The story so far...

Braving the Big Apple: How I went up the river, spent the night with drowsy docs, & got through grad school without breaking any bones

Sat, 31 May 1997 22:15:50 -0400

Back when I first decided to take the job in Alaska, my fellow interns joked that I would run into a bear, get lost in a snowstorm and be chased by wolves. Some, congratulating me, couldn't entirely mask a doubtful note in their voice; others said it outright: "Why would you want to go there?"

Eighteen months later, some of my Alaskan friends were similarly puzzled. "New York City?" they said when I told them I hoped to attend Columbia University's graduate journalism program. "Why would you want to go there? It's dangerous."

But I was determined. I knew I wouldn't get a better chance to report in New York City until much later in my career, if ever. I didn't relish the thought of going back to school, and I had been turned down for the program once before, immediately after finishing college. But I hoped that my Alaskan sojourn would improve my chances, and Columbia sounded more like work than school. Besides, I thought, nine months couldn't be so bad.

Living New York
The housing, however, could. My brother, Alex, and I arrived on the Upper West Side, four blocks from Harlem's famous 125th Street, on a sweltering August day. We found my room in Fairholm Hall, a nondescript brownstone on 121st Street, chopped up into graduate "suites." I would share my suite with four other men and one brave woman: one kitchen, one singleton bathroom and no other common areas among us. My room was just big enough for its generic furniture and me -- as long as I was sitting or lying on one piece of furniture or another. My first-floor window looked out through an industrial security grate onto the back of Teacher's College, where, twice a week, mounds of festering garbage bags awaited local vagrants and, eventually, the garbage truck.

It smacked more of a cell block than a dormitory (much less a "suite"). My brother tried to cheer me up, telling me how, if I ever managed to open the grate, I could squeeze out the narrow window on nice days and perch on the bottom of the fire-escape, reading and chatting with people going in and out the front doors. He needn't have worried -- any time I spent in that room, I would be sleeping or firmly attached to the telephone in a last-ditch scramble to round up interviews before deadline.

However grim my housing, New York was splendid. I had been told horror stories about police finding long-dead skeletons in the wilds of nearby Morningside Park, but by the mid-1990s, crime had fallen, and "Morningside Heights" (as Columbia euphemistically called its acreage closer to Harlem than the Upper West Side) was about as safe as anywhere. And the life!

Across Amsterdam Avenue were a Chinese take-out store, where I would feed my colds with won-ton soup and pot-stickers, and an Ethiopian restaurant, where I would celebrate both my move-in and my departure. The 24-hour Green Tree deli became my high-priced grocery, and at the corner with Broadway, a mom-and-pop deli kept me in bagels, coffee and pastrami sandwiches. For a kid whose aunt had once sent him H&H bagels by Federal Express when he lived in Alaska (thanks Aunt Susan!), this was heaven indeed.

School daze
But all was not bagels and mu shu pork. I had a degree to earn.

On the one hand, I knew what I was in for: I had grown up in and around a university, I had single-mindedly pursued a newspaper career since seventh grade, and Columbia had turned me down once, leaving me no doubt that the competition was stiff.

On the other hand, there was a lot I didn't expect. On the first day, a troupe of deans assembled to welcome us, and one pronounced the school "the West Point of journalism." (Later, classmate and West Point graduate Mark Beach noted wryly that he had graduated from "the Columbia Journalism School of the Army"). Most of did abysmally on a pop quiz of current-events, particularly when asked to name the statue gracing the school's entrance. (It's Thomas Jefferson, of course, presumably in honor of his memorable line that

"[W]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

-- a noble sentiment, even if, as president, Jefferson censored papers critical of his administration.)

They threw us into the thick of things immediately, sending us out on a multi-bus tour of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Soon after, we began "RW1," the core class of the first semester, basic reporting and writing, from the ground up.

Our classmates talked of the close friendships they made in this class, the lasting memories, the camaraderie. My class has memories, all right, as well as a few friendships. But most memorable of all were the sparks that flew nearly every time we met. We were a volatile bunch: Southerner Parker Lee Nash, who early on took to defending Pat Buchanan; Ed Corey, whose politics mixed Seventies liberalism with a half-gallon of libertarianism; Eric Jansen, whose understanding of international politics was as incisive as his domestic Republicanism was ordinary; Randi Schmeltzer, a walking encyclopedia of pop-culture. No topic was too slight for political bickering, no discussion too short for veiled barbs from all sides.

All this time, we tromped around "our" neighborhoods -- sections on New York, Ari Goldman told us when we first arrived, where you wouldn't take your visiting mother for tea, neighborhoods we were to cover as if we were beat reporters for a local newspaper. Despite having covered a municipal beat before ( in Alaska and for my college daily), I spent most of my reporting days walking endlessly throughout Inwood, the tiny neighborhood perched at Manhattan's northern end, atop Dyckman Street but before the Harlem River, a weird amalgam of new Dominican immigrants east of Broadway and often elderly German, Jewish and Irish immigrants and their descendants on the west, by Inwood Hill Park. Without any actual authority beyond mere studenthood -- no newspaper, no legitimate claim to be a freelancer -- I felt suddenly robbed of the ability to just approach people and start asking them questions. Eventually, usually just in time for each deadline, I collared enough people and asked enough questions to write an adequate story. But I longed for a publication, one that would again give me not only a reason to ask questions, but an audience to write for.

Meanwhile, Ari Goldman, longtime New York Times religion writer and author of Finding God at Harvard, taught us. Many days, like a Zen master, he taught in proverbs and koans. "A lede," he would say, "is like a first date." And, "You can't do journalism on an empty stomach." Or, "An interview is like playing jazz." (Corey, the eldest of our class and a onetime jazz musician, objected ãÝmost jazz wasn't improvised at all, he said.) More Goldmanisms

Then came our trip to Sing-Sing. After weeks of uncertainty, Prof. Goldman finally confirmed it: We would be taking a tour of Sing-Sing, the infamous penitentiary "up the river" from Manhattan, guided by none other than Rabbi Irvin Koslowe, the Jewish chaplain who had walked the Rosenbergs to the electric chair.

The tour was everything you might expect: Chilling, depressing, grim. We were told what color clothing to avoid, so we wouldn't be shoved into a cell in the event of a riot or lockdown. The women, told to wear no jewelry or makeup, nonetheless met lewd comments and catcalls from a few of the inmates. In the chapel, we met one-on-three with a handful of inmates, some of whom were murderers, some of whom were evasive and all of whom were disarmingly pleasant.

And then, back in the classroom, it was as if we had been to two -- three, four -- different prisons on different days, meeting different inmates. The barbs were no longer veiled and accusations flew -- fuzzy-minded bleeding hearts, insensitive spoiled suburban brats, political correctness, vindictive double-standards -- and at the end of the table, Prof. Goldman watched us; I couldn't tell if he was bemused, in shock or simply watching. Eventually, he broke it up. (Later, he would apologize for not stepping in earlier.)

Sleep deprivation
A New York City resident at work. By the time of the Sing Sing clash, many of us were already looking ahead to the rest of the school year. Second semester, we were warned by many, was much harder than first; not so, others countered -- it was easier. Either way, the master's project loomed.

Today, Columbia touts the master's project as the essence of its program: a single article, 2,000 to 4,000 words long, delving deeply and incisively into a worthy topic. (The project has changed over the years, and not so long ago was more of a traditional master's thesis; alumnus Patrick Buchanan wrote his on Canada-Cuba trade and the U.S. embargo against Cuba, and its first quote, of a newspaper headline, is many pages deep.) The reality of the project can be much different. Some fail to avoid the faculty's admonition that "a story is not an idea" and spend countless pages delving into a topic without any apparent regard for a point or a news hook. Others, some quite ambitious, barely get past the planning stages. One I read in the archives was a first-person piece about a student who attempts suicide amid the stress of school and then finds she is unable to sign herself out from a truly scary mental ward. (When I mentioned the student driven to a suicide attempt, Ari Goldman said, "Which one?")

Still, some projects have truly been masterful. One, by Jennifer Toth, was ultimately picked up by The Wall Street Journal and later published as The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City, a harrowing first-hand account. And, while searching for a topic, I couldn't help but remember the successful projects to the exclusion of all else.

As always, I pushed the deadlines. I changed projects three or four times in the weeks leading up to the decision day. Just a week in advance, I decided to write about fentanyl, the surgical anesthetic so powerful, and so seductive, that it was apparently the narcotic of choice for anesthesiologist junkies. I had no idea how I'd find addicted doctors, but I knew it was a story that interested me. Then, a few days later, a classmate showed me the new issue of GQ: In it was a piece on fentanyl physician addiction. Talking with Ruth Padawer, my master's adviser, she mentioned the story of Libby Zion, who died seven hours after being admitted to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in 1984, without ever being seen by an attending physician.

I seized on it, and during the weeks between the end of the fall and the beginning of the spring semesters, I sat in my dorm cell calling across the city. Just two hospitals were willing to let me follow their interns throughout a complete shift, and -- after a brief break for Christmas with relatives in the Northeast -- I went to the South Bronx on the day before New Year's Eve and spent more than 30 hours straight with a resident. Two more such visits, along with more research and interviews, showed that New York City hospitals widely violated the state's rules governing how many hours doctors-in-training may work -- the thesis of my master's project. (Not long after I wrote my project, the office of Mark Green, the New York City public advocate, also revisted the issue and came to much the same conclusion.)

Escape from New York
I wrote the bulk of my master's project early in the second semester -- it measured 12,000 words, and I felt it was just half of what I had hoped to write. Ruth set me straight. Gradually I filled in the holes and, with Ruth's guidance (and the help of Liz Benjamin), whittled the article down to size -- almost. In the end, it was some 6,000 words long, drawing an ascerbic note from Ruth that she hadn't remembered reading that I was exempt from the 4,000-word upper limit.

Staying up all night with doctors, padding around Inwood, debating everything from journalism ethics to Rudy Giuliani's latest pronouncements -- it was all heady stuff. Somewhere in there, I even learned a few things: from Jonathan Mandell, how to delve deep, find the telling details, and remember that, however narrative, journalism should always have a point; from Ken Brief, how to put together a solid story in little time; from Sandy Padwe, how to be skeptical of official platitudes and keep digging no matter what (or else!).

Sometime during that year -- it all seemed to blur together as it was happening, too -- I caught a game at Yankee Stadium (with Courtney Hardee and Hiro Tanaka, who did play-by-plays for us in English and Japanese); wandered Times Square at 3 a.m. after the Yankees celebrated their 1996 World Series victory (where we met a late-night wedding party and other revelers); hiked through Inwood Park; briefly interviewed Ed Koch; hung out with a private investigator; and lived longer on bagels and coffee than I ever thought possible.

Then it was almost over. Once again, I realized would need a job (a theme that shouldn't have been a surprise by then). Somehow, I snared an interview with Jim McGarvey, then metro editor of the Daily Record of Morris County, New Jersey. One of three Columbia students offered a job, I was the only one that accepted.

Within a few weeks after graduation, I was moving into an apartment between Hiawatha and Minnehaha streets in Lake Hiawatha, a one-time summer village that had been absorbed by sprawling Parsippany.

Compared to my previous relocations, I would be moving next door, to suburban north-central Jersey, 30 minutes from the George Washington Bridge if traffic is light, roughly midway between the Delaware and the Hudson rivers. Culturally, I was leaping across the nation's class divide, from the edge of impoverished, immigrant Washington Heights to one of America's richest counties, the home of AT&T, a place where, one local official told me primly, "we care about our schools, and we care about our roads." For the next 15 months, I would have to care, too.

A Year in Alaska: How I ended up in a fishing village & what I did there.

Wed, 31 Jan 1996 21:52:48 -0500

The beginning
As my four-month Politics & Journalism Internship with the Chicago Tribune in Washington, D.C., drew to a close, I knew I'd have to find a job somewhere. I wanted to stay in journalism, and I had to face the facts: The New York Times and the Times of London weren't exactly breaking down my door.

I'd have to start small.

Leafing through the Editor & Publisher classifieds one morning, one ad stood out from the rest:

"ALASKAN WEEKLY looking for general assignment reporter to cover bustling fishing town in Southeast..."

If I'm going to start small, I thought, why not go to Alaska?

So I took the reporter's job with the Petersburg Pilot, a weekly paper with a circulation of 1,619, on an island of 3,419 souls. I hadn't been farther west than Iowa in 10 years, and I had never lived in a town with fewer than 100,000 residents. And yet, on Jan. 16, 1995, I landed in Petersburg, Alaska, where I was to stay -- and work -- without a break for more than a year.

The Pilot
I wasn't alone at the Pilot -- my editor, Lori Thomson, made up the rest of the newsroom staff. We also had a pressman, three advertising and office staffers and the owner-publishers (a husband-wife team). For the first six months, all went as I expected: I reported and wrote between 12 and 18 stories a week, including everything from the police log and high-school basketball coverage to two or three front-page stories each issue.

It kept me busy enough. We could only count on breaking news for one front-page story a week. Together, Lori and I had to search for another two or three. That, plus run-of-the-mill council and advisory-board meetings, the bustling summer fisheries and close coverage of downtown businesses, made for a full paper, as well as a full week. All the while, we kept an ear out for KFSK-FM, the local public radio affiliate, and the thrice-daily news reports that often sent us scrambling to rewrite a story or find a new angle for one we hadn't known about.

Then, in late July, Lori took a job with the Juneau Empire, leaving me to fill the Pilot single-handedly until the publisher could hire another reporter.

For the next six months -- until reporter Jerry Blair arrived in December -- I did everything but run the press, sell ads and (except occasionally) lay out the paper. Mostly I reported, covering everything and digging up front-page news and features as well.

The news
Shortly after I arrived in Petersburg, Lori told me that, early in her own tenure at the Pilot, she noticed that the paper provided a lot of material for the Anchorage Daily News's statewide roundup of local-interest stories, which usually featured the quirky and surprising. She wondered if all Alaskan towns provided so many tidbits.

Nope, the section's editor told her. Just Petersburg.

Despite its small size, Petersburg is among the busiest fishing ports in the United States. It ranked ninth in the volume of seafood landed in 1994 and 11th in the value of its catch (up slightly from 1993). It claims fame as home to the world's largest halibut fleet, and that lucrative fishery has helped make many of the town's fishermen wealthy.

Understandably, fishing news was vital. I quickly learned which kinds of fishermen catch which kinds of Pacific salmon, how to get sensitive catch information from cagey canneries and fishermen and, of course, the difference between a trawler (who drags the bottom for fish) and a troller (who uses hooks and lines to catch fewer fish in better shape and with less waste).

At the same time, I covered the city and its $21 million budget, followed one of Alaska's first stalking cases through two trials (and one hung jury), and profiled some of the town's more colorful residents and veterans. When a humpback whale breached and landed on a local man's charter boat, I wrote the story. When the city tranquilized more than 30 black bears living at the municipal dump and flew them to another island, I was on hand, taking notes and pictures. And when 14-year old Iza Froehlich died of an unexplained heart-attack on her way to school, I covered the town's grief. In all, I wrote at least 800 articles for the Pilot in 1995, including about 150 longer features or in-depth stories. Several of my articles are available online.

The island and its people
Mitkof Island is, Petersburg tourism brochures once said, "just" 800 miles north of Seattle. One of the few Southeast towns without a deep-water port, it's usually ignored by all but the most adventurous small cruise ships. And, according to a survey by the city in 1995, that suited a little over half the residents just fine -- many didn't particularly want tourists. Others say tourism is the only hope for diversification, that fishing could go the way of logging, which has dwindled to near non-existence in Petersburg and shrunk drastically elsewhere in the region.

The tourism debate is just one of the several issues splitting the town along its generational and political faults. For years, one of Petersburg's most tedious debates was also its most contentious: how to run a water line and road from a new water reservoir to the town's water-treatment plant. Pro-development residents wanted it to open up new subdivisions; pro-environment residents didn't. This one issue led to two city-council turnovers, a ballot proposal and even a council recall attempt in the late 1990s. In the end, the developers won out, and today a new road runs where once a boardwalk led hikers and mountain-bikers across muskeg and rain-forest to the rocky beach of Frederick Sound.

Then there's the park expansion proposal, and whether or not to build a deep-water port at all. Throw in the decision by the U.S. Postal Service to move the post office, and you had enough controversy to keep Petersburg's citizens busy for years.

The town was -- and largely still is, I’m told -- split into a number of factions: The descendents of its Norwegian founders tend to like it more or less the way it is, and don't want major changes (like more tourists), though the younger ones wouldn't mind a few more amenities (stores, maybe some fast-food joints), Those who arrived in the 1970s and during the state's oil-, logging-, and construction-boom of the 1980s tend to favor heavy residential and commercial development in Petersburg, and back logging interests much of the time. But many environmentalists arrived in Petersburg at about the same time and since, and they prefer leaving the town, and the wild, the way it is. Rarely do the three groups see eye-to-eye (although the old-timers make up something of a swing vote), and almost every issue splits the town nearly evenly.

All of this is set against a backdrop that can only be described as lush: The town is built up to the calm waters of the Inside Passage and backed by the brown-green scrub of muskeg, or peat bogs. Rising above the town behind it is wooded Raven's Roost, and across the Wrangell Narrows are the steep, forested slopes of Petersburg Mountain and Kupreanof Island. Spanning the eastern horizon is the immense Coastal Range, its jagged peaks marking the border with Canada. Summer brings (in good years) deeply blue skies and 18 hours of bright sun. Winter brings thick, moist snow, cold, and just six or seven hours of tepid, cloudy sunlight a day. Spring and fall are just wetter and rainier than the other two seasons. Many residents spend a month or two "down South," which can equally well mean Seattle as Belize.

Sharing the island with people are black bears, porcupines, deer, wolves, a few moose, countless waterfowl, bald eagles, crows and ravens, and, of course, its waterways teem with the trout and salmon that make it a popular fishing area. The residents split their time between being mountain-men concerned only with hunting, fishing and maintaining their houses and boats in a sort of modern-day survival, and living the close, gossip-ridden small-town lives of a Sinclair Lewis novel.
Leaving
Through all of this, I reported and wrote away. The paper grew gradually, from a regular 16 pages to a regular 20, swelling to 24 at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The summer and its attendant bustle came and went, and hundreds of transient cannery workers and fishing-boat crewmen with it. The fall drizzled drearily on.

After six months of filling the paper on my own, it was time to go. In October, and again in November, the Juneau Empire offered me a reporting job. Reluctant to commit to spending another year in Alaska, I turned the offers down and applied to Columbia's graduate journalism program. I also sent out resumes and clips to newspapers around the country.

Finally, in January, I packed up my belongings, gave away the scant furniture I had acquired, sent my cat to live with my parents, and headed back to the Midwest. I went slowly, taking the state ferry to Bellingham -- technically riding a part of the Interstate Highway System -- and then traveling by bus, train and rental car back to Illinois by way of Portland, Sacramento and San Francisco.

At dawn, pulling out of Omaha on Amtrak's California Zephyr, I saw the broom-like elms sticking out of flat, brown fields, and I knew I was back in the Midwest. Soon, though I didn't know it looking out into the February grey, I would be heading East again, farther this time, to New York City and a grueling nine months at Columbia University.

Theo Goes to Washington: How I got kicked out of the Capitol & shook hands with Newt.

Sat, 31 Dec 1994 10:23:59 -0500

Graduating from college is, for most people, a moment of truth. The "real world" looms, bills beckon, jobs are scarce, and the first words on everyone else's lips are: "So. What's next?"

I was, much as I hated to admit it, no exception.

My summer was taken care of, with two months learning German and visiting relatives in Munich. Yet I still had to find something to do come August.

What I did was go to Washington.

I didn't go on my own, of course. The Washington Center for Politics & Journalism had accepted me for its Politics and Journalism Internship (now its Politics and Journalism Semester), a series of political-reporting seminars coupled with a newsroom internship -- in my case in the D.C. bureau of the Chicago Tribune.

I would spend the next four months covering press conferences, researching 1994 campaign spending and writing articles for the Tribune, all while watching the GOP take control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

The city
It was a normal D.C. August when I arrived in the capital and unpacked my boxes in the room I rented high up on 18th Street N.W., about halfway between downtown and the northern corner of the district at Silver Springs, Md. The National Zoo, a short bike ride away, was still full with summer visitors, and Congress wasn't yet back in session.

I had a few days before I would begin my internship, and I spent them getting to know the least interesting part of the city: downtown. It shuts down promptly at 6 p.m., and the only eatery I found open after 9 p.m. was a seedy Burger King two blocks from the Tribune's old suite on L Street.

My first full day in the city, I walked by the scene of an armored-car robbery just minutes after an ambulance took the fatally wounded guard away.

My third day, a Sunday, I accidentally wandered into the Capitol basement while making a cursory circuit of sights around the Mall. It took the security guards a little over half an hour to notice me and find me; they didn't even ask my name as they escorted me out. "Another lost tourist," one guard told another over his handset.

The Tribune
The day I walked into the Tribune offices on the second floor of a red- marble and gold-trim building on L Street, there was only one reporter there. The bureau chief, Jim Warren, and Michael Tackett (then associate bureau-chief) walked in an hour later, a little surprised to find me there.

Soon, however, I found my niche, and even before that, Lynn Marek, the office's librarian, found me work: Clip each day's Tribune, file the half-dozen newspapers that arrived each morning, help office manager Helen McGinnis distribute the mail, make sure faxes reached the right people, hand out transcripts from the Federal News Service...

Not all was clerical, however. I spent some of my time just talking with the other reporters there: Bill Neikirk, the White House reporter; Steve Daly, then the political reporter; Elaine Povich, who covered Congress. And, in time, I did more and more reporting.

It was the fall of the United States' non-invasion of Haiti, and as the tension built, each of the reporters in the bureau got busier. After a few hours, I was no exception. One reporter wanted to know what "roll-on, roll-off" ships were -- vehicles that, suddenly, everyone seemed to know everything about, from Wolf Blitzer to anonymous military officers. Someone else wanted to know more about the officer leading American forces. Later in the day, I was sent to an off-the-record briefing at the Pentagon, just in case. (The briefing, it turned out, was also covered by the transcription service, and the office had a transcript before I got back).

Throughout the fall, I lent a hand when needed and otherwise sought out my own stories. I wrote about a report that showed hunger increasing in the United States while falling elsewhere; the Washington Post picked up the Tribune's version. I wrote about another report showing drug use by U.S. teenagers going up. I covered a hearing on heroin trafficking and helped cover one of the very first FCC auctions of wireless-frequency licenses. When the FAA investigated a series of commuter-plane crashes, I wrote one end of a story with the paper's Chicago-based transportation reporter. And all the while, I was heading down to the FEC to check on Dan Rostenkowski and Mel Reynolds and their campaign finances.

A little before the election, I began noticing some political signs that were just a little more interesting than most of those sprouting on lamp posts and stop lights throughout the city: A goofy looking young man in a lemon-yellow suit looked out from them, holding a mixed drink in one hand and a corkscrew in the other. "If you want to get screwed," the sign said, "elect a politician. If you want to be served, elect a bartender." From there, I wrote my article about maverick candidate Russell Hirshon, who claimed to be taking on Marion Barry and his Republican opponent, Carol Schwartz, for the mayor's office. (You can read that story, and others I've written, on this site).

The Center for Politics & Journalism
I did not intern at the Tribune in a void. Twice a week, I and 12 other interns around the city met in a conference room loaned to the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism, headed by former Democratic mover and shaker Terry Michael.

There, while snacking on the cookies and juice he provided, we heard Terry and his guests talk about what makes Washington tick. From direct-mail consultants to Washington Gov. Michael Lowry, we heard about the good, the bad and the inescapably partisan.

Terry founded the program, he told us, after years of watching political reporters missing the point, covering the inside baseball of campaign politics and all but ignoring wider public and policy issues. So he set out to make a difference where he still could -- in the minds and hearts of impressionable and eager young reporters. Until recently a one-man show, Terry's center hits up Republicans and Democrats, television journalists and inky wretches, even the parents of former participants, for money and expertise.

The result: a star-studed speaking lineup and the best route in town to top-notch D.C.-bureau internships. (Indeed, the internships were so attractive that Terry soon shifted the focus away from them; once the Politics & Journalism Internship, his program became the Politics & Journalism Seminar.)

Like other interns, the events that made my day were the kind of things that ruined a more seaseoned reporter's. Twice I spelled Bill Neikirk at the White House for a 6 a.m. press-pool call to follow President Clinton on his morning jog. The first time, with Yeltsin in town for a state visit, I rode with two dozen or so reporters, photographers and others to a Secret Service-approved ambush spot on the Mall. We wated as Bill jogged toward us, chatted with some passers by, and then ambled on past with a wave. "Why didn't you bring Yeltsin with you?" called out Helen Thomas, the gathering's dean. "Wish I could have," Bill chuckled, running on.

We piled back into the black Secret Service vans, drove to the other side of the Mall and piled out again. This time when Bill sauntered by, Helen was on the phone and he was off the hook.

The second time I got to go jogging with the prez, we didn't get so close. Not long before, an angry pilot had buzzed the Washington Monument and crashed into the side of the White House, scuffing the siding badly. It wasn't the only disturbance that fall --Ýone man squeezed off a few shots at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue before the Secret Service tackled him; someone else escaped after a drive-by shooting from the Ellipse; later, presidential palace guards shot a homeless man to death on the sidewalk because he had taped a knife to his hand. So, the plane-crash apparently rattling Bill's keepers, we didn't even get within shouting distance of him on the second jog.

To be sure, a D.C. intern's life is made of such near-misses. Ed Rollins once caused a stir at a Sperling Breakfast -- saying he had paid off black preachers in a Northeast primary -- so skads of reporters-in-training arrive at each of the morning feeds, hungry and bleary-eyed, picking at muffins and fruit, listening to Dick Gephardt drone on and watching enviously as the few seasoned veterans leave early after downing a few eggs, sausages and sides of bacon. Occasionally, a near-thing becomes a complete miss: Once, looking for Sperling's event, I stumbled into a room full of beefy, suited men, sure I was in the right place. But muffins and fruit were as scarce as the pork-products were plentiful, and I soon left -- I had crashed a hog-grower's convention.

Sometimes, however, fame and notoriety beckoned -- or at least shook hands.

It all started, in a sense, with the bureau's fax machine. It was one of those thermal-paper faxes that spat missives out from one long roll, slicing each page off and letting it fall, curling into a little tube, into a bin below. My job was to smooth the pages out, match pages one through 99, staple them, and figure out who wanted which. Most of the time, the answer was, "No one."

Take, for example, Bill Kristol. These days lauded as a "conservative commentator," "editor of the Weekly Standard" or even, "conservative journalist," Kristol, to me in 1994, was northing less than a menace. He alone kept our fax machine whirring three hours out of four, mostly with his countdown to the GOP's master stroke, the one event that, he promised, would seal the November Congressional elections for his party. (The rest of the time he was chortling over the party's mulishness; "Keep on obstructin'!" one fax crowed, exhorting Newt and Co. to bottle Congress up entirely.)

As read Kristol's faxes on the much-vaunted Contract With America, I wondered who would cover it. So, the day before the event, I asked. Mike Tackett asked around. No one, he said. "You want to?" So I did.

The day of the press conference on the Capitol steps, I picked up the hefty packet of press summaries, proposed legislation, solemn promises and political philsophizing. Leafing through it, something struck me, and as the the gathering broke up, I legged it after Newt himself, catching him alone for a moment as he headed for the Capitol steps.

"Mr. Gingrich," I began after clumsily introducing myself, "I couldn't help noticing that the term limits provision doesn't apply to people like you, who are already in office. Why not?" He muttered something about the importance of regularly turning over the ranks of Congress. I was stymied -- he hadn't answered, and he was beginning to turn away. Then he and I realized we were surrounded -- other reporters, a few cameras, even a TV crew had zeroed in on the master of ceremonies. Another reporter jumped on the question: Why not? Other inquiries followed, a we were scribbling for nearly an hour.

(The next day, newspapers across the nation ran front-page packages on the Contract With America and Democratic jibes about the Contract On America. In Chicago, Tribune subscribers could read all about it on Page 20, in my eight-paragraph article. But I'm not complaining -- I got a great clip.)

Despite the fun and the first-rate education -- and despite the Tribune's generosity -- with its $250-a-month stipend, WCPJ was no free ride. And all the while, the real world crouched just out of earshot, drumming its fingers idly and waiting to pounce once again. What was I to do?

North to the Future!