Spent ten months earning a Master’s Degree in Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I was exposed to a faculty of veteran journalists and it was a valuable experience.
One month before graduation, my faculty advisor Penn Kimball called me to his office and told me, “Don’t wait for the graduation ceremony next month, that’s a waste of time. You’ve got a wife and child, you need to start looking for a job immediately.”
He told me the news business is pretty much the same everywhere, pick out a city and start knocking on doors.
Turned out to be valuable advice and lucky timing.
I picked San Francisco. It was June 1969. Big news was happening in the Bay Area. Students at Berkeley and San Francisco State were rioting because of the Vietnam War. Governor Reagan was using the word “bloodbath” to describe what could happen if police were interfered with. The Black Panther Party in Oakland had become prominent front page news.
The day after I arrived in town, I telephoned the News Director at KPIX-TV, the CBS station. I had written him a letter, and when I called he told me, “Come over immediately.”
At his office News Director Ron Mires asked me the following question: “Do you think you can fill the shoes of William Randolph Hearst III?”
My response: “I don’t understand the question.”
Ron explained to me that Willie Hearst, grandson of the great man (Hearst Corporation Publisher William Randolph Hearst), has just telephoned that morning to say that he was quitting the lowest job in the newsroom. Mires said that Willie had decided to work at his grandfather’s newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner.
Willie Hearst’s job of daytime courier and nighttime news writer had just opened up that very day, starting at 2PM.
Stupidly, I asked, “How much does it pay?”
“$120 a week,” said Mires.
“Any chance I could earn more?” I pressed, “ After all, I have two master’s degrees, one in economics, the other in journalism.”
Impatiently, Mires pointed to a stack of applications on his desk and said, “You see these resumes? Half these people will work here for nothing. Make up your mind right now.”
“I’ll take it.”
“I see you know something about supply and demand,” said Ron smiling.
I started that afternoon. Just a summer relief job, it ended after three months. I asked Mires if I could try being a reporter and he told me that I didn’t have enough experience.
“You don’t start as a reporter covering news in a big city like San Francisco,” he told me. “Try a smaller market,” he added.
Several months later, I got my first reporting job at KXTV CBS Sacramento.
This position also involved a famous name.The News Director who hired me was Tom Capra, son of famed Hollywood film director Frank Capra. (See Chapter 8)