John Craig took chances, and I'm proof
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The first time I ever laid eyes on John G. Craig Jr., the late editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he was hunched over a computer writing his weekly column. It was mid-November 1988, a time when the PG occupied the fourth floor of the building we then shared with The Pittsburgh Press.
Despite having an office in the back of the newsroom, John preferred to write surrounded by the sounds of police scanners, whirring copy machines and the weird mélange of crosstalk, laughter and profanity that make big-city newsrooms such interesting places.
Because I sat a few feet away at the clerk's desk fielding angry calls -- often about something John had written -- he was usually in my line of sight.
Some of the calls he got from readers infuriated him, but he never ducked a call, deadline or not. In fact, John relished conflict on some primordial chest-beating level.
A call that started reasonably could end with him screaming that the caller was "some kind of damned fool" followed by the sound of the phone slamming on its cradle and a mischievous chuckle on his part. I picked up some of my worst habits as a clerk watching John refusing to suffer fools gladly.
Once when I was in his office to be reprimanded about rudeness to an editor or reporter, we ended up laughing about something else entirely. My so-called infraction never came up because John Craig didn't care about me hurting someone's feelings. Life was too short to pretend that all complaints were equal. Pettiness and office politics bored him.
The takeaway from that conversation was his relatively sober advice to me to "ramp up the intellectual seriousness" a bit if I wanted to be taken seriously by our colleagues.
A few months later, I was in his office again. My shirt was covered in black ink from wrestling with the leaking printing cartridge of the newsroom printer. The now-smeared shirt was dripping wet from my attempt to clean it minutes before our meeting. John Craig pretended not to notice.
He asked if I was serious about becoming a journalist. If so, I could start full-time in the features section in a few weeks. My other option was to continue being the PG's most "incompetent clerk" or leave for a civil service job I had recently been offered. We shook on it. "Now get back to work or whatever it is you do," he said.
First Published May 28, 2010 12:00 am
