Performer: Genesis
Songwriter: Mike Rutherford
Original Release: …And Then There Were Three…
Year: 1978
Definitive Version: Knebworth 78, 1978
At Medill, Intro to
Journalism, aka Boot Camp, consisted of two parts. The first part I’ve
mentioned—essentially it was classroom practice. The second part consisted of
sending everyone out into the real world.
The assignment was simple:
You were given a beat somewhere in the suburbs, and you covered it like you
would if you worked at a daily paper. Four out of the five days, you were expected
to file at least one story by a particular deadline—usually 4 p.m., if I recall
correctly.
Beats were assigned based on
how you did in first half to a certain extent but also on your mode of
transportation. I had a car, so I was assigned Deerfield, an upper-middle-class
suburb fairly far to the northwest of Evanston.
But I wasn’t assigned to
cover all of Deerfield. Instead, I got Deerfield police, fire and parks. The
reason why this was a problem quickly became apparent: It was November, so
there wasn’t much activity with the parks. There hadn’t been a fire in a
decade. And police? Crime in Deerfield consisted almost entirely of car
burglaries—not car theft, but breaking into cars and stealing radar detectors.
How the heck do you craft a
story out of that on a daily basis? That became my challenge and one I grew to
quickly hate as my struggles to make something out of nothing and get it past
my gatekeeper rapidly mounted.
Not only did we get new
beats in the second half of Boot Camp at Northwestern, but we also got new
instructors. Time has lost the name of my instructor—I remember what she looked
like—but what’s important to know is that she hated me. Well, OK, that’s a bit
strong. It probably is more accurate to say she hated my work. I could tell that
from my daily grades.
In Boot Camp, we didn’t get
letter grades. It was a check plus-minus system. If you had a check or a
check-plus, you were good. A check-minus or, worse, just plain minus meant you
had to rewrite and perhaps rereport your story, due the next day along with
whatever else was due.
I had a few rewrites in the
first half of Boot Camp, but the second half was a river of rewrites. I rewrote
my stuff almost every day. Rare was the day when I’d turn something in, and I’d
get even a check-minus, let alone a check. But what could I do? There was
nothing going on worth writing about.
One night, I got the keen
idea to go out on runs with the guy who was the media-relations guy at the fire
department. There was one run: it was to a home where they smelled smoke, but
it was just something that got stuck in the ductwork.
Otherwise, all he did was
tell interesting stories about the “big ones.” He said the two biggest fires he
encountered on the job was when the DC-10 lost its engine and crashed at O’Hare
and when Arlington Park burned to the ground. He didn’t work either fire;
Deerfield just had to cover the other communities called to the scene.
The story I generated from
that night required two attempts to pass through the gate.
I suppose in retrospect, the
fault of the rewrites was mine. I had no experience in news gathering and just
flat didn’t know how to do it, or, really, how to do it to the instructor’s
expectations. At the time, I was convinced that something more was going on,
because I sure didn’t have as much trouble in the first half of the class.
I kept trying, driving out
to Deerfield almost every day to call on my sources and see whether anything
was happening. Fortunately, Scott had sent me a care package that consisted of
a tape of a new bootleg he bought—Knebworth.
I wasn’t real familiar with
mid-Seventies Genesis, so I listened to that tape all the time as I’d head out
on the Edens Expressway, heading North to Lake-Cook Road in hopes of finding
something, anything, to write about that day.
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