As a former newspaper reporter in a couple of small central Indiana cities, I covered my share of dead dog stories.
“Dead dogs” are stories that have no chance of being interesting, but are ones your editor sends you out to cover because he has space to fill on page 9 of the local section or because she has a hole in tonight’s newscast that needs filling. (Or because he not-so-secretly hates you.) Why you find yourself in possession of a dead dog story doesn’t matter. What does matter is the next few hours in which you try just about anything to breathe life into a story that you know is a goner.
Dead dogs might be stories about the weather. Maybe it’s a story about a local farmer who has grown the county’s biggest acorn squash. Maybe it’s a story about a local woman who crochets clothes for dogs (ostensibly live ones). Maybe it’s story about the Aunt Gracie Longbottom who for the past 57 years has tantalized the town with her scrumptious carrot cake. The bottom line is that a dead dog has no hope of being interesting and every expectation to be a soul-sucking story upon which you don’t wish to ascribe your name or likeness.
I don’t mean to infer that you hope for death and mayhem to serve as fodder for interesting news reporting, but dead dog stories are the ones that make your career flash before your eyes. In journalism school, you had visions of exposing injustice, of shining a light on the dark underbelly of crime, and of your acceptance speech when you’re inevitably awarded the Pulitzer. Six years later, you’re trying to make a story about town hall meeting in BFE sound remotely interesting. I can remember standing there, covering that meeting, reporter’s notebook in hand, thinking “how did it come to this?”
Recently, I was watching one of my local news channels when I heard a news reporter utter a statement that was the verbal equivalent to pinning a note reading “goodbye, cruel world” to your shirt and leaping off a bridge.
This unfortunate reporter was attempting to report a “story” concerning an Indianapolis neighborhood in which people drive too fast. Really? A story about people driving too fast? Clearly, news was slow in the Circle City on this sunny April afternoon.
Apparently, however, this dead dog story actually contained a real live, er, dead dog. The dog in question allegedly met his maker after being hit by a vehicle that was traveling too fast through a residential area. I am a dog lover through and through, but a story about a dog being hit by a car is about as newsworthy as the boil your Aunt Barbara had lanced last week.
As the reporter was valiantly trying to make this dead dog into a real story, he said, and I quote, “the dog, affectionately known as….’Poopy’…is now buried in the backyard.”
Trust me when I tell you that whenever your editor sends you out on boondoggle assignment such as this, the person you interview will always, always be a crackpot, have a bizarre name, be missing most of his or her teeth, or have a dead dog named “Poopy.”
Always.
This is what I call The First Axiom of News Reporting. It’s an immutable law of reporting. Ask any reporter.
I looked into the reporter’s dead eyes staring at me from my television screen and I swear, he was silently emoting, “Someone, please, please for the love of all that’s good and holy, someone please smother me with a pillow.”
His pain was palpable—and a pain that I know all too well.
Unfortunately, dead dog stories aren’t the only way in which a reporter can see his career flash before his very eyes. Sometimes, the biggest news stories are invaded by The Crazy Passerby.
The Crazy Passerby (also known as The Second Axiom of News Reporting) is the inevitable witness to whatever news story you’re trying to cover. You might not know this, but no newsworthy event in the history of journalism has been witnessed by a relatively sane person with a decent command of the language, and the owner of most of his or her original teeth (or at the very least, a decent set of dentures that he or she is actually wearing).
You can’t avoid The Crazy Passerby. You can ignore all the obvious card-carrying crazies – the ones that look like Aqualung; the ones covered in cat hair and wearing purple spandex; the ones that carry a pocket knife in one of those little leather belt pouches (oh yes, every single one of those folks is plumb crazy). You can avoid all the usual suspects and set your eyes on the most normal looking person in sight, and without fail—WITHOUT fail—he or she will open his or her mouth and the crazy will flop right out and wiggle around all over your shoes.
One such Crazy Passerby tried to nose her way into possibly the biggest news story of my young career. It was April 1992, and I was a police reporter for a Midwestern daily newspaper. It was a Saturday and like most days off, I was running errands with my police radio lying on the passenger seat of my car. To say that I was dedicated to my job is an understatement. I literally slept with my scanner, running out at all hours of the night to cover shootings, fires, and all manner of police and firefighter fun. Dates were hard to come by in those days. Go figure.
On this particular day, I just happened to be on the city’s north side, when a call went over the air regarding a plane crash near Grissom Air Force Base, located near Peru, Indiana, and about 12 miles north of Kokomo, Indiana.
At any rate, the crash itself was a tragic event in which an Air Force Reserve pilot crashed his A-10 Warthog fighter plane into a wooded area near the base, killing him and destroying the plane.
(I want to say at this point that I am in no way trivializing the pilot’s death. His death was a tragic loss to his family and our country. The rest of the story I’m telling here has little to nothing to do with the crash itself.)
There were several people nearby who saw or heard the crash. I got a line on one such woman and after ditching a bubble-headed blonde television reporter who was following me around, leaching off my journalistic instincts, I managed to find the “witness.” One look should have told me to stay away.
Far, far away.
Her eyes were flashing “Helter Skelter” like a cheap neon motel sign on the fritz. Being the ever intrepid reporter, however, I pressed on.
After getting the proper spelling of her name and writing down her phone number (something I always did so that if I needed to call back later for clarification, I could) I asked her what she heard or saw, and I will never forget her response:
“Well, I was a’sittin’ on the pot when I heard this loud WHOOOSH and BOOM!”
I resisted the natural urge to ask her if the loud whooshing and booming might’ve come from the porcelain throne upon which she was perched, but I managed to refrain.
She continued: “I got up, ran outside and saw the biggest dadburn fireball you ever did see.”
The snapping sound heard by people nearby might have sounded as though someone stepped on a dry tree branch, but it was really the sound of my reporter’s notebook slamming shut.
One would think the sudden and very decisive closing of one’s notebook would ward off further comment, but Little Miss Helter Skelter was not the be deterred. The Crazy Passerby continued: “I didn’t even flush, I just got up and ran outside to see just what IN THE HELL was going on out there. I didn’t even bring my gun.”
At this point, I was doing my best defensive backpedal, trying to get away from this crackpot, and she just kept walking with me, offering all kinds of helpful advice about the secret goings on at the sinister military base.
“It was one’a them military planes,” she said with a strange hand gesture that I think was supposed to represent an airplane flying through the air. It was as though she thought I might not have gleaned the fact that a military plane was involved even though there were scores of military officers and vehicles in the immediate area that pretty much had already given that nugget of precious information away.
“They fly right out of Grissom, you know. At all hours. Lots of ’em.”
By that point, I was thinking of ways that I could end my suffering by taking a mental inventory of the items in my possession at the moment that could be used to take my own life. I had a ballpoint pen, a notebook, a Bic lighter and a police radio. My options were stabbing myself in the neck with the pen, eating my reporter’s notebook and hope that the spiral binding did bad things down there, lighting myself on fire, or bludgeoning myself to death with the police radio.
Perhaps sensing my discomfort, the lady asked me if I had a business card. In my dumbstruck terror, I reached into my pocket, pulled out a business card and handed it to her. I can still see that moment in slow motion, my hand holding the card as my brain sent signals to my arm to move it forward while grasping said card, and stopping just in front of The Crazy Passerby so that she could take it. Over and over, I see a slow-motion replay of my arm moving toward her, stopping and her taking the card.
The good news at that very moment was that the card seemed to placate her long enough for me to trot away – and trot, I did. I was literally wishing that the aforementioned bubble-headed blonde female news reporter in heels would rescue me, or that the MPs—who were looking for me and the newspaper’s photographer, by the way—would just shoot me. I literally had to just walk away with her still rambling away about conspiracy theories aplenty.
Eventually, after speaking to dozens of military personnel, traipsing around a muddy creek bank, getting poison ivy, having a loaded M16 brandished in my general direction, and nearly ending up in a military brig (long story) I made it back to the newsroom and wrote like the wind, posting two front-page stories in time for the first print deadline.
The following day, I was in a mostly empty newsroom working on my Day Two story, which is news lingo for a follow-up story that adds to deadline story from the day before. I had done several phone interviews, spoken to family members of the pilot and done as much research as a could on the A-10 fighter plane (remember, this was 1992 and the Internet was still only available on college campuses and at government facilities).
I was about one-third of the way into my Day Two story when my phone rang. This was also before CallerID was on every phone, so I had no idea who it was, but I was assuming that because it was a Sunday and that I had just left messages with multiple people, that it was probably someone important returning one of my calls. It wasn’t.
You know who it was: The Crazy Passerby.
I’d barely introduced myself when the voice of crazy said, “Why didn’t you include me in your story, Mr. Reporter?” She put enough stink on “Tribune Staff Writer” to offend a fishmonger.
As you probably assumed, I decided that a serious story about the tragic death of a decorated Air Force pilot was not the place to quote a woman who was “on the pot” when the pilot met his end. I thought the visage of her running out the door—pants only partially returned to their upright position—would have been wildly inappropriate.
The voice on the other end of the line continued, “I took the time to talk to you about the big ol’ plane crash over there, and I told all my friends I was gonna be in the paper. You made a fool outta me, mister.”
I swear, I am NOT making any of this up.
Calmly, I said, “Ma’am, I didn’t use your quotes because your quotes just didn’t seem appropriate given the gravity of the story and I didn’t want to sully the pilot’s remembrance by mentioning that the nearest witness was relieving herself at the time of his death.”
“Stop using all them big words, Mr. Smarty Pants,” she hissed into the phone. “You didn’t want people to know what I know. That’s why you didn’t put me in your story. You made me look stupid to my friends.”
I resisted the urge to point out that I rescued her from looking stupid to the entire newspaper readership. After spraying me with one of the most stunning strings of profanity I’ve EVER heard—and I’ve heard some stunning profanity in my days—the line went dead.
After sitting there in stunned silence for a few seconds, a wry smile ran across my face. After scratching around on my desk, I found my Indianapolis phone book and called the television network for which the aforementioned bubble-headed blonde television reporter worked. After being transferred to the reporter’s voice mail and hearing her sing-songy outgoing message, I was finally greeted with a beep, after which I said:
“Hi, my name is Milton (last name withheld) and my wife witnessed that plane crash yesterday, but was too upset to speak to anyone. She has a lot of great information to share and she’s only giving it to one reporter. She’d like you to call her, please.”
I could barely keep from laughing as I said, “her number is (insert The Crazy Passerby’s number here). Thank you.”
I almost fell out of my chair laughing in an empty newsroom.
