History of My Reading: Get Me Rewrite!

 

Washington Newsworks had a weekly slot for a restaurant
review, which became a pain.  I did a couple to fill in, 
including one on French bistros called "Salads and Sad Cafes,"
in the manner of Apollinaire, Parisan poet and friend of Gino
Severini.  But we had no illustration, so our photographer
Michael McCarthy followed me and my coffee cup
 into our conference room. I threw some coins on the table to suggest
 a cafe, disguised myself as best I could, and this is the photo we used.

Not long after I’d abandoned Boston and began my Greensburg exile, I got an unusual phone call. There were two voices greeting me on the line. I knew both but from different places and contexts—two people I couldn’t imagine having ever met.

One was Michael Shain, a friend since college who I had last seen in New York. The other was someone I’ll call James, who I’d known in Boston as a young reporter out of Harvard writing for the Boston Phoenix. (Most of the names that follow are authentic. I’ve indicated where I’ve changed a few—like “James”-- to be free to offer my interpretations of long-ago events than might not be theirs.)

I would have thought these two had little in common other than both knowing me. And they weren’t calling from either of the places I had last known them. They were calling from Washington, DC.

They delighted in my surprise. Then they told me they were involved in a soon to be launched alternative weekly newspaper called Washington Newsworks. James was the Editor, and Shain was the Arts Editor. Somehow my name came up, and they discovered they both knew me.

A copy of an old letter suggests I was offered the job of film critic, but the pay seemed not enough to live on (which is ironic considering what followed,) let alone compensate for all the bad movies I would probably have to see. I preferred the idea of freelancing from a distance, and maybe going down to DC for a week or two at a time to report a few stories.

For awhile after I returned from my Florida trip, that’s what I did. My first assignments from Shain were pop music pieces, including a pretty good one on the Eagles and the LA ethos, especially the music’s relationship to the sensuous weather of southern California, which Eastern rock critics didn’t get. I got checks in the mail, so it was looking good.

At some point in early spring of 1976 I took the train to DC to stay with Shain for awhile and see what other articles I could do. The train was for people without cars (like me—and Washington was only a four hour drive away) who weren’t budgeted for air fare, but also for people who just liked the experience—and I met several such kindred spirits on my first trip down.

I stayed with Shain in his three rooms, kitchen and bath on the fourth floor of an apartment building that had seen better days at 2147 O Street, on the corner of 22^nd Street, and within walking distance of Dupont Circle up the hill. Contemporary photos suggest the building has since been renovated and upscaled, and is now called The August.

As I would learn, this was in the Northwest (or NW) quadrant of Washington, with the city’s Federal Triangle and main business district —the largest, richest and most white of the quadrants. The city of Washington was then about 70% black. (The distribution across the city now is roughly equal among the major official categories of white, black and non-white Hispanic.)

When I threw my duffle bag on the living room couch where I would sleep, I had not a clue that this would turn out to be my residence for many months. It was also the residence of an ever increasing and ever more visible population of cockroaches.

One of the pieces I reported in Washington was on a new revival movie theatre on Capitol Hill. One of its principal owners was Jim Lardner, son of Ring,Jr. and a former colleague and office-mate at the Boston Phoenix. My first interview with Jim was in the cinema’s projection room during an afternoon showing, which included an unintended bit of slapstick comedy when the film started unspooling onto the floor and I got involved in the rescue operation, along with the dressed for success ad rep for Rambling Through Alexandria magazine. (I actually saw Jim on a TV clip recently, the Lawrence O’Donnell hour on MSNBC, out on an overpass protesting, identified as a man-on-the-street.)

I also worked the phones for a piece on the by now perennial fear that college humanities programs were being abandoned for the fashionable pursuit of more practical career paths. With the Larks and Owls section of my New Times piece as background, I added some new interviews and a satirical frame (I invented the Night People’s Liberation Front that issued its press releases at 3 a.m.) for a story on day vs. night people.

Otherwise I was hanging out at Newsworks, making my calls and getting absorbed into the camaraderie of the staff. The Newsworks offices took all three floors of a wood frame house at 2311 18^th Street NW in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. That area has since become gentrified and fashionable, but at the time it was a battered and abandoned district, unreconstructed from the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. There was a certain tension and tentativeness about the neighborhood. Most businesses had fled or not reopened, and some buildings were still empty.

I learned from staff members that their building was owned by the Newsworks publisher, who I will call Diane Archer, in her early 30s. I was told that her family was generationally wealthy (oil money) and that she was listed in the Social Register, an honor with which I was unfamiliar but clearly was significant in status-conscious Washington.

When I first started going there, the first floor was staffed with ad reps, circulation, distribution and others engaged in the business side, as well as—sequestered alone at a bulky machine in a back room-- someone called the word processor. Editorial was in the big front room of the second floor, with management (the publisher, associate publisher and general manager) in offices at the back. The third floor—all one room as I recall-- was the province of the art and production staff.

Both at the offices and back at his apartment, Shain acquainted me with the extent of his job and the non-staff freelancers he used. It wasn’t long however before he announced he was taking time off, and with the correct approvals, I would be his substitute as Arts Editor. He promptly disappeared for awhile but when he came back he admitted that he wasn’t returning to Newsworks.

So in May I became Acting Arts Editor. I was enjoying myself, partly because the work was stimulating but mostly because of the people I was working with, particularly the editorial staff: bright, lively, engaging and friendly. Among them I felt useful and wanted.

Maybe my sense of ease had something to do with the similar parts of our backgrounds, largely modest economically, with some fellow Catholic school survivors and a high proportion of Italians—very unlike the Boston Phoenix staff. John Aquilino was the capable and mischievous managing editor, and he introduced me to the impressive-on-all-counts general manager, Gwen Capabianco, who was comfortable and welcomed in editorial, partly because she shared our sense of humor. From the first floor, frenetic ad rep Gigi Fava would come up to join the noise. (Bob Mondello was one of the theatre reviewers, but he wasn’t around the office very often in my time.)  It seemed everybody was funny and fun, and in their 20s or early 30s.

Now I was there among them pretty much all day every day. Looking into the room from the front windows, my desk was on the right, facing the room. I could see just about everybody from there, except James, the editor, who was nearest the windows behind a folding rattan screen.

But it was also a volatile, emotional and expressive group, and together with those coming in and out of the office—photographer Michael McCarthy, news writer Jeff Stein and others—there was a fair amount of cacophony and chaos, often high spirited but sometimes contentious.

In this dynamic I for some reason became a center of calm. For one thing people seemed amazed that I was organized, but I was also the only one in editorial with experience running part of a paper. They looked on me as a voice of reason, which is not the role I would predict for myself in all contexts.

In 1976, the late 1960s television series Star Trek had been rediscovered in syndication for several years, and it was becoming a cultural phenomenon. In Washington (as elsewhere) episodes were on every day, on multiple channels. I mention this because Star Trek was the source of my nickname as Arts Editor. They started calling me Spock.  I was very logical, and at least somewhat alien.

So it happened that one day I looked up from my desk when I heard two male staff members arguing loudly just beyond the front room. They were facing each other when I got up and approached them from behind, and silently applied the Vulcan neck pinch to each of them. They both immediately slid to the floor.

That’s what Newsworks was like.

By June I also had my first cover story, a Washington-centered update of my futurists piece that New Times failed to print. It worked partly because Washington was host to many futurist organizations and futurist consultants were either working for the federal government or trying to influence it. I positioned the story as a conflict between the technocrats and the alternative futurists (the cover was a kind of comic book illustration) but what stands out now is the response to all the enthusiasm I originally reported from the World Future Society convention in Washington a year earlier.

From new interviews it became clear that nothing viable had been sustained, and the whole futurist field was coming up against its built-in limitations. It seemed like the beginning of the end, though it would be about five years before the Reagan administration effectively killed futurist concerns, along with the few meaningful institutions like the congressional Office of Technology Assessment.

By June everyone on the staff knew that Newsworks was in deep financial trouble. Diane would periodically announce a new small “investor” whose money would keep us afloat for a few more weeks. The paper’s financial straits fed increasingly insistent and anxious questions and discussions among the staff about editorial direction and the paper’s identity. Part of this stemmed from the early history of Newsworks of which I was then unaware.

Someone sent me a 1977 academic paper about Newsworks from the beginning, but since too many facts and surmises from my time there were wrong, I hesitate to depend too much on its version of the paper’s origins. But after I left Washington I did talk with a few staff who had been there from the beginning, and they confirmed a general story.

It’s generally agreed that Washington Newsworks started out with a big bank account. They spent thousands on an initial ad campaign, and threw a lavish inaugural party that drew journalism luminaries include the Washington Post’s power couple, editor Ben Bradlee and writer Sally Quinn. This was the Woodward and Bernstein era, when investigative journalists were the new heroes, so journalism was suddenly glamorous. (Though Watergate was over, as was the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration, yielding to the comparatively bland Gerald Ford presidency when the big Washington stories concerned a series of now forgotten sex scandals.)

Newsworks began with large ambitions. It was going to be “Washington’s Third Newspaper,” in the same league as the dailies, the Post and the Washington Star. “It was like people were..ready to go into orgasm,” one of my informants told me about those first days. “We were going to be instantly important.”

But their first issues were disappointing. (I’m not sure I ever saw them, but they’ve been described as unfocused and boring.) “We heard that people at the Post and other media people looked at those first issues,” my informant said, “and never picked up a copy of Newsworks again.”

For some of those involved from the beginning, the flaw was in marketing. Maybe—that’s not my area—but maybe that’s also disingenuous. From my point of view it’s not how you sell it—it’s what you print.

My instincts were educated by the Boston weekies, where the alternative press grew out of the counterculture. Even in 1976 it was still twentysomethings writing primarily for their contemporaries. The Washington area had a lot of universities and colleges, and there were a lot of young people working for the federal government. What did they have in common—in life experiences as well as interests and attitude?

We were the rock generation, and the film generation. We were a generation made skeptical as well as idealistic by the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam and Watergate, so alternative views of political matters were part of what drew younger readers. We were culturally different, but some older readers as well responded to quality writing and a different point of view, especially on the arts.

As an alternative paper, Newsworks could focus on some local stories (real estate scandals, etc.) and even if its readership didn’t automatically care about them, the stories themselves could get people reading. But a heroic but tiny news staff wasn’t ever going to compete with the resources of the dailies, even if the Washington Post was notoriously uninterested in local news. The question for me was: what excited us? Maybe it would excite readers more or less our age.

I began to learn more about Washington, primarily from our staff and freelancers—not only talking about topics and stories, but their lives. For one thing, the staff was mostly single—and there were a lot of single people out there. Informal discussions about the local culture accumulated (I recall specifically a fascinating conversation with ad rep Valerie McGhee), and I jotted down an idea among a number of article ideas. And then it grew.

Staff members were intrigued, and in May I got James’ approval to develop, assign and edit a special section, to be called “To Be Young, Single and Lonely in Washington.” It became the cover of the June 10 issue, which would eventually be the paper’s most successful.

Objectively, this was a series of articles that the Post and the Star did not have the credibility to produce. We didn’t necessarily provide great journalism, but the articles had insights and started the conversation.

From the inside, what stands out is the enthusiasm of the staff in producing this section. I wrote the introduction and one piece, and our brilliant features editor Jean Callahan wrote about celibacy, but News Editor Amanda Spake interviewed people about meeting partners in bar, and hard news writer Jeff Stein wrote about attitudes towards love at first sight. Eight staff members contributed to the “Fifty Ways to Meet Your Lover” guide, with some suggestions definitely tongue in cheek. The issue also included Jean Callahan’s expose of an alcoholic rehab facility, which had—and failed—mostly black patients, as well as an expose of phony rental agencies.

1976 was the American Bicentennial year, with big celebrations scheduled in Washington. Newsworks did a special section for the first week of July, which I edited. For one article I came up with the idea of finding people in Washington with the same names as the 1776 founders, and telling their stories. That some of them were likely to be black gave the idea real promise. It seemed to me such a natural newspaper idea that I was worried all week that the two dailies, the Post or the Washington Star, would come out with their version first. They didn’t.

Instead Newsworks had Jean Callahan’s incisive set of interviews with Ben Franklin (a Marriott executive), Betsy Ross (retired government worker), Abigail Adams (bartender at a fashionable bar), and two George Washingtons (a counselor for DC public schools and a retired third generation Washingtonian, both black.)

It was probably this experience, of working together on something that excited us, that provided at least some of the impetus for the staff to want me as Editor, and for me to want to do it. Diane, the publisher, was impressed that I was a “grassroots” choice. A meeting of everyone was called but the outcome had been pre-arranged. I have my regrets about how this was handled, but I was voted in as Editor in July, moving up from Arts and Culture Editor on the new streamlined masthead. James went on to a reporting job in Paris.

I had decided that my first official act would be to eliminate the folding screen that separated the Editor’s desk from the rest of editorial, but by the time I got back to the editorial office, the rest of the staff was taking it down on their own.

I suppose I made my mark immediately in two ways. First, I discovered that most freelancers weren’t being paid, though they often had not been told they wouldn’t be. Some were never told, just strung along. I stopped that immediately. I’d been a freelancer and half the work of it is getting the money you were promised in a timely way. So I did my best to make sure that were promised payment got it, and—to blank dismay in the publisher’s office—I insisted on telling prospective writers that we weren’t able to pay.

In fact we still got new writers—eager for clips perhaps, or wanting to appear in Newsworks specifically. I did this partly as a practical matter: I didn’t see how to establish relationships with writers by lying to them.

The second matter was reviving a story that had been quietly killed by the publisher’s office because it might offend a crucial advertiser. We got the writer back in, meticulously fact-checked the article, and printed it. It turned out the advertiser didn’t care. He figured that’s what newspapers did.

My first issue as Editor was in mid-July, coincidentally with my previously scheduled story on the Star Trek phenomenon (“Star Trek Explained”) on the cover. The occasion was Washington’s first Star Trek convention. The conventions were relatively new but already widespread, and for a good many years they themselves were a cultural phenomenon (as suggested in the 2004 Spielberg/ Tom Hanks comedy The Terminal, in which a minor character successfully woos a young woman through her participation in Star Trek conventions. The young woman is played by Zoe Saldana, who went on to play Lt. Uhura in the 2009 Star Trek feature film.)

At the convention I met Star Trek’s chief founder Gene Roddenberry and his wife Majel, observed actor James Doohan (Scotty) interact with fans, and interviewed some vendors of Trek related merchandise who traveled in teams from one convention to another every few days.

In my research I used The Making of Star Trek by Roddenberry and Stephen Whitfield, and Leonard Nimoy’s first book, I Am Not Spock. Star Trek was about to become a publishing phenomenon as well, when The Star Trek Fleet Manual led the quality paperback best seller lists in 1976.

This issue also contained a story by Tom Redburn (now designated our City Reporter on our new masthead) about schemes for a new DC convention center, particularly the proposal by a certain New York real estate developer who would name a tower after himself, as yet unknown in Washington. I loved this story for its understated skepticism, and the suggestion that this developer was just making stuff up and the assembled reporters were simply writing it down. If Redburn and Washington Newsworks had been heeded in 1976, this country could have spared itself a tragic future. (But even at the time, the Village Voice took note of Redburn’s story, and his follow-up.)

The Redburn story on convention center proposals was one of many examples of our alternative take on the news. Some were on topics too obscure by now to explain, but in particular I remain proudest of three cover stories of lasting significance in my tenure as Editor.

The first was a story that came to us. We learned that the Congressional Black Caucus together with other members of the House would soon be considering a congressional investigation into the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and that his wife, Mrs. Coretta Scott King, was secretly coming to Washington to offer her support.

We were offered exclusive publication of attorney Mark Lane’s case for this official inquiry, which alleged a conspiracy, with two conditions: Lane would receive copyright for his text, and Mrs. King’s presence in DC would not be disclosed.

These days the term “conspiracy theory” is rightly associated with far right craziness. But in the 1960s and 1970s, many serious people all along the political spectrum were troubled by the repeated lone gunman orthodoxy in the notable assassinations of the 60s, and various sorts of conspiracies were seriously suggested.

Moreover, there was growing hard evidence of other conspiracies, especially involving J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the CIA. For years in the antiwar movement we were warned of government spies around us, and agent provocateurs who advocated violence to discredit the movement. By 1976 there was undisputed documentary evidence that the FBI had run a number of such operations.

The common sense objection was that conspiracies were impossible because somebody would talk about them. In fact people did talk about them, but there were so many charges and counter-charges that muddied and muddled the narratives that the truth was often unclear.

My role was to edit the Mark Lane manuscript, mostly by creating a continuous thread and breaking it into “steps” with subheads. What emerged from his account reflected the now well-known hostility of the FBI towards Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement, and local police hostility in Memphis that could have allowed the actual assassin to escape.

I prepared the August 26 issue with this story on the cover, but at the very last minute before we went to press, the people who gave us the manuscript got cold feet and wanted to withdraw it. I let it be known to them that if they did so, we would not be bound by our agreement to keep Mrs. King’s presence secret, and that would be our story. They relented.

In addition to printing the story, I went to Capitol Hill with one or two staff members, and we personally distributed copies to every Congressional office. When we were finished I found myself in the Capitol Dome, across the rotunda from what looked like a document in a display case. Curious, I walked over to see it. It was the Magna Carta, the English charter of freedoms signed in 1215, the precursor to the Bill of Rights and all such documents. It was one of the four surviving originals, lent to the US for just this Bicentennial year. But there was no crowd around it that day. Just me. (A replica replaced it, and is still displayed there.)

The meeting did result in a congressional inquiry a few years later, which in 1979 concluded that a conspiracy was likely. Though accounts of this assassination, like all the others, remain disputed and controversial, the King family has since openly and consistently believed that the man convicted was not the actual assassin.

The second story also involved an assassination, but one that happened in Washington days before Newsworks ran a cover story about it. Orlando Letelier, exiled member of the elected Allende government of Chile that ended in the military coup and dictatorship of the notorious Pinochet, was killed by a car bomb in the heart of Washington. Also killed was American Ronni Karpen Moffitt, while her husband Michael (also a passenger in the car) escaped serious injury.

The Nixon presidency was hostile to Allende when he was elected in 1970, and was privy to plans within the Chilean military to overthrow him in 1973, with CIA support. In 1976 Letelier was in the United States lobbying with some success against loans by US institutions and those of other countries being offered to Chile’s military junta, already proving itself to be murderous and oppressive.

Newswork’s coverage was organized entirely by Jeff Stein, our designated Political Reporter. He wrote the main story, mostly about the ongoing investigation into the assassination, plus a background piece on the Chilean dictatorship’s reign of terror. It was widely believed that the bomb was planted by agents of the Chilean secret police, but the FBI’s lackluster investigation seemed to focus more on Washington’s “left-leaning” Institute for Policy Studies, of which Ronni and Michael Moffitt were members. (Eventually even the CIA concluded that the Pinochet government was responsible, though the extent of the CIA’s own foreknowledge or involvement is still debated.)

The section also included a remembrance of Letelier by Michael Moffitt, a tribute to Ronni Karpen Moffitt by an Institute staff member, excerpts of a Letelier interview, and Jeff’s short account of the Institute on the days after. Jeff also wrote about the memorial service in Washington, where Senator George McGovern spoke and Joan Baez sang.

Apart from some text editing and organizing, my contribution was to look at all the material Jeff spread on my desk, and after some weary hesitation, to cancel the planned cover and run with this, which required a few editorial staff but mostly a production staff stretched thin already to work overtime to get it ready. It was one of my better decisions. To my recollection, no other paper in town came close to our coverage.

For the third cover I had a bigger role. A story came to us by a writer unknown to us named Nowlan MacDonnell Ulsch, about Johnny Perrin, a Stanford Law student and war resister who was the defendant in a celebrated case questioning the Vietnam era draft in 1970. Just after his appeal was heard but before the decision was reached, Perrin disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Ulsch’s story described this All-American Boy who resisted the draft, and narrated the mysterious circumstances around his disappearance, with suggestions that the FBI and/or CIA might be involved.  It was an absorbing and well constructed story, and I spoke with the writer at length to gauge its credibility. That it was a kind of Missing In Action story—Vietnam MIA’s were beginning to be an issue—but in the war against the war, made it different, if not unique. It was also timely—for Democratic party presidential candidate Jimmy Carter was talking about issuing unconditional amnesty to resisters in Canada and elsewhere.

At our next staff meeting I solicited ideas for other stories that could comprise a special section, something that was becoming part of the Newsworks identity, for which this would be the centerpiece.

So that was our September 23 cover: the Johnny Perrin story, Jeff Stein’s interviews with Vietnam reporters now at work on books, and interviews with six young veterans of the war and of the war against the war, produced by John Aquilino, Ken Shapero and our Capitol Reporter, Pamela Larratt.

In addition to editing these pieces, I contributed an introductory essay called “Amnesty and Amnesia.” This essay and the section as a whole clearly struck a nerve. We got some buzz and some very complimentary mail. I was asked to appear on a Washington early evening television talk show to talk about it; as far as I know, it was Newsworks first media recognition for stories we printed.

I kept one self-described “fan letter” that said my introduction “is one of the best pieces of its kind I’ve ever read.” It was signed simply Terry Alford, on Northern Virginia Community College stationery. It arrived during the frenzy of that fall and I never acknowledged it. Now I find that its author has become Professor of History Emeritus of that same college, as well as a distinguished scholar of the US Civil War era, with books that include the definitive biography of John Wilkes Booth. Alford was also a consultant to Steven Spielberg for his film, Lincoln.

My essay (reproduced at Kowincidence here) asserted that just a few years after it ended, the Vietnam war had all but completely disappeared from public discussion, including all the issues it raised. Reading it now, two things strike me: it reminds me of today’s cultural amnesia concerning the Covid pandemic, in which more than a million Americans died. And the essay now reads as a clear forecast of the sea change in American politics begun a few years afterward, with the Reagan revolution. Disappearing the moral and political questions the war and the war against the war brought to public consciousness paved the way for the illusory nostalgia-driven reactionary 1980s.

As for the Johnny Perrin story, all these years later he is still officially a missing person. Perhaps ironically however, N. MacDonnell Ulsch, apparently the same person who as a young writer suggested federal involvement in Perrin’s disapperance, has since become a prominent analyst of cyber strategies who advised, among other entities, the CIA.

Writer Arnie Reisman and director David Helpern of "Hollywood on Trial."  We used
this photo taken for us by Elizabeth Offner.

As it happened, the two Hollywood Blacklist films I’d followed as they were being made—the documentary Hollywood On Trial and the feature The Front—were both being released that fall of 1976, so I had the opportunity to finally use what I’d researched and written almost two years earlier. The result was my last solo cover, “The Return of the Blacklist” for the September 9 issue.

We got some positive comment and mail on this story, including from a witness to the Blacklist’s destruction. (A greatly expanded version of this story is posted on my Kowincidence blog, here and here.) Besides being personally satisfying, this story added something that was generally missing from alternative journalism to that point—a sense of history, and its connection to the present.

For those summer and autumn months I was working like crazy. The Newsworks organization was visibly depleted by fall. Several of the chief writers at the beginning, like Amanda Spake, Frank Browning, Craig Unger and Chris Pala, had moved on. A few freelancers held on, like Art Levine, Bill Holland and Peter Koper, who was probably brought on board by Jean Callahan, as they had a shared history involving Baltimore’s Fells Point and director John Waters.

It was worse on the first floor, where the few survivors in circulation and ad sales (only Gigi Fava and Michele Paradise were left; Valerie McGhee now filled in as copy editor) seemed to be working with desk lamps surrounded by deep darkness.

Those who remained multi-tasked. Mark Jenkins (Distribution Manager), Fran Moshos (Listings Editor) and Nancy Williams (Proofreader) all contributed articles and reviews. Hilary Berns was Subscription and Classified Manager, and also our receptionist at the front door.

Jean Callahan produced a long and lively story for almost every issue, if not two. Meanwhile, Managing Editor John Aquilino and I wrote like mad, including under pretty obvious pseudonyms. All the copy went through me, and mine were the last eyes to proofread before press. I worked closely with the art and production people on the third floor (Art Director Tom Trapnell, Leslie Perkins, V.J. Fahey and Craig Millet), even more than I had at the Phoenix. They were more a part of the editorial process from the beginning, so they were more personally invested in what we were doing.

I streamlined our format, grouping short local stories under the title of “Here” and added a new feature called “Persons.” People Magazine had just become a wildly popular publishing phenomenon that eventually changed print and media journalism profoundly. Our publisher wanted to know how we could adapt. I came up with “Persons,” that instead of glorifying celebrities, did stories on unpublicized local individuals with something remarkable (or maybe eccentric) about them.

Editing news stories was interesting, and I developed a rule of thumb: the lead (now vulgarly called “the lede”) was usually in the third paragraph.

And I was still Arts Editor as well. There was some stability week to week: Art Levine and Mark Jenkins wrote about music, and Mark did our regrettably few pieces on visual arts. I could count on solid copy from film critic Joel E. Siegel, dance critic Marcia Mintz MeGehee and theatre reviewer Bob Mondello. But I felt we needed an additional writer to thoughtfully cover the less well-known theatres and productions. I more or less mentored a student who also worked in the Kennedy Center checkroom, named David Paglin. And I found the combination of writer and critical intelligence I was looking for in an MFA student at Catholic University, Janice Paran. But by then it was pretty late in our game.

It also fell to me to pick up the slack (and cover for vacationing regulars), with theatre and film pieces, and even restaurant reviews. In fact two of my favorite pieces I did were fill-ins for the vacationing Siegel: one on movies about the newspaper biz (All The President’s Men came out that summer) and one on the film programmer’s art of what films to pair for a double feature. (One of my examples was the pairing of two Truffaut films at the Biograph. A few years later, after I interviewed Truffaut for Rolling Stone, I sent him this piece. He wrote back saying my analysis was “very accurate.”)

Back when I was just the Arts Editor, I started doing what I did at the Phoenix: feature more book reviews and to that end, establish relationships with publishers.

In particular I discovered Dover Books. I hadn’t paid much attention to the Dover imprint, but I must have received an announcement of new release plus their catalog. Dover performs an immense service by reprinting in sturdy but relatively inexpensive editions many classic works now in the public domain. These may include new material—prefaces, commentaries, or in the case of H.D. Thoreau: A Writer’s Journal, a new selection edited by Laurence Stapleton. I cherished the copy I’d had since it was assigned for Douglas Wilson’s Thoreau class at Knox College.

I got Dover to send me several new and older books by and about Lewis Carroll as well as Thoreau’s essays, but they drew the line at their multi-volume complete Thoreau journals.

Otherwise (to sneakily return to the alleged theme of this series) I read and reviewed Robert Creeley’s latest book of poems and Carlos Castaneda’s Tales of Power, the volume in his Don Juan series that impressed me so much that eventually I went back and read the earlier ones I hadn’t taken seriously. I still saw it as, if not actual fiction, a literary work, but within a different tradition.

After I’d added Editor to these responsibilities, I managed one feature piece centered on another spasm of books about Scott Fitzgerald, including a new collection of some of his magazine stories together with several by Zelda Fitzgerald. Thanks to my college studies of Fitzgerald, I had the background for this overview.

But there were more books than editorial space, let alone time, so in the guise of a feature on Summer Reading, I highlighted a new enthusiasm, William Irwin Thompson, and his book Evil and the World Order, referencing his somewhat earlier The Edge of History, while at least mentioning a dozen or so new books by John Ashbery, Marge Piercy, Ralph Keyes, Lillian Hellman and Henry Frenay on the French during the Nazi occupation, as well as two new novels: Doctor Rat, a short novel by William Kotzwinkle published by Knopf in what they were internally called the “Borzoi Puppies,” and Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star. This is perhaps DeLillo’s most forgotten early novel, but it remains a favorite of mine—and, I was pleased to learn from an interview—of the author’s.

When my futures piece was on the cover, I selected as a kind of companion piece a review of two science fiction books (The Cyberiad by the great Russian writer Stanislaw Lem, and The Space Vampires by the well-known British writer Colin Wilson) by a young writer named Garrett Epps. Contemporary Washingtonians now know him as an eminent legal scholar and professor of both constitutional law and creative writing, as well as the legal affairs editor of the Washington Monthly and a prominent commentator for the Atlantic on, for example, the Supreme Court.

Another source of books comes from friends. I must have glanced at the spine of Creation Myths by Marie-Louise Von Franz a hundreds times on the bookshelf at Shain’s apartment, seemingly a forgotten gift. I was intrigued, but it would be years yet before I got a copy, years more before I seriously read it, and along with other books by and about her mentor C.G. Jung, it opened an entire new area of reading for me.

In those months in that office I mostly lived on coffee (years later, Gigi Fava told me she still associated me with the smell of coffee), but my long days were sometimes broken by a sandwich or snack carried in my new Spider-Man lunchbox, contributed by Pamela Larratt (and her son who’d presumably outgrown it. I still have it.) There were few places to eat in Adams-Morgan then, and only a neighborhood bodega for snacks. The closest restaurant would have been Avignone Freres, a prestigious restaurant on Columbia Road since 1928, but it shut down after the 1968 riots. It had recently re-opened its bakery, however, its pastries being among its claims to fame. But those were occasional special treats. (The restaurant did open again months later, but closed for good in 1986.)

But when I needed to escape, eat something substantial and bathe in the air conditioning, I walked to the block above to Columbia Station. In particular my Sunday treat was bacon, eggs and toast, which came with a slice of cantaloupe.

I could visit Columbia Station at the end of my day as well. It was also the scene of the release party for one or both of the first two albums by our contributing writer Bill Holland, and his band, Rent’s Due. I still have “Run or Fight” playing in my head, the tune leading off his second album, and the title tune of his first album likewise remains a favorite: “If It Ain’t One Thing, It’s Another.”

I missed a lot of what Washington had to offer (including plays and music events our reviewers wrote about but I couldn’t see because I had to work) but I did manage to see James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt down at the Merriweather Post Pavilion outside Columbia, Md., and two events early in my residence at the huge Capitol Centre in Landover, with a capacity of 16 thousand or more. One was Paul McCartney and Wings. Our press seats were high up and distant, but a kind stranger near us passed his binoculars around, and when I focused on McCartney singing at the piano (maybe it was even “Maybe I’m Amazed”), I had the weird sensation that he was looking right at me.

Just a night or two earlier, I witnessed a benefit performance at Capital Centre featuring Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, on behalf of the Jerry Brown presidential campaign, shortly before the Maryland primary. Afterwards, Michael Shain and I joined other press invitees in a huge room with nothing in it but a long table laden with cold cuts. We were somehow lined up in front of this table waiting expectantly for the stars as I saw Jerry Brown striding across the empty distance, with an aide or two. He shocked me by purposefully walking on a direct line to me, and spoke to me those profound and unforgettable words: “Where’s the food?” (Linda—who we were clearly hoping for—and the other stars never showed.)

At the other end of my stay, I saw the early punk messiahs, the Ramones, at the behest of our young writer, Mark Jenkins, who seemed fascinated that I was among the first generation of rock critics, a distinction I hadn’t realized until then. It was one of three shows at the Childe Harold club and I sat alone at a table very near the stage. Each member of the band struck a pose and varied it little as they blasted one short robotic tune after another. And yet they were mesmerizing. I didn’t exactly feel over the hill (though a few months earlier, at a desultory midnight publicity party for a new album by David Crosby and Graham Nash, I’d officially turned 30) but I knew something had changed that wasn’t going to include me.

Dupont Circle was an uphill walk from Shain’s place and not very far from Newsworks, so I tended to hang out there when I found the time, especially in the bookstores. (At one, I found myself perusing one sale table while Carl Bernstein was at another.) I particularly liked a new bookstore called Kramerbooks, which soon added Afterwards, a few tables crowded up against the bookshelves, but with an espresso bar and cafe food. It was an innovation then, and for me reminiscent of the bookstore and cafe I dreampt up with friends one afternoon in the Gizmo at Knox College. It was the only sort of job any of us wanted.

I recall one day in Kramerbooks, with several Newsworks colleagues. I bought a book to distract me from the journalistic level of thought—a paperback copy of The Order of Things by French philosopher Michel Foucault, which I doubt I ever finished. We then had lunch together, served by Robert Hinton, who had been a major part of Newsworks early days, but had apparently found the cafe business to be more remunerative.

At that time author Larry McMurtry owned and operated a book shop in Washington, which I never got around to visiting. But I did hear him give a talk—his voice was not at all what I was expecting, not the voice I heard in his prose. I met him afterwards, inviting him to write something for Newsworks, which he didn’t get around to doing.

Editing and writing for Newsworks was months of dizzying hard work, some desperate hard play, and along with a peculiar kind of loneliness, the kind of companionship and closeness I’ve rarely experienced.

Early in my tenure as Editor, a call for me came through the main number. I answered without knowing who it was. I heard a stern voice say with heavy contempt, “So you think it would be fun to run a newspaper.”

I knew who it was halfway through, and I knew who he was quoting. It was David Helpern (my friend and the director of Hollywood On Trial) calling from Cambridge, and he was quoting a famous line we both knew well from Citizen Kane, pronounced by Kane’s disapproving money manager and former caretaker to the young Orson Welles as Kane. We shared a long and very satisfying laugh.

For despite the wilting Washington heat, the frenzy and frustration, the wolf scratching and growling at the door and the constant side debates about the paper’s future, it was fun. It happened way more than once that we would be separately working at our desks, attacking the typewriters, mumbling on the phone or staring morosely at notes or copy or thin air, and suddenly one of us—John Aquilino, Jeff Stein or I, for example—would pick up a telephone receiver and shout into it: “Stop the presses!” “Get me rewrite!”

It was perhaps a feeling of irony or absurdity, as if we were in some crazy movie about being a newspaper, but often it was exuberant recognition that for as long as this lasted, we were a newspaper. It was hilarious, desperate and precious, and something we shared.

We worked in the office together, went off to stories together—I recall especially a long car drive and conversation with photographer Michael McCarthy. By the fall we were a tight little group that worked and socialized together. If we were at the same party somewhere, eventually that core group would gradually drift together, as if drawn by gravity to the same corner of the same room.

By fall it did seem that Newsworks was getting favorably noticed and our journalism was getting attention. The September Washingtonian magazine featured Newsworks in its “Good Reading” slot, noting it was “beginning to find its place.”

We got a number of letters suggesting we were popular with young newcomers to Washington, and an accepted and valued resource. A key to that was the colorfully designed selection of upcoming events of interest to a young readership called Eight Days A Week and appearing on our back page every week. Like other collections of short items throughout the paper, these were contributions from across the staff and from freelancers. Also inside were more comprehensive listings, organized by the indispensable hand of Fran Moshos.

I can’t say we were establishing an identity, if that means some apparent and easily summarized category. But we were creating a character, a reflection of the small group of people pouring themselves into Newsworks every day.

We felt we were on the road to success (by which I mean survival), as measured by reader enthusiasm, general buzz and the eagerness of good younger writers to appear in our pages. In addition to his other duties, John Aquilino began and ran an intern program, and his work with these writers resulted in several stories we used. He in particular felt that one more substantial investment could lead to Newsworks becoming a going concern for years to come.

But the paper seemed to be existing financially only on a series of last-minute, very small pots of investment cash. As early as August we weren’t sure we would continue to publish two weeks ahead. I found myself once again resisting attempts by one or two people I haven’t named here to allow advertising to dictate editorial content, but otherwise I was doing what I could to aid our survival, even beyond my editorial responsibilities. I spoke (though awkwardly) to a few potential investors, compiled a list of complimentary quotes and significant stories for publicity, and designed a new house ad that “re-branded” us (an expression exactly nobody used in 1976) as the “Washington Outsider.”

I also persuaded management to offer back issues for sale, partly as a kind of poll to see what stories attracted readers. To the surprise of the publisher’s office, we got a good response. I personally tallied the results. All I now remember is that the “Young, Single and Lonely in Washington” cover remained the most popular. We did do a follow-up, a special section on “Couples.”

But time was clearly running out. From the publisher’s office came a proposal outlining a greatly scaled- down Newsworks. It involved firing almost everyone who had remained when others moved on. My response was that whatever merits this plan might have, I personally was not interested in being part of it. My loyalty was more to the beleaguered group that remained, and I was not so intoxicated with Washington that I would stay under all circumstances. My own living situation was clearly unsustainable—still sleeping on a futon couch in a small roach-infested apartment (and by then, Shain was himself getting restless with this place.) I wasn’t being paid enough to afford more, and the paper’s precarious state didn’t make even a year’s housing commitment possible anyway.

There was support in the Newsworks building for that proposal, and though I didn’t oppose it, I took some heat for what was primarily a personal decision. But for whatever reasons, that idea faded away.

My relationship with publisher Diane Archer was amiable and professional, though with growing tension as time went on—and time ran out. She was smart, savvy and generous. We just had different points of view, leading to different actions.

So the critical moment came with another proposal from the publisher’s office, to reduce staff salaries. (“Salaries” was a bit of a misnomer, as I found that for at least part of my tenure I was being paid as a freelancer, without Social Security.) Everyone who remained was sacrificing, probably missing out on other opportunities, and though I didn’t know the full financial circumstances of really anyone else, I was certain that I for one did not have inherited wealth to fall back on. So I countered with a proposal to raise staff salaries, just slightly, mostly to make the point. And perhaps to force the issue, for I felt a number of staff members had their lives and careers on hold, out of loyalty and—well, the fun of being a newspaper. At the next meeting it was approved.

We soldiered on awhile longer without a last minute rescue; then the wolf finally came. At a meeting, contentious at times (only my trust in Gwen kept me from really losing my temper), it was decided to “suspend publication.”

After the decision but before we completed the last issue, I used the last comp ticket I would ever get through Newsworks to attend a performance at the Kennedy Center of No Man’s Land, the play by Harold Pinter in its original production, starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.

I was seated too far back, and too distracted by Newswork’s imminent end to see much of these two great actors I admired, though I did hear a line I used as the out- of -context quote above our goodbye announcement: “Once a man has breasted the tape, he must breast the tape forever.” (It refers to winning footraces.) At intermission I met two Washington Post reporters who expressed admiration for Newsworks, especially the arts coverage.

The night we put the last issue to bed (which ironically contained a double page record company ad, precisely what kept the Boston weeklies in business), much of the staff gathered in the third floor production office for a bittersweet farewell. I tried to lighten the occasion by treating it as a graduation, complete with Class Prophesies and a Class Will I assembled. It would be the last time we were all together.

Between then and the final day I spent most of my office time writing letters of recommendation for everyone in editorial, and a few others. Personal notes of appreciation went back and forth throughout the building.

The day the issue came out was my last in the office. I arrived to the chaos of men carrying out desks and furniture. All that was left in editorial were phones on the floor. I was on one of them, doing a media interview on the life and death of Newsworks, when the line went dead. All the phones had been disconnected. As soon as I put the receiver down, someone scooped up the phone and took it away.

Later I was back on that evening talk show, in which I mostly sat with the camera on me while I listened to my old publisher at the Boston Phoenix, Steven Mindich, on the phone holding forth on the perils of the alternative press. (In recent weeks we’d been sending issues to the Harvard Square out-of-town newstand, where they invariably sold out.)

While I was sitting alone for a moment backstage after the bright bath of light around me during this TV show, the finality and the exhaustion finally hit me, especially when I realized the Newsworks story was out of my hands. It would now be what others said it was.

The Washington Post did a feature story, positioning Newsworks as the last in a long line of underground newspaper failures. When asked if I thought this was the last, I was quoted as saying no, it was the first of the second generation, the alternative weekly. A very few years later, the Baltimore City Paper and then the Washington City Paper proved this to be true.

Another post-mortem, the academic paper I mentioned before, also concentrated on the paper’s failure. Although the people associated with Newsworks quoted in it all had positive things to say about me and my tenure, the author asserted that as Editor I had been so desperate for readers that six of the last 12 issues had covers featuring sex or violence.

To get to that number of six, “violence” would have to include some or all of the following: the Martin Luther King assassination inquiry, the Letelier and Moffitt car bombing assassinations on the streets of Washington (kind of a big news story, especially since it’s the only time that it happened, television dramas notwithstanding), our cover on the gun control debate, and/or on the Vietnam war. “Sex” might mean “Selling With Sex” cover story by Jean Callahan, the theme of which is in the first paragraph: though everyone believes it, sex doesn’t actually sell much of anything. Then perhaps the Couples cover, the cover on the abortion debate, and maybe even the cover on women DJs in Washington radio, talking about sexism in the media.

At the time, the only solace I felt was supplied by Max Robinson, the first black anchor on a Washington TV station, who in a couple of years would become the first black network anchor at ABC. After he reported one evening that Newsworks had printed its last issue, he commented: “Too bad. I thought this town was big enough.”

I heard later that Diane had consoled herself with a trip on the Amazon. I took the train back to Greensburg.

I made a few trips back to Washington over the next year or two, seeing some combination of John, Gwen, Jean, Marsha and Mark in particular. Once I met with the editor of the glossy Washingtonian magazine, who commissioned an article comparing Washington and Boston. Among those I interviewed were Frank Rich (who grew up in Washington and went to Harvard) and Tim Crouse (who lived in Cambridge but political reporting took him to DC.) But my story was apparently too negative about Washington and never ran.

I did have a final adventure on one of those trips. After various social outings with Newsworks friends, I found myself on my own the night before I was scheduled to leave Washington. So I went to see yet another Truffaut double feature at the Biograph in Georgetown. I was in the lobby between movies when I spotted a familiar face. When I was at Newsworks she was a young actor at the Washington Theatre Lab. I saw her at an afternoon rehearsal when I’d gone along with John Aquilino, who was writing a short feature on the Lab, and Michael McCarthy who was taking photos. In the ensuing story we managed to misspell her name but I did squeeze in a line about her as “strikingly beautiful” with “a compelling presence.”

In the lobby dimness, she seemed to half-recognize me as well, so I went over and re-introduced myself. She was also there on her own, so we sat together for the second feature, Mississippi Mermaid. She thought it was too romantic. Afterwards we had a long conversation with some food and a glass of wine or two at a nearby restaurant. Perhaps the candle light I remember just reflects the giddy magic of those moments, the kind intensity of her eyes, her luminous smile.

I walked her to her apartment, which was so far away that she rode on my back for a bit, and then I rode on hers. We laughed a lot. In her living room we traded songs on her guitar. She played and sang “You’ve Got A Friend.” The evening ended not quite the way I would have liked, but I was certainly enthralled. Still, I made my train the next day.

We exchanged letters that winter—she thought she might join friends sailing around the world. My second letter went unanswered, and the next time I saw her she was 10 feet tall on the silver screen in National Lampoon’s Animal House, co-starring as the only sane person in the film. That was just the beginning of a long career. Her name was, and still is, Karen Allen.

It’s been nearly 50 years now since Newsworks, and I’ve long since lost touch with my colleagues there. My most recent contact was with Tom Redburn, who went from Washington to the Los Angeles Times (he and his wife hosted me for one of my working trips to LA in the late 70s) and then to the New York Times as a writer and editor for many years. He put me in touch with the right editor there for my last piece for the Times in 2004, appropriately enough an arts section cover story on Star Trek. Retired from the Times, Tom now writes a Substack newsletter.

Tom Redburn and wife in a recent profile photo

I don’t participate in any social media so my sources of Internet data are limited, but I managed to glean some information about our alums, however dated. And like Tom, they also have done quite well.

Our Jeff Stein was briefly editor of Newswork’s successor, the Washington City Paper before he started his own weekly, which lasted a little longer than Newsworks did. He appears to have turned his full attention to national security for Salon online, and began his SpyTalk column for the Congressional Quarterly, before taking it in various forms to the Washington Post, Newsweek and currently onSubstack. He also freelanced for the New York Times and many other prominent publications and online outlets, and is the author of three books.

Jeff Stein in 2019 photo

In the years just after Newsworks I was still in touch with Jean Callahan when she was an editor at American Film and in Boston, at New Age magazine. Her author’s page at Simon and Schuster for her book, Your Older Dog, says she returned to being a freelance writer and made a home in Massachusetts.

I failed to find anything that suggested the correct Gwen Capabianco, and a hard time with John Aquilino. I know he’s not the young actor nor the Navy admiral that pop up first on Internet searches. I remember maybe a decade ago he used to have a web site filled with interesting writing. But I did find that our John Aquilino likely remained in the DC area where he’s been a writer, editor and consultant. He is on LinkedIn.

Mark Jenkins was probably the last Newsworks person I saw in Washington or maybe Baltimore, when I passed through in the early 1980s. He’s since has had a long career writing about film (including for NPR.org) and music (Rolling Stone, Washington Post, etc. and co-authored a book on—fittingly enough—punk rock.) He’s also written on architecture and for 13 years authored the weekly Washington Post column on art, “In the Galleries.” Some examples of his work are online here and here.

Pamela Larratt back in the day.  Maybe a Michael McCarthy photo, maybe not.

The last I heard directly from Pamela Larratt was a postcard from Montana (I think) in the 1980s. Her online profile describes her as “Reporter, Mom, Nana, Teacher, Singer, Activist” living in Spokane, Washington. There are a few videos on YouTube of her on piano and singing her own songs. Good to hear her voice again.

Of our regular freelancers, film reviewer Joel E. Siegel was not the Joel Siegel who would review movies for Good Morning America, though a film writer for the Washington Post called our Siegel “the best film critic who ever worked in this town.” From Newsworks he reviewed regularly for Washington City Paper and taught at Georgetown. He was also a jazz aficionado who won a Grammy for liner notes.

On the other hand, one of our theatre reviewers was that BobMondello—who after a stint at—where else—Washington City Paper, went on to national fame reviewing movies and theatre for NPR’s All Things Considered.

Janice Paran

Janice Paran, my “discovery” as a theatre writer, was soon writing for American Theatre magazine. She has multiple MFAs, including one from Yale Drama, and was a long time director of new play development at the McCarter Theatre Center in New Jersey, where she worked with such notables as Christopher Durang and Beth Henley. She is a playwright and dramaturg, taught at Princeton, and recently was an artistic associate for the Sundance Institute Theatre Program.

There are several David Paglins associated with the performing arts in the DC area but I’m not sure which (if any) is the one I edited in the autumn of our Newsworks.

After Newsworks, Amanda Spake became an editor at Mother Jones. She’s since edited at and/or written for the Washington Post Magazine and U.S. News and World Report, among other publications.

I last saw Frank Browning in the late 70s or early 80s in southern California, where he gave me a copy of his book, Vanishing Land: The Corporate Theft of America. He’s since written or co-written at least eight more books, many dealing with gender issues. He was a science correspondent for National Public Radio.

After Washington, Michael Shain went back to New York, where I saw him often throughout the 1980s. He had a long if off-and-on career with the New York Post, eventually becoming a well-known columnist. Most recently his work has appeared in the Queens Chronicle in Queens, New York, where he lives.

Ezra Doner, as he was

Ezra Doner has his own law firm specializing in entertainment and copyright law. I was pleased to see his name in the credits of The Practice of the Wild, a film on poet Gary Snyder I watch repeatedly.

As a writer, Peter Koper went from appearing in Newsworks to the Baltimore City Paper, probably when Mark Jenkins was there, and wrote for American Film, possibly when Jean Callahan was there. He continued a varied career as writer, film director and occasional actor, often involving his long-time friend, director John Waters. Koper died in 2022.

Valerie McGhee became the co-founder of the Washington Journalism Review. She maintained an active interest in the arts and the environment. But at only age 46, she succumbed to a brain tumor in 2000.

Gigi Fava, around her Time Magazine time, I believe

I last saw Gigi Fava in the 1980s after she’d moved to New York. She eventually became an award-winning art director for Time Magazine and the New York Times. She’s now the creative director of her own firm.

Robert Altemus, who designed the overall look of Newsworks, has since won over 150 national awards designing for prestigious magazines and TV networks, but also with a penchant for fantasy and science fiction projects.

Art director Tom Trapnell created designs for the Los Angeles Times and other publications and organizations. The testimonials on his website mirrored the “Trapper” I knew as art director for Newsworks: highly talented, decent, calm and collaborative.

Bill Holland in 2014

Bill Holland and Rent’s Due kept playing through the 1970s while Bill kept freelancing as a writer, with a side gig as a book scout. In the 80s he was the Washington bureau chief for Billboard Magazine, and starting gigging as a musician again in the 1990s and beyond, with a “Best of” album issued in 1996. You can hear some of his tunes (including “Run or Fight”) on Apple Tunes and Spotify.

There are a lot of Michael McCarthys, but I’m pretty sure ours went back to Boston where he got a medical degree at BU, became the North America editor of The Lancet (UK) from 1997 to 2007, and is described on LinkedIn as a medical editor and writer in Seattle, and video producer for Northwest Science Media Workshop.

I’ve noticed that none of the bios I found online mention their time at Washington Newsworks. And why would they? No one else would know what they were talking about. Newsworks was a kind of brief dream we all had together, a long time ago.