Ny times obituary writers

My father, who died when I was five, had a reputation as a great newspaperman. I never doubted that I could be one too. I believed her, and that's where my trouble began. I was eight when I took my first paper route - three hundred houses with the Columbia Pioneer at ninety-five dollars a week.

That first winter, my mother delivered the papers with me. She woke me at five in the morning dressed in a scarf, sweatshirt and jogging pants, white moon boots, and her old camel-hair coat, and we went out into darkness to the corner of Stadium and La Grange to pick up the bundles. On certain days the distributors would leave inserts - the home section on Tuesdays, real estate on Fridays, comics, coupons, classifieds, and Parade for the Sunday paper - and my mother and I would sit on the cold floor of the garage putting inserts and headsheets together, folding the papers in thirds, slipping them into plastic sleeves.

When we had folded and bagged all three hundred papers, my mother popped the hatchback of what was then her brand-new AMC Gremlin, brown with a white racing stripe. We stacked the papers in the back of the car, then sat in the front, waiting in silence as the Gremlin warmed up.

This was the best time of the day. The silence, the murkiness of first light, the warm air from the heater closing around us. By the time I was twelve, I was collecting newspapers. I'd save one a day from my morning route, and my mother, Lorraine, who was a secretary at the University of Missouri Journalism School, would bring home thumbed-through discards from the school library.

The papers piled up in labeled stacks in the garage, until eventually I had so many that my mother had to park her car in the driveway. This must have been an inconvenience, since we had limited space, but she wasn't about to let an AMC Gremlin, which smelled of engine oil when you turned on ny times obituary writers heat, roll over my dreams.

I grew up with a heightened sense of my own importance, which my mother encouraged. She figured an only child with a single parent ought to be treated as exceptional. I'd come home from basketball, a skinny sixteen, and she'd be standing by the microwave lining Triscuits onto a plate, slicing cheese to melt on top.

I'd go to the refrigerator for a soda and see my final grades taped to the door. Maybe they go crazy. If you're born great, the rule is: Pale and narrow, the bones in her downturned face just beneath ny times obituary writers skin, my mother would often strike me as youth standing at the boundary of old age. I'd watch her turn in the crinkly black dress that sharpened her features and darkened her eyes and wonder if men in town found her pretty. She'd walk to the stove, rigid and deliberate, and roll a cigarette in the flame.

Even on my mother's salary, we could have afforded a better place, something I never tired of bringing up. We had lived in the same Sears, Roebuck house at La Grange since I was five, always with boarding students stomping above us. Our half of the house had low ceilings and little light, and though it was kept ny times obituary writers, nothing had changed in years. The living room was small, with a lumpy yellow sofa, shag carpet, a near-empty curio cabinet, and a fallapart rocking chair that I was forever salvaging with Super Glue.

We ate in the kitchen at a Formica dinette under cheerful aphorisms that my mother would copy out of magazines and hang on the walls. My room had always looked the same, even later when I came home to visit, as it did when I was a boy: I cherished this picture because I had an actual memory of the scene. The cloudless sky, the pale grass on an uncommonly warm spring day. My father, Charlie Hatch, thirty-six years old, sitting on the back ny times obituary writers of my uncle's house in Wichita in a blue and white seersucker suit with a Panama hat brim-down over his head.

I remember my mother chasing me with a camera while I ran around the yard making airplane noises, my arms outstretched. Out of the blue my uncle had snatched me up and whispered conspiratorially in my ear, "I'm going to zoom you at your daddy and you're going to take his hat.

The photograph, a grainy black and white, captures the scene a minute later. My father, hatless, his back to the camera, bends above me, looking over ny times obituary writers shoulder.

I'm sitting upright on the lawn in a white shirt. The Panama hat rests hugely over my head. My mother and I were for the most part alone. She did sometimes have company over, small potlucks with friends from ny times obituary writers office, but usually we had the evenings to ourselves. I'd organize my newspapers in the garage or write long editorials at my desk for no one's eyes but mine, while my mother played her light operas too loud on the RCA Victor my father had given her.

She'd twirl around the room or hum along as she read Cosmopolitan in the fall-apart rocking chair. My mother kept no photographs of my father in the living room. What mementos she did have were locked away in her bedroom, down the dark hallway from mine. The few times I went in there as a child, I felt an immediate urge to turn back. Her small room had no carpeting, and the creak in the wood, the shock of the cold floor on my bare feet, gave me a feeling of emptiness.

The double bed was always made, with a brown chenille spread pulled taut over the single pillow and tucked in all around like a private's bunk. Hanging above it, in a thick wooden frame, was a needlepoint sampler of flowers and vines surrounding the words grow where you ny times obituary writers planted.

Against one wall was a heavy walnut dresser; atop it, neatly arranged in saucers, lay pennies and nickels and Viceroy cigarettes. In the far corner sat an old rolltop desk, always locked, where I assumed my father's things were saved: My father's first job out of the Navy was on the city desk at the Wichita Kansan.

Back in the early sixties a midrange paper sent out maybe a dozen reporters, and the cub, my ny times obituary writers at the time, usually got the police beat. He checked ny times obituary writers with the ny times obituary writers, kept contact with the precincts, and reported to accidents, robberies, and the occasional homicide, where he'd call his stories back to ny times obituary writers office for rewrite. He liked the work but, according to my mother, he was restless.

He wanted to make an impact on the world, and toward the end ofeight months into the job, his opportunity arrived. In those days, the Associated Press put out a calendar of upcoming national events every other Thursday, and late one November afternoon my father picked off the wires the news that President Kennedy would be in Dallas the next day.

He was off Friday and Saturday, so he called my ny times obituary writers and cut out of work early and bought a ticket on the five-fifteen Silversides Thruliner, the overnight bus to Dallas.

The next morning at Love Field, awaiting Kennedy's arrival, ny times obituary writers father weaved through the crowd ny times obituary writers a cordoned-off press area right ny times obituary writers front just as the President and the First Lady were appearing at the door of Air Force One.

President Kennedy descended the metal staircase, walked up to the press area and the cheerful throng that had gathered to greet him.

Of all the hands extended, he chose my father's. For a moment that must have replayed in his mind every day for the rest of his life, my father held the President's hand and looked straight into his blue eyes, squinting in the bright noon sun.

As the presidential limousine pulled away, with its plastic bubbletop removed and bulletproof windows rolled down on account of the glorious weather, my father, not giving it a second thought, squeezed in with the press pool, which followed six cars behind the President in a telephone company van.

The van was turning a corner when three shots cracked the sky over downtown Dallas, and my father witnessed it all: Suddenly the President's car sped off and the van driver followed it, passing the Vice President's car, racing out onto the highway to Parkland Hospital. My father saw President Kennedy's body wheeled toward the emergency room. He saw the horror-stricken expression on the face of the man pushing the gurney. He saw two priests hurry down the ny times obituary writers corridor with purple stoles wrapped tightly in their hands and a policeman rush by with a heavy carton of blood for transfusions.

He was there, at the hospital, at 1: In the days following the Kennedy assassination, my father's byline reached not only the Kansan but the Kansas City Star and newspapers all over the Midwest.

He stayed on the story ny times obituary writers two years, covering the Warren Commission investigation and the Jack Ruby trial, leaving the Kansan for the Chicago Tribune, where he headed a special Dallas bureau until the dust began to settle. By the time he moved to Chicago inthe year before Ny times obituary writers was born, he was already a star. I ny times obituary writers home, in Columbia, for college, and my mother made a great show of loading up the Gremlin and driving me the quarter mile to my dormitory room on the University of Missouri campus.

Ny times obituary writers the journalism school, I thrived, tackling regular assignments for the Columbia Missourian, the school's daily paper. I won an annual reporting award for my series about the effect ny times obituary writers deinstitutionalization ny times obituary writers the local homeless. For this, my mother gave me my father's briefcase, a weathered oxblood London Courier, still edged with newspaper ink.

In the summer of my junior year, I landed an internship with the St. Louis Independent, where I returned after graduation to work as an editorial assistant. A slot opened up on the obituary desk when another young reporter left for the night police beat. And on the fourteenth of August,exactly three months before my twenty- second birthday, the Independent promoted me to full-time obituary writer.

From my corner of the ny times obituary writers I believed that I could be a lodestone too. I merely had to hunker down, work hard, and await the inevitable.