Nows and Forevers

When I was a kid, I used to wake up in the still of the night and wonder what it was going on in the dark half of the day.

It was silent and still and the only light on a clear night came from the moon. Once a night, after midnight, there would be the rattle of the train where you could hear up and down the town. There were factories in my blue-color hometown but I wasn’t close enough to hear the machinery.

Once or twice a week, I slept in the back seat of our Plymouth Horizon while my Dad drove into the city to pick up Mom from her retail job so she didn’t have to take the bus home after dark. People got out of work at 5, like my Dad, or 8 like my Mom. And my Dad would carry me from the car to the house so I would stay asleep, and I would wake up and it was daylight.

But some nights, I would wake up and wonder what the night was like.

Most nights I would fall asleep to the low tones of my Radio Shack AM handheld. In the summer, it was a Red Sox game out of WTIC, north and east of me in Hartford. The rest of the year it was WCBS 880, the all-news station in nearby New York City.

Newsradio 880 was an education in itself in the ‘70s and ‘80s. That old TV show proclaimed there were 8 million stories in the naked city, and they came one by one from my radio: the Son of Sam murders and the blackout in 1977, the Blizzard of ‘78, John Lenin’s murder, the Bernard Goetz subway shootings. A lot was going on in the Naked City, and I heard it all on WCBS.

All news, all the time.

There was another all-news station in New York, WINS. I stuck with WCBS, for it had less structure and more art and shoe-leather reporting. WINS had the headlines. WCBS gave you the beating heart of the city, and personalities you grew to know by listening.

I credit my parents, who were both journalists, for my eventual career. You could say I grew up in newspapers: One of my earliest memories is being in the city room of my father’s paper. And I would end up working with three editors on my first job who had worked with my Dad 20 years before and knew me as a kid.

Yet WCBS played a big role, too. It fed one of my life’s obsessions, a thirst for breaking news and the rhythm of story. And it was a constant reminder of just what was out there in the middle of the night: There was always an announcer or two giving the news and a reporter who was working nightside, traveling around the city to breaking news stories.

Little did I know in the ‘70s and early ‘80s that I would be doing that kind of work, too. Not in New York City — though I was a journalist in New York City for a decade it wasn’t for crime and general mayhem — but not too far away, in inner-city and suburban Connecticut. I learned a lot, going to midnight and early morning fires and shootings and other breaking news. Whatever fear — and fascination — with the dark went away pretty quickly.