I should've wriggled harder, or kicked his shins when I saw him coming.
But Jeff Goertzen got a good grip on my puny arm; and before I knew it he had slam-dunked me into a 50-gallon trash can in the Renegade Rip newsroom.I was 9. He was 20ish, and a graphics artist for the weekly Bakersfield College campus newspaper where my mom worked.
Goertzen, now with the Dallas Morning News, taught me the first of many lessons I learned in newsrooms: Don't linger between someone bigger than you and an empty trash can.
The "Don't Linger" lesson proved less impressionable than another that stuck during several years tagging along with my journalist mom in college and local newsrooms: "Don't make stuff up."
I've learned more in 12 years of newspapering: Spell a person's name right or they'll hate you forever, write the good along with the bad - and print what people say, not what you think they should say.
We are on our honor. Yes, we can make things up. Yes, we probably can find a way to sneak almost anything into today's pages. We are on our honor.
I remain perplexed by three things after reading recently that Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith - a decorated writer and journalism convention favorite - resigned after admitting she created characters in four of her recent columns.
First, that it takes a fair amount of pluck to presume that your fiction is better than the public's truth.
Second, that everything really is about entertainment.
Third, that Smith's fiction must reflect her belief that the Boston Globe isn't really about reality - which I define as news and happenings. Instead, she perceived it to be about her version of "truth," a convenient mix of fiction, philosophy and poetry.
Smith called herself a poet.
She contrived a cosmetologist, a marathon volunteer, a mom whose daughter was getting a makeover and an eloquent woman dying of cancer.
"Claire" was the centerpiece of a story about promising cancer therapies demonstrated in mice.
"I'm not proud," says Claire, the false feature of the story. "Right away, I said, `rub it on my skin, pop it to me in a pill, shoot me up with it.' If I could find a way to steal it, I would. Hell, if I could get my hands on it, I'd swallow the whole . . . mouse."
When caught, Smith did apologize. In a final column last Friday she said, "From time to time in my metro column, to create the desired impact or slam home a salient point, I attributed quotes to people who didn't exist."
Smith won this year's Distinguished Writing Award given by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, but the group withdrew the award Thursday at the urging of Smith's editor.
Maybe it's me. Maybe it was growing up in Bakersfield. But it has always seemed to me if you talked to enough folks, went to enough places, snooped around and paid attention, you could always find a story better than anything you could dream up.
Bakersfield - butt of late-night television jokes - was good to me, but it was a strange place. Some newsy things were obvious, some more subtle.
One year in the mid-1980s, we had honest-to-God Killer Bees. About the same time, a silhouette of the Virgin Mary appeared in the stucco of a central city home.
We had a dust storm so bad it pitted cars and shut down the schools. Another time we had a cricket infestation that left two feet of hard, dead insect bodies in our shed.
Bakersfield is home to former California state Sen. Don Rogers, who lived around the corner from me growing up.
While a senator, and under financial duress, Rogers asserted that as a white man, he couldn't be required to pay income taxes because he is not a citizen of the United State under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. He filed a document that said so, despite the fact U.S. citizenship is a requirement for the California State Legislature.
There were stories more sub-lime.
In the early 1980s, a retired police commissioner killed himself behind my house. Our neighbor to the rear, Glenn Fitts, was a widower. He taught "administration of justice" classes at the college where Mom taught. He wrote law enforcement text books and had schooled half the city's police force on the science of their jobs. He drove a station wagon with wood paneling.
I heard two pops just as I was waking up one Sunday morning.
As it turned out, there were spectacular details in the shadows of our mundane, middle-class suburban neighborhood.
Turns out our neighbor was showing pornography to local teenagers in a special video room. Turns out drugs were being bought and sold from his house. Turns out Fitts was under constant police surveillance by the men and women he trained after a 15-year-old girl was found strangled outside of town.
There were other, more gruesome details I wish had been fiction.
Reporting is hard. Gov. Mike Leavitt, Salt Lake Mayor Deedee Corradini and Utes coach Rick Majerus - these people are articulate, quotable. Sometimes average people are not.
Smith wrote three columns a week - all played prominently on the pages of the Boston Globe. She is fallible, Smith wrote in her final column, and tried to be "10 times as good by doing 10 times as much."
Smith wrote she wanted her columns "to jolt, to be talked about, to leave the reader indelibly impressed.
"And sometimes, as a result of trying to do too much at once and cutting corners, they didn't," she wrote. "So I tweaked them to make sure they did."
I can't understand this pressure, but my stepfather can.
As a sports columnist for the Bakersfield Californian, Larry Press wrote five columns a week for 40 years. They weren't all tomes. They weren't all good. They certainly weren't all poetry.
But Larry had a reputation for getting out and meeting people. There were L.A. Dodgers to interview, but there were also ballboys.
Spend two hours asking questions and almost everyone has some interesting perspective.
Journalists are taking a beating. Or rather, we are asking for the beating ourselves.
The New Republic magazine recently admitted that 27 of 41 articles written by Stephen Glass had partial falsehoods.
Time magazine said a story about the use of lethal nerve gas during the Vietnam War published in connection with CNN may be false.
The new media watchdog magazine Brills Content charged in an article that journalists inadequately reported and jumped to conclusions in the early weeks of the Monica Lewinsky matter. But the article, written by Steven Brill, was attacked for misquoting some sources and not identifying others.
So journalists may deserve to get the worst spanking of their lives.
We cannot create truth as we see it, and hopefully we do not. I'm challenging myself to get away from the office and meet some people. I'm going to shut down the Internet and see who I can find to talk to.
I'll bet I find someone interesting. And until I do, I promise not to make anything up.