For early police reporter,
little room allowed for error

The job of a reporter was tough and expectations high from The Journal’s early days onward. Colin J. “Mac” McDonald, who started at The Journal in 1927, gave readers in 1976 a taste of what the old days were like. The following is taken from his account.

I was on the job when police got the call on the early afternoon bus-train crash on Fenton Road.

Colin J. 'Mac' McDonald

I sped there, then on to Hurley Hospital. Swiftly getting names and injuries of the numerous victims, I phoned them and other details to the city desk in time to get the complete story into that day’s Journal.

The city editor liked that.

A few weeks before or after that incident, I was on top of another early afternoon story. I arrived at an apartment in a house near Hurley just as a young woman, her throat cut and her eyes rolling back in her head, breathed her last. Beside her lay her common-law husband, and near the door stood a policeman who had just shot the man when he refused to drop his razor. Again, I was on the phone in time to make the deadline.

The city editor liked that, too.

But he was not pleased over what happened when he called me in from the police beat one morning in 1932 and told me he was sending me to Bay City to cover that day’s session of the federal grand jury.

It was the grand jury that was about to indict Mayor William H. McKeighan and other city and police officials for conspiracy to violate the federal prohibition law.

As he gave me his instructions, I stood there dreaming of making Page 1 and having my name on the story (he was stingy with bylines, but the reporter who usually covered the grand jury had been getting one every day). When he finished, I realized I hadn’t heard a word he said and fearfully confessed it.

He was irked, but instead of howling with rage, as some city editors have been known to do under equal provocation, he patiently repeated his orders.

I didn’t get the byline.

That city editor was Roy K. Lawrence, who had held the job for nine years when I went to work for The Journal as a full-time reporter in February of 1928 at the age of 19 after five months as a part-time staffer. He continued as city editor until 1934 and was a reporter from that year until his death in 1942 at the age of 56.

The old-timers said Roy had been a great police reporter. He expected his police reporters to be just as good, to be on top of every big story, day or night. The 40-hour week was years in the future, and so was overtime pay.

Roy used to bicycle during his years as a reporter, but he recalled that he ran to the Michigan School for the Deaf, about a mile from his home, when called about a dormitory fire there on May 21, 1912. He expected tragedy. To his relief, he found that all the boys and girls in the building — 290 of them — had filed safely out. That was one of his biggest stories.