held for seven years in North Vietnam answered questions at an overflow event on the base. I asked him how the POWs kept up on major news events, and he said that was extremely difficult.

My mind raced for a follow-up question. This guy was a lifelong pilot until he was shot down in 1965. The sky had been his home.

“Sir, could you tell us, for example, how you first learned that we had landed on the moon?”

He collected his thoughts. “One of the prisoners got some sugar in a food package and there was a depiction of the landing on the packet. That’s how we knew we had made it to the moon.”

His answer gave me goosebumps 50 years ago, and it still does. I used it in the lead of my story. The next day, a competing reporter who had covered the same event told me she was furious that it hadn’t occurred to her to do the same.

As I said, sometimes a good story is just hiding right there, in plain sight.