After my junior year in college, The Buffalo News selected me to be one of their summer reporting interns. The paper arranged for me to live in an old-style cinder-block dorm room with no air conditioning. I was supposed to have a fellow intern as a roommate, but his father took one look at the grim setup and yanked him before he could move in. (I assured my poor Mom that I would be ok there, but we had a teary parting because I don’t think either of us truly believed it.) The campus bordered a tough neighborhood, but it did have a handy rail connection that I used to get to the paper’s downtown office. My gruff metro editor treated us as if we were full-time staff reporters. We covered hard news like shootings and fires as well as weekend summer festivals. Back then, the paper published a morning and an afternoon edition, and it seemed like my editor was always there, whirling around the newsroom handing out assignments (but never compliments).
The intense internship kept me busy, but my off hours were not so easily filled. My room didn’t have a TV and there weren’t many other people living in the dorm. I had a landline in my room, but I had to use a prepaid phone card to make long-distance calls. I brought a microfridge to stash slabs of lunchmeat and sacks of Arby’s sandwiches (you could get 5 for $5). I went on some adventures with an intern who had a car, but otherwise it was a lonely time.
Before I left home, my Dad let me borrow David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman, who was one of my Dad’s great heroes. When loneliness crept in, I picked up the massive book and fell under the spell of McCullough’s masterly storytelling. I was transported from a sweltering dorm room in western New York to a rural turn-of-century Missouri farm, then to the horrors of the front in France in World War I, then to the machine politics of Kansas City, next to Washington and the awesome weight of “the moon, the stars, and all the planets” of the presidency, and finally back home to Independence, a perfect match of a city’s name and a man as there ever was.
Truman changed my life and maybe saved it, in a way. I know for certain it saved me that summer and opened the gateway to discover McCullough’s other great works. I later learned that the great baritone voice that narrated The Civil War and other PBS films and documentaries belonged to him, which only increased my admiration for his skill at making history so absorbing and real. While I was working on my first book, I read that McCullough also wrote his first book in his spare hours while working full-time and raising a family. That was inspiring to me.
I’m sorry I never got the opportunity to meet David McCullough, or at least hear him speak in person. But he leaves behind a shelf of masterful books that will always be reliable companions on life’s journey.