Fire in the belly

When I was a young man back at the University of Georgia, my favorite professor was Conrad Fink, who I’m pretty sure is still there.

Fink is a brilliant man with great bushy, expressive eyebrows, and he was a no-nonsense journalism teacher. He taught us that we should always write our stories in a way that the “Kansas City milkman” would understand what we were writing about.

He also told a great a story about when he was a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Borneo, covering a war, and he leaped over a barricade and rushed up to the king to ask him a question, since the press was tightly controlled there. According to Fink, the king, a large man, patted him on the head and just said, “Everything will be ok, little man.”

I had a little trouble staying awake in Fink’s class, not because he was a bad teacher, but because it was a 7:50 a.m. class, and I was a senior in college, and I played drums in a band, so I had a few late nights here and there. He would throw erasers at me when I nodded off, then when I woke up, he’d continue as if nothing had happened.

I got to thinking about Fink the other day, because I remembered one day my senior year, when I met with him in his office and asked him about my impending journalism career. I was expecting great advice from him, a pep talk to send me rushing out the door and ready to take on the world.

He sat back in his office chair, folded his hands in front of his chest, pointed those steely eyes at me and said, “Williams, you have a lot of talent. Probably more than anybody else in the class. But you don’t have that fire in the belly that it takes to be a great journalist. What you need to do is go down to someplace like Coca-Cola and get yourself a job writing advertising copy. That’s your best bet.”

I was stunned. How dare he say this to me? Well, I would show him. I would go out and get a job at a newspaper and work my way up to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and make my mark, no pun intended.

Of course, he was right. Ten years later I indeed found myself at Coca-Cola, writing promotional copy for the 1996 Olympic Torch Relay. This after a journalism career that featured such highlights as the time an editor brought us all together to give us a lecture on not throwing our pencils away while they were still usable, because that was a waste of money. He also showed us how to write on both sides of the paper in our notepads. Whatever flicker I had in my belly was stomped out at that moment.

For the past 12 years, then, I’ve followed Fink’s advice, not exactly writing advertising copy, but mostly corporate stuff. I suppose I’m a little disappointed in myself for not becoming the next Bob Woodward, or even Mike Royko, but I’ll live. Like Judge Smails said, “Well, the world needs ditchdiggers, too.” Or even corporate hacks.