The Rookie and the Crime Reporter

In the spring of 1937, editors at the Indianapolis Times offered a full-time job to one of the newspaper’s freelance correspondents at DePauw University, John Bartlow Martin, at a weekly salary of $22.50. Martin accepted the newspaper’s offer and arranged with university officials to finish his coursework in absentia while working in Indianapolis. “They were insistent that I come at once,” Martin said of his editors, “and I was afraid not to,” remembering how hard jobs were to come by during the Great Depression.

First published as the Indianapolis Sun in 1888, the newspaper became the Times in 1923 after its purchase the year before by Scripps-Howard Newspapers headed by Roy Howard, who had grown up in Indianapolis and worked for both the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News. The Times enjoyed a reputation as a vigorous and crusading newspaper, winning the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1928 for its coverage the year before exposing the oppressive influence of the KuKlux Klan in the state.

In comparison to the other newspapers in the city, which Martin described as supporting the Republican Party and filled with dull, uninspired reporting, the Times was “lively, aggressive, liberal, and leaning Democratic, more fun to read and to work on. The Times hired you young, paid you little, and promoted you fast.” On Martin’s first day of work at the newspaper he received a curt assignment from the city editor, who told him, “Report to Heze Clark at 4 a.m. tomorrow. He’ll tell you what to do.”

Clark, whose full name was Hezlep Williamson Clark, had been the police reporter at the Times since July 1, 1928, and remained in the same position until his death in 1956, earning a distinction as the oldest working police reporter in the country.

Although born in Michigan, Clark had come to Indiana as a youth to Bluffton, where his father and uncle operated a newspaper that staunchly supported Prohibition. Later in life Clark still had vivid memories of falling into a batch of printer’s ink at the age of five. He also enjoyed reminiscing about the time in 1891 when his father, also the son of a newspaperman, brought him for the first time to Indianapolis. After a fire engine raced by the duo, Clark’s father took him by the hand and said, “you might as well cover your first fire.”

A star football player at Indianapolis’s Shortridge High School, Clark went on to earn All-American honors as a halfback during his junior year at Indiana University, graduating in 1907. He started his newspaper career as an assistant sports editor with the Star, covered the police beat on the Terre Haute Tribune, and returned to Indianapolis to cover the federal courthouse for the Sun.

During his career covering crime news, Clark got in a few scraps now and then. In 1916 Willard Norris, seventeen, who had been arrested for breaking and entering into a shoe store, attacked Clark at the reporter’s home on East Twenty-Sixth Street. Norris had vowed to seek revenge on those who had written anything about him and his crime.

As the Star reported, “the attempt to down the former football player proved futile, for Clark, obtaining a hold that had made him the champion wrestler at Indiana University when he was a student, held the youth until the arrival of Motor Policeman Burk and Shope and Patrolmen Burris and Oakley. Norris was arrested, charged with assault and battery with intent to kill and carrying concealed weapons. It is said that he was armed with a pair of ‘knucks’ and a long knife.”

Arriving home after work one night, Clark had noticed Norris sitting on the steps of a vacant house just west of his residence. Clark was sitting on his back porch when Norris came up and asked him to step out and hear what he had to say. When Clark approached Norris, the youth hit him several times over the head before the former athlete could grab him. “Clark suffered severe bruises on the side and head,” the Star reported, “but was not injured seriously.”

Clark left journalism in 1923 to coach athletics at Rose Polytechnic Institute (today Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology) in Terre Haute, leaving five years later to join the Times as its police reporter. Over his many years on the job, Clark, a chunky, balding figure, became known for his tenacious recording of facts on cases, his loyalty to the newspaper, his unrelenting work ethic, and his detailed memory. Once asked the secret to his longevity, the respected newsman responded, “Come to work a little earlier, work a little harder and work a little longer and you’ll always be on top.”

Martin had the unenviable task of replacing the then sixty-year-old Clark on the 4:00 a.m. to noon police reporter shift (Clark switched to the afternoon shift). For a week young reporter followed the veteran newsman as he prowled around the corridors of police headquarters, raced to the scene of crimes and fires, collected all the facts he could, and phoned them in to the rewrite men on the Times news desk.

Although Martin came to discover in their time together that Clark could not write a proper English sentence, he was the “most thorough collector of facts on police cases I ever knew.” Martin learned from Clark whom to talk to, whom he should avoid, and what questions he should ask. “They didn’t call it ‘on the job training’ or ‘internship;’ they called it ‘breaking the kid in,’” Martin remembered. “That’s what it was. After a week I was there alone. That’s how I became a reporter.”

Many years later, while teaching at Northwestern University’s Medill School ofJournalism, Martin wondered how a student could manage to spend thousands of dollars and a full year “learning less than Heze Clark taught me in a few days [for] free.”