Monday, May. 18, 1970
Front-Page Fitzpatrick
Everyone knows that the hard-drinking, writin', fightin' newspaperman is a creature of the past, a denizen of a simpler age, when "media" was just a word in Latin and penny-press barons waged ferocious circulation wars with gory headlines and salacious scoops. Everyone, that is, except people who know Tom Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Sun-Times. At 42, "Fitz" seems to be a character straight from the typewriters of Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, reporting, writing, drinking and brawling in the best Front Page tradition. "Yeah," he says. "I'm out of my time. I would have been great 30 years ago." Perhaps, but the Pulitzer committee, which last week awarded him the prize for local general reporting, seems to think he is pretty good right now.*
Stupid Bowlers. Fitzpatrick won his Pulitzer for a first-person, 1,500-word account of S.D.S. Weathermen on the rampage last fall in Chicago. "I got the story because I can run like a scared antelope when I have to," he says. "I ran five miles with those kids that night, and I kept up with them." After the running, he really had to pour on the steam, banging out some ten pages against a deadline only 40 minutes away, finishing so close to it that he did not even have a chance to read the story over. In the eyewitness account, Fitzpatrick refuses to moralize. Instead, he creates a word picture of the rampage that leaves the reader out of breath. "By this time," he wrote of the early part of the run, "you have already learned one important rule about mobs who are tossing rocks. You have to stay up front and stay right in the street with them. If you get on the sidewalk, you'll never see the rock that hits you instead of an apartment window." Later comes the confrontation: the police "were lined up across the street, and they weren't saying a word. It was a sight so formidable that you didn't blame the kids when they turned and ran back . . . to escape."
Even without reworking his story, Fitzpatrick knew it was first-rate. In fact, an hour before he was notified that he had won a Pulitzer, he walked into the office of Sun-Times Editor Jim Hoge to announce: "If this contest isn't rigged, I think I'm going to win."
For Fitzpatrick, it was a long-delayed victory. A journalism major at Kent State, he switched to English when the chairman of the journalism department told him he could not write and would never make it as a reporter. For a long time, it seemed that the chairman was at least half right. As a cub reporter on the Toledo Blade in 1957, Fitzpatrick freelanced a story for a competing paper. He was fired. At his next job, in Lima, Ohio, he recalls that "I was writing a column in which I said that bowling was stupid and that bowlers were stupid. The publisher told me I couldn't say that any more. So the next morning, I wrote another column saying how stupid I thought bowlers were." Again he was fired.
After some relatively quiet years on the Chicago Tribune (where he won the paper's Beck award in 1963 for his reporting of a mine disaster), Fitzpatrick was hired in 1966 by the Chicago Daily News to cover baseball. At the Chicago Cubs-White Sox intracity game of 1966, Fitzpatrick, who had been drinking, started slugging it out with another reporter a few feet away from his managing editor. The next morning, Fitzpatrick says, the editor "accused me of ruining the greatest day in sports in the history of the city of Chicago." Once again he was fired.
His next tour of duty was on the copy desk of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "They were going to rehabilitate me," Fitzpatrick recalls. "They weren't going to let me out on the street to report. I stayed there until I couldn't stand it any longer. Then I got drunk and they fired me." Back to freelancing and Chicago, where Sun-Times Editor Hoge took him aside one day and said he had a job for him if he could straighten up. Fitzpatrick said he could.
He cut down on his beer drinking and began jogging three to five miles a day. He lost 40 Ibs. (down to 185 Ibs.) and has gone for weeks at a time without a drink. "I wanted to be in good shape because I wanted to prove to everybody I wasn't a drunk," he says. Still, the reformed Fitzpatrick has had his incidents. A month ago he was assigned to cover one of the first flights of a Boeing 747 from New York to Paris as part of his vacation time. He got a passport and said goodbye on Monday for the Tuesday flight. Wednesday he called the city desk. "This is Fitz," he said. "I'm not in Paris." As he tells it, he had gone out drinking with friends, lost his passport in their car, and didn't find it till two days later. "I guess I really didn't want to go to Paris," he says.
Marshal with Guts. Covering the Chicago conspiracy trial, Fitzpatrick was denied entrance to the pressroom one day after proceedings had ended. He gave the federal marshal "my freedom-of-the-press speech. Then I told him I'd like to see if he had the guts to throw me in jail." The marshal did have the guts; Fitzpatrick was booked. He still bristles at the incident. "I feel that on a story I've got a right to be there and cover everything," he fumes. "If it costs me my life, if I get fired and can never get another job, that's O.K. I'm still going to write the story the way I see it."
As of last week, the chances of another Fitzpatrick firing were clearly diminished. In victory, he was magnanimous. "I owe it all to Jim Hoge," he said, "because he gave me a job when nobody else in the country would have hired me." Then he added: "And I owe it all to me because I'm so good."
*The other Pulitzer journalism winners: Thomas Darcy, Editorial Cartooning, Newsday; William Eaton, National Reporting, Chicago Daily News; Philip Geyelin, Editorial Writing, Washington Post; Seymour Hersh, International Reporting, Dispatch News Service; Marquis Childs, Commentary, St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Ada Louise Huxtable, Criticism, New York Times; Dallas Kinney, Feature Photography, Palm Beach Post; Harold Martin, Local Reporting, Special, Alabama Journal; and Steve Starr, Spot News Photography, Associated Press.
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