Notes of a Self-Seeker is a novel about a divided country, the role of journalism in society, and the most tumultuous year in modern American history–no, not 2020, but 1968. Told from the perspective of a southern reporter who travels north in January to take a job on a Vermont newspaper, each of the thirteen chapters chronicles the events of one day in a year like no other. If you thought 2020 was a rocky ride, reacquaint yourself with the news of 1968. Reporting, writing, drinking, the cycle of a daily newspaper is the rhythm of Bud Willis’s life, an unhealthy progression from job to job that lands him in a frigid Yankee backwater. He’s an outsider and an insider, a reporter writing about events but also turning them into the record that history will remember, a southerner getting the inside scoop in a northern state, and before long he’s caught between a scary police chief, an ambitious state’s attorney and an unfolding story he can’t quite wrap his head around. To make matters worse, Sy, the managing editor he has come to admire, is in a war to prevent his newsroom from unionizing.
About the Author
In September, 1964, Bill Porter started working on The Rutland Herald in Rutland, Vermont, first as a reporter and then as an editor. In January, 1973, he went to the Herald’s sister paper, The Times-Argus in Barre, Vermont. He was the Managing Editor there for eight years. When he began working at the Herald, newspapers were being produced using hot lead. By the time Bill left The Times-Argus, newspapers were being produced by computers. That’s why this book rings so true. Bill was there when it was happening. He was in the newsroom covering the stories of 1968. He was there for the union fight. So much of what happens in this book happened to Bill, and he tells it true.
Read a Sample from Notes of a Self-Seeker
Chapter Two: Friday, February 2, 1968
Merle and Ron were both looking at Willis, waiting for the rest of the story. “Damn,” he said suddenly, “I feel like doing something. We need some action. Get one more round then let’s wander back over to the paper and see what’s going on.” They finished the drinks long before he finished telling about Lyndon Johnson passing the civil rights bill, and he was still telling Texas stories about Johnson when they got back to the paper. The three of them walked in laughing, but the scene in the newsroom stopped them just inside the door.
Seymour and Connie stood squarely in front of each other, separated by three feet of charged space. Everyone else in the newsroom gaped at them openly, not even pretending to work. Seymour’s face was red. His hand plowed in quick jerks through his messy hair. Connie seemed relaxed, a small smile on her face and her hand propped on her left hip in a curiously masculine, athletic stance, like an on-deck batter or a tennis player waiting for an opponent to recover his composure after a bad serve.
Both of them looked over as the three came in, but no one greeted them. Sy turned back to her and said angrily, “Look, Connie, here’s what I think. I think I run this newsroom, and as long as I do we’re going to cover local news the way I say we’re going to cover it. And that means we’re going to cover meetings. Period.”
He was talking faster and louder with each sentence, working himself into a froth. Everyone in the newsroom had seen Seymour boil over into emotional anarchy, most often during confrontations with aggressive critics who dared challenge a reporter or the paper’s coverage. Usually, the target of the anger withered and slunk away, sometimes murmuring about madmen. Now, though, Connie was standing her ground, watching Sy with a taunting smile that looked as though it might escalate into an open laugh.
Willis looked on in stunned anticipation. He heard a gasp as someone took in a large swallow of air, but then he realized he was holding his own breath so he didn’t know if the noise came from himself or someone else. He looked around, but everyone in the room seemed to be holding his breath.
“That’s what local news means and that’s what it’s always going to mean as long as I am editor of this goddam newspaper,” he shouted. “And if that means every goddam reporter has to go out every goddam night, then, by God, that’s what they’re going to do.”
Connie waited with exaggerated patience until he stopped, either out of words or out of breath, then she moved a half step closer to Seymour and said, “And that means lots of overtime for everybody, right? Because reporters are people too, just like everybody else, and if we’re going to work all night and all day, we’re damn well going to get paid for it, just like anybody else would.”
Her hands began to move as she warmed up. “We care about news just as much as you do, but we’re not machines. We have lives outside this newsroom and we have a right to live them. And if we give up our nights, our time, to cover an assignment, then we have a right to be paid a premium for it.” Her voice was low and calm and her words were carefully spoken, but by the end her right hand was chopping in front of her in tight little thrusts that sliced through a section of air running roughly from Seymour’s chest to his belt line. “Other morning newspapers pay a premium for night work and there’s no reason why this one shouldn’t.”
“Oh, and by the way,” she said, looking around at her audience, “they already pay a premium for night work in the composing room here.” She looked triumphant, Willis thought, maybe even a little smug, but when he looked over at Seymour, he was surprised to see his angry glower turned into an ironic smile.
“Well then, Connie,” Sy said slowly, “why don’t you get a job in the composing room? I expect Rocky would be glad to have you. Of course, every time you wanted to stop work for a little tirade, you’d have to punch out on the time clock.”
For a moment, the room was frozen in place, as silent and as still as a theater set at the moment before the curtain goes up. Then, as if on cue, a dirty little man wearing a folded paper cap and stained green work trousers walked into the newsroom, shuffled passed the knot of people without looking up, and stopped in front of Seymour. He wiped his blackened hands on his t-shirt and said with a toothless grin, “Nine-Fingers wants to know when we’ll get the last page tonight. Says to tell you if we get started late again, he’s going to tell the old man.”
Seymour snorted a short laugh and said to Connie, “Maybe instead of the composing room, you’d rather work in the pressroom. You could be a colleague of Eric here,” he said, turning to the stunted, ageless messenger.
“As for you, Eric,” he said, “fuck off. And go tell Nine-Fingers to fuck off too. He’ll get the last page when we get the last news. And he’ll run the press when we’re ready to run the goddam press. As always.”
The pressroom drone just stood there grinning, showing no self-consciousness and evidently oblivious to the charged atmosphere in the room. He pulled up the tail of his t-shirt to wipe the gray drops of sweat off his face, exposing a hairless belly and the filthy tops of his boxer shorts. He looked around at the fidgeting crowd and then across the room at the copy editor, Stebbins, who was the only person in the room doing any work. Eric tilted back his jug-eared head to leer up at Seymour and said, “Ayuh, I can see you’re all going flat out. Well, don’t let me hold you up.” He turned around casually and strolled slowly out the door. If he knew any of the others that he passed on his way out, he didn’t give any sign.
When the door had closed behind him, they all looked toward Seymour to see if the fight was over and he was going back to his office. He was not. He stood looking at Connie. “Do you know how Nine-Fingers got his name? No, of course you don’t. Well, he got it one night when he was trying to coax another day’s paper out of the obsolete, worn-out press that’s been malfunctioning on a regular basis down in that black hole of a basement for the past seventy-five years. He was trying to unstick a roller without shutting the goddam thing off because he wasn’t sure he could get it going again if he shut it down, and for him the most important thing in the world is getting a newspaper off that machine every day. He was sticking his hand in that monster and it by God mashed off his goddam finger. Mashed it off. And do you know what he did? What Nine-Fingers did in that very moment when he was getting christened with his new name? He jerked out the rest of his hand, tied a dirty rag around it, and ran off the whole pressrun before he went to the hospital.
“You want to know the funny part of that story? The funny part is that later, the press gang was speculating about whether he screamed when his finger got cut off. The press made so much noise that most of them didn’t know anything had happened and no one heard him holler. So, later they asked him if he had screamed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘because I couldn’t hear a goddam thing.’ Then he said, ‘But I’ll bet the sonofabitch who got that paper yelled when my finger fell out into his cornflakes.’”
There was general laughter, and Willis thought, well he’s got them again, Connie loses. But Seymour didn’t stop. He called again to Connie, “What makes you think you can manage these reporters’ time better than they can manage it themselves?” She looked like someone who has been slapped, and Willis saw several reporters looking down at the floor. “They were getting along pretty well before they had a guardian angel.” He paused but Connie didn’t answer, and he was about to open up with another salvo when the shrill sound of the AP alarm bell rang out over the clatter of the wire. The frantic ringing stopped him and he whirled around toward the machine over in a corner behind the news editor’s desk.
“Where the hell is Greenberg?” Seymour shouted. He glared at the empty chair behind the desk. “Goddam it, where the hell is Greenberg?”
Simmons called out from the outer ring of the crowd, “He’s in the toilet.”
“What?” Sy snapped his head toward the deep-voiced reporter. “How do you know?”
“Well,” Simmons said, his voice rumbling slowly over the heads of the small crowd, “it’s seventeen minutes past midnight, so where the hell else would Greenberg be?”
The reporters laughed. Everyone knew, but no one ever mentioned, that every night at 12:10 Greenberg left his desk, picked up the Herald Tribune from the table where all the newspapers were tossed each day, and went into the bathroom, where he stayed for twenty minutes, arriving back at his own desk at twelve thirty. Everyone knew this routine except Seymour, who still had an irritated, puzzled look on his face.
“That’s right,” Connie said cheerfully. “Greenberg’s bowels are the only things that move on schedule around here.”
The others roared, ignoring the renewed ringing of the AP urgent bell. Seymour’s confusion turned to rage and he yelled, “Goddam it, somebody see what’s on that wire. Where the hell is Greenberg?” Several of them jumped but he was already in full stride, dodging around desks, and he was the first to reach the AP machine. He grabbed the narrow, coarse paper and ripped it off along the edge of the plastic flap that covered the sputtering keys.
He scanned the widely spaced lines of type, then quickly checked through about a yard of copy before he turned around and said in a calm, low voice, “The Viet Cong are pounding our troops and the South Vietnamese all over the goddam country. Da Nang may be in trouble. A bunch of marines are surrounded.”
No one replied, and Seymour turned to Ron. “Go tell Rocky we’ll be having some late copy.” He walked away toward his office, still holding the ripped-off AP copy. “Tell Greenberg to come see me when he gets back,” he called over his shoulder to no one in particular.