Calvin Trillin Looks Back on His Illustrious Career

AUDIE CORNISH, ANCHOR: Still an incredibly moving and poignant reminder of the scale of that abuse. Now, we want to talk about someone who knows all about the power of great journalism, legendary writer Calvin Trillin. With more than 60 years of experience under his belt, Trillin’s vibrant reporting has taken him from covering the civil rights movement in the ’60s to just humorous observations of American regional food scenes. Now, his new book is called “The Lede,” and it’s a collection of the best pieces from his illustrious career. He joins Walter Isaacson to share some of his favorite anecdotes in the field.

WALTER ISAACSON, CHIEF: Thank you, Audie. And Calvin Trillin, welcome to the show.

CALVIN TRILLIN, AUTHOR, “THE LEDE”: Thank you, Walter. Nice to be here.

ISAACSON: Congratulations on your new book. And it has that rollicking, humorous feel, that sort of droll humor you’ve had throughout your career. But in some ways, there’s a serious strand to it, which is you talk about starting off as a reporter in the south during the civil rights movement in 1961. And you say if that hadn’t have happened, you might not have stayed a reporter. Explain why that was so important to your career.

TRILLIN: Well, I think particularly when you’re just starting out, it’s helpful if you get knowledge one subject. In this case, it happened to be an important subject, the desegregation struggle in the South. But the confidence you get from knowing that what’s on the page is something that not everybody knew and that you know a little more about it by just writing about it constantly. And in the South, I was in the Time Bureau in Atlanta, and occasionally I wrote about something else, about a football coach or something like that. But usually I wrote about race. And I think that’s valuable for a young reporter.

ISAACSON: Despite the fact that you started by covering the civil rights movement, you said you never became that interested in politics, that you wanted to cover America without being one of those people who tried to cover congressional hearings. Explain to me what you did throughout your career to keep your fingers on the pulse of fun stories in America.

TRILLIN: For 15 years, I did a 3,000 word piece for the New Yorker every three weeks. And it’s odd because magazine reporters would say, how do you keep up the pace? And newspaper reporters would say, what else do you do? Didn’t seem like a full time job to them. But I thought that, I remember my sister, when were kids, I was very interested in baseball. And she said, I don’t understand why you care about baseball. They’re all the same except for the score. And I got to thinking a little bit that was true of politics, particularly as we’re seeing now there, 80% or 90% of the coverage is who’s going to win. Something we’ll all know the night after election. If all the reporters defected to Venezuela, we would still know it the night after the election. So it seemed to me less interesting than stories about regular people, ordinary people. If my colleagues will forgive me, regular people rather than them.

ISAACSON: One of the ways you covered it was through food, but it wasn’t like the best of all restaurants. You just love great local restaurants. About a week ago, I went to Mosca’s, down here in New Orleans, or near New Orleans, and I thought of you because you used Mosca’s or Arthur Bryant’s pit barbecue in Kansas City as a way of understanding colorful people. Tell me about Mama Mosca.

TRILLIN: Well, the Mosca’s, it was said that — the rumor, or the legend, I should say, in New Orleans was that Mr. Mosca, the original, was Al Capone’s chef. That really wasn’t true. They did come from one of those suburbs around Chicago where funerals are also attended by FBI people in cars with cameras. But Al Capone, he was an Al Capone chef. Mama Mosca, at one point, said when somebody did a review of the restaurant, said I don’t care what they say because I can’t read. There’s a great protection for a restaurant proprietor, and Mosca is just stuck to what it was doing. And I was very fond of it.

ISAACSON: I’ll just mention that I was the states-item reporter who wrote that story when Mama Mosca said, don’t worry, I don’t read.

TRILLIN: That’s right. I had forgotten that. And it should have been in the story, of course, but I don’t know what happened. We cut you out for space.

ISAACSON: Yes. Thanks (inaudible).

TRILLIN: Yes, was a couple of words too long.

ISAACSON: You call your book “The Lede,” and, of course, you spell it correctly, the way we would spell the lead in the newspaper. And I want to read you what I think may be your favorite lead. You put it in the book. It’s also from a Louisiana newspaper, and I’ll read it. Maybe you can parse it for me. The lead of the story is a veterinarian prescribed antibiotics Monday to a camel that lives behind an Iberville Parish truck stop after a Florida woman told law enforcement officers she bit the 600-pound animal’s genitalia after it sat on her when she and her husband entered its enclosure to retrieve their deaf dog.

TRILLIN: I love that paragraph. One of the things I’m particularly entranced with is that it’s all one sentence. There’s only one sentence there, and he manages to get that story. And when my friend, James Edmund (ph), sent it to me, at first I couldn’t read it without breaking out laughing. I finally able to do that. But the deaf dog is what got me at the end because it just seems to come out of left field somewhere. I thought that was a great lead, and you didn’t even have to read the story. I imagined a sort of tableau with the Florida woman and her husband, a Florida man, and saying, here fido, here fido. But the dog is deaf, of course, we can’t hear. And also the fact that nobody talks about what happened to the woman being sat on by a 600-pound camel. So I thought it was — I guess it remains my favorite lead that anybody ever wrote.

ISAACSON: Some of the great pieces in this book are profiles of colorful legendary journalists. And let me throw a couple of them out. Have you talk about them? What about Russell Baker?

TRILLIN: Russell Baker, it’s fair to say, hero of mine. The interesting thing about Russell Baker is that he wrote both serious columns and humorous columns, and he didn’t have to label them. It sort of became obvious as you went. And I think I mentioned when Russell was living uptown, he was walking down the street on a sidewalk, and a potato fell, apparently from a high window in one of those big buildings and just missed him. And he wrote a column about how it feel to be killed by a potato falling from a residential building. And it would be terrible because people, even your friends, would get a little smile out of it. One time I was having trouble thinking of a column, and I said, I think I’ll take a walk, maybe a potato will fall near me. And my wife said, Russell’s already done the potato column. That’s it.

ISAACSON: There’s Sticky-fingered Navasky in the book. Tell me about him and how you gave him that nickname.

TRILLIN: Well, when he asked me to write a column for The Nation, I said, how much were you thinking about paying for each column? And he said something of the high two figures.

ISAACSON: This is Victor Navasky, the editor of The Nation.

TRILLIN: Editor of The Nation. And he said, we’ve been paying 65. I said, that sounds like the middle two figures to me — 65. And before the, before he was editor of the Nation, he had this occasional magazine called Monocle which paid even less than the Nation. I sent them a piece once and they said they were publishing it, and they sent me a bill. So the Nation was sort of an improvement. Then, then when, when I, I wrote a a poem. I was inspired by John Sununu I love that name, Sununu, and I love the fact that he always thought he was the smartest guy in the room. And so I wrote a poem called, if You Knew What Sunu-Knew, and sent it to Victor, and he said, would, would you like to do one of these every issue? He was willing to pay me the same as he paid me for a column, even though a poem was shorter. And I said well, it’s a hundred dollars coming in, rain or shine. And then of course, I realized that that other periodicals paid poems by the line, like The New Yorker was the highest paying at something like $10 a line. I was getting a hundred dollars no matter how long or short the poem was. So if I wrote, say, a four line poem about Lloyd Benson of Texas becoming the Secretary of Treasury was the man is known for Quo Pro quidness. In Texas, that’s how folks do bid-ness. That’s $25 a line, still more than the New Yorker.

ISAACSON: How have you seen the role of journalists and the perception of journalists change?

TRILLIN: Well, I think, I think journalists are generally more respectable now, I think.

ISAACSON: Is that a good or a bad thing?

TRILLIN: Probably bad but I think now, if, if if, if some reasonably successful businessman is told that his daughter is about to marry a reporter I don’t think he tries to interfere at the, at this point. But, but I, I, I, I think anytime you have too, too much to protect it, it, it’s sort of takes away from how candid you are. So I, I think that’s probably not a good thing. But I think one of the ways to change is that journalists have changed. There are fewer of them, or more of them if you count all the bloggers in, the people in the basements, but it, but it somebody Trump say, or something in their underwear boxer shorts doing blogs and that, then there are more journalists than there ever were. If that’s, if that’s the cutoff.

ISAACSON: The book ends the way your career began with the Civil Rights Movement. There’s a wonderful picture of you in 1961 with John Lewis in the Birmingham Bus Station. That’s the author’s picture of the book. Tell me, what was it like being in the Birmingham bus station as a young reporter interviewing a John Lewis or covering the Freedom Rides?

TRILLIN: Well, it was exciting, of course, and like, at least once, once or twice scary. I think I was too dumb to know how scary it was. And one of, one of the, one of the things on the Freedom Rides is Claude Sitton from the New York Times was covering for the Times. He, he was in the South for quite a while, and he’s another person who, who I thought of as a model reporter who, one of the difficulties which he saw by being just scrupulous about everything was that it was hard to treat the sides equally. I mean, there, there’s no really moral equivalence of the man who wants to vote, and the man who burns his house down because he wants to vote, burns the other guy’s house down. I say in the book, it’s not like covering the Michigan, Ohio State game. On the other hand, you, you really can’t obviously be on, on one side or another if you’re a reporter.

ISAACSON: You write about covering during the Civil Rights Movement, Ruby Bridges just a few blocks from here in New Orleans, as a 6-year-old, I think she was in the early sixties, desegregating the school there. And then I think you met her again 50 years later. What were, were your feelings on that, both the coverage of her at the time and then seeing her 50 years later?

TRILLIN: Well, one, one of the other aspects of covering things in the South is people had to make really serious decisions about – Ruby Bridge’s parents had to decide it was okay to send her to this school, even though people are gonna be yelling obscenities at her. And she’s only six years old. And it was not only her courage, but the courage of her, of her parents. And when I met her 50 years later, I said, it’s been really nice seeing you all grown up. And tho those, again, as I was saying before, it’s, it’s covering regular, normal people when they’re in irregular and, and not normal circumstances. And, and–

ISAACSON: And what you say about that is that “I had watched these ordinary people having to make momentous moral decisions.”

TRILLIN: Yeah, that is true. Or, or the immigrant owner of a diner that was suddenly faced with a sit-in and whether he was gonna seat them, which, which he wanted to ’cause he sympathized with them. But did that mean the end of his business and his family not having the support that they needed? So those are, those are big decisions made by everyday people.

ISAACSON: Calvin Trillin, thank you so much for joining us.

TRILLIN: Thank you, Walter.