If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

Long, long ago when I was introduced to news reporting, the introduction was made by Francis “Frank” Byron, an editor at the late, great Buffalo Courier-Express.

I had encountered him in the course of my service to a political campaign in which my area of responsibility covered the 11 counties of the Eighth Judicial District of the New York State Supreme Court. I cultivated a number of top editors, reporters and columnists and channeled stuff about my candidates to them. One was Byron.

When they needed someone to run the Wellsville Bureau, Byron reached out to me, as people would put it these days. I agreed to give it a try. He began to teach me how to do news.

Go and find out. Call and find out. Then tell the readers about it.

I loved news then, and I love it now. I’m a hopeless news junkie. I love to read it, hear it, see it, watch it, find it and write it. It’s wonderful when people call me and tell me news, bump into me somewhere and say, “Something happened that might be news…” or “Did you know about [some interesting item]?”

Getting news releases in the mail or by email is good, too. Occasionally they are forwarded to me by an editor, with a request to make something more like valid news out of them. A few even are written logically enough to be used with just some formatting help.

News that has to be unearthed, pried out, pulled out with the patience of a robin trying to get the whole earthworm, can give more satisfaction to a reporter than the kind that is easy to come by. But there are times it is right there and could easily be missed, if we don’t see that it is news.

Frank Byron asked me immediately, “Do you read the Courier-Express?” I had to admit I did not. “Now you will get it every morning,” he promised. “So what DO you read?”

“The Times Herald,” I told him. “And Time.”

“Good. Read the competition. And read Time, everyone should read Time.”

That was how I had become a news junkie. I was reading Time before I started school, back when backward ran sentences until reeled the mind, as Wolcott Gibbs famously stated, capturing Timespeak.

Grampa would accumulateda few weeks’ worth of Time on top of the milk cooler at his farm, then bringt them to me in a precious bundle on one of his visits to our farm, where he usually handed them directly to me. “These must be yours,” he would say, pointing to the “M.L. Nelson” on the label.

Time referred to reporters as newshawks, except for such as Dorothy Kilgallen, who was a newshen. I suppose I could have been thought a newschick, in years to come, on the earliest occasions I contributed something as a stringer. OrdinarilyI did not “keep a string” (get paid by the inch) by papers, but apparently many reporters did when they were functioning  as correspondents.

A Byron byword was, “Ask the hard questions.” If I was being sent to interview some political personage, that was something he would add in the way Paul Herzig encourages his Players to break a leg.

It seemed my fellow members of the press considered me brash enough to do just that. I was green, and very young and petite, so maybe I would not provoke as much resistance as a grizzled veteran would. At a Ted Sorensen press conference, when he was launching a run for the U.S. Senate, my fellow journalists hissed, “Pssst! Marti! Ask him about Chappaquiddick!”  “Yeah,” others would agree. “You ask him,” like so many kids urging Mikey to try the cereal.

Sometimes, I learned, it isn’t a matter of having to be as abrasive as Helen Thomas. Sometimes it is just bothering to ask the easy questions. Byron would explain, “It can be routine news, but it’s still news.”And “Officials usually are happy to tell us anything newsworthy. But when they are reluctant, it’s a good idea to find out what’s the big secret.”

Brit Hume came to Alfred to give a talk. I attended his press conference. Harking back to when he had been a Jack Anderson legman and had helped break the ITT scandal, I asked him, “How did you get the Dita Beard memo?”

Hume laughed. “I asked her for it.”

There was more to the story than that, but it boiled down to Hume having been quite direct with the ITT lobbyist.

Frank Byron encouraged me to “provide art,” meaning photographs. I hadn’t thought about that, realizing that usually the C-E sent staff photographers all over the place, and few of their reporters were expected to take photos. The paper wasn’t going to issue expensive cameras to everybody!

But Byron did ask me, in an off-hand way, whether I could possibly go to Wellsville and photograph a private plane that had been ditched in the Genesee. So I borrowed my husband’s folding camera, a Kodak Tourist II, and waded out into the river up to my hips and took the photo, then interviewed the pilot in his hospital room. His buddies were going to be so upset! They were members of a little flying club, which owned the plane.

Byron was delighted. From then on, I could do the photos in my bailiwick, the more the merrier. And I always got my negatives back, along with an occasional big glossy.

As more papers asked me to moonlight or daylight for them, I always asked permission from Byron, and he always said that was my right. “Just don’t do less for us,” he would add. My personal rule was that the paper with the first deadline after I got some news was where it would be filed first. I hit 11 a.m. and 11 p.m. deadlines six days a week, and the 11 p.m. Saturday too.

Sometime after the Courier-Express had been bought out by the Buffalo Evening News and I had come back to Pennsylvania I learned that Byron had retired, then that he had died. A couple of years ago his grandson tracked me down and contacted me by email. We have continued our contact as he researches the career of a man whose memory he reveres but whose work was a mystery to him. I am only one source, and sometimes a suggester of others.

Frank Byron was a fine newsman. And, for me, exactly the right teacher.

Peace.