Turning the Page

The great biographer Robert Caro cites a reporting admonition he first learned from an old Newsday editor who was schooling him in the business of public records. "Turn every page," the editor said. Sopecifically, he meant a reporter must examine every piece of paper, peruse every document from front to back. More generally, he meant a reporter must be impeccably thorough. One never knows where the treasure or the smoking gun may be buried.

This is, for me, both the most difficult and the most fun part of writng a book like 'Nightmare in the Pacific.' I had a blast taking, for instance, an Amtrak train from Washington, D.C.'s Union Station

to Newark's Penn Station early one morning and then walking several blocks to the Rutgers University Library, home of the Institute of Jazz Studies.

Rutgers University Libraries

The archivist set me up at a desk and delivered on a dolly several of those lovely boxes containing...well, that's the point. I wouldn't know what information was contained within until I lifted each manila folder, extracted a piece of paper and settled in for the reading. Good times!

The hard part, for me, comes as the day wears on and the closing time approaches. I get tempted to rush. I take less care in replacing the manila folders in the box. I start to skim, until the Caro inside my head smacks me back into line.

And sometimes, you find a page where you least expect it.

The late afternoon walk from the Rutgers University library back to Penn Station took me down Market Street, a gritty and beaten-down urban scene that I was anxious to escape as I scurried along with my briefcase but that I later came to revisit in memory as I learned about drummer Dave Tough's final stumbling walk along that same street.

-- Jan. 7, 2025.