Half a Century of My 'Daily Miracle'

By: Greg Mitchell Some people know me as a "magazine guy," others as a "book guy," but the truth is, I've always considered myself a "newspaper guy," and I do mean always. From a very early age I checked the baseball box scores every day. Another factor: My comic book hero was Superman, but I really wanted to grow up to be Clark Kent, who didn't have to worry about kryptonite or the chance that one day a bullet might not bounce off his chest.

My interest in newsprint led to a gimmick that earned me good grades in school: No matter what the class (except gym and woodshop), I'd execute most of my major reports in the form of a tabletop newspaper. Rather than create a stuffy term paper with footnotes and a lot of text, I'd imagine how the front page of a newspaper might have covered, say, the Battle of Gettysburg or the opening night of Hamlet.

Taking a a blank sheet of paper, I'd draw in a few columns for Page One, hand-letter a logo and the headlines, and then, on my father's typewriter, compose a few short stories, careful to stay within the narrow margins. Sometimes I'd paste in a photo or two.

Worked every time: A+ for originality, even if the content was slight (is this how Al Neuharth got the idea?).

In junior high I joined the school paper, but it didn't come out often enough and I hardly wrote a thing. Taking matters into my own hands, I co-founded what I later called "the first junior high school underground paper in America." (The term "underground paper" didn't even exist in 1962.) With a couple of helpers, I wrote and edited a six-page mimeographed news and gossip sheet every few weeks.

We covered sports, the red-hot race for class president, and upcoming school events, and provided lists of everyone's favorite songs (mainly Roy Orbison and early Beach Boys). My friend's father printed it, primitively, at his office. It was a direct challenge to the lame school paper. Just as we were about to get busted, 8th grade mercifully ended.

We revived the paper the following year, but the school lowered the boom after we hinted that a certain English teacher was perhaps a little too friendly with some of the girls in his class. The paper had become so popular, the principal offered a deal: You can keep publishing, but you have to do it out of the school print shop, and with a faculty advisor. We turned down the offer, and with graduation on tap, we let it go.

In high school I kept doing those fake newspapers as term papers (still worked), and met my first steady girlfriend working for the school paper. Went to Press Day at a nearby j-school and ended up enrolling there. During my summers in college I worked for the Niagara Falls Gazette, a mid-sized Gannett daily ? the best job I've ever had, present company included.

It had all the classic elements: carbon paper, a Press Box tavern next door, and sloshed copy editors. The editors gave the summer reporters a lot of rope, and I wrote dozens of stories, somehow managing to win the top reporting prize in our circ class from the New York State Publishers Association for a 10-part series on police/black community relations after the city was hit by a minor riot. Got $500 for it, too. Also covered the notorious 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

One of my favorite chores was filling in for vacationing sports writers, which allowed me to cover the Buffalo Bisons minor league baseball team. One year I met a 19-year-old catcher named Johnny Bench. Another time, Bisons manager Don "Zip" Zimmer, already hefty and long retired as a player, had to activate himself for a game because of injuries to others. Sure enough, in the first inning, he popped a home run. He re-retired after the game, so I saw Don Zimmer's last dinger.

But it gets better. Upon graduation, I spurned newspaper offers to head to New York and enter the magazine world. A dozen years later, freelancing, I went to Miami to write a spring training profile of fiery Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver. Walking along the left field line with the "Earl of Baltimore," I mentioned that I had seen the last home run hit by his friend, Don Zimmer.

Weaver laughed and muttered: "So did I." Turns out the home run came against the Rochester Red Wings, the team he managed on the way to the big time. Then Weaver added a few crucial details: It was a grand slam, and he had just gone out to the mound to tell his young pitcher not to give the old guy anything good to hit because he might still be dangerous. So the pitcher turned around and laid it right in there and Zim hit it out. The name of the pitcher? Future Hall of Famer (and underwear model) Jim Palmer.

Baseball, and newspapers, been very, very, good to me.