Expressionless, he muttered, throwing my file aside, “Smart, huh? Let’s see where that would get you.”
Where that would get me? To the ladies’ room, where on count- less afternoons, deadline time, I cried buckets after reprimands by the gods—over wrong grammar, weak stories, overwritten features, wrong information, bad layout. Name the offense, I must have committed it. But having broken me down, they also built me up. It was a learning experience like no other. What were the rudiments of journalism I learned from Joe Luna (who, if you didn’t know, wrote the journalism textbook in use in schools for the longest time) and my other career deities? As an editor, watch out for racist or sexist lines. Until my near-hanging in the newsroom, I didn’t realize there could be landmines in the contributor’s copy I was editing. In a first- person account of her stay in Nigeria, this contributor wrote that the water was so bad, “one could actually grow scales.” I found that line grabbing so I enlarged it as a pull-quote beside the story, to get the readers’ attention. Smart. The day the story ran, a delegation of Nigerian students walked into the office of Joe Luna, demanding a letter of apology from the newspaper. Otherwise, they threatened, their government would file a diplomatic protest. Again the summons came, and I was asked to sit outside Joe Luna’s office while he tried to avert a diplomatic row. It was the longest 20 minutes I had spent sitting. I waited for the ceiling to fall on me, a fate kinder than having to face my editor. After the students left, Joe Luna called me in and asked, “Now, give me one reason why I shouldn’t fire you.” Again, to the ladies’ room.
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