As author Philip Meyer sat in a college class listening to a professor lecture about systematic tools for measuring things like trust in government, a thought struck him: a journalist could do this! He thought about the newsroom conversations he'd had about the possibility of reporting on some interesting social phenomena. The group always ended with a shrug and a lament that there was no way to measure it-but he began to wonder. It was an epiphany for Meyer, who went on to report on the 1967 racial riots in Detroit and write the groundbreaking book Precision Journalism. While others were arguing that reporters should not use scientific methods to make conclusions of their own, Meyer was using computers and statistical software to elevate the standards of traditional journalism. At age fifty, he switched gears and entered the world of academe, where he continues to stir the pot. In Paper Route, he recalls two interconnected careers and examines how journalism, quantitative methods, and original thinking led him to live the remarkable life that he's still enjoying.

Paper Route

Finding My Way to Precision JournalismBy Philip Meyer

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Philip Meyer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-8312-1

Contents

Introduction...............................................vii1. The land...............................................12. World War I and its effects............................73. My arrival and the long disruption.....................254. The World War II Years.................................395. High school journalism.................................576. Off to college.........................................657. Becoming a newspaperman................................798. The Topeka Daily Capital...............................919. The Silent Generation speaks...........................10110. Another war............................................11911. Up in the air, upside down.............................13312. Aboard the USS Pocono..................................14713. The Kansas desk........................................15314. Hark the sound.........................................16715. Getting sand in our shoes..............................17716. Becoming an investigative reporter.....................19317. Washington D.C.........................................20718. Escape to Harvard......................................23519. The Detroit riot.......................................25920. A year with too much news..............................26921. "You're a sound man."..................................28522. Precision Journalism...................................29723. Executive suite........................................31724. The rest of the story..................................335Endnotes...................................................339Index......................................................343

Chapter One

The land

We moved often in the Depression years, and the two farms were the constant in our lives that kept us emotionally anchored. My parents were born in adjoining townships in Washington County, Kan., and they spent all but a few wartime months of their married life no more than one county away from their original family farms. The siblings on both sides had grown and scattered, but each family left a bachelor brother who kept the original farm operating both for his own support and as a resource and refuge for the extended family.

The Meyer farm, in Strawberry Township, was the more prosperous. My Swiss-born grandfather Jacob Meyer acquired its first 120 acres from the original homesteader, Christian Wherley, in 1880, and expanded it by buying two adjoining farms, each 160 acres, the standard size set by the Homestead Act of 1862. Roads in the prairie states are neatly laid out in square-mile sections clearly visible on cross-country flights. Four 160-acre homesteads fit in a section. Twenty-five years after his original purchase, Jacob made the final payment on the third farm, and he owned, debt-fee, 440 contiguous acres of gently rolling fields and pasture with a creek running through the eastern portion. It was called Pete's Creek, Peats Creek, or Peach Creek, depending on whose map you used. The original Wherley house had just two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom, but Jacob kept adding to it as his family grew to its full complement of eight children. Frank Meyer, born in 1886, a decade before my father, remembered the house as it was when he was a small child:

... a two-room homesteader's frame house; that is, two rooms on the ground floor and two above, which are still unfinished and used only for storage. I can still see the long shelves suspended on wires from the rafters, as a protection from mice. Among other things these shelves contained the year's supply of flour, which was milled from wheat grown on the farm and taken to a mill 17 miles away.

The south room on the ground floor is the kitchen, dining, and living room combined. The bedroom faces the north, with one window on the north wall and one on the east. I am sleeping in a crib facing the north window. I awaken sometime in the night and am aware of being very, very cold and that an icy, gusty wind is beating snow against the window panes and am conscious for the first time of a real Kansas blizzard.

My own childhood memory begins nearly five decades later, and it shows a relatively modern seven-room house with electricity and indoor plumbing. The power came from a bank of six-volt batteries stored in the milk house and charged by a one-cylinder gasoline engine. It was enough to light a single weak bulb in each room and power the radio. The bathroom, built by my father in his late bachelor days, contained a flush toilet and a tub whose water source was a well situated in a draw halfway between the house and barn. A windmill pumped the water to a storage tank in the barn loft, which provided enough elevation to create water pressure for the house. This water supplied the bathtub, the toilet and the kitchen sink. Drinking water came from a well next to the house. We used a hand pump to fill an oaken bucket that we kept on the kitchen counter with a dipper for drinking. Today, we call that kind of living "off the grid," but in rural Kansas of the early 20th century, the power grid had not yet been built.

Two stoves lined the north wall of the Meyer kitchen. The larger one burned wood for winter cooking and heating, and the small kerosene stove was used for preparing summer meals. A pail of dried corncobs was kept handy for kindling. There was a pass-through serving bar to the dining room with china cabinets above. A hand-cranked telephone and a foot-powered sewing machine decorated the far wall of the dining room, which opened to a spacious living room containing a pot-bellied wood stove, a piano, a library table stocked with Dr. Elliot's five-foot shelf of Harvard Classics, and a Morris chair whose reclining back adjusted with a rod that fit into grooves at the rear of its wooden arms. A hollow footstool contained playing cards and a cribbage board. The ground-floor bedroom had doors to both the living room and a short hallway leading to the, bathroom, kitchen, and the stairs to the second floor. The fourth and last-built bedroom was above the living room and was large enough to sleep four.

Jacob and Matilda Meyer had eight children in the 22 years from 1884 to 1906, and the house comfortably held them all. That was not the case with my mother's family. William and Zelda Mae Morrison had six children in nine years and raised them in a two-bedroom house a few miles to the east, in Linn Township. I'm not sure how they managed it. The two small bedrooms each had a double bed flush against an interior wall. There was a day bed suitable for one person in the living room, and the enclosed back porch contained a manual cream separator and an iron double bed.

The original owner of the land had built dirt-floored living space in below-ground rooms, accessible on the east side, and perhaps those were still habitable, although by the 1930s they were used only to keep food cool in the summer and to frighten small boys with tales of ghosts. A small bathroom with a tub was located off the kitchen, but water had to be carried to it from an indoor pitcher pump that retrieved captured rainwater from a cistern.

At night, the house was lit with a few kerosene lamps carried from room to room, and the toilet was an outhouse in the far backyard, beyond the chicken house. Life was harder there, especially in the winters when keeping warm and putting food on the table were...