Missing the Boat

What promised to be a prize assignment became a lasting lesson in punctuality simply because I missed the proverbial, and literal, boat.

“This is a reporter’s dream,” my editor Marty, a wizened, chain smoking, black coffee drinker said as he handed me a press pass and a packet containing information about the maiden voyage, for reporters only, of a lighthouse ship designed to replace its land bound counterpart off the coast of the Jersey shore.

It was late summer, a few weeks after the infamous Newark riots of 1967. I had completed my initiation period as a cub reporter for The Journal, a daily still publishing in Jersey City, New Jersey. I had paid my dues by working as a rewrite copywriter, then obituary editor, and, finally, a substitute reporter covering routine municipal meetings and second-string general assignments. Now I was being handed a plum that even the most hard boiled of seasoned reporters would envy.

“We’ve already got the publicity photos,” Marty said. “So all you’ve got to do is write your impressions of the trip. You know: what is looks like, how it feels to be bobbing around the ocean in the thing. It’s going to run on the front page with your byline, of course.”

Thrilled and terrified, I imagined myself suavely hobnobbing with reporters from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and several other big league newspapers.

The ship was slated to depart from Manhattan’s Battery Park. A brief ceremony was to be followed by a three-hour cruise. However, driving in from New Jersey, I misjudged the time, got stuck in early morning downtown traffic, and compounded my woes by taking a series of wrong turns. As a result, when I was finally pulling into the parking lot reserved for the press, I could see the ship moving full steam ahead across the Hudson River.

Desperate, I checked in with the Coast Guard and pleaded with them for a motorboat, a rowboat, anything that would get me onto that ship. Working my way up the chain of command, I received a series of sympathetic but firm denials. There were neither military nor private boats for hire. There wasn’t a thing around that I could hijack.

Then the sinking reality of my plight hit me. I had missed the boat. Even worse, I had become the living embodiment of a notorious cliché.

With tail wedged firmly between my quivering legs, I headed back to the newspaper office. I sat at my desk unable to function until Marty arrived. When he did, he gave me his customary good morning grunt, walked several steps past me, then, like a character in a film comedy, stopped dead and slowly retraced his steps backward to my desk.

“You missed the boat, didn’t you?” I nodded, while he, like a shaman nvoking a curse, muttered obscenities under his breath. “Well, get on the phone, get me some quotes, and write up that damn story anyway.” A longer string of stronger obscenities followed this.

I knocked together a story. It took me most of that day to complete what easily could have been crafted during the leisurely, prestigious cruise. It took all the rest of the week to live down the gibes of my colleagues.

When my story appeared, it was without a byline on one of the back pages. Instead of a multi-column, front-page special feature, it was merely an emasculated, five- paragraph news brief. As usual, I clipped it, but, unlike most other pieces I wrote for The Journal, I didn’t save it. I knew all along it’d be the one story, and the one story, I’d never forget.