My first job, post-paper route, was as a messenger in the advertising department of the Chicago Tribune. As a 15-year-old aspiring journalist (and, yes, underage hire), I thought the experience might be a career path to Woodward and Bernstein heights. By coincidence, the day I started—May 1, 1974—was Watergate Wednesday, the same day that the Tribune was the only newspaper to publish the just-released transcripts of the Nixon White House secret tape recordings in their 246,000-word entirety. I walked into an office where my future-fellow messengers were frantically stuffing copies of the broadsheet supplement into enormous manila envelopes, the kind with string clasps on the back. The office’s mission was to deliver those envelopes, that very afternoon, as part of a vast promotional strategy, to advertising clients ranging from the heart of the Loop to the outermost suburbs. The scene in the office was bedlam. My new boss told me that my job that day was to take a seat on the bench and stay out of the way.
Like me on the bench that afternoon, the journalism dreams went nowhere, at least via my messenger job at the Tribune. The era of the copy boy rising through the ranks to foreign bureau chief was over. But that messenger job did offer life experiences that I couldn’t have imagined.
