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.”
1 comment:
I really loved reading your thoughts, obviously you know what are you talking about! Your site is so easy to use too, I’ve bookmark it in my folder
Hazmat Boot Covers
Post a Comment