For Seniors : Luckily for USC, Those Who Can Do, Also Teach

Just when you thought everyone with wisdom and historical perspective has either been given a golden handshake or helped out the door with a buyout, along comes Murray Fromson. He’s 65 and USC hired him last month to be director of its School of Journalism.

And why not? Between his stint as a reporter for the Associated Press and his long career as a news correspondent with CBS television, Fromson has seen and reported on a wealth of historic events.

But Fromson brings to his new title at USC more than his career achievements. He’s passionate about his profession and deeply concerned about the education of young journalists.

Fromson doesn’t forget the horrors he has seen or what shaped him as a man.

“I had my first knife fight when I was 8. I probably should have been a thug after growing up in a tough Bronx neighborhood,” he said, putting his feet up on the couch in his Brentwood home.

And maybe he would have if he hadn’t looked up one day when he was 7 and seen the Hindenburg fly overhead. When he raced home and turned on the radio to hear the news about it, what he heard, instead, was the now-famous broadcast of the airship’s fiery destruction.

“I knew I wanted to be a journalist. To be able to report that sight with only language and leave such images--well, there couldn’t be anything better,” he said.

Fromson’s early life was hardly rosy. Deserted by his father during the Depression and left with a mother so tortured by ill fortune that she could not care for her son, he was placed in a foster home at age 5. He was removed from that home five years later when a social worker thought the couple caring for Fromson were too old.

He remembers being humiliated by getting clothes and medical care through charity. “Being on relief is a terribly degrading experience,” he says.

And that’s all he wants to say about it. He doesn’t even want to dwell on his professional past, saying his reticence is due to an article he’s doing for the New Yorker and a book he’s writing about the Cold War, America and the press.

Still, even a short talk with Fromson is rich enough to recapture a rich career. After starting as a copy boy at the Los Angeles Times in 1946, he reported on the Korean War, was in Vietnam during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, lived in Moscow during the height of the Cold War, and covered the Chinese invasion of Burma and the war between India and Pakistan. Back home, he was with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, at the trial of the Chicago Seven and in Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement.

Regarding the profession, he says: “Television news and print reporting in general are in decline, but the free press is essential to the service of a healthy democracy. I’d rather live with a flawed institution than be subject to government censorship.”

But Fromson is doing more than living with the flaws. He’s offering opportunities to correct them through the USC Center for International Journalism. The center, which he founded in 1985, offers fellowships to journalists to study politics, economic systems, languages and cultures.

Fromson got the idea for the center in 1972 when CBS asked him and his family to move to Moscow, recalls his wife, Dodi. “Murray wanted to study the language before he went, and CBS said no--not enough time or money,” she said. “I mean, how could we move to the Soviet Union and not even know what the store signs said? Finally, he told them he wouldn’t go without some Russian, and he received eight weeks of instruction.”

Fromson considers the center to be his most satisfying accomplishment. “History is important, and a good journalist has to be a student of history,” he said.

Fromson is enthusiastic about working with student journalists and warns that he will never retire.

“Journalism made my life. I love this business with a passion--though I’m probably not good-looking enough to break into television today,” he said.