He stormed out the swinging doors and jabbed the elevator button like it was Engledow‧s eye. Before he reached the street, I had asked Bill Latham for his job. Mr. Latham was in the slot, pulling on his sleeve garters. He squinted from under his eyeshade, studied my face a long time. “All right,” he said. “I‧ll tell Chuck and Jorge you‧re moving over Monday.” Just like that. Suddenly I was a real reporter. A young Oklahoman named Bill “Monty” Montgomery worked police and was the best reporter on the paper. I worshipped him. Within a few months I was covering cops on his days of. The rest of the time I was a general assignments reporter, although we didn‧t use that term. We also didn‧t use the term “journalist,” a word then coming into fashion among college-educated members of the craft. “A journalist,” said Ed Engledow, “is just a newspaperman looking for a job.” We were reporters. We wrote about everything. In the years since, I have come to realize how lucky I was to get some of the assignments I did.
