“HOOKER DUMPED AT SEASHORE,” and Other Lessons from the Fourth Estate, by heidi siegmund cuda, aka @maewestside
My first week as a cub reporter for the Pulitzer Prize-winning weekly, the Point Reyes Light, and a corpse shows up. Having devoured the Nancy Drew catalog as a young Catholic-school bookworm, I liked a good mystery.
In this case, a lady of the night had ended up on the wrong side of luck, and it was all very film noir.
The newspaper’s owner, David V. Mitchell, decided the headline would read: “HOOKER’S BODY DUMPED IN SEASHORE.”
This was the middle ‘80s, and it may as well have been the middle ages.
A shitstorm ensued where everyone in the various townships weighed in with their verbal pitchforks, which usually came in the form of letters to the editor or in person. Leading the charge was a former lady of the night herself, who continually got into regular shouting matches with Mitchell.
I remember one particularly salty afternoon, where he defended his headline from his second floor balcony office. I could hear his balls clank as he walked across the floor to stand at the edge looking down at his critic.
Some dialogue ensued with the machine gun rat-a-tat of a precode Cagney gangsta flick, and I remember thinking to myself, “There’s a man with some gaddamn balls.” He stood his ground, whether you agreed with his choice of verbiage or not. It was his newspaper and due to its compact size, he always emphasized an economy of words. The word “Prostitute” didn’t fit the font size.
My father, who owned a print shop in North Beach, saw another issue. Due to fiscal restraints, the newspaper’s masthead was old and crusty, muddy and clumsy. One weekend that summer, my father went into his San Francisco shop, and created a crisp masthead for the Point Reyes Light.
Well, suddenly, this cub reporter, who was actually a summer intern, got elevated to the second floor sidekick desk, and boy did I have a swell time. I was in J school at UC Berkeley, and it was the first time I had hands-on reporting experience.
I remember the first time Mitchell edited my copy. He saw all the “Mr.’s” and “Mrs.’s” I’d included to sound very proper. With a red ink pen, he deleted them all and said, “We’re not the New York Times yet.”
I couldn’t tell the difference. That summer, I rooted out cults, exposed silent springs, and a cover story I penned on feral pigs got picked up by Newsweek. Along with sharpening my writing and reporting skills, I learned how to lay out the paper, and I even had my own delivery route.
I’d drive my little yellow Opal from Inverness, where I was paying $25 a week to live in an artist’s loft which I shared with banana slugs. I’d cruise through the scenic seaside towns of Point Reyes, Bolinas and Stinson Beach, where people would be milling in front the Post Office waiting for the newspaper.
I’ll never forget that. Every week, the Light’s readers would line up to get their hands on the paper, certain a letter they’d written would be published or a follow up story printed about the mystery woman. It was the only paper of its size that had foreign correspondents reporting from revolutionary countries, and the first to give an 11-year-old Latina a column.
I met locals that summer who roasted roadkill on spits at Drake’s Beach, and I got lost in fog and wound up amid a posse of cows. I hid in bushes to follow a leader of a cult around, and I even won a tennis tournament.
By the time the internship ended, I had the main tool I needed to get a job: clippings with my byline. And Mitchell, who I’d nicknamed Iron Balls Dave, gave me $50 and a pizza party.
I would go on to a career where I would be mentored by legends in the industry, both in print and in television, and I am damn grateful to have worked in journalism before the death of a thousand cuts resulted in buzz fed brains and zombie anchors.
Typically, its leaders are no longer fearless iconoclasts of the Fourth Estate, but of a bean counter variety spawned in the front office.
There are so few in media who stand any ground about anything, because the ground is now made of quick$and.
GIVING UP THE GHOST
I just got back from Guerneville, Ca, a funky art community in north Sonoma County. While admiring the flora and fauna on Goat Rock beach, just minutes from where Hitchcock filmed “The Birds,” I stumbled across a corpse. As it later turned out, the man was running from an alleged dark past, and apparently he offed himself before the past caught up. It was all so film noir, so out of the past.
Even though I left corporate news three years ago, I still morphed into cub reporter. Documenting, taking video, and alerting all local stations that a man had given up the ghost.
It was in between sweeps and management was on vacation, so no one cared. No one, except a small local daily paper, bothered to report the story.
I thought about the David V. Mitchell’s of the world, and how 30 years earlier a newsman took a story of a seaside body and ran with it, causing a shitstorm but reporting the facts…. all the while, standing his ground, and teaching a cub reporter a thing or two about journalism.
#freepress 💕✒️
******
Heidi Siegmund Cuda is a former Los Angeles Times columnist and investigative producer for Fox 11 News. She has authored multiple rap and punk books, and is currently writing screenplays, among them: a zombie satire of corporate local TV news.
