S.L. Sanger
S.L. Sanger bio (aka Stephen L. and Steve)
Born: Iowa City, Iowa, 1936. A farm kid for a few years. My dad was a farmer, then sharpened discs (hard to explain to non-farmers), followed by work at the cemetery end of the funeral business, meaning digging graves, and winding up in management as the superintendent of Iowa City's municipal cemetery. My mother stayed home to raise my two brothers and me. She was vastly relieved when her job-hopping and whimsical husband landed the city job with benefits and a pension. I enlisted in the Army in 1956, but only lasted six months. A B.A.in history from the University of Iowa in 1959. Graduate work later in history and journalism at San Francisco State College and Iowa.
Work history:
Copy boy, San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 1959-61. I had little interest in a journalism career, but needed a job. $49 a week and many shifts started at 4:30 a.m.
Reporter and editorial writer, The Daily Iowan, student paper at Iowa, 1962, one of the best I ever wrote for. Instead of completing the master’s, I decided to dump academics and get some real experience. I put in one semester at the Iowan, but that was sufficient, with clips, to land a real job.
Reporter, Springfield (Ohio) Daily News and Sun, 1962-63. A not bad newspaper in a decaying Rust Belt city. I covered cops, courts, general assignment and learned the trade.
Staff writer, The Associated Press, Fresno and San Francisco, 1964-67. A difficult job. Fast-paced and demanding, although rewarding because an AP writer after a few years gained terrific self-confidence and a valuable reference for future jobs. In those years, it was mostly politics and civil unrest, plus the usual range of violent events – homicides, car wrecks and plane crashes.
Reporter, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 1967-68. Politics and anti-war protest, both particularly important in Honolulu as the state capitol and headquarters of command for the Vietnam war.
Reporter, The Fresno Bee. For a few months in 1969, a writing position at a first-class newspaper writing mostly op-ed articles. Honolulu called and I returned.
Editorial writer, The Honolulu Advertiser, 1969-71. This job taught me to stick to reporting. Editorial writing tended to be second-hand ivory tower behavior with too many restrictions from editors and publishers. Reporters had more fun. They got out of the office and mixed with the crowd.
--Six months in England (Cornwall mostly) doing not much of anything—
Reporter, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1972-88. Politics and general assignment, some desk work as assistant city editor and night editor, the last years as the military reporter, which meant covering both the military and the peace movement – War and Peace. Occasionally, a foreign assignment -- Germany, Korea, Northern Ireland, Tahiti -- mostly military related. My special interest was nuclear weapons, which eventually resulted in two oral histories of the Hanford plutonium works during World War II, with the help of Seattle documentary filmmaker, Robert W. Mull.
Of all my newspaper work, my favorite story was an easy-going article for the P-I in 1984, about an Eastern Washington family's work in the wheat harvest. I quit the paper in early 1988 to become what I had wanted to be for some time – an ex-newspaper reporter.
A few words about how I survived financially after leaving a well-paid job at the Seattle paper. I was only 51, a long haul to Social Security and Medicare benefits. I had $18,000 in cash, some income from utility stocks, eventually a bit of revenue from the plutonium books. At first, I lived in low-cost Tipton, Cedar County Iowa, for a year to write, I thought, a book about life back in Iowa after a long absence. After Iowa, it was Los Angeles off and on, then Cashmere, Washington, a little town in the tree fruit bountiful Wenatchee River Valley over the mountains east of Seattle. I wrote freelance for the Good Fruit Grower magazine, which nicely paid the rent. Later, with Medicare and Social Security, I moved to Bellingham north of Seattle for romantic reasons.
Occasionally, I wrote a few magazine articles, which actually paid a decent fee. These included one, co-written, about mountain lions in the West for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, another for Invention & Technology magazine about the Trinity Site in New Mexico where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945,and an article I am still fond of about the Little America truckstop in Wyoming for American Heritage. Two of the books, Cedar County, the Iowa memoir,and A Terrible Logic, a Cashmere murder story with an intriguing twist, were serious efforts,but turned out to be effective mental health therapy instead of income producers. I had other projects, aborted before launching or filed away indefinitely. I remain interested in nuclear weapons, specifically the U.S. Air Force Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. Mostly, though, this interest is more academic than viable.
AFTERWORD – When I started in the business in 1959, it was a different world. They were called city rooms then, not newsrooms, a term we associated with despised television news. In those city rooms the only devices were typewriters and clattery teletypes. Stories were edited with pencils, scissors and paste pots. In the back shop were hot type Linotypes, the size of small elephants, and printers putting together pages of lead type. Editors wore green eyeshades and yelled a lot. Older staffers kept bourbon in their desks. Almost everybody smoked. The city rooms usually were a housekeeping disgrace. The few women staffers were as tough and foul-mouthed as the men. We got by with a lot. At the Seattle P-I, not that long ago, my reporter friends and I during slow periods would tell the city desk in case of emergency we could be reached at the Silver Stein under the monorail or in the newspaper parking garage for our frequent target practice with air pistols. Fortunately, we were all dues-paying members of the American Newspaper Guild.
A few years ago,I read a review in The Wall Street Journal of a reporter’s memoir, “String of Pearls,” by Elizabeth Buckley. The first paragraph rang a bell.
“Today’s sorry newsrooms – silent, smokeless, boozeless, cursor-cursed funeral parlors bear no resemblance to the divine hell-holes that persisted at newspapers and wire services until the mid-1970s. They were seas of grunge and debris, rackety with the clatter and jingle of teletype and typewriter.”
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$10 prize from The Daily Iowan in 1962, for coverage of civil rights issues and demonstrations at the University of Iowa. The award is named for an old dog that hung around the city room.