Journalism Texas Style

Dan Jenkins comes by journalism organically: “Part of it was going to movies where guys like Clark Gable wore a press pass in their hat.” In downtown Ft. Worth, he attended Paschal High School, which also brought us writers Bud Shrake and Liz Smith, movie star Ginger Rogers, golfer Ben Hogan, Gov. Price Daniel and man-on-the-moon Alan Bean. Jenkins and his wife, June, just attended the 100th anniversary of the high school this Oct. 28.

“I can’t remember when I didn’t want to be a writer. As an 8-year-old kid, I pulled an old typewriter out of the attic, put it on the kitchen table and started copying news stories out of the paper,” he recalls. “Later, I started writing my own versions.”

It was in high school when he wrote a funny satire on a Ft. Worth Star-Telegram columnist for his school paper. The sports editor at the Ft. Worth Press, Blackie Sherrod, read it and hired Jenkins sight unseen “because he was gutsy and a satirist.” That was 40 years ago.

“Dan was the most confident writer I ever knew. Never re-wrote anything, had a sense of the ridiculous and the best ear for dialogue I ever read,” Sherrod recalls.

Thus began the reporting saga of Dan Jenkins, who spent 15 years as an ace sportswriter when little Davey O’Brien and Slingin’ Sammy Baugh were making football history.

Last November, Jenkins published his ninth novel,”Fast Copy” (Simon & Schuster: $19.95), his resounding “yes” to the country and Western song, “Does Ft. Worth Ever Cross Your Mind?” Crossing Jenkins’ mind is not only Ft. Worth but the 1930s, “when everything was better--theater, football games, gangsters (of course), Presidents, summer nights, cafes, saloons--everything but air conditioning.”

We were having breakfast to talk about the book, the rollicking saga of Betsy Throckmorton, a beautiful and feisty newswoman who returns to her hometown of Claybelle, Tex., with her Barnard College education, her Time magazine experience and her handsome, ever-loving husband. Once home with Daddy, the publisher of the Claybelle newspaper, Betsy discovers the hometown banker engaged in a get-rich murder scheme. It is Bonnie-and-Clyde time, with every banker in Texas scared silly of a hold-up. The Texas Bankers Assn. has littered the state with a brochure that reads: “Reward--$5,000 for every dead bankrobber; not one cent for a living one.”

Into this story of blood and print and love, Jenkins weaves those thigh-slapping cornball descriptions that are so characteristic of his style. In “Fast Copy,” he doesn’t disguise his long romance with news reporting and “every ink-stained wretch who knows what it’s like to wait for the deadline muse.”

Jenkins admits to rewriting, researching--and suffering while writing this novel. “I hit the microfilm at the Star-Telegram for nine months when (wife) June was establishing Juanita’s,” a Mexican restaurant chain she owns in New York, Florida, and on Ft. Worth’s Sundance Square, where you find the flavor of Cowtown restored by the Bass Brothers.

Out of it came the headlines and news stories that verified his own memory of his favorite era:

“I loved everything about the ‘30s,” which he stretches from the Depression (1929) to Pearl Harbor (1941), “the Texas Rangers, Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone, and the glittery Texas Centennial with Amon Carter’s billboard invitation: ‘Go to Dallas for culture; come to Ft. Worth for fun.’ ”

“Ft. Worth is Texas; Dallas is Atlanta,” Jenkins says.

The flavor of Jenkins’ prose, like Pace’s picante sauce, stretches from Claybelle clear to New York City. A “Fast Copy” sampler:

--”Texans never let facts interfere with their opinions.”

--” ’Waco?’ Florine said, ‘There’s nothing in Waco but tornadoes and Baylor. If the Baptists don’t get you, the funnels will.’ ”

--” ’Why wouldn’t she know what she’s talking about?’ Ben said. ‘She’s my daughter, isn’t she? It’s a genes deal.’ ”

--”Betsy had spent more time in the newsroom than a moldy sandwich. . . . She had grown up on Southwest Conference football, but Ben would have suffered two strokes and a hemorrhage if she hadn’t gone East to get the thick-book education he could well afford at Barnard College for Women.”

--Time editors: “. . . all dripping with Princeton ivy or speaking in quaint Harvard stammers.” Time researchers: “. . . headed by a woman whose hair was worn in bangs, who wore bulky sweaters, Scottish plaid skirts, ballet shoes and could name all of the European capitals.”

--”Ruth was a sob sister for the Daily News, a plump, gaudily dressed woman with frosty eyes and dyed-blond hair. Her ambition was to get off the tear-stained gossip sidebars about the mothers of dead cops and become a three-dot gossip columnist so she could eat free in good restaurants.”

During the ‘30s, Jenkins remembers, hobo towns in Texas were easy prey of small-town scams and bigots who would deliver DOA anybody who hadn’t shaved, just to claim the reward offered by the Texas Bankers Assn. Jenkins based his story on a small-town newspaper editor who teamed up with Texas Ranger Frank Hammer to stop the human slaughter.

“I work a lot on picking names for my characters, names that should be in Texas. The right name in a novel is important,” he says. “Ft. Worth had two good guys who were rich, Amon Carter and Sid Richardson.”

Both appear in the person of his 55-year-old publisher of the Claybelle Times-Standard, Ben Throckmorton. The villain is named Lank Allred.

Part of the charm of the book is print folklore, a Texanized version of “Front Page.” It should be required reading at journalism schools, which are now all named Departments of Communications or Media Centers. There, the rollicking romance of the trade is lost. Journalism history should never fall into the cracks. No--once there was a bar near every newspaper office where reporters gathered after deadlines, drank cheap whiskey and indulged in their favorite pastime: quoting leads and guessing whether it was from the by-line of Damon Runyon or H. L. Mencken or Herbert Bayard Swope. Matthew Arnold called it “literature in a hurry.” But it was a time that produced newspaper copy so vivid and free-wheeling that readers were lured into the story, however trivial or world-shaking, and became part of the human comedy and tragedy going on around them.

For his own part, Jenkins’ favorite lead was written by St. John in the Bible: “Jesus wept.”

On second thought, he says, maybe it was Damon Runyon’s lead on Al Capone’s trial: “Al Capone was quietly dressed this morning, except for a hat of pearly white, emblematic, no doubt, of purity.”

Jenkins, long acclaimed as the best sports writer Texas ever bred, may be more: He may be simply our best writer.