A Personal Story

At my small daily newspaper in the 1970s, the News Tribune in Waltham, Massachusetts, the big stories were often about developers trying to build apartments.

That sort of copy was full of details, factual. Some said it was dry material. I liked it myself. Of course there were other stories: schools, crime, housing authority ups and downs, and of course politics on all levels.

My editor, Larry Grady, was a good guy. With a million things on his mind while putting together the paper, he always smiled. His boss, Tom Murphy, was good, too. But Larry was my main man. He rarely needed to do any heavy duty rewriting or conferring with Tom, who represented the newspaper and wrote the editorials.

With a little white hair, and with black rimmed glasses, Larry would sit at his newsroom desk and review each story. Then, the stories were typewritten on grey paper, two sheets with a piece of carbon paper between them, with corrections written in pen. You kept the second copy just in case. When something big came across the news desk, Larry would straighten up in his chair and start pushing his fake lower teeth around with his tongue.

Then he would get up and bring the sheets back to whatever writer it was – there were eight or nine of us – and deliver a few instructions, some praise or whatever he needed to convey.

It was an old newsroom. One room, surrounded with windows. Not pretty windows, just big slabs of glass to get as much light in as possible. Everything in the newsroom seemed gray. Oh there were other colors, but you noticed the gray. The gray stuck to you.

We could smoke if we wanted; I smoked all the time. I also drank coffee all the time. Morning, afternoon, after night meetings, always: a butt and coffee.

I was a young man then with glasses and black hair growing down over my shoulders. I used to stuff it up under my hat, like a wig, on my National Guard weekends. I also had a moustache. It made me feel much older than the early twenties that I was; less vulnerable.

The newsroom was on the second floor. Down one floor was the "hell pot." That was where the lead was melted down and made into new letters to be set by the linotype machines. In the same area was the makeup room and then the press room. I was just getting the trick of reading upside down and backwards, which is what a person saw looking at the print in its lead galleys. Of course you could ask for a copy of your story and they would run off one on a piece of paper so you could read it the usual way, but knowing how to read the galley’s meant last minute checks could be made.

That "hell pot" kept the newsroom warm in winter. In summer we kept as many windows open as we could and brought in fans. Some newspapers had more modern equipment. We did not.

So we sat and sweated and worked.

Behind Larry was the wire desk. It had two tickers – Associated Press and United Press International – spiting out copy from around the world on reels of paper that had to be refilled regularly.

Anything special and a bell rang in the machine. Two rings were extra important.

I was tending it one day in 1972 when three bells sounded. Arabs had kidnapped Israeli Olympic athletes at the Munich, Germany, games and killed 11. All hell broke out. Paper was spewing out of the clanging machines and we had to stop the presses to get the news in that day’s edition.

There was a lot going on internationally and nationally. Vietnam was still a big issue. President Richard Nixon was in trouble. And I was right in the middle of it all, working in a daily newsroom, cranking out hard news. I wanted to show, too, that I could write other things than just news copy. I would try a feature here or there. There was no real time to do a proper one, but I tried.

Of course there was no time for an editor to stand beside me and help me with my writing. Writing was something you had to pick up as you went along. Actually there were times I wished the editor would take a piece of my copy and savage it, just to show me how to grow. But he had, as I said earlier, a million things to do to get the paper out the door.

One day in late August or early September I decided it was time to try something new. An opinion piece: something completely new.

It was a radically different piece of expression. Instead of writing a news story, stating facts in order of importance and conveying knowledge to the readers without influencing them either way, an opinion piece tried to make them see my way of thinking. It actively sought to change my readers’ thoughts.

First off, I would need a subject worthy of some sort of comment.

I had that: My subject was Father Robert Drinan, D-Mass. 3rd Congressional District. It was campaign season, a little before the primary elections, and Drinan was doing practically nothing for the campaign as of yet. He was a controversial candidate who usually liked to get into debates. After all, he was the head of the Boston College Law School. And he was a Jesuit. Jesuits were the special forces among priests. They carried out the Inquisition when they were created, centuries ago, and had kept on fighting ever since: Fr. Drinan was a prime example.

Why, then, was he so quiet?

Well, I reasoned, he had a whole bunch of Republicans seeking the nomination and it would be wasting money and energy and time trying to fight all of them. He only needed to defeat one of them, the winner. So he was just keeping his powder dry.

This was no brilliant idea on my part. It was one I had not seen explored elsewhere, though, so I figured I’d give it a try. It didn’t take long to draft. Right at the top of my gray sheet of paper I typed OPINION and got to work.

Drinan, I wrote, will not debate issues like President Nixon or taxes or abortion or anything else until the smoke clears and a single Republican opponent emerges. I put it in Larry’s "in" tray and went back to work on another story.

Larry called me.

His lower teeth were bouncing around furiously. Why was I writing this? What’s the angle? Do you know how to set up an opinion column? Who are you that you can suddenly start writing "think" pieces? What did I think of Drinan?

After a few more questions he said OK, we might run it.

Wow, I thought, an opinion piece, a feather in the cap; especially since I knew that Larry was a Drinan critic. Abortion was the issue. Drinan was for government-paid abortion. That was against Catholic teaching. Fr. Drinan would need to explain himself to the voters. To Larry, Drinan was a baby killer. Period.

But I did not know his feelings went so deep. I thought Larry liked Drinan except for that one point. Anyway, my opinion piece was on Drinan’s election strategy against a group of Republicans.

That was all it was. Or so I thought.

Next day I was finished with my morning frenzy – deadline was around 11 a.m. – and was making some calls on other stories. One of the newspaper delivery men dropped a few of the papers at the top of the stairs. I went and picked one up.

As I checked the front page, Larry told be to check the editorial page. What? Already? My very own first opinion piece; I have started to help people understand the world with my little bit of knowledge as a guide. That was a very special moment for me.

All my life I had wanted to be a writer who made a difference in the world. And now I had taken my first, tiny little steps in that direction. Then I began to read.

As I read, my jaw dropped. There was a byline that identified this as William Finucane’s piece of reasoning. But Larry had changed the piece. Drinan had become, in this diatribe, a fetus killing, pro-abortion dragon.

Reading it, one would have to say that not only questioned Drinan’s abortion stance, I vehemently opposed it. I did not. Rev. Drinan’s held a perfectly tenable position; I actually agreed with Drinan on this issue.

Didn’t matter; what counted was what was written: the writer intended the think piece to reflect the writer’s feelings. Otherwise the writer would not have written it in the first place.

I would have to bring this up with Larry, so I walked toward his desk. But before I got there, I saw he was reading the piece himself and seemed pleased as could be.

Nice think piece, he said. Well, he offered, it had to be rewritten to bring out the stronger points, but not bad for a first opinion piece.

But Larry, I said, you changed the whole piece; it blows abortion up into the main issue and takes a side on that one issue. That was not what I was trying to do.

‘Well, like I said Bill, it needed some tweaking,’ he casually explained. ‘It came out as a darn good piece.’

End of conversation. Get back to work. What could I do?

Larry saw no problem with what he had done to my opinion piece. He felt he had done the right thing. There would be no more discussion on this topic with Larry.

I tried to shake it off. Only it didn’t just go away.

A week or so later I got word from Larry to go to Newton, a town right beside Waltham, and cover Fr. Drinan. I was to do the regular candidate interview and write a boilerplate story.

It was a sunny day at the corner of Washington Street and Walnut Street in Newton. My old school, Our Lady’s of Newton, was just down the road a couple of miles. Interviewing Father Drinan should have been simple for me; I had been a Catholic all my life.

I was a even chorus singer, and an altar boy. I founded the guitar Mass in my parish, and I taught Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. I was a gospel lector. I had been elected to the Parish Executive Council. I was Catholic.

Rather more accurately, I was once a Catholic. Now I was agnostic. But priests were not people with whom one normally argued. Somehow, that felt uncomfortable.

Still, reporting was my life now, not Catholicism, so I would wear my tough exterior like all good newsmen should and face the famous Jesuit. Drinan was a priest who could – according to church law – speak on selected religious subjects infallibly. However, secular topics were all fair game and he would have to answer my questions.

He needed to get elected, so he would talk with me.

I was told Fr. Drinan was outside a nearby coffee shop, talking to people as they walked by. So I just walked up and asked a few questions. He was a little taller than I and had deep-set eyes that searched about until they found something interesting and then locked themselves onto that subject. The wind made a mess of his hair. He was wearing his priest’s clothing.

His hands moved carefully from point to point when he answered.

After a few questions, he tilted his head and asked which newspaper I wrote for, and I of course told him "the Tribune."

A hitch of his shoulders and a scratch on his neck from the stiff white collar; he knew that paper and was suddenly cautious.

What is my name, Fr. Drinan asked. "Bill Finucane," I replied.

The eyes flared and suddenly he was fuming. He remembered that opinion piece a week or two ago. It was unfair and should never have been written. How can a newspaper write this falsehood?

He stood much closer and the hands outlined each point like a completed argument, his head stayed at an angle and his lips tightened.

Out on the sidewalk, Fr. Drinan, a Jesuit, a law school president, a United States congressman, was standing beside this rag-tag reporter, hammering me into the ground with each rhetorical blow harder than the last. I didn’t mind encountering or even bearing the unhappiness of an elected official directed at a fourth-estate watch-dog; it was part of being a reporter. But this was different.

Fr. Drinan was attacking me, personally, for something I did not do. He knew my think piece quite well -- and despised it. He did not know that it was really Larry’s think piece. Finally I mentioned that someone else had added some new material before my think piece was published. I didn’t want to make any trouble for Larry, so I used no names. He was inhaling, getting ready to let go another volley when I slipped in that bit about someone else.

He held the breath and finally he did let it out. Well then, he said, that doesn’t really mean too much to me, who is the target of these barbs, now, does it? The Drinan name is the one getting beat up here. Who does the beating is immaterial.

I apologized. I don’t remember how I apologized; maybe it was with an almost imperceptible tilt of my own head. However it happened, the whipping was done. Instead of punishing me, he had now instructed me on the nature of a think piece and how the object of the writing is far more important than the writer.

Got it.

I got to my car and drove back to the newspaper office.

When the day was just about finished and everybody in the news desk had gone home, I popped my head into Mr. Murphy’s office.

Murphy had to bring his latest editorial over to the news desk, so we walked there and I told him about my "think" piece and what had happened with Larry Grady and with Fr. Drinan.

Mr. Murphy only used the left side of his face to talk, or more exactly the left side of his lips were the only part of his face he used when he talked. When he heard the facts, he fidgeted with the pieces of editorial copy in his hand.

We were at the news desk now. He took Larry’s chair and had me pull another over. ‘Larry,’ said Mr. Murphy, ‘is a great newsman. He’s right on everything. Knows his facts. He keeps you newsroom people working and happy all at the same time, a great ability. But he does have this one problem with abortion and Fr. Drinan and the church and his own faith. He belongs to one of those Catholic groups opposed to abortions, can’t remember the name of it, but he is smack in the middle of it. So I guess that, at times, he lets his faith cloud his judgment as a newsroom leader. There’s the problem. Larry never showed your piece to me, Bill, so there was no chance to countermand him. But I’ll talk it over with him and we won’t let this happen again. OK?’

Yes sir. Thanks.

I don’t know if Larry followed Mr. Murphy’s advice, or whether Mr. Murphy actually ever gave him the advice. But I remember now – 30 some years later – that the most important person in any think piece is the one who is in the spotlight.

Writers just put stories to paper.

People like Fr. Drinan are themselves stories. Some are wonderful stories, some are appalling, but all are human.

The men I’ve reflected here all tried to do what their consciences told them to do, and I judge none of them now that I am the only one still living. But in this is a lesson any writer should remember; a published story can help, hurt, save or condemn any person, any reality. It is vital to always recognize that fact.

Think pieces especially are far too important to be written or treated casually. They live forever.

February 2007