“Robert Kennedy’s Been Shot!”

Fifty years ago, tonight, the assassination of Robert Kennedy bit me like a tsetse fly – infecting my neurons with a journalism disease that lasted more than 30 years. This brief excerpt from “Tule Town,” my soon-to-be-published memoir about my early years as a reporter, describes how it happened. (Subscribe to the blog for updates about the book)

My fiery mother worked at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner as a proofreader and had gotten me a summer job in the production guts of the paper. We were strikebreakers, which shamed me deeply – and still does – but nine people in our family depended on those jobs, and that’s what kept me sane when confronted by picket lines of angry, disillusioned men who despised us for taking what was for many of them their last newspaper job.

“Scabs! Scum!” the strikers shouted as cars driven by Muscle Beach weight-lifters slowly took us through the picket lines. Strikers shook those cars and beat dents into them with their fists, and smashed windows with bars of lead. They stuck cameras in our faces and put our mug shots on posters in public places, as if we were criminals.

Constant Fear

This was a savage strike on both sides. Shots were fired. A drunken sports writer pee’d out a window on strikers below. There were beatings. A death. I was scared every afternoon when I came to work and scared every midnight when I left.

All I suffered was spit in the face. And guilt I will carry to the grave. Not mom. She was Irish-Catholic and had been guilted into having seven kids. Now she had to feed them. Fuck guilt. And she spat back.

At times, the atmosphere was as wild inside the Her-Ex as outside, fueled by on-the-job drinking. A brilliant typesetter named Lee Stepp sucked whiskey vigorously as he spanked out lines of hot type. Late into his shift one night he decided to spank the newspaper, and dropped 13 classified ads into the next day’s edition that read, “This place is fucked.” Then he walked out.

My mom’s boss, a souse named Laddy, picked on the wrong woman one night when he attacked her for exposing his incompetency. “You’re fired!” he said. She shot back, “You can’t fire me, I fire you!” Then she stomped up to the publisher’s office and didn’t return until the next day. She arrived to see Laddy standing perplexed under his desk, which had been hoisted to the ceiling by mom’s co-workers.

“What are you doing here?” she yelled. “Didn’t I fire you?” He stomped up to the publisher’s office and was never seen again.

A Dramatic Night

I learned other things that hot-blooded summer. For one, I learned to love breaking news. The Her-Ex was only a few minutes from the Ambassador Hotel where Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and I was working late the night it happened. The paper was already locked up when a photographer ran through the press room, yelling:

“He’s been shot! Bobby Kennedy’s been shot!”

George Hearst himself raced down with all the other suited execs and – after I ran over to shake his hand – oversaw the rebuild of the front page. They set aside handfuls of lead type to make a gaping hole for the new huge headline, KENNEDY SHOT, and the photo of Kennedy lying and dying on the floor in his own blood. I watched the front page take shape and felt my own blood pounding. God! Jesus! Christ in concrete! History in the making and here I was in the balcony. Instant addiction. But I wanted more. I wanted to be in the front row when action takes place. 

Three weeks later, I got more.

It was midnight at the start of my 21st year and the rascally scum I worked with swept me off to the front row of a strip-show stage. Our eyes were at high-heel level when hard, pounding music began and out stomped a line of semi-naked, costumed beauties staring down at us staring up.

Breasts! I had never seen one before and now I see 12!

…the rest is in the book.