Rancor and Romance
In the Rubble of The Houston Post

I drove into The Houston Post's parking lot the morning of April 18 and came face to face with pandemonium. Security guards, police officers, and camera crews jammed the edge of the lot. A television reporter, with whom I've had dinner and drinks several times, stuck a microphone in my face, the camera rolling.

"What kind of severance pay are you getting?" he demanded.

"Fuck off," I explained, and stalked past him, past the cops and barricades as if it was another scene, like the zillions I've been to in five years as a reporter. Inside the building, stunned employees gathered around their bosses.

Gerald Garcia, the editor, talked to nearly 200 newsroom employees at around 10:30. As we gathered around him, we held onto each other.

 The Post's death wasn't our fault, we were told; it was the price of newsprint. We doubted this; the paper had netted a profit of almost $10 million in 1994, its best year yet, according to Garcia, and to several executive secretaries who had helped celebrate the profits at a party just last October. I know an out-of-work executive secretary who has an engraved champagne glass from the affair.

Local television stations covered the plight of 1,900 full-time employees and contract workers for a day. The next day, idiots blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City and we disappeared off the radar screen, just another news blip.

It didn't get quite real for me until two weeks later, when Bert Walter died. Bert worked on the copy desk and I didn't really know him, except that he once told me I look like Helen Mirren, the actress, a compliment I took with great pleasure. Lisa Bass, who worked with him, says he was the best of the "old white guys," the people who are having the hardest time finding work now. He had gone in for an angiogram and dialysis -- he was taking the test in order to qualify for the kidney-transplant waiting list -- and had some sort of seizure. His family is still waiting for the autopsy report.

His widow and seventeen-year-old son are also waiting to see if William Dean Singleton of Consolidated Newspapers, the man who shut our 111-year-old newspaper down, will honor Walter's life insurance policy. Singleton cut us full-time workers with sixty days' pay, the least amount he could under a dubious interpretation of federal plant closing law, and he cut our benefits -- including life insurance -- the day he cut us, except for the medical insurance that was paid to the end of the month.

Up until Walter's death, the closing had felt like a whirligig of parties and job interviews. Features reporter Clifford Pugh threw the first and best party on that first night. I brought bottles of champagne on my grandmother's maxim that all of life's important occasions call for champagne. I awoke the next day remembering little, except that I believed I had proposed marriage to the Post's jazz critic, Tim Carman.

 Maybe this happened because I always thought Tim was attractive but never dared cross that workplace line; or maybe I wanted to hold onto something from the Post. He swears I didn't propose. But he occasionally hints that I should try again. We are one of several romances sprung from the ashes, described as shipwreck romances by reporter Leigh Hopper.

On the other hand, all of this -- the job loss and the forced changes of residence or profession -- has been hard on people's marriages and relationships. Newsroom couples, of which there were at least three, know the odds of finding work for both partners at another newspaper are not good. So the more hireable spouse -- in all three cases that I know about, the husband -- is leading the job search, with a demoralized spouse following.

Post colleagues married to nonjournalists are also having a tough time. Often, they earned less than their spouses. Even if the spouse understands the journalism disease, this is no financial argument for going to another city. So now what?

And, of course, we are all anxious and angry, and damned hard to live with.

Texas journalism took a hard blow to the heart the day the Post closed. Award-winning columnist Paul Harasim became a spokesman for the Veterans Administration. People like assistant city editor Jay Dorman, community news editor Rob Meckel, and state editor Jim Jennings also left journalism, and may not return. Jennings, who is fifty-three, has been golfing; Meckel has been looking at corporate communications, among other things; Dorman became an insurance adjuster. Between them they had put in sixty or seventy years of coaxing and coaching young reporters, of service to the city, the state, the profession.

Within days of the paper's demise, Knight-Ridder, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Gannett, and other papers flew into town to interview us. Mel Opotowsky, from the The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California, came to buy us meals and give us his sympathy. He had a few jobs. Judy Bolch, from the Raleigh, North Carolina, News and Observer, interviewed people for a handful of jobs in May, but a few days after she left, the McClatchy chain bought her paper, leaving hiring in limbo.

Others have come to town and left darker impressions. Reporters talk about the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel interviewing three of them at once; two found themselves in the peculiar position of having to out-shout their spouses to get a shot at a job.

The Oregonian's recruitment director blew into town and told different stories to different people about whether or not there were openings. He sent out graceless letters afterwards ("Imagine our file drawers . . . full of Marty Grahams"). And he wasn't the only one to make it clear to us that he had jobs for members of minority groups that didn't exist for whites.

The Post actually had a decent representation of African-American and Latino reporters. A university journalism professor I called, in an unsuccessful attempt to find journalism work for a high-quality night editor, told me his department could free up budget money only for a minority hire, and asked for the names of African-American reporters -- names I supplied with some misgivings.

I think most of us support affirmative action and the goal of diversity. Yet more than a few of us have been asked in interviews about our minority colleagues' availability, and more than a few of us fear losing a chance for a job because we are white. This is a fear we fumble to talk about; I'm uncomfortable writing about it for fear of sounding racist.

Leonard Fleming, an African American reporter, was also distressed. He told us he didn't want to tell newspapers he is black because he didn't want people to say that's why he got the job. And there we were, his friends, telling him to use his race, to use any weapon he had, to get himself a job -- to hell with people's snotty remarks. Still, hard-working reporters who lack prominent prizes and the race card struggle with the notion that prospective employers might only have money for special recruits.

This is just one of many resentments and anxieties; they tend to add up. Since the paper closed, everyone I know has felt lousy. Some drink. Some sleep too much, others too little. The same with eating. And those chronic aches, allergies, infections have all been disproportionately acting up.

Sometimes our fears and resentments surface during our job searches. Some of us become aware of our hostility in the midst of interviews and fear we are giving a negative impression. "It's anger pouring out on the keyboard some days," Matt Schwartz, a brilliant government affairs reporter, says. "It's hard not to write a cover letter that sounds like the beginning of a threat, of a stalking."

Everywhere we go, people ask the same questions: Did you see it coming? What are you going to do now? -- meaning, got a job? Juan Palomo, a columnist, editorial writer, and one of the best political reporters around, took to wearing a button that said: "Not yet, but thanks for asking." Some of us did land equivalent jobs right away. John Gravois, our city editor, got a job at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as their government affairs editor. Bill Pack, an excellent reporter, is moving his family to Baton Rouge since the Advocate gave him a good job as an education reporter. Other colleagues, however, went on to lesser jobs.

 Still others have slipped cleanly into depression. Palomo, the columnist who famously "came out" in our newspaper and was fired -- then rehired after public protests -- didn't look for work for three weeks. His column writing days may be over, he reasoned, and he didn't want to do much else. Movie critic Joe Leydon's sadness lifted briefly when Clint Eastwood, whom he interviewed several times in his thirteen years at the Post, called him to commiserate.

In spite of our own losses, we worry about each other. I tell people I don't have it so bad -- I'm healthy, single, and have no children, and can take the time to look for the right job. I worry about people like Frank and Lisa Bass, a medical writer and a copy editor, with three children and a mortgage. The Basses say they'll be fine. They worry about the niche writers -- how many movie critic jobs are there? -- and about older colleagues who will have a much harder time finding work.

It has been many weeks now. About half the newsroom has been hired somewhere, mostly editors and copy desk people. I've found part-time work at an executive search firm. The irony of tracking down recruits for well-paying industries while I struggle to stay in newspapers isn't lost on me. I free-lance a piece or two, to use up those last good local story ideas before I leave Houston.

Soon, I hope. A trip to California turned up a couple of future possibilities. I mail out $3 resume and clip packets; most go without response. Schwartz gleefully reports getting two telephone rejections and one in writing, all in response to a single letter. He's pretty sure they don't want him.

It's an odd feeling to be refugees like this. It's as if a tornado hit us. There was no leisurely pack-up, no farewell luncheon. We are scattered to the wind. There is no place to even check for messages. The Houston Post is gone.

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