Farewell to the Jersey Journal

How it looked, except the Radio Shack was a Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee shop.

The Jersey Journal, the (almost) daily newspaper in Hudson County, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, is going out of business. Saturday is its last day. It’s been published since 1867. There have been many rumors over many recent decades about its imminent folding. But this time the demise is real.

The “JJ,” as many locals call it, has been owned seemingly forever by the Newhouse family. I believe it was one of their first newspapers. Nowadays their Advance Publications empire includes many media properties, including the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, to name just two. Their portfolio includes the Oregonian here in Portland.

Their main New Jersey newspaper, the Star-Ledger, is based in Newark, not too far from the Journal’s offices in Jersey City. They’re terminating the hard copy of the Ledger, going online only. But the JJ is vanishing entirely. The Advance website NJ.com will purport to cover the news that the Journal used to, but there’s no way they’ll do it justice.

It’s a big loss for Jersey City. The Journal has always played a significant part in the life of that city. The big public square in the center of town is called Journal Square. For many years the Journal was written, edited, and printed at 30 Journal Square (pictured). Lately they moved the writers down to a dinky office in another part of town, and the actual printing has been done way out in a drab suburb somewhere, with the papers being trucked into Hudson County. Now even those suburban presses are shutting down, and the JJ offices are, too.

It was my sophomore year as a classics major at St. Peter’s College, walking distance from Journal Square, when the college’s public relations guy, Ray Martignoni, called me and asked how would I like to work over Easter break at the Jersey Journal. They were putting together their annual “tab” (which I guess meant tabloid insert) aimed at newcomers to Hudson County. It was really just a vehicle to sell advertising. Most of the editorial content consisted of addresses and phone numbers of various government offices and other resources around the county. There was a little writing involved, but mostly the job was calling the phone numbers from last year’s version and making sure they still worked.

The editor in charge of updating the “tab” for another year was a guy named William Howard Taft. “Like the President,” he would say. Taft was the chief of the Hoboken bureau of the JJ, with a dinky storefront office at 6th and Washington, on the main drag of the “Mile Square City.” I believe the back room was the circulation office, where the Hoboken edition would arrive from Jersey City every morning (except Sunday) and get sent out for distribution. The JJ was an “afternoon” paper, and so not a lot happened at night. The Hoboken edition probably arrived at 9 or 10 in the morning.

I don’t remember much about the work, but I do remember that Taft liked me. He was an odd fellow, to be sure, but impressing him meant that one thing was going to lead to another. How would I like to work on some real stories over the summer? As an alternative to my other summer job prospect, veteran deputy soda jerk at Dick’s Luncheonette (a story for another day), it sounded pretty good. And so of course I said yes.

Bill Taft, center. Nat Berg, far right. Lois Fegan between them. To the left, society ladies of Jersey City.

A couple of months later, I found myself back at the same desk, but with a different office mate. Taft wasn’t around much, but Pete Hallam was. He was a seasoned reporter who had been covering Hoboken for years. He seemed to know everybody and everything in that town. Pete was kind, taught me a lot, and even got me my first byline, on a story about a sly hot dog vendor who was beating the permit bureau by operating out of his garage.

They let me cover the city by myself when Hallam was on vacation, which wasn’t a great idea, but we all survived it, and at some point – I can’t remember when or how – I was reassigned to the hub of the paper’s editorial output, the “city desk” at Journal Square. They sat me right behind the city editor, and I was thrown into the thick of one hot story after another. We’d clock in at 10 a.m., and there was a final edition that stories could go into if they were done by about 11 or 11:30. Deadline time was wild. We were all on manual typewriters, maybe a dozen of them in that room pounding away at once. The typewriters all had bells that rang when you got near the end of a line. Thump thump thump! Clack clack clack! Ding! Ding! What a sound.

They liked what I did for them, and they invited me back for the next summer. But I had a better idea: Why not hire me full-time, right then, for a permanent year-’round gig? The editor-in-chief, Gus Lockwood, wouldn’t go for it. “You have to finish college,” he croaked, with his pipe between his teeth. 

But I knew I could finish my last half of undergrad at St. Peter’s at night. They had an active evening school, and as a clerk in their registrar’s office (another story), I knew their program like the back of my hand. I would take one academic quarter off (they called it a “trimester”), then finish my degree in two and a half years at night. Lockwood said he’d think it over.

I don’t remember exactly what happened next. He probably called my mother. But eventually he agreed. We shook hands. I got a union card. My summer job had turned into a career path, just like that. I was 18 years old.

Except for my brief stints in the Hoboken bureau, I spent my three years at the Jersey Journal working out of the “city room” in Journal Square, which was upstairs from the giant, loud, dirty, dangerous printing presses that produced the actual papers. Mostly I worked the day shift, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., but when people went on vacation, I was willing to fill in on the night shift (something like 4 p.m. to midnight) or even the “lobster” shift, which started at something like 2 a.m. and wrapped up around 10 a.m. The work week started on Sunday night, ramped up on Monday morning, cranked until Friday evening, and ended on Saturday morning. The JJ didn’t publish on Sunday. Everybody not on the day shift got paid a little extra, a “night differential.” It was in our union contract, which was reprinted in a little booklet they gave us.

In that room I played several different roles, including covering the police once in a while and even penning obituaries for a couple of weeks one year. I was on what they called “general assignment.” I was temporarily promoted several times to “rewrite man” when the older guy who had that spot was off on vacation. The “rewrite man” was almost like being an editor, but it was like being a reporter, too. Reporters out in the field would call in and dictate their stories, word for word, to the rewrite man, who would type them up. The rewrite man could stop them, ask questions, relay messages from the editor, correct grammar, and generally make the piece better. It was an especially important position as the deadline for the day’s edition loomed and things were moving fast.

I covered a lot of stories in my brief time. Much of it was politics. Around a half dozen local politicians had been convicted on corruption charges just before I got there; we were obsessed with their movements as prisoners within the federal corrections system. These included the former mayor, the head of the county commission (in New Jersey they’re “freeholders”), a port commissioner, and the county police chief, who was the “bag man.” He had been found with a garbage can full of ill-gotten currency in the basement of his home. I am not making this up.

The new mayor was a 30-year-old doctor, Paul Jordan, who was unlike anything the city had ever seen; there was a lot of hero worship around that guy, although his political career was short. He wound up going back to medicine and is still kicking these days at age 83.

For me, it was a surprise to learn that a lot of the honchos I was writing about were fathers of guys I went to high school with. The new head of the county commission, the city police chief, the ex-mayor who was in federal prison in Pennsylvania – they were all dads of boys I had gone to high school with. One time a union boss disappeared and was presumed dead. When I went to the family home, up on the Heights, to get a statement, to my shock and horror another high school classmate of mine opened the front door and let me in.

The city operated the big local hospital in those days, the Jersey City Medical Center, and like every public institution around there, it reeked of incompetence and corruption. There was a maternity hospital next door, named after the mother of Frank Hague, the former mayor who had been the city’s most ruthless boss and graft-taker. The Margaret Hague lived up to his name; it was run by the county.

We had a reporter covering each of City Hall and the county building, but sometimes there was more going on in those buildings than one person could handle, and so I was brought in. Once a toddler was kidnapped for a couple of days over his father’s gambling debts; I got that one, and although we never did tell the whole story of why it happened, my sidebar won a local journalism prize.

The Nixon gasoline crisis happened in the middle of my time at the JJ, and there were lots of local-angle stories about that. I remember us getting some time off to line up in our cars to buy gas so that we could drive around the county to cover things, if necessary. But most of the time they kept me close to the center of the action, at Journal Square.

I took on some investigative stories. One was about apparent corruption in the city fire department, another about how the mob was building giant mountains of garbage, totally illegal, in the local “meadowlands,” a.k.a. swamps. Nothing came of either exposé – readers knew that everybody in government was on the take around there, and none of this was news to them. But there were some consequences. In one case, I got the back window of my car broken out as a warning to back off; at the time, the message went straight over my head. On the other situation, a phone caller threatened my family. The editors wisely took me off those stories and wound them down before somebody, probably me, got hurt.

You couldn’t blame me for wanting to be a muckraker. All the time I was writing for the Journal, the Watergate scandal was rocking the nation and the world. Woodward and Bernstein were taking down Nixon, in public. There were dramatic Congressional hearings that dragged on for weeks, and they were watched by millions, live on our fat little TVs. It was quite a heady time to be a journalist, on whatever scale. I felt inspired.

My job, which paid incredible money for someone my age, provided a free education on so many topics. I learned from the old guys about all the politicians and bureaucracies on our side of the Hudson River, and in that densely populated part of the world, they were legion. I learned what it’s like to put out a daily newspaper, and what it’s like to have a full-time job. I learned how to think and write fast, and how to take constant feedback from superiors. And maybe most significantly, I saw how important lawyers were in the grand scheme of things. I was constantly on the phone with them to get their take on their cases. One sweet, older lawyer, Frank Hayes, whose office was also on the Square, would stop by and take me aside to explain legal doctrines to me. Between that and what was happening in Watergate, I learned that attorneys have a lot of power.

Every once in a while I dream that I’m back in the Jersey Journal city room. It’s on the third floor; you go to your right upon stepping off the elevator. When you walk in, just past Lockwood’s secretary, you’re facing south. To your immediate right is a long table where the copy editors sit. Then the big heavy desks start; they’re in rows, all in front of you on the right, the rows running from east to west. The first row is where the managing editor and city editor sit, and next to them the copy boy. Then the reporters’ rows start, four or five rows of three or four people each. There are large windows on your right, but no view: They face out onto the roof of the building next door, and then some blank bricks. 

 

The air in the room has got a fair amount of cigarette smoke in it, and the drab green walls are coated in nicotine yellow. They haven’t been painted in many years. It seems like the 1930s, even though it’s the 1970s.

 

At the managing editor’s spot there is the end of a pneumatic tube that runs up to the ceiling, turning to run along the ceiling through the wall in the back. There’s a rumble coming from back there; somewhere beyond that wall is where the presses are. The tube is there to shoot the edited stories out to the composing room, where typists retype them and metal “slugs” are created. On these little metal bars, in mirror image, are the words that will be printed on the paper. Before it goes into the tube, the copy is placed in a clear plastic cylinder, about a foot tall and maybe three inches in diameter. The copy gets rolled up and placed in the cylinder, and the rubber lid of the cylinder is closed. Once it is in the tube, the cylinder gets sucked by some unseen mechanism out to where the compositors are. State of the art.

 

On your left as you walk in are a couple of offices, and the men’s room. One of the offices is where Lockwood sits, and the other is for a guy named Gene Farrell, who at that point is the “executive editor” and writes all the editorials. Past his office are our mailboxes, and then there is a group of individual desks at which sit the women who put out the women’s section of the paper. Yes, there is a section just for the ladies, recipes and fashion and etiquette and such, and about six local writers, all female, grinding it out.

 

On the other side of the aisle from the women are the teletype machines. We are getting Associated Press and United Press International. The machines are as big and clunky as everything else in that room. They type out the news from elsewhere in the state, and the country, and from around the world. They are so noisy that they are in their own special closet. 

 

When major news happens, a bell rings loudly on the machine that is about to type out the story. You can hear the bell even outside the closet. If something really, really big goes down, the thing rings maybe six or eight times. I missed Nixon’s resignation – I was on vacation that week – but I was there when his vice president, a crook from Maryland named Spiro Agnew, was drummed out of office. When the bells went off, I went into the closet to see what was up. They put big news like that into a “flash” that is all caps, with a space between each letter: “A G N E W   R E S I G N S.” Ding ding ding.

 

There is also a photo machine between a couple of the big windows. One of the wire services transmits pictures over this thing. The photos print out on rolls of special paper. We use the images in the paper on occasion. One of the editors puts crop marks on it, and out through the tube it goes to be made through some arcane process into a metal plate.

 

On a weekday, the city room is really hopping. The typewriters are being pounded, phones are ringing and being answered, editors and reporters are calling out to each other across the room. It is an amazing scene to be part of, to be a contributing part of, especially when you are hardly old enough to vote.

When I heard that the Journal was folding, I started searching on the internet to find any remnants I could of the time I worked there. There’s hardly anything. I could subscribe to an archive service with copies of the old papers, but I’m kind of “subscribed out” these days. Somewhere, in some bankers’ boxes in the closet in my office here, are a few clippings and “tear sheets” of things I had written. But at this point, I’m more interested in the people I worked with than what we printed.

And so I started running my ex-colleagues’ names through Google. Not much showed up. Some of my co-workers have disappeared without a trace. It’s understandable. The last time I saw them was 50 years ago, long before the internet de-anonymized nearly everybody.

But it’s not right that they have faded into the mists like that. And so I’m moved to list the whole roster, as best I can remember it. Now, for almost all of these characters, I could tell you a story or two. There weren’t too many drab characters on the team. But that would be a book, and this is just a blog post, and so a quick rundown is all I’ve got in me at the moment. At least these names will be together somewhere, namely here.

I’m going to inadvertently omit some people, and I doubt I’ll spell everyone’s name right. But here is most of whom I was in there plugging away with.

At the very top was the publisher, Jim Wear. He was a tall guy, sweet as could be, older than my uncles but younger than my grandfathers. You’d see him in the elevator now and then; his office was upstairs somewhere, as I recall. I never went there. That was probably a good thing. He’d show up in the newsroom on occasion, and he was always encouraging to us goofy young guys.

Just under big Jim on the masthead were Gus Lockwood and Gene Farrell, whom you’ve met, and then next down, I would say, was the city editor, Bob O’Brien. Bob was a kick in the pants. Another big guy, built like an ex-football player, and I think from Boston or thereabouts. He had an Irish sense of humor and a temper to go with it, but he and I got along swimmingly.

Next on my list I’d put the news editors who were out in the “bureaus” – satellite newsrooms around the county. There were three such offices, and I don’t think I ever met face to face with the guys who ran two of them: Marty Gately down in Bayonne and Haig Anlian up in Union City. I couldn’t tell you what they looked like, but I knew them pretty well, spending time with them on the phone seemingly every working day. Taft was the head of the Hoboken bureau, but Hallam had that ground well covered, and Taft was in Jersey City as much as he was out in the dinky bureau office.

In the city room, a news editor took over in the evening, probably around 7. It was Frank Goodman, who like me, drove in from Kearny. Frank was cut from a way different cloth from O’Brien. He got things done quietly. But he was effective. I can still hear his raspy laugh.

Moving down the pecking order only slightly were the managing editor types. I’m not sure what exactly their titles were, but these people were instrumental in getting the news pages filled up and ready for the presses. During the day there were two guys playing these roles. One was named Conrad Wolfson. Connie was from New York City somewhere, maybe the Village, and he was a warm, witty chatterbox with a heart of gold. A true mensch. Off to his right was a character named Bob Aronson, who had an impressive way with the written word but was also nimble enough to negotiate countless time-pressured interactions between the newsroom and the boys setting the type out back. What’s on Page 2? You asked Aronson.

I only got to know him a little bit, but there was a lovable fellow who sat in Wolfson’s seat on the “lobster” shift, which started in the middle of the night. His name was Eddie Hartnett. After Goodman had “put the paper to bed,” Hartnett would take it over and see it through until the presses actually started rolling at 8 or 9 a.m. When he got off his shift at 10 or so, Eddie would pick up his empty lunchbox and head downstairs to the Commuters Bar, every single day. Once in a while a question would come up at 10:30 or 11 that only Eddie could answer. A couple of times they sent me down to the Commuters to ask him. To my surprise, the bar was jammed, and Eddie was always there, ready with a smile and the answer.

The smartest, most clever guys in the room were on the copy desk, where all editorial product would be edited before it went up the chute. Each of these dudes was a walking Strunk & White, plus experts on the paper’s own style rules. Was it “ten” or “10”? (“10.”) Is Joneses’ a word? (Yes.) Is “under way” one word or two? (Two.) And oh, the headlines. Some of them would make the reporters gag, but most of them were right on, and occasionally they’d be so sharp that they'd take your breath away.

These were the copy editors: There was Stewart Benedict, another New Yorker, and a playwright on the side, as I recall. Next to him was Peter Farrell, son of Gene Farrell. (There was a lot of nepotism in the Newhouse chain, and still is I think, but Peter was no nepo baby; he was a fabulous editor and could have done any job in the house.) Across from him was a guy named Joe Casey, whose acerbic wit capped off awesome skill with an editing pencil. And sometimes we’d have on duty a dapper older man, an Italian stallion, Tony Zito, whose wry smile and interest in horse racing are unforgettable.

Next in the hierarchy was the “rewrite man,” Arnie Freilich. He sat to my immediate left every day and kept me out of trouble. Arnie was also the shop steward of our union chapter, the Newspaper Guild. When he saw something that looked like management taking advantage of me, he’d say something. That wasn’t often, but I heeded his advice.

That brings me to the reporters, my peers. Here I was, this kid waltzing into a prime seat in the city room, and yet every one of them supported me, and helped me get going. Looking back, there were quite a few. There was a payroll for talent in those days.

I’ll start, for no apparent reason, with the reporters who worked out in the bureaus. One was Katie Moloney, one of the few women reporters outside the women’s section. I’m recalling that she was up in North Hudson with Anlian. I never met her in person, but I remember doing good work with her on the phone a few times.

There were two brothers who worked both in North Hudson and in Jersey City, Dick Small and his younger brother John. Each of them sat next to me at Journal Square for a while, but they were also up in Union City for a while. I’ll bet they knew young Bob Menendez when. 

Another bureau type who wound up in Jersey City was Tom Golodik. He started out in Bayonne with Gately but became a good friend of mine after he moved up to Journal Square. Tom tried to teach me how to service my own Volkswagen. That led to calamity (another story), but it wasn’t his fault.

Also coming in from Bayonne, I dimly recall, was Jim O’Reilly. Jim was a little older than us kids, but he wasn’t what you’d call middle-aged yet. Like all of us, he had good days and bad days in the city room. The bad days were when he was working for Taft.

Last but not least among the bureau reporters was Peter Weiss. He, too, was working in North Hudson when they moved him down to the city desk. Nobody who ever worked with Peter didn’t love him, and I am no exception. There’s a scholarship in his name at New Jersey City University. If there’s a heaven, he’s in it. What a sweet guy.

I also crossed paths with a reporter named David Grossman (or maybe it was with two “n’s”). He didn’t say much, but when he did it was always generous and thoughtful. It looked like he could have big things ahead of him.

Moving the spotlight back to center stage, there are two general assignment types with whom I sweated out nearly every day of my three years. They sat right behind me, and we all saw and heard everything that happened to any of us at those humongous, dusty desks. One of these co-workers was Harvey Zucker. Harvey commuted in from Queens every day, a Mets fan I think, and about as faithful a team player as you could get. Lockwood would come out of his office with one corny story idea after another, but Harvey could always turn them into something interesting. They asked him to cover school science fairs, of all things, and not only did he do so cheerfully, but he did it so well that it became a thing around town.

Then there was Ron Leir. This guy could cover anything, and there was something about him that drew people out. His wit was droll, and he had a delicious sense of irony. There were some activists around trying to get the city’s decrepit Hudson River waterfront reclaimed as a natural area. The old guys laughed and sent them to Ron. He listened. They eventually had the last laugh. It's called Liberty State Park.

On the “lobster” shift with Eddie was an old guy by the name of Bill Judkins. Of all the reporters in the city room, I knew him the least. We shared a chair, after all; if he was there, I had no place to sit.

But one of the night owls I did get to know was the obituary writer. I’m a little fuzzy on this, but I am remembering his name as Douglas Dabney. I think he came in around 4 p.m.; funeral parlors were most active at night. In those days, the JJ printed a free obituary on anybody who died in the county. Douglas’s job was to call around to all the funeral homes every day and get the lowdown on the latest dead people. With rare exception, they got three paragraphs each. 

Out in the field were reporters who didn't answer to the bureaus, but they didn’t have a desk at Journal Square, either. They had “beats” elsewhere. They’d gather their information and type up their stories at some other location, and the copy would get delivered somehow (usually by them) to Journal Square. Think of it: no internet, no email, and even fax technology was so primitive that we used it only to take stories from the state capital, Trenton. The “beat” reporters would either call in and dictate their stuff to Freilich, or type it up and drive in to drop it off.

The big three who had this routine were Larry Babich on police, Rae Downes at Jersey City City Hall, and Jackie Farrell (yes, related to Gene and Peter, I think) at the Hudson County building. Of these three, Rae Downes was a real standout. She had just come off covering the dramatic corruption trials of the local politicians, and she was a dogged investigator. When she asked a politician a question, she didn’t take bull manure for an answer. She was down at City Hall (which her husband, Charlie Koshetz, used to cover before becoming a flack) trying to help us figure out whether the reform mayor was for real.

Babich was another capable reporter. He was tight with the cops, which I quickly learned you had to be if you wanted them to tell you anything. Maybe he was too tight with them, but in those days, it wasn’t an issue that many people worried about. When I subbed for him, sources dried up. They would talk only to Larry.

Jackie Farrell, I honestly didn’t know. He was one of those voices on the other end of the phone, and there were enough years between us that not much but business was ever exchanged.

Which brings me to the Trenton “bureau,” which was really just one man, by the name of Joe Albright. Joe would send most of his copy in by fax. In those days a fax machine was like something out of “Back to the Future.” There were lights and silver paper and a cylinder that spun around and around. A five-page story took something like 20 minutes to get transmitted.

Albright on deadline was a trip. I’d be his “rewrite” guy sometimes, and he’d invariably call in breathless with his breaking news. He’d get so excited, you’d have to calm him down to get coherent sentences down on paper. But can you imagine his gig? Covering Trenton, New Jersey, all by yourself, for a Jersey City newspaper, relaying information to people you’ve never seen and are never going to see. That is dedication.

My remaining list grows short. I don’t know where to put Peter LaVilla. As I recall, he worked nights, covering meetings. Meetings, meetings, meetings. City Councils. School boards. If they met at night, we had LaVilla out there. He might have been in the North Hudson bureau, too. I’d run into him occasionally, but we weren’t too connected.

No roster would be complete without the little guy with the black-rimmed glasses in the back row, just in front of the teletype closet: Mr. Nat Berg, the political columnist who put the spin on the news of the day. He knew everybody's business. He knew even more than they thought he knew. He’d crank out the political and social gossip with ease. Material like that is easy to dismiss as fluff, but it has a lot of influence. Nat’s certainly did. And I can’t think of a more humble, respectful guy. A wise man, not a wiseguy.

There was even a fictional reporter that I remember. Back on the “Dine and Dance” page, where they’d run ads for restaurants and bars on Thursday or Friday, they would include a short “column” that was a thinly disguised promotion for one of the regular advertisers, selected by the advertising department. Connie Wolfson was in charge of this “column.” He had me write it a few times. The same pen name was used every time. It was something like “Jeff Knight." Maybe that will be the title of my autobiography. "I Was Jeff Knight."

A word about the copy boys and girls. These were young people, maybe my age then, who performed menial but crucial tasks around the office. Most had ambitions to become writers, and many of them realized their visions. The one I remember best is Augie Torres, who did indeed become a reporter, retiring out of the JJ after many decades there. There was also a guy whose face I can remember, but whose name isn’t going to come to me. Neil, I think he was. Hard-working, helpful, energetic.

This brings me to Judy Valente, who was a couple of years behind me at St. Peter’s. She may have been a copy girl at some point. Or an intern. But she was a real writer, and I’m sure she parlayed her talent into something much bigger. 

There were two departments just off the city room: sports and women. You couldn’t go wrong either way. The sports department was run, according to the organizational chart, by Jack Powers, but it seemed like a real team effort. Powers, an older guy in a silver crewcut, was a jack of all trades when it came to sports, but his big love was handicapping horse races. The JJ published his daily picks for winners at one of the tracks. Jack was always around the city room kibbitzing with us news reporters, and he had wise insights, delivered half-jokingly, into the news of the day.

When Jack went off duty, Milt Kerzner took over on the night shift. I had no reason to work with Milt, but when I bumped into him, he was genuinely interested in me and my writing. His main reporter was the one and only Cas Rakowski, the source authority for all things sports in Hudson County, at both high school and college levels. The other sports reporter I’m remembering is Arnie Leshin, and the faintness of my recollection reflects how little we interacted. We were just in different universes, I guess.

Is it time yet to discuss the women’s department? My heart starts beating a little faster. There they were, on the way to the composing room, these beautiful women, of all ages, and they were all writers. Eighteen-year-old me was always looking for an excuse to walk over that way and take it all in. The reporters in that department usually ignored me, which is a good thing, because if they had done any more I probably would have fainted.

Who was over there? The chief was Lois Fegan, super-accomplished in what women’s sections of newspapers were back then. She was married to Gene Farrell (it’s a Newhouse shop) but her journalistic chicken came first, before their marital egg. She had it down. 

The reporters included Cathy Portman and Dianne Kenny, to whom I was too scared to utter a word; and Prudence Wear and Pat Donnelly, who went out of their way to befriend me as the new kid (and I do mean kid) on the block. Prudence, Pat, and I saw many things eye-to-eye, it was obvious from the start, and we still do today. Prudence was Jim Wear’s daughter (right?), and she married Peter Farrell (right?), but like Fegan's, Prudence's talent was obvious. In retrospect, all of those women reporters were being grossly underutilized. Speaking of daughters, Milt Kerzner’s daughter, Nina, spent at least one summer in the women’s department as an intern, and she and I became good friends, too. 

Now, I’m recalling one other member of the women’s department, but her name escapes me. She was what I would have called an elderly lady back then, but she was probably younger than I am now. Wherever you are, madam, you are remembered, but forgive me, not well.

In another part of our floor was an archive of clippings from old editions of the paper, along with metal printing plates of photos of people that had appeared in those editions. The material was indexed and kept in drawers, arranged in an alphabet like a library card catalog. In the newspaper biz, this was called “the morgue.” I retrieved many materials from the JJ morgue, which was being run in those days by a wonderfully competent and helpful person whose name I am remembering (rightly or wrongly) as Josie Donovan. And to make matters better, my trips to the morgue were brightened immensely by Josie’s assistant, a Black fellow just a little older than me named Marty Murphy. To look at us, Marty and I had nothing in common, but the opposite was true. We were especially good at exchanging ideas about music, and sports, but we also enjoyed simply hanging out. Occasionally I think we stepped out to my car and split a joint together.

I almost forgot the photographers! And that would be a big miss. They didn’t work out of our building, and I suspect they were somehow independent contractors, because they operated out of a house with a darkroom, a few blocks off the Square. Over by the White Castle! Anyway, when you needed a photo of something, you called over there, and they went out and took it, developed it, and delivered it to the city room.

The chief of that operation was Eric Groething, and for some reason I’m pretty certain that his wife was somehow involved with the JJ as well. Below Eric came Wally Hennig, but it was the low man on the totem pole that I’ll remember the most distinctly. It was a younger guy named Steve Golecki. Steve got really excited at the fact that he would be sent to photograph crime scenes, natural disasters, gruesome accidents, and the like. So much so that he had his car tricked out to seem like an unmarked police car. He had a red light to put on the roof, and the car even had a siren. And a huge engine. He and I, Bogdanski and Golecki, had some adventures together on the road. I’ll leave it at that.

So there. That’s everybody I can remember. But those I just described are impossible to forget. My name was in with theirs for a while, I’m proud to say.

Above and beyond the crash course I was getting in political science, my time at the JJ provided tremendous training in writing. The paper had its own style, and we weren’t given much, if any, leeway around it. Because the space that was being allotted to any story was an estimate, and subject to change if breaking news warranted, every piece had to be written so that it could be cut from the bottom up without the reader noticing. The first paragraph had to stand on its own as the whole story, if necessary. Similarly, the first two paragraphs had to stand on their own, and the first three, and the first four, and so on. I didn’t always get it right, but just trying to do so instilled some serious discipline in my prose.

The editors were not shy about giving feedback, sometimes painful amounts, as something I’d produced had to be rewritten, often more than once. The copy editors, who cleaned up our mistakes and wrote all the headlines, were wordsmiths of the highest order. To this day I’m using tips and remembering fine distinctions that I picked up from those guys. All that wisdom paid off in my later career path.

The old folks gave mostly good advice about life, too. They were smart as whips, most of them, and they were living, or had lived, full lives. Some were boozers. Some were bitter that they hadn’t gone further in this world. But they were, above all, kind. Their experienced voices could steer a young guy in good directions.

But as valuable as the Jersey Journal experience was, after a couple of years I was getting restless. At one point I remember interviewing in New York City with some guy at the Daily News for a possible position over there – a much bigger pond in which to swim. But any serious discussion would have to wait for college to be finished, and at that point graduation was a year or so away.

Meanwhile, somehow law school popped onto my radar screen. And given how important lawyers were at that moment – in Watergate, but even on my own little assignments – the seeds of change had been planted in my mind. I recall Rae Downes, a genius of a reporter who was as close to a lawyer as you could get without actually being one, telling me that I was cut out for it.

Then in my third summer at the newspaper, I took a cross-country road trip with a couple of friends of mine who were moving out west. We drove from Jersey City to Los Angeles and ended up in Tucson. I flew home from there, back to the city desk grind. But somewhere on that long road it dawned on me that I was a short-timer, not only at the JJ but also in that line of work, at least for a while.

There would be no fourth summer. I took off for law school in California, and never set foot in the Journal building again. As I drove off out I-80, the idea was that I would become an attorney representing journalists, or a journalist covering the legal system. Anthony Lewis was covering the Supreme Court for the New York Times. I wanted his job.

None of that panned out, of course. But the lawyerly career I did wind up pursuing owed more than a little to the many gems I had collected at the Jersey Journal.

And now it’s gone. It’s a shock, really. In the back of my mind, it felt like the JJ would always be there, chronicling in its own modest and imperfect way the many comedies and tragedies that play out every day in the deep heart of northern New Jersey. But nothing’s forever; eventually quittin’ time rolls around. 

Ave atque vale, baby. Farewell to the Jersey Journal, and hail to every writer, editor, copy boy, copy girl, morgue attendant, or photographer who ever worked there.