Guerrilla Pilot: Alex Vraciu in the Philippines

On December 14, 1944, Alex Vraciu, one of the leading U.S. Navy aces in the Pacific, flew two missions with Fighting Squadron 20 from the USS Lexington near the former American airbase Clark Field in central Luzon in the northern Philippines about sixty miles from the capital of Manila. With no Japanese planes in the air, Vraciu and his fellow pilots concentrated on destroying enemy aircraft on the ground.

Pulling away from a low strafing run on his afternoon mission, Vraciu realized that his plane had been hit by enemy fire in its engine’s oil tank. “I knew that I’d had it,” he remembered. “Oil was gushing out and going all over my canopy, and my oil pressure was rapidly dropping. There was no way I’d be able to get back to my carrier.”

Pilots on the Lexington had been warned by the ship’s intelligence officers that if they were hit and had to bail out of their aircraft over Luxon to head westward away from the lowlands, an area that held the majority of Japanese troops in the Philippines. The hilly western section of the island, which included Mount Pinatubo, an active volcano, included dense forests from which several guerrilla forces fighting the enemy and gathering intelligence were active. Also, it was possible for downed pilots to make their way to the coast for possible rescue by an American submarine. “It’s hard to head away from the direction of your carrier,” said Vraciu, “but it had to be!”

Following the fall of the Philippines to the Japanese earlier in the war, some of the American and Filipino troops had escaped and fled to the jungle or hills to continue to fight the enemy, particularly in Luzon, as U.S. Army Forces in the Far East guerrilla groups. According to historian William Manchester, by the end of 1944 more than a hundred and eighty thousand Filipinos had fought with or aided the guerrillas in some manner. These groups included former members of the Philippine army, sometimes led by American soldiers that had escaped the Bataan Death March, and the Hukbalahap (Huks), the military arm of the Communist Party of the Philippines.  

Preparing to bail out of his stricken aircraft, Vraciu opened his canopy and began throwing out any items he did not want to have with him if he happened to be captured by the Japanese (any information that might be useful to the enemy). “When I dared not wait any longer, I climbed out on the wing of my plane and impulsively held on to the side of the cockpit and trailing edge of the wing—waiting—so I could get farther out of the lowlands and get into the hills,” he noted. “It probably was just for a matter of a few seconds, but it sure seemed like a long time.”

Jumping free of the plane, Vraciu had only a short time to think before he hit the ground. “I remember coming down, saying to myself, ‘Alex, what have you got yourself into this time!’” He landed about a half a kilometer away from the city of Capas in the Tarlac province. A member of the Filipino guerrilla force who lived in Capas remembered hearing Japanese anti-aircraft guns “barking furiously” as he cultivated his garden. Looking up, the resistance fighter saw a lone American aircraft flying over the city to the west and Japanese soldiers gathering to follow to see if the pilot would survive the crash.

Vraciu had made up his mind that he would not allow himself to be captured by the enemy, and snatched his .45-caliber gun from his holster when he noticed about eight men running toward where he had landed. A slightly dazed Vraciu heard the group shout: “Filipino! Filipino! No shoot!” In a short time, the men had changed the pilot’s oil-soaked flight suit and helmet for a straw hat, shirt, and pants he could only button the bottom two buttons on. “A couple of the men gathered in my parachute and picked up my backpack, and then they said we had to leave quickly because the Japanese would be converging in ten minutes because they had an encampment nearby,” Vraciu said.

The group headed off in the direction of the nearby hills, passing through a small village along the way. After going by the village, the group entered a field of tall grass. They were led by a young Negrito boy who could see the path through the vegetation. “They picked me up a couple of times along the way and then put me down again,” said Vraciu. After this happened to him the second time, the pilot asked what was going on. The guerrillas showed him that they had set bamboo traps in the tall grass to discourage the Japanese from following them. “One of these traps could rip off the whole calf of your leg, they said,” Vraciu noted.

Because he did not know where he was being taken, Vraciu felt some concern about his would-be rescuers. His worries ended, however, when a couple of the young men in the group came over to him as they were heading into the hills and asked him two questions. “They wanted to know if movie star Madeleine Carroll was married the second time and whether Deanna Durbin [a Hollywood actress and singer] had any children yet,” said Vraciu. “Now, I half smiled and thought to myself, ‘Why am I worrying if this is all they were concerned about?’”

There remained, however, one nagging concern for the downed airman. Vraciu could not help but worry about how his new wife (they had married in August) might take the news that he had not returned to the Lexington. Back in East Chicago, Kathryn Vraciu told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune that the last time she had heard from her husband had been in a December 10 letter in which he had written: “You won’t be hearing from me again for a long time.”

Fred Bakutis, commanding officer of Fighting Squadron 20, wrote a letter to Kathryn on December 18 in which he noted that although Vraciu had been with the group only a short time, “his friendly, cheerful personality had already contributed much to the morale of the squadron. Moreover, he was a most competent pilot and a real asset to us. His missing status has been a great shock to all of us even though we hold considerable hope for his eventual recovery.”

After explaining the circumstances of how Vraciu was hit by Japanese anti-aircraft fire and offering some hope of his safe return, Bakutis cautioned Kathryn that was not “beyond the realm of the possible, that he may, or already has fallen into enemy hands.” Later, on Christmas Day, Kathryn received a dozen roses her husband had earlier ordered for her.

For several weeks Vraciu stayed in a guerrilla camp headed by Captain Alfred Bruce, a gaunt and thin survivor of the Bataan Death March who commanded the forces in the South Tarlac Military District. “I got there a couple of days too late for these guerrillas to take me over to the west coast of Luzon to be picked up by an American submarine,” Vraciu noted, “but I was lucky because that submarine was sunk by a Japanese submarine.” 

Vraciu and a couple of other American pilots rescued by the guerrillas stayed in a hut built over a chicken coop. Visitors to the camp could always tell how long the pilots had been in the Philippines by the length of their beards, he recalled. On December 17 Bruce appointed Vraciu as a brevet major in the guerrilla forces and gave him the job as administration officer.

Food, a scarce item in the Philippines, became an important part of what the pilots thought about as they waited for American troops to invade Luzon. They soon became sick of constantly eating rice (upon his return to the United States, Vraciu banned rice from his family’s dinner table for three years). For a change of pace, the Americans happily dined on what the Filipinos said was wild duck, but turned out to be fruit bats. “It wasn’t too bad,” Vraciu remembered. For their Christmas dinner, the pilots were lucky enough to have turkey. A rookie chef, Vraciu did not cook the turkey long enough, but the pilots were so hungry they ate the meat practically raw.

To help keep his mind occupied during his weeks with the guerrillas, Vraciu befriended a monkey he and the other pilots named Dugout Doug, an unflattering nickname that had been given to General Douglas MacArthur by American troops. Vraciu also kept notes on what was happening on Japanese airfields in the valley below. When his frustration level at not being in combat built high enough, he took a potshot with his .45-caliber pistol at a low flying enemy airplane. He learned, however, that his freedom came at a price. One day a visiting guerrilla told Vraciu that Japanese soldiers had killed twenty-two men from the village “near where I landed, trying to get them to tell them where I had been taken.”

On the morning of January 9, 1945, approximately sixty-eight thousand troops from the U.S. Sixth Army landed on the coast of Lingayen Gulf and began the long march to retake Manila from the Japanese. News of the landing reached Bruce’s guerrilla camp through another downed pilot who had been brought there. Bruce decided to send 150 members of his force north to hook up with the U.S. military. The guerrillas hoped to pass along to their allies information on the strength of Japanese troops in the area and to obtain arms and ammunition to continue their fight.

The activity aroused Vraciu’s interest, and he received permission from Bruce to join the small guerrilla group. Before leaving, Vraciu asked Bruce if there was anything he wanted, he would try, when he rejoined his squadron, to fly over his territory and drop it to him. Bruce thought about what he wanted for a moment and replied: “Two cans of beer.”

Just prior to starting out, the guerrilla force’s leader, Major Alberto Stockton, suffered a recurrence of malaria. “Just like that, I found myself in charge—a navy lieutenant,” laughed Vraciu. “I was called major and had an aide I called Wednesday.” For the next week, the group, armed only with a few pistols and rifles with no ammunition, evaded Japanese patrols and made its way toward the U.S. lines, growing larger and larger in size as they passed through various villages. “They [the Filipinos who joined] wanted to get in on the action with the Americans coming in,” he noted. “Some called them ‘sunshine patriots.’”

On its journey, the group stopped for lunch (rice) in the village of Mayantoc. While there, Vraciu met the local mayor and an American woman married to a Filipino who lived in the village. While together the three of them read leaflets dropped by U.S. planes and signed by Sergio Osmeña, president of the Philippines. The leaflet called upon Filipinos to rally behind General MacArthur “so that the enemy may feel the full strength of our outraged people.”

Suddenly, a member of another guerrilla group came face to face with Vraciu and half pointed a rifle at the pilot. “He could see that I wasn’t a Filipino, and he appeared to be a little puzzled about what to do,” said Vraciu. At first, the guerrilla mistook Vraciu for a member of the Hukbalahap, saying, “You Huk!” The pilot told him he was an American and, realizing what he was about to say sounded like a scene from a bad Hollywood film, told him: “Take me to your leader.”

As the two men went down the trail, one of Vraciu’s men ran toward him for protection. Members of the other guerrilla group, under the control of an American survivor of the Bataan Death March named Albert Hendrickson from the North Tarlac area, fired and killed one member of Vraciu’s band and seriously wounded another man. Visibly outraged, an angry Vraciu ordered the shooting to stop and yelled at the opposing force’s commander that while the Americans were trying to wrest control of the Philippines from the Japanese, they were spending “more time killing each other than you were fighting the Japs!” The shooting ended, and the two groups combined forces and agreed to travel to Hendrickson’s camp.

On the nighttime journey to Hendrickson’s camp, Vraciu traveled in style, riding on the back of a small horse. Unfortunately, the horse was none too pleased at having a rider, and attempted to bite him whenever he could. About two hundred yards from the entrance to Hendrickson’s camp, the horse finally got the better of the American pilot. “He just laid down and wouldn’t go another yard,” Vraciu recalled. “He made me walk the rest of the way.”

After a few days of inactivity, Vraciu, anxious to connect with the advancing U.S. forces, told Hendrickson he would be taking his guerrilla group and leaving the next morning. Hendrickson seemed reluctant to have his group leave, telling Vraciu that if the American army planned on coming into his territory, they should report to him. When Vraciu indicated he planned on leaving no matter what, Hendrickson changed his mind and agreed to have his men go as well.

That evening, the camp was on alert for a possible Japanese attack from across the river to the west. Someone gave Vraciu a carbine and he lay out that night with the others waiting for the enemy to strike. As he peered through the darkness, Vraciu remembered asking himself: “What is a good fighter pilot doing laying on his stomach in the middle of this God-forsaken country?”

Late the next morning, Vraciu participated in what he called the “strangest join-up of forces on the American side during the war.” Both guerrilla groups marched together up the Philippine National Highway and were led by a bugler and three men displaying the flags of the United States, Philippines, and the guerrilla forces. “Following the flags came twelve of us ‘chosen few’ on horseback,” said Vraciu. “This horse was a little bigger and didn’t try to bite me.”

As the group passed through villages on its way north, it picked up small groups of women, children, and dogs, who joined the march. This strange procession drew the attention of an American Avenger aircraft attempting to figure out who they were. “We’d just wave at the plane and wonder what kind of thoughts the crew may have had about us,” Vraciu noted.

The group finally came upon an advance outpost manned by what Vraciu remembered as a six-foot, eight-inch-tall private who did not know what to do with what he saw. The soldier decided to let someone else deal with the problem, telling Vraciu: “Da sergeant’s down da road.” The group continued and finally came to the outskirts of the 129th Infantry Regiment, a former National Guard outfit from Illinois. “When they found out I was from the Chicago area,” said Vraciu, “there were warm feelings all around. They quickly broke out coffee, wafers, and beans.”

After visiting for a short time, the pilot mentioned that he had valuable information that he had to turn over to the commanding general. “They called somebody right away,” said Vraciu, who while waiting said goodbye to his guerrillas.

In no time at all, a one-star general showed up with an aide, and Vraciu joined them for a trip to the city of Camiling in an American Jeep. The general drove and Vraciu sat beside him in the right seat. The two men talked on their way to General Robert S. Beighter’s headquarters in Camiling.

During a lull in conversation, the aide sitting in the back seat said, “You’re Vraciu, aren’t you?” It turned out that both men had attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, at the same time, but Vraciu could not remember what class the aide had been in. At Camiling, Vraciu had lunch with General  Beightler and remembered devouring an entire loaf of bread, which the general “got a big kick out of.”
 

“The major’s dead”: Richard Tregaskis and Major Don B. Dunham

Throughout his time covering combat in World War II for the International News Service, correspondent Richard Tregaskis discovered many captivating individuals to write about. While on the aircraft carrier USS Hornet on its way to confront the Japanese at the Battle of Midway, he latched onto the confident commander of the ship’s Torpedo Squadron 8, John C. Waldron. 

During the tense struggle by U.S. Marines to hold Guadalcanal, Tregaskis tagged along with the men of the First Raider Battalion on a raid deep into enemy territory and became close to Lieutenant Colonel Merritt “Red Mike” Edson, whom he later described as the “bravest, the most effective killing machine” he had ever encountered in his career covering combat with troops of twelve nationalities.

The courage of one fighting man Tregaskis wrote about, however, Major Don B. Dunham of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, has not received the attention it deserves. The powerful dispatch Tregaskis produced about Dunham’s courage on a hill overlooking the village of Altavilla in Italy—an action that led to the major’s death on September 17, 1943—was delayed in publication due to Tregaskis’s subsequent near-fatal wounding on another Italian mountainside in November. The article finally reached readers in the United States in early December, and the correspondent included the incident in his 1944 book Invasion Diary.

Preparing for the invasion of Italy while resting in Algiers in late August 1943, Tregaskis had spent time making the necessary mental preparations for the coming ordeal. While scrounging for needed supplies—bedding roll, knapsack, mess kit, map case, and an air mattress, the “golden prize of every field soldier’s possessions”—at the public relations office, he found a quiet room where he could sit and look down on the streets of Algiers and think about what was to come. “Always before a mission I try to calculate the odds,” he recalled. “This is a dangerous job, no denying that. . . . I figured my chances of getting killed or wounded would be three of four out of ten. I had the customary confidence that the worst could not happen to me; that chance would stay on the side.”

Tregaskis and Seymour Korman of the Chicago Tribune had been assigned to accompany the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment for the invasion. Before landing with the paratroops on September 15, Tregaskis met the regiment’s officers, including its commander, Colonel Reuben H. Tucker of Ansonia, Connecticut, and Dunham of Lemon Cove, California. 

While discussing details of the upcoming mission, the conversation, Tregaskis recalled, turned to discussing “the disposal of personal effects” in the event of an officers’ death. “If I get killed, turn my personal effect over to the vultures [his fellow officers],” Tucker joked. Dunham told the reporter: “I want you to be damn sure that I’m killed first.”

On the evening of September 16 Tregaskis received his first taste of action in Italy, joining Tucker and about 150 men in seizing two objectives, including its main goal, the hill commanding Altavilla. “We walked carefully through the narrow path in the moonlight, and reached the last knoll, which was almost bare on top, though edged with thick trees,” Tregaskis reported. “Here some of us lay down for a minute, exhausted.” 

Because the Americans had to divide their forces between the two objectives, he noted that there were only no more than seventy men available to defend the position he was in, Hill 424, against a possible German attack. Dunham sent a two-man patrol down into the valley, trying to get through to the frontlines for reinforcements. “We never heard from them,” noted Tregaskis. Dunham left to hunt for snipers, moving, the correspondent remembered, “like a practiced hunter. I watched his feet, and the one knee bending and unbending like the rocker arm of an old side-wheeler, disappear over the crown of the slope.”

Throughout the night Tregaskis could hear heavy fire, including the “Brrdddt-t-t-t, brrdddt-t-t-t, brrdddt-t-t-t” from German Schmeisser machine-pistols firing in short bursts and the screeching of artillery shells against the hill they had left behind. “The German batteries were giving us hell,” he said. In spite of the clamor, Tregaskis managed to get some sleep on the rough, stony ground before being awakened at about 3:00 a.m. by Dunham’s return. “I couldn’t get the sniper,” the major told the reporter. “Things are not so good. No support has come up. Somebody’s got to get through and ask for help.”

Accompanied by a sergeant, Dunham decided to take the risk. He gave his map case and pistol to Korman for safekeeping, grabbed a Thompson submachine gun and two clips of ammunition, and shed his unneeded equipment. Dunham shook hands with Tregaskis and said good-bye in a way that caused the correspondent to believe that the major did not expect to return. “I am going to try to get back,” Dunham said before he and the sergeant slipped off into the night and into the dangerous valley below. 

“A few minutes later we heard bursts of machine-pistol fire, saw the sharp darting lights of tracer bullets amongst the black of the trees down there,” Tregaskis reported. “Answering fires came from our weapons. We wondered if Don Dunham had got through.”

The major had not made it. While Tregaskis busied himself with digging a foxhole, the sergeant returned, and the correspondent could see that his eyes had “the haunted, hunted look of a man who has been in mortal danger.” The sergeant reported that he believed Dunham was dead, as he had heard “death rattlin’” coming from the major’s throat. That left only one officer, Tucker, still available for action. Later, as Tregaskis continued to toil on his foxhole, a medic and the sergeant came by to confirm Dunham’s death. “The major’s dead,” the sergeant noted. “We went out and found him, and he’s hit in the head, the neck and the chest.”

Unlike Dunham, Tregaskis survived. While safe behind the lines the correspondent learned that Dunham had been posthumously awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for his action on the hill. Tregaskis wrote an article outlining the major’s bravery—a piece published a month before Ernie Pyle’s famous column from Italy about the death of another officer, Captain Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas, on an Italian hill, a piece that appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the country. In Tregaskis’s article, he recounted Dunham’s death, writing:

“After that, I may say frankly, I forgot about Don Dunham: the shock of knowing he had died, faded in the strong and urgent light of the need that faced us: the fact that we were still cut off and almost helpless; that the Germans beginning at dawn would throw a tornado of artillery fire at us; and those men in camouflage suits that looked like awkward shapes of foliage would try to charge up the slopes leading to our hilltop; that tanks would be brought in to add to our torment; and that our colonel [Tucker], the only remaining officer who had not been killed or wounded but a man who lived for fighting, would hold us there till hell or relief came. These thoughts filled my mind then, and during the dawning, when the shells, tanks and charging Germans came as expected; during the day, when the shells came closer and closer; when there were bloody-bubbling wounds carved into layers of tissue by the score; when a nasty little tank came as expected and blasted away point blank; when, finally, through the squeak of sniper’s bullets and the crash of shells some few of us got back to bring the word of need for reinforcements for those on the hill. Such experiences would stop the most confirmed philosopher from thinking.

 “But after that ugly experience became a memory, we who had seen him go out to die thought of Don Dunham; and the steady, calm look of his eyes when he said ‘I’m going to try to get back.’ The mission he undertook had been a failure; but in his death he had been a success and a hero; no man who has that look in his eyes of knowing death and facing it willingly—can be other.”
 
 
 
   
 
 
 

The Old and New Journalism: John Bartlow Martin at Northwestern

As a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois, Jim Borg took an independent writing class in the fall of 1975 that required him to research and write an article that might be suitable for publishing in such national periodicals as Esquire or The New Yorker.

A few months earlier, Chicago newspapers had been full of reports about the death of Steven Stawnychy, a recruit at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center who had been abused by his instructors. On the evening of June 3, 1975, Stawnychy had committed suicide, letting himself be struck by a Chicago and North Western Railway train. “He walked over and laid his head down on the tracks,” said the engineer of the train that hit Stawnychy. “When I realized what he was up to, I just went into ‘emergency’ and tried to stop—but, of course, it was too short a distance.” For his article, Borg, wanted to “put all the pieces together into a comprehensive story that also looked at Stawnychy’s background” to unravel why the recruit had taken his own life.

On a gray day late that fall, Borg took an early draft of his article to be critiqued by his professor, John Bartlow Martin, during a meeting in the study at Martin’s Victorian home in Highland Park, just a thirty-minute drive from the Northwestern campus. “The study was modestly furnished and obviously a place where work was done, nothing for show,” Borg recalled. “The ashtray on his desk was nearly overflowing but I don’t remember him smoking as we worked.” Martin showed Borg how to cut and blend the story, paring down each of his sentences to ensure that every word counted.

The result was magic, said Borg. He described his editorial session with Martin as “the most instructive half hour of my life.” Martin also assisted Borg in obtaining a grant from Medill that enabled him to travel to Stawnychy’s hometown in Minnesota to complete his research. Borg completed his article, had it published as the cover story in the April 1976 issue of the Chicago Tribune Magazine, and won an award for it in a United Press International competition.

Martin’s teaching career at one of the country’s top-ranked journalism schools began in 1969 had first joined the staff at Medill in 1969, when he started as a visiting lecturer. He accepted the job in order to help support his family while he labored to finish his Adlai E. Stevenson biography. His hiring had been part of Dean Ira William “Bill” Cole’s effort to bring professional reporters and nationally known individuals in the profession to teach at Medill.

During his time at Medill, Martin taught two graduate-level seminars, including one on the limits of American power, similar to one he had taught at the City University of New York. His other seminar, officially known as Journalism D26, Independent Writing Projects, focused on the how and why of producing serious nonfiction magazine articles. The class helped students improve their writing, sharpened their reporting skills, guided them in organizing their research, and showed them how to structure their material in a way suitable for magazine publication.

The class met irregularly as a group, with Martin spending more time in one-on-one consultations with his students about their projects than in a formal classroom setting. He required them to read, and discussed with them, two well-known books that had often influenced his own work: The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, and A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by Henry Watson Fowler. Martin discovered that some of his students had been previously introduced to Strunk and White either in high school or as undergraduates, but “doting fathers read Huckleberry Finn to small children before they are old enough to understand that Huckleberry Finn is a book about human freedom. Students read Strunk too soon. They need to read him while they are trying to write seriously.”

Worst of all, students had a lackadaisical attitude about the profession they had chosen. “They do not understand,” said Martin, “that writing is a serious and difficult business. They have an unspoken contempt for their material. They need to be made to take it seriously. A writer bears a heavy responsibility. They do not seem to feel it.”

Few of his young writers, however, had anything interesting to say, Martin noted, while the elders they wrote about “have a good deal interesting to say but we cannot hear them because of the authors’ noise.” He also was annoyed with young writers who did not take the trouble to learn grammar, how to write a clear English sentence, or invented dialogue or fabricated “composite characters” without first informing their readers. “To my mind, this is writing fiction, or, less politely, faking a story, lying,” said Martin. “To all this, my students would reply that I am an old grouch. They would be right.”

In addition to Martin, others who became familiar figures at Fisk Hall were Newton Minow, the former Federal Communications Commission chairman, and Sig Michelson, the former CBS News president. “I was a fan of John’s work,” said Peter Jacobi, who began teaching at Medill in 1961, remained there for eighteen years, and served as assistant and associate dean during that time. “His magazine pieces were so carefully reported and brilliantly written. I felt he would make an excellent teacher for our students, particularly the more advanced ones.” Jacobi remembered there was a “certain pride” felt at Medill for having secured Martin as a teacher, and, “because he was a true gentleman, we came to like him as a colleague.”

After just a year at Medill, Cole promoted Martin to full professor rank, complete with tenure, a salary that topped out at nearly $30,000 a year, plus health insurance—a benefit that proved to be vital over the ten years he remained at the university, as health woes plagued Martin, exacerbated by his longtime smoking habit. Although Martin always told his students that writing could not be taught, he did believe that if they already had the ability to write a decent English sentence, he could, perhaps, “teach them to write a better one,” as well as instructing them on how to do the legwork necessary to produce a decent magazine article. 

Gregg Easterbrook, a student of Martin’s during the 1976–77 school year and today a well-known author, recalled that when students slipped up even verbally from the dictates of Strunk and White, they were sure to hear about it from their professor. “He didn’t suffer fools gladly,” Easterbrook said.

From Fowler’s classic tome, Martin shared articles on such issues as the that/which problem, formal words, hackneyed phrases, paragraph rhythm, pedantry, meaningless words, and others. “He was very strict about formal grammar rules,” Easterbrook said, adding that Martin’s lessons on the subject came during a time when the proper use of grammar had been in decline.

As a way to improve their style, Martin also encouraged his students to read good writing, using as examples his own magazine stories from Harper’s and the Saturday Evening Post; Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War; Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento; and Paul Horgan’s Approaches to Writing.

Most of the fifty-four students who took Martin’s advanced writing classes at Medill each year had no experience producing anything more complicated than a spot news story, but Martin still made them submit an outline for a magazine article, then report and write and rewrite a story running anywhere from fourteen to eighteen and a half pages. He allowed his students to pick their own topics and let them use newspaper clippings and library materials to prepare their outlines. For their rough drafts and finished article, however, they had to use only interviews, documents, and other primary sources. “The rock-bottom foundation of all journalism is reporting,” said Martin. “Writing is important, editing is important. But in the end everything depends on reporting.”

For those students who were unsure of what to write about, he provided a list of potential topics, using such local stories as the possibility of a third airport for Chicago, a slum fire, voting patterns in Chicago and its suburbs during presidential elections, and public housing. Martin also distributed as a guide a 1954 outline he had done for Post editors on a possible story about the life and death of Gus Amedeo, a Chicago burglar who had killed a policeman and had been gunned down in return (published in the Post in 1955 as “The Making of a Killer”).

Although by the time he joined the Medill faculty general interest magazines such as the Post, Life, and Look were on the decline, hurt by television’s domination of the home entertainment market, Martin maintained an abiding faith “in the ability of a good writer to make a living by simply being able to communicate facts, whether in magazines, books, TV, or elsewhere. The writer serves truth. He is needed.”

When he began his career at Medill, universities across the country, including Northwestern, had been beset by unrest. These were the days, Martin remembered, of the shooting by National Guard troops of students at Kent State, the radical actions of the Weather Underground, and the militancy of the Black Panters—a time known in Chicago as the Days of Rage. Martin said he had been, by and large, on the side of the students, overlooking their long hair, beads, sandals, and chains. While some of them insulted and harassed their professors, Martin said he escaped such outbursts. “It was a hard time to be a student, a hard time to be a parent, and even a rather hard time to be a teacher,” said Martin. He preferred the turmoil of that period—“students were at least alive,” Martin noted—to the “inertia and careerism” that infected students in the post–Vietnam War era.

After a few years of unmet deadlines, broken appointments, and sloppy article drafts seemingly dashed off at the last possible moment, Martin began approaching “each new student somewhat warily.” Writing for magazines proved to be beyond the capabilities of most of his students, as they tended to produce academic papers, not magazine pieces, while nearly most had great difficulty in structuring the material they collected. All too many of them simply could not “write a clean crisp English sentence,” and Martin wondered if elementary schools and high schools in the United States had somehow stopped teaching basic English grammar, let alone syntax. 

Growing weary of marking the same errors again and again on every article draft he received, Martin, to save time, had a set of rubber stamps created that offered such straightforward criticisms as: “awkward,” “loose, wordy,” “not entirely clear,” “says little,” and “what mean?”

Many years after his days at Medill, Easterbrook still remembered the corrections Martin made on one of his assignments. Martin had invited Easterbrook, whom he considered be one of the most promising writers he had in his course, to his Highland Park home to discuss his manuscript about the Republican Party in Chicago. What struck Easterbrook, besides the fact that his professor had been willing to invite him to his home and talk to him for a half an hour about his work, was that when Martin returned his article he had made comments on almost every sentence, with some sentences having more than one suggestion for improvement. The corrections—“dull,” “sloppy,” “overwritten,” “bad grammar,” for example—were stamped on his manuscript using orange, green, and red ink. “My God,” Easterbrook said he thought to himself at the time, “this guy uses these words so often he had stamps made.” 

Martin also dissuaded his students from erroneous usages that had slowly crept into the English language—“media” for “television,” “image” for “reputation,” as well as “impact” as a verb for “affect” and “input” for “suggestion.” Easterbrook in particular recalled Martin’s maxim that good writing had to be rigorous and that every word on the page had to be there for a reason. It was a lesson that should be learned by a writer in any style or genre, said Easterbrook.

Taking a class with Martin could be an intimidating experience for Medill students, as he had no problem in telling them exactly what he thought about their writing. Niles Howard signed up for Martin’s course while at Medill in the early 1970s, believing it would put his career on the fast track, or so he thought. He believed so even though neither he nor his fellow students were sure what the difference was between a newspaper article and a magazine article.

When Martin, whom Howard described as “a little introverted, not gregarious, not a back-slapper, but thoughtful,” returned his first writing assignment to him, the professor had scrawled on it, “This isn’t even an article. Why don’t you try again?” A chagrined Howard went to Martin’s office and asked for guidance on what he might do to improve his piece. The two of them talked for almost an hour on “how I might salvage my academic standing (let alone my ego),” said Howard. 

The memory of what he and Martin talked about has faded over time, but one point his teacher made stuck with him, and it is advice he still hears whenever he sits down at a keyboard and starts to write. “A magazine article is not a bunch of facts and quotes,” Howard quoted Martin as saying. “It’s a journey from point A to point B. Your job is to persuade the reader to ride along.”   

If students took their work seriously, Martin treated them with courtesy and did all he could to help them hone their craft. An army veteran from Alabama, Mike Plemmons arrived at Medill in the late 1970s with considerable newspaper experience, having worked at two daily newspapers in the South and another newspaper in Massachusetts. Plemmons spent his first semester at Medill in Washington, D.C., reporting for the Medill News Service, which allowed students the opportunity to live in the nation’s capital and report on the activities of the federal government. A professor-editor at the News Service recommended to Plemmons that he study with Martin when he returned to his studies at Northwestern.

The next semester, Plemmons took Martin’s advanced writing class and decided to create what he called an “experimental” article on the education system, giving three points of view side by side—a seventh-grade student, his parents, and his teacher. Halfway through his project, Plemmons began to be sorry he had ever taken it on. The interviews were easy enough, but he could not find his “lede,” the opening paragraph enticing readers to go further into his twenty-page manuscript.

One day, while going over a draft of the article with Martin, Plemmons remembered that Martin circled a paragraph in his story, a quote from a seventh-grade teacher, sat forward in his creaky chair and said, looking directly at him, “This is good.” Rewriting a piece that size in the days before laptop computers and digital word processing required hard, tedious work, but Plemmons decided to take Martin’s advice, abandoning his previous story structure and restarting his piece with the paragraph Martin had circled. “It worked, of course,” said Plemmons. “The rest of the story wrote itself.” 

On the last page of Plemmons’s finished article, Martin simply wrote: “I like this piece.” Although he never published the story he wrote for Martin’s class, Plemmons kept the manuscript in his possession for several years, cherishing the memory of a time when a professor took his writing seriously and treated him like a colleague.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, a large number of Medill students were drawn, thanks to the work of such reporters as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, to careers as investigative reporters, or to find jobs where they could practice the New Journalism that had been pioneered by such talented writers as Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion. Journalism historian Marc Weingarten noted that in the turbulent 1960s, Wolfe and his cohorts had realized that traditional reporting was “inadequate to chronicle the tremendous cultural and social changes of the era.”

Martin, however, had quite a different viewpoint—he still believed in the old-fashioned advice from Strunk and White that a writer should always place himself in the background and write in a way that drew the reader’s attention to the writing, rather than to the writer. In his estimation, New Journalism required a writer to give his views about every fact, to constantly perform, and to “become, indeed, virtually the principal actor in the drama.”

Today, Medill honors Martin's decade of teaching and his remarkable writing career through its sponsorship of the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism.