Retired Vice President and Special Correspondent, to the AP 25-Year Club Dinner in New York

I spent some time trying to figure out how one should address a gathering of AP people with such a remarkable array of seasoning, wisdom, service and experience. Then it came to me — so I will begin: Fellow fogeys.

We are here tonight as colleagues who shared the last 25 years or more in service to The Associated Press. Over those years, we handled stories we couldn't have imagined — the aftermath of a president's resignation, the American withdrawal that finally ended the Vietnam war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and then of the Soviet Union itself, the Challenger disaster, the impeachment of a president who didn't have sex with that woman, the election that wouldn't end.

Those are among the stories I remember most vividly since 1975. 1 know that each of you has your own list of the stories that you handled — wrote, edited, assigned, photographed — that are the markers of your career so far.

The great thing about working for the AP is the so far — the certainty that there is another major story ahead, one that may move to the top of your own personal news digest. That certainly was the case over my 45 years — the next story was always the one that counted most.

But, of course, we didn't spend every hour working. We had to have time to gossip and gripe. I mean, what's the point of going to work every day if you can't second guess the boss.

I venture to say that we, together, are champions at that pursuit. We've been around long enough to complain among ourselves about the way things were under not one or two but three AP presidents — Lou (Boccardi), Keith Fuller and Wes Gallagher. If they'd only have listened to us, we could have told them how to run the place.

Although I guess we would have to admit that they managed fairly well, even without our intervention.

And for all the off hours griping, we're still here, the lifers. That makes us an unusual company, especially in recent times. We are like the rare major leaguers who spend an entire career with one team.

At this point, I do have to confess that I didn't quite do that myself. I left the AP briefly in 1974 to become Washington bureau chief of the Detroit News. The pay was better but the work wasn't. I learned that within a week — I missed the sense of urgency and commitment I had learned in 19 AP years, so I quit and came back in less than a year. It was not a happy experience, but it was a valuable one when I became bureau chief and then executive editor, because it enabled me to work with staffers facing similar turning points in their careers knowing what I was talking about. Some left, some stayed. I tried to help and encourage all of them.

We are an unusual class of people, even those of us with an asterisk like mine. Not many people in today's economy join an organization and spend a career there. The more usual career path is one of changing courses and employers, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the lure of a dot com that turns out to be counterfeit.

Years ago the Wall Street Journal did a profile of me by way of explaining the role of the AP and the wire services — there were two real ones then — in covering presidential campaigns. A friend who worked for what we then called the specials, meaning the daily newspapers, paid me an odd compliment. His quote was — "at what he does, Mears is the best. But nobody can figure out why he wants to do it." He was talking about filing under pressure, delivering copy instantly, working two cycles and handling all the other burdens of our calling. You can figure out why I wanted to do it — there is no more important work in journalism, and once you learn how to do the AP job, it becomes addictive. I never envied the people I traveled with who had all day and half the night to write their campaign stories.

All they did was prove the rule that work expands to fill the available time. The story you do immediately, while it is all fresh and before you start agonizing about wording, is likely to be the best story you can produce. At least it was for me.

We work harder than most people in the news business. We do it better than most people. And we are damned proud of it. Which is not to say that we aren't often frustrated by nitpicking editors and members, that we don't feel overworked and sometimes undervalued. One of the cliches of the profession is the one about wire service journalism. That is supposed to mean drab, dry, formula writing, sort of raw material, not the elegant prose of the Times or the Post or the Tribune writer. That myth is perpetuated by people who do not read our kind of wire service writing. Given the sheer volume of what we do, we have our share of copy that fits the cliche. But I will match our best against any in the business.

That's one of the reasons we are all here after all these years. There are people who couldn't do our work, good journalists who couldn't handle what we do every day. But for those of us who can, the AP is a professional home like no other.

I remember a bureau chiefs' meeting about 20 years ago when Keith Fuller lamented the distance that had grown between AP people in the age of computers and instant messaging. He said the relationship of the old slow speed days, 60 words a minute on clattering teletypes, when the AP was a smaller, simpler organization, had passed, that AP people had too often lost touch with each other.

I knew what he meant — when I started in Boston in 1955, we still had Morse code operators. The basic communications equipment of the AP was the model 15 Teletype, which went into service in 1935. That's the year I was born. Then the computer changed everything and the old ways were obsolete.

When I was working in New England before I went to Washington in 1961, there was a Teletype repairman who handled member problems in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, on what seemed to be a constant road trip. When a bureau got a trouble call from Bangor or St. Johnsbury, the procedure was to put a message on the New England wire summoning him to come and fix it. He'd message back where he was and when he could get there.

So there is a different, often more distant relationship now. Our organization has become a vast one, expanding into areas we didn't touch in my early years. We work at terminals instead of typewriters and telephones. We communicate instantly, but in some ways, that makes us more distant. People send each other emails instead of walking across the room. But we are still a family. We talk a language unique to our business. We do things in ways most newspeople don't understand and wouldn't even try.

I think you are like I was for 45 years. Part of an AP world that is habit forming. For people who can do our work, there is nothing to match it — the exhilaration of a story you wrote and delivered while the rest of the pack was rummaging for a lead. Or the opportunity to help a young staffer learn how to do it. Even the grudging satisfaction that goes with finally satisfying a cranky member newspaper, even though you know the S0B will be complaining again in a day or so.

Since I've got the microphone, I'm going to share some of my AP memories, and hope to listen to some of yours over a drink or two. First, I have to confess that I rubbed some feelings the wrong way over the years, not by intent but because I was in a rush, and at times because I was nervous. Some people don't believe me when I say that, but I never handled a major story that didn't make me at least a little nervous. You're only as good as your last story, and I always wanted to make it the best one. I hope that helped me keep my edge, until the last story I wrote, the running on the inauguration of President Bush. But it obviously made me seem brusque.

Harry Rosenthal still says I snubbed him at the Harry Truman library in Independence in 1966 because I didn't use the telephone he had found and carefully set aside for me. I came to a pay phone first and grabbed it. I've tried to make amends, but Harry never forgets. That was the day Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill. I remember it because of the helpful editing New York provided. I filed a lead saying that Johnson signed the bill after a journey of a thousand miles to share the moment with Harry S. Truman. Some genius on the General Desk checked the Atlas and changed the lead to say it was a journey of 996 miles.

In Cincinnati in 1968, the correspondent asked if he could help and I said no, there wasn't anything to do just then so I was going to check into the hotel and relax and he should too. Somehow that came across as a brushoff and his bureau chief protested. Some of you may remember Jack Bell, the AP political writer until he retired in 1969. Jack was a crusty, old school newsman. Or, as some said, a curmudgeon.

So it sort of hurt when the Columbus bureau chief said that from then on, Washington should send him nice guys like Jack Bell, not people like Walter Mears.

That bothered me because I hadn't forgotten my own days as the local guy sent to help the Washington reporter. That was in 1960, when I distinguished myself at my first opportunity. I was sent from Boston to Providence to help on a John Kennedy campaign visit. The scene at the airport was chaotic and I couldn't find the AP team. So I got on the bus, went to the press room and asked somebody to point out Pat Morin of the AP.

Full name Relman, full reputation, two Pulitzer prizes, one for Korea, one for Little Rock an AP legend. He was over in the corner on the telephone. So I went over and sat beside him and waited. When he got off the phone I said "Mr. Morin, I'm Walter Mears from the Boston
bureau. Is there anything I can do to help?"

Yes, he said. You can get off my goddamned hat because you are sitting on it. I did and eventually we became friends.

I went to Washington the year Kennedy became president and was assigned to do my first running election copy in 1962. I was part of a team of three. Art Edson, a magnificent writer and Doug Cornell, my idol and role model, were the veterans and I was the rookie. Cornell was the ultimate AP artist, the best I ever saw at digesting and delivering a running story with a beautiful lead and doing it all instantly.

The Washington bureau chief asked Edson to keep an eye on me and give him a note on my performance that night. Art made a copy for me. His report said "Walter Mears writes faster than most people think and frequently faster than he thinks."

Since this is a night to reminisce, I am going to go back to my AP beginning, in the old Boston bureau, on what then was newspaper row, a cramped set of buildings on Washington Street, one of Boston's famously narrow main streets.

I still remember the frosted glass on the door emblazoned The Associated Press, and the wonder with which I walked through it every morning to handle copy and write stories that newspapers were actually going to print. And get paid for it. Fifty-five dollars a week.

My basic training was a sort of AP boot camp, under Francis R. Murphy, a crusty editor who made drill sergeants seem tame.

I would take a stringer call, type my story on a carbon book — the copy boys stapled them together using carbon paper that had been used in the Teletypes, so every shirtsleeve in the bureau turned instantly blue — and hand the story to Frank. His reactions were not gentle. More than once he ripped it into pieces and threw it away, counseling me at the top of his voice that it was no good. That went on for what seemed a long time, although it must have been only a week or so. I was convinced my fledgling career was about to crash on takeoff. Then one day Frank looked at a piece I'd turned in and said, that's okay. High praise from the drill sergeant.

After that, I was part of the operation, not just the college boy, as the veterans had said until then. Frank died before I got the Pulitzer Prize. I treasure the telegram I got from the veterans in Boston. It said "Frank Murphy would have been proud. We are."

In 1956, 1 was sent to open the AP bureau in Montpelier, Vt. In that era, the training program for becoming a correspondent was about like the one for becoming a newsman. Which is to say there wasn't any.

I was told to go and be the Vermont correspondent, and that I would find a desk and Teletype in the press room of the statehouse. I went there with my portable typewriter, found the desk and winged it. Since there had been no previous correspondent, at least I didn't suffer by comparison.

It was a one-man bureau, and the one man, scared and 21, had to learn how to do things in a hurry. I managed. It was a great place, a great job and an instant education in self sufficiency.

My first national campaign experience was in 1960, when somebody got sick and Washington needed a sub on the story. I was sent to NewYork from Hyannis Port with Kennedy to cover his first speech as the Democratic presidential nominee. I did and then set about dictating the story. I called 50 Rock and asked for the desk. That's what you did in Boston. Except that the operator said we have six desks, which one do you want. I asked her to list them. She said general, bureau, business, sports, foreign, world.

I guess I need the World Desk, I said, figuring that what I had was of world import. They weren't interested. I finally got connected to the bureau desk, which took my dictation. They weren't that interested either, but they took it.

Dictating, incidentally, is becoming a lost art, and it is one we ought to reclaim. Reporters may not have to dictate frequently, but knowing how
to do it can save you in a pinch and it also is the best way I know to get the story aligned in your head and ready to deliver, by dictating or by writing.

Like all of you, I suspect, there were times when I thought I deserved to earn more than I was making. I thought that after a year or so in Washington, so I screwed up my courage to ask Bill Beale, the bureau chief, for a raise. I was working nights so I went in a bit early one day to see him. He was standing by the mail desk, and I said Mr. Beale, could I speak with you.

What about, he said.

I think I have earned a merit raise, I replied.

At that, Beale turned without a word and walked into the men's room.

I found that puzzling, but I followed, thinking that perhaps that is where he had his merit raise conferences.

He was relieving himself. Being unfamiliar with bureau personnel policies and all, I decided to do the same. Before flushing, he said I can help you. And left. I got a ten dollar raise.

When I became bureau chief 15 years later, I chose to deal with merit requests in other surroundings.

Management brought its own set of problems. Fortunately for me and for the AP, it also brought Reid Miller from Miami to Washington. His title was assistant chief of bureau, but his job was partner, the best I ever had.

He helped with such intractable problems as the one that arose when one of our news dictationists, a less than stable man, came into my office and demanded to file a grievance against the Newspaper Guild. I said no, you can't file a grievance against the Guild. They do that. It's your union. He got a bit exercised and loud, but finally gave it up.

In 10 campaigns, and nine presidencies, Richard Nixon was the most fascinating politician I ever covered or know. He was a genius in many ways, a fool in enough others to bring him down.

I remember the night in 1972 when the White House said Nixon would be making a nationally televised statement from California. No subject announced. I did the running. There was no way to prepare because we didn't know what was involved.

Nixon went on the air and announced that he was going to travel to what was then called Communist China on a journey for peace. Thank you and good night.

There is no way to describe what an incredible moment that was. Nixon the Red baiter going to the capital of the Communist regime he had spent the early part of his career denouncing.

I delivered a nice clean bulletin. The problem was the second graf. We didn't have any. Nobody could remember whether we broke relations with Peking in 1948 or 1949. Nixon didn't say when he was going or who was going with him. He just said goodnight. It took a while to get that bulletin matter to the wire.

After Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, 1 was with Keith Fuller when he got a call from a southern publisher of the far right persuasion. I only heard one side of the conversation, of course, but it included Fuller's reassurance to the publisher that Reagan would do just fine as long as the damned national press stayed off his back. When I reminded Fuller that he WAS the damned national press, he replied with a less than conservative epithet.

My favorite campaign swing was a day with George Bush the elder during the 1992 New Hampshire primary season. Bush set a record for malaprops not even his son is going to match. He said something about the nitty bitty great bird band, which approximated the name of the outfit.

For reasons known only to him, he said "Don't cry for me, Argentina." He promised not to be overly optimistic about the economy like Mrs.Rose Scenario, a woman not heard of before or since. That was the campaign in which Bill Clinton proved his ability to dodge bullets. At least some of them. He talked his way out of a sex scandal, a draft scandal, lost the New Hampshire primary by the same margin by which another early frontrunner, Sen. Edmund Muskie, won it in 1972. That was the beginning of Muskie's downfall because he got less than a landslide. But Clinton claimed that losing the primary by a 7 point margin made him the comeback kid, and he made people believe it.

My last AP campaign, of course, wound up with the most incredible election story of my career, the five weeks of overtime in which the role of the AP was unmatched. I was proud to be part of it and to work one last time with the new generation of AP reporters who are building records that will far surpass those of my generation. I hope that years from now, those talented young people will still be part of the AP, careerists who will be at their own 25-year dinners. Or, to put it less elegantly, who will become the fogeys of the future.