Boston Pols by Jack Vaughan Circa 1975
Reading James Caroll’s The City Below for the Mission Hill Book Club and it brings up a lot of the mood of when I first got to Boston. Looking back in my morgue files – I thought I’d trot out a piece from my days writing for the BU News. The editors there were nice enough to send me down to the City Council to see if I could come up with a story, and it took quite a while but it happened. It was an election year, and I took a hack at understanding the city politic.
That fit nicely with the interests of my BU teachers -- reporters and editors for the Boston Globe and Boston Herald. I’d read Tom Wolfe, Lincoln Steffens’ bio (see below), the Real Paper and the Boston Phoenix, (avidly) and Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And I was on the case as cross-city school busing brewed up a storm.
The voice I heard was Mike Barnicle, the Boston Breslin. In fact I also heard the prose of another Globalist, my BU teacher, Jeremiah Murphy, who also had a column in the Globe then. Another influence was beat writer James Farrell. And, at the Boston Phoenix, Syd Blumenthal and Real Paper, Paul Solomon. A true mentor was Jim Higgins, a teacher at BU SPC who was very persistent in urging journalists to look at the class struggle inherent in the workings of the news
The city was gaining its reputation as a racist city in those days - these were the days of school busing. All and all - an eye opener. I was second-string at the operation for the most part, but that was kind of cool, because, while the first string got the plumb on campus news assignments, I got to go downtown and wonder through City Hall.
My later efforts took other directions but I have a fond spot for these "Salad Days." We didnt have to buy text books. We had to buy the papers.
I was out of school a few years when I got to BU's School of Public Communications, and working full time nights. I was starting over with a JO major, and taking the slow part time track, so I didnt get the experience of going through the college with classmates of the same class. Among my mates at the BU News were Renee Loth, John Garalnick, Doug Farqhar, Pam Miller, Pam Hart, Joe Nocera, Dick Silverman, Jim Mintz, Deborah Stewart, Nancy Doyle, Mike O'Conners, William Feldman, Marty Goldman, Glenn Rifkin. Classmates that I shared classes with included Bill O'Reilly, Al Morganti, Steve MacFadden - Steve being the guy that introduced me to Mission Hill.
Read: Boston Pols - BU News
re Lincoln Steffens - By the time he came to Boston, Steffens had refined his investigative methods, which required the reporter to find the individuals that most influenced the life of a city, to ascribe their motives, and to examine the areas where one group’s interests conflicted with another’s. [for the rest of this click on Filenes and Steffens]
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