PEOPLE OF INTEREST
The NEWSMAN/PLAYWRIGHT
BY JANIE GOULD
An old-school newsman who earned his
88
stripes at Chicago’s legendary City News
Bureau now writes and directs plays.
Seasonal Vero Beach resident Paul
Janensch, 75, grew up in the Chicago suburbs.
After high school, he tried his father’s line of
work, then signed up for the bureau. Sales, he had
discovered, was not for him. “I’m nosy,” he said,
“and I like to write. Journalism, as it turned out,
was a perfect career.”
The defunct news bureau was started in the 19th
century as one of the country’s first cooperative
news services. It was known for its hard-boiled
editors who taught eager young reporters how to
get the facts, and get them straight. One legend
has it that if your mother says she loves you,
reporters were supposed to check it out! The rambunctious
atmosphere of the place was captured
in the play and movie The Front Page.
“It was like a boot camp for budding reporters,
with terrible hours, weekends and overnights,’
Janensch said. “I thought it was great, and I’ve
loved journalism ever since.”
In the early 1960s, Janensch went to work for
United Press International as a writer of radio
news copy. “We could tell any story, no matter
how complicated, in three short sentences,” he
said. “It was the time of the Cuban missile crisis,
and there was one bulletin after another that we
had to translate into radio copy. I was writing
radio copy every hour during the crisis.”
Janensch, who earned a bachelor’s degree
in philosophy at Georgetown University, was
a graduate student in journalism at Columbia
University when President John F. Kennedy was
assassinated in 1963. He was in the campus newsroom
when bulletins started appearing from Dallas
on wire-service Teletype machines. “After the
third bulletin, I tore it off the machine and took it
around the building,” he said. “Nobody believed
me at first.”
In 1965, Janensch was a new reporter for the
Louisville Courier-Journal, and one day in the
newsroom, while waiting for his next assignment,
he was reading a story in another paper about
the civil rights march in Selma, Ala. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. was leading demonstrators to
Montgomery. “I was reading national coverage of
it and I told the city editor I thought it was one-
dimensional,” he said. “So he said, ‘You think you
can do better, kid?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ so they sent me
down there with a photographer.”
King had a brother who was a preacher in
Louisville, and Janensch knew him. That connection
gave the reporter access to King in Alabama.
Paul Janensch has
been wintering in
Vero Beach for more
than four decades.
Ed Drondoski >>