SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - Last evening I spent a couple of Merlot-filled hours at John's Grill, a saloon that figures prominently in the Dashiell Hammett book The Maltese Falcon, which was made into a great movie with Humphrey Bogart. It was after a long day of reporting and writing that included a rubber-chicken lunch listening to an assistant U.S. attorney general regaling a roomful of CPAs about how her tax division was kicking butt in finding tax cheats.
Her language was sufficiently provocative that I was able to write a story in the one-hour I had to get it to my Washington D.C. editors at BNA, Inc. I haven't had to move that fast in years. In about an hour, I get to do a repeat when the head of the entire IRS will be speaking to the same group. I'm told he's really great for a few soundbites and the CPAs are sharpening their pencils to nail him with some good questions, which I won't understand probably.
But as I was reading over some of the postings on the SWCS Yahoo discussion list, I was reminded of humble journalistic beginnings, in which I thought having to write 200 words about a football game for the Trojan was a massive undertaking. A sports story for Chrissakes! Who won, who lost, who scored and did it rain?
The Eavesdroppers, co-authored with John Rupp, was a lot more fun, but it was pretty intimidating to write, too. Even if we had a whole month to put a column together.
It's a long way from that classroom with Calvin Hanson reading out of an ancient journalism text to me sitting on the 13th floor of a hotel in a state that has had four significant earthquakes in the last few days.
13th floor? Earthquakes?
Calvin Hanson might appreciate the humor. It's hard to say because he laughed exactly once in our Trojan class our entire senior year. He never laughed at what we wrote in Eavesdroppers.
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