My Short Time At Port Huron
From James Donahue’s Journal
The end of my career as a Times Herald bureau reporter began with a telephone call from one of the staffers, a reporter in Port Huron who warned me that plans were in the works to close the Sanilac Bureau. He said he heard there was a job opening at the Tuscola County Advertiser and suggested that I apply for it.
The call left me stunned. This tip came from a man who wasn’t anybody I was especially close to or had any reason to trust. I called the managing editor and asked him point blank about the “rumor.” I was assured that there were no plans for closing the news bureau and that I had nothing to be concerned about.
I don’t think more than a week passed before I was called to the office for an important meeting with the editor. That was when I was told that the bureau was, indeed, going to be closed. I had a few days to get all of my personal things packed up and moved out, and a crew was going to be sent from Port Huron to pack up all of the desks, files and office furnishings.
I was given the option of moving to Port Huron to work or to find work elsewhere. This created a huge dilemma for us since we lived near Cass City, some 80 miles away. I had living quarters set up at the Sandusky office, but commuting from Cass City to Port Huron was not something that was going to work out. After talking it over with Doris, the decision was made to remain on the Port Huron job. We were in the midst of remodeling the Deckerville Road house and we needed the income from both my job and Doris’s job to cover the costs of paying off that mortgage and dealing with our other debts.
Consequently I found a small apartment in Port Huron and moved in. I lived there during the week while working for the newspaper and drove home to Cass City on the weekends. That was a very bad arrangement.
I was assigned to work under a woman who was the city editor at the time. She appeared to consider me an “intern” and insisted that I work at a desk directly next to hers so I could be constantly supervised. She treated me like a rookie. My stories were constantly tossed back at me for rewrite. Some of the stories I was given never saw print. I was given ridiculous assignments like riding the city transit buses and interviewing riders, profiling who the people were who used the bus system.
Part of my assignment was to make routine calls to the police and regular contacts in Sanilac County and attempt to cover Sanilac County news from Port Huron. I discovered that all of the files I needed to work with, however, had been dumped into a pile of rubble in a storeroom that I did not have access to. Without access to those files, follow-ups of ongoing news stories in Sanilac was almost impossible.
I hated working in the main office of a daily newspaper . . . especially that one. The young hot-shot guys assigned to temporary editor positions, clawing their way up the pipeline in the Gannet Chain, tended to ride the staffers. I was the extra guy in the newsroom and got moved from desk to desk as various reporters took vacation time off. Thus one week I would be on a business beat and the next I might be covering court news. The problem was that I did not know my way around the city, I had no contacts, and every story I worked on involved extensive time and research.
While this was going on, the telephone was ringing incessantly. The managing editor made it a rule that the telephone must never ring more than three times before someone in the office picked it up. There were times when I was nearly alone in the office. I have always had a system of mentally shutting off all abstractions, including ringing telephones, when involved in writing. Writing, for me, has always been an act of creative art. Any interruption breaks my chain of thought and destroys the flow of the piece emerging from the tips of my fingers. Because the telephone in the newsroom rang incessantly, I was able to mentally shut off the noise and never heard it. This got me in constant trouble with the managing editor and the publisher. When they saw me at work at my desk and failing to answer that telephone, I was singled out for lectures and warnings. Consequently, I became a telephone answering robot instead of a writer for that newspaper. Most of the calls were from idiots who had little of value to say. Sometimes the caller complained about something he or she had read in the paper. I remember one guy was drinking in a bar and was in an argument with another drunk as to which team won the World Series at a particular year. I hated my role as a telephone answering robot. I hated working in Port Huron.
I took my solace in the evening by fixing microwave dinners, renting films at a local video store, and spending my nights eating junk food and watching movies. I think I gained some weight while living there. I remember one night eating an entire quart of chocolate marshmallow ice cream. It was one of the unhappiest times of my life.
The Friday night drives from Port Huron to Cass City, and the return trips on Sunday afternoons were terrible. The roads were always packed with other drivers, all doing the same thing I was. And during the summer that I was there, I also had to contend with the tourists. I hated those drives.
Jennifer graduated from high school that year and she wanted to enroll in a junior college. We had the idea that she could move in with me and go to school at Port Huron Junior College. She moved in with me for a few weeks, and that made my evenings more enjoyable. We had fun fixing special meals in the little kitchen. But since there was only one bedroom, Jennifer had to sleep on the couch. We thought that if this was going to be a permanent thing, we had to find a larger apartment. The little complex where I lived had no other vacancies.
Before she got enrolled in school and before we had a chance to look seriously for another place to live, however, things changed dramatically again on my job. It came to an abrupt end.
From James Donahue’s Journal
The end of my career as a Times Herald bureau reporter began with a telephone call from one of the staffers, a reporter in Port Huron who warned me that plans were in the works to close the Sanilac Bureau. He said he heard there was a job opening at the Tuscola County Advertiser and suggested that I apply for it.
The call left me stunned. This tip came from a man who wasn’t anybody I was especially close to or had any reason to trust. I called the managing editor and asked him point blank about the “rumor.” I was assured that there were no plans for closing the news bureau and that I had nothing to be concerned about.
I don’t think more than a week passed before I was called to the office for an important meeting with the editor. That was when I was told that the bureau was, indeed, going to be closed. I had a few days to get all of my personal things packed up and moved out, and a crew was going to be sent from Port Huron to pack up all of the desks, files and office furnishings.
I was given the option of moving to Port Huron to work or to find work elsewhere. This created a huge dilemma for us since we lived near Cass City, some 80 miles away. I had living quarters set up at the Sandusky office, but commuting from Cass City to Port Huron was not something that was going to work out. After talking it over with Doris, the decision was made to remain on the Port Huron job. We were in the midst of remodeling the Deckerville Road house and we needed the income from both my job and Doris’s job to cover the costs of paying off that mortgage and dealing with our other debts.
Consequently I found a small apartment in Port Huron and moved in. I lived there during the week while working for the newspaper and drove home to Cass City on the weekends. That was a very bad arrangement.
I was assigned to work under a woman who was the city editor at the time. She appeared to consider me an “intern” and insisted that I work at a desk directly next to hers so I could be constantly supervised. She treated me like a rookie. My stories were constantly tossed back at me for rewrite. Some of the stories I was given never saw print. I was given ridiculous assignments like riding the city transit buses and interviewing riders, profiling who the people were who used the bus system.
Part of my assignment was to make routine calls to the police and regular contacts in Sanilac County and attempt to cover Sanilac County news from Port Huron. I discovered that all of the files I needed to work with, however, had been dumped into a pile of rubble in a storeroom that I did not have access to. Without access to those files, follow-ups of ongoing news stories in Sanilac was almost impossible.
I hated working in the main office of a daily newspaper . . . especially that one. The young hot-shot guys assigned to temporary editor positions, clawing their way up the pipeline in the Gannet Chain, tended to ride the staffers. I was the extra guy in the newsroom and got moved from desk to desk as various reporters took vacation time off. Thus one week I would be on a business beat and the next I might be covering court news. The problem was that I did not know my way around the city, I had no contacts, and every story I worked on involved extensive time and research.
While this was going on, the telephone was ringing incessantly. The managing editor made it a rule that the telephone must never ring more than three times before someone in the office picked it up. There were times when I was nearly alone in the office. I have always had a system of mentally shutting off all abstractions, including ringing telephones, when involved in writing. Writing, for me, has always been an act of creative art. Any interruption breaks my chain of thought and destroys the flow of the piece emerging from the tips of my fingers. Because the telephone in the newsroom rang incessantly, I was able to mentally shut off the noise and never heard it. This got me in constant trouble with the managing editor and the publisher. When they saw me at work at my desk and failing to answer that telephone, I was singled out for lectures and warnings. Consequently, I became a telephone answering robot instead of a writer for that newspaper. Most of the calls were from idiots who had little of value to say. Sometimes the caller complained about something he or she had read in the paper. I remember one guy was drinking in a bar and was in an argument with another drunk as to which team won the World Series at a particular year. I hated my role as a telephone answering robot. I hated working in Port Huron.
I took my solace in the evening by fixing microwave dinners, renting films at a local video store, and spending my nights eating junk food and watching movies. I think I gained some weight while living there. I remember one night eating an entire quart of chocolate marshmallow ice cream. It was one of the unhappiest times of my life.
The Friday night drives from Port Huron to Cass City, and the return trips on Sunday afternoons were terrible. The roads were always packed with other drivers, all doing the same thing I was. And during the summer that I was there, I also had to contend with the tourists. I hated those drives.
Jennifer graduated from high school that year and she wanted to enroll in a junior college. We had the idea that she could move in with me and go to school at Port Huron Junior College. She moved in with me for a few weeks, and that made my evenings more enjoyable. We had fun fixing special meals in the little kitchen. But since there was only one bedroom, Jennifer had to sleep on the couch. We thought that if this was going to be a permanent thing, we had to find a larger apartment. The little complex where I lived had no other vacancies.
Before she got enrolled in school and before we had a chance to look seriously for another place to live, however, things changed dramatically again on my job. It came to an abrupt end.