Today I heard an echo from my long lost past as a journalist.  After recently joining Facebook, I received a contact from a high-school chum of mine I hadn’t heard from in nearly 30 years. We caught up via emails over the course of several days. Then he sent me an email today, trying to remember if it was I who had introduced him to Ray Bell, a journalist who died last week and whose obituary appeared in the pages of my former employer, The Dallas Morning News.

Ray Bell. Man, I hadn’t thought about him in decades. I met him when I was writing part time for the weekly Chronicle, a rag of a broadsheet in the Dallas suburb of Carrollton, where I had attended high school. I was covering local football games under the Friday night lights for $15 a story and another $10 if I shot a useable photo.

One Saturday morning I went to the newspaper’s grungy office to work in the dark room, actually a converted closet, hoping my shutter finger had been quick enough to capture something at the previous night’s game worth an Alexander Hamilton. Pecking away at a manual typewriter on a battered garage-sale desk was this sinewy guy with slicked-back, graying hair, sleeves of a crisp, white shirt rolled up, and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He momentarily looked up through stern, horn-rimmed glasses, took a drag on the butt, and blew a perfect “O” into the dank air of the office.

I introduced myself as the high-school stringer, come in to do some printing.

The New Editor in Town

“Ray Bell,” he said in a voice cured by cigarettes and whiskey. “I’m the new editor.” Then he looked around the office with a look of disbelief—and maybe a little disgust.

Before I could say anything else, he went back to typing away, presumably on copy for next Wednesday’s edition. I still had until Monday to get my game story in.

It just happened that was the day I discovered I’d shot the single best sports photograph of my life. I developed the film, Kodak Tri-X 120 size used in an old Yashica twin lens reflex camera provided by the paper. A Yashica was a poor man’s Hasselblad. You looked down into the viewfinder on top of the camera. The mirror that reflected what the lens saw into the viewfinder  reversed the image, turning the subject to be shot upside down. This made shooting sports a very disorienting exercise; but the paper’s publisher, a penurious sort I used to call Sir Ted the Cheap, refused to spring for a legitimate 35mm SLR camera. After performing the proper chemical steps, I opened the steel developing canister and unrolled the film from its reel, held it up to the tiny darkroom’s single light bulb. One of the negatives looked promising.

A few minutes later I had a test print that confirmed it. I had captured the star running back of R.L. Turner High, my alma mater, sliding on rain-soaked turf trying to recover a fumbled football as a defender was falling toward the ball. The bulky, side-mounted flash on the camera had perfectly exposed the scene of two players grimacing with concentration to recover the pigskin, freezing the splash of the water off the turf  like diamonds in midair. Somehow I had managed to get the shot in perfect focus, not a trivial matter with the antiquated camera. The large negative provided so much detail, you could read “Wilson” on the football. I excitedly made a final 8x10 print and burst into the office, holding up the still-dripping photo, and shouted, “Look at this!”

Bell looked up from the typewriter, took another drag on his cigarette, and beckoned me to his desk. I proudly displayed the single best picture of my 19-year-old life. He tilted his head back a little to see through the bottom half of his bifocals.

“That’s pretty good art, kid,” he stated nonchalantly. I was a bit deflated at his tone. “We can use it on page one.”

Page one! Not buried in the bowels of the paper, which, truth be told, was little more than a shopping circular for the local grocery stores and car dealerships. Page one! My look of neophyte delight caused Bell to chuckle.

“Now get me some copy to go with it,” he growled.

Have Typewriter, Will Travel

Ray, I would discover, was a skinny version of Lou Grant, maybe not quite as gruff but ultimately just as avuncular. Ink coursed through his veins. All that was missing was a fedora with a press card in the hatband. I thought him worldly, too. Having been born in Waco, he started writing for various small Texas newspapers after graduating high school at 16. Eventually he landed at the Dallas Times Herald, my idea at the time of journalistic nirvana, the paper I hoped to work for after graduating with a journalism degree from what is now called the University of North Texas. From there, he had covered Atlanta for the Associated Press, also writing various articles for national magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. He returned to the Times Herald. All this I learned after a few weeks of going with him for coffee at the nearby Denny’s .

So what had happened? How could a guy with all of this experience, with this journalistic moxy right out of “The Front Page” be working at The Carrollton Chronicle? I asked. (Hey, I was a budding journalist myself, and inquiring minds wanted to know!) He mumbled something about life and tough breaks and raw deals.

Ray must have been pretty desperate. I knew The Chronicle’s post of editor probably paid somewhere south of carpenter’s helper but still north of high-school football stringer. Apparently, it paid enough to keep him in cigarettes, which he consumed by the cartons every week; starched white shirts and black ties; and, based on the roadmaps I’d read in his eyes occasionally, whiskey. He always picked up the tab at Denny’s, too.

Ray was good at the job of banging out coherent copy in the time it takes most people to address an envelope. He was a good editor. He’d take my game-story copy and give it a quick once-over with that thick editor’s pencil, almost always shaving a few words here and there or moving up a paragraph or punching up the lead. My pride of authorship would get bruised a bit, but he could explain every change in a way that made it hard to argue. I suspect if I had argued I might have seen a nastier side to Ray, but it never came to that.

The Comedy Stylings of Ray Bell

In fact, most of the time, despite his being sent down from the majors to play, at best, Single A ball, he was pretty jocular. He had a million jokes, many of them journalistically oriented, which, almost by definition, meant they were lewd, crude, and rude as well.

I remember he could turn Laura, the girl just hired out of Tulane University to be the paper's one full-time staff writer, beet red as easily as lighting up a Salem. Many of his jokes involved women with “great lungs,” as he used to say, leering across his desk at Laura, who, shall we say, was not a full-figured girl. (I would learn later, however, that neither was she a candidate for the boy’s swim team when she stopped me outside the office one afternoon and asked me out on a date, four years my senior and clearly missing those fun days in New Orleans.) She would blush at Ray's supremely sexist jokes, then rally her women’s lib side and call him a chauvinist pig. To which he would throw back his head and let fly a long, smoky guffaw. I still remember one of his jokes:

 An editor sees a story run across the wire-service teletype about a man who escapes from an asylum then is caught at his girlfriend’s house in the middle of a conjugal visit. The editor didn’t have room for more than a one-column brief, which made writing the headline a challenge. He came up with:

Nut Bolts,

Screws 

I still crack up at that one, mainly because Ray could barely contain himself before getting to the punch line. (Remember, if you tell the joke, you have to be sure to say, “Nut Bolts (comma) Screws” in order to visualize it properly.)

It Takes Brains To Be a Veteran Journalist Like Ray

Like any veteran journalist, he had a lot of war stories. The one I remember concerned his coverage of a plane crash around Atlanta. “It was in the woods at night,” he said. “The fire lit up everything. I’m walking around the site, trying to find someone in authority, when I felt my foot slip. I looked down and saw in the firelight that I had stepped in a guy’s brains.”

After a few months of working together, Ray suggested Denny’s for a cup of coffee. It was clear on his face when we sat down that he had news.

“Well, kid,” he said, fumbling for his lighter,  “this is my last week at The Chronicle.”

I furrowed my brow. What? Sir Ted had fired Ray? For what? The Chronicle’s news page had benefited from Ray’s hand, for sure. It must have been money. Ray must have asked for a raise, and Sir Ted had said, “Off with his head!” But that wasn’t it.

“I’m headed to The Morning News to work the copy desk,” he said, inhaling smoke through his nostrils in a way that always kinda creeped me out. “I’ve enjoyed working with you and Laura. You’re a smart kid with some talent.”

“That’s great, Ray,” I said, genuinely glad he was going back up to the big leagues.

Then he stunned me with his next speech. He begged me not to go into the newspaper business. He told me I’d never have a normal life if I did, that it would wreck my marriage, that “it would break your heart.”

Ray's Bladder Problem

I knew from previous comments that he was divorced and had at least one kid,  a son about 10 at the time, who lived a few hours away with his ex-wife, who also had been a reporter. I would learn when I, myself, made it to The Morning News right out of college after two summer internships there why Ray had ended up in temporary exile at The Chronicle. One of the old-timers at The News told me that one day Ray had come into work at the Times Herald totally blotto, lit up, three sheets including the storm jib to the wind. Legend had it that he climbed up on his desk, railed at all the stunned reporters and editors around him, then proceeded to unzip his pants and urinate all over what was then a cutting-edge computer terminal that cost more than $5,000, more than a quarter of a reporter’s salary back then. Legend further had it that the terminal shorted out in a July Fourth display of sparks and popping. He had then proceeded to the exits, never to darken the doors of the Times Herald again, especially when management had found out what had become of their fancy-schmancy terminal.

I never knew what brought on Ray’s tirade. Perhaps it had been related to his divorce or separation from his kid or maybe he was just a mean drunk. In any case, I was amazed that The Morning News, about as conservative and uptight a newspaper this side of the Fascist Gazette you could find, had hired him. Someone must have vouched for him.

Oddly, even though I worked for more than three years at The News in sports a mere 20 yards or so from the city desk where Ray toiled, we rarely spoke. Maybe I reminded him too much of the time when he had been really down and out. But I would occasionally look down the long newsroom and see him at the copy desk, pecking away on his terminal, puffing a Salem, all serious as a train wreck.

Ironically, I would have my own tirade in the newsroom at The News, though I was sober as a judge at the time. Ray, I think, was off that day. A new sports editor from Boston had instigated a reign of terror, making everyone on the sports staff miserable. When he reneged on a promise to promote me  and then days later called me on the carpet for a misidentified player in a college-football story I had written, I snapped. As I recall, I called him a “lying sack of shit” in the middle of the newsroom, to which he screamed, “You’re fired, Poyner!” as I stormed out. A few days later, the former sports editor who had been put out to pasture with some emeritus title in favor of this Boston bastard, called to query, on behalf of management apparently, if I’d be interested in coming back. I just couldn’t, I told him, remembering then Ray’s speech about how journalism would ruin my life.

Have a Heart Attack, Win an Award!

I read Ray’s obituary online from The Morning News today. It said he had won several awards for a first-person story he wrote about surviving a heart attack in the parking lot of The News on his way into work in 1983, two years after I had been fired. Those Salems and Jack Black were bound to take a toll. He was about 52 at the time, my age now. Ultimately, he died at 77 on March 5 of “chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,” a 50-cent term for emphysema and a bunch of other nasty lung things. Quite frankly, I don’t know how he lasted that long. Ray was a tough ol’ bird. 

The obit said he had worked at The News for 20 years before retiring roughly 10 years ago. (Apparently, Ray had learned to confine his peeing to the men’s room.)  He had remarried 20 years ago and stayed that way until his death. Even in retirement he covered high-school football games while living in Waxahachie, about 30 minutes south of Dallas, until taking a portable oxygen unit to the press box wasn’t good enough for his health anymore last year. The obit said he left behind three sons and a daughter, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. Not bad for a guy who couldn’t quit something that would ruin your life.

 I wish I had a picture of him--or, as we used to say, art--to show you. He was a piece of work.