Angels? copilot recalls GOD, days of 'developer fluid?

(Editor's Note: While Joe Mc-Adoo frolics on the beaches of Maui, SBJ staff will be filling in on the Rusty Saber beat. This week, reporter Cheryl Capages recalls the good old days of Springfield journalism.)

Taking some time off from a 23-year-long adventure as a lawyer was what the doctor ordered. With a year under my belt, I can once again call my-self a journalist.

But I had a lot of help, starting with Dale Freeman, who gave me my first reporter job with the evening paper here, the Leader-Press.

As I recall, GOD (Good Ol' Dale) once said that we weren't doing good jobs as reporters unless everyone was mad at us!

It was from him that I learned reporters must always be on the lookout for what the "damguvment" is doing. In his Sunday "The Ozarker" column, Dale sipped a "Big Arnj" in his backyard rose garden with his better half, Jean, and made jibes at politicians and reformers. He made us think outside the box.

Dale did other things for us, too, like finagling 25-cent-an-hour raises for us and expecting us to be grateful. We didn't do it for the money, anyway.

He let us have traditions, too. As a daily paper, we worked on holidays. But after we put the paper to bed, we'd sneak off in small groups to the photo lab and secretly toast the holiday with "developer fluid," as we termed it.

Dale made us work as a team, and we laughed a lot, especially at ourselves. When I was lucky enough to land the assignment to fly with the Blue Angels in a trainer jet, I'm sure he had something to do with the photo that ran with the story it was me getting out of the jet cockpit, bottom first.

But it was wonderful fun.

"What a great job! I can't believe they actually pay me to do this!" I remarked to Betty Love, the pioneering female photographer, when I was still a cub. She just snorted at me and made a U-turn on Glenstone during peak traffic. Good ol' Betty.

Artist that she was, Betty excelled at color photography and unique photos, teaching me to pay attention to details. For one of my stories, she meticulously arranged Fostoria glassware for at least 45 minutes to get the lighting just so.

She also took a photo of a Bengal tiger. "You don't see any cage bars in the picture do you?" she cackled. That's be-cause she took the picture from inside the cage.

I learned my craft from great wordsmiths, especially Tom El-lis, farm page editor and resident ornery codger, a title he held in great esteem. He also penned the most delicate prose to the changing seasons on the op-ed pages. Tom was the original "Curbstone Critic," a col-umnist who poked fun at all kinds of silly things like or-ganized religion and city government. Members of religious groups would come to the newsroom to pray over him. I swear, it's true!

Frank Farmer, police reporter for years and co-editor of the farm pages, was a wonderful teacher and yarn-spinner. With his down-home manner, Frank taught that the best way to get a reluctant interviewee to talk was to say, "Tell me about your dad. I bet he was a good ol' boy." He could write about anything at length.

There were many more, in-cluding the wonderful cartoonist Bob Palmer probably the smartest man I ever knew outside my dad. Politicians clambered to get the originals of his pointed, lampooning cartoons of their antics. As photographer Bob Linder once said, "We were lucky to have crossed his path."

And then there was Mike O'Brien, who like the Scare-crow was to Dorothy was the one I loved most of all. "Obie" was the greatest inspiration to us.

As feature page editor and later, city editor, he cheered, coaxed and edited all of us on to better writing and national awards. We loved to make him laugh, because he enjoyed it so.

I can still hear his gleeful chortle from the time I telephoned in a big story from Kansas City. Tricky Dick was in KC swearing in its chief of police as the new FBI director.

I began the story with this lead "Standing a stone's throw from President Nixon ..." O'Brien cracked up on the other end of the phone and fell out of his chair. I had to think a moment about what I'd written. "Stone's throw" "Richard Nixon" maybe you had to be there. But it was funny, and it stayed as the lead.

You know, I could write a book about the folks at the old Springfield Newspapers. Maybe I will.