[To introduce himself, Charles offers this essay, "On becoming a science writer." He may be reached by email at churlncal@earthlink.net.]
Recently a young friend, a college student, asked me how I became a science writer. I said I'd think about it and let her know.
I thought about it for a few days and decided the question should be: "When did you become a science writer?" So, okay, Hannah, here goes...
As soon as I got out of the Marine Corps in 1946, I enrolled in the University of Minnesota to finish college. For a few extra bucks I did some freelancing. One article I wrote for Ski-U-Mah, the UniversityÕs monthly magazine, was about Dr. Maurice Visscher, a pathologist on the medical school faculty. I had in mind talking with Dr. Visscher about Sister Elizabeth Kinney's then-popular but controversial technique for treating polio, which was epidemic at the time. But I also knew that Dr. Visscher was involved with some other scientists working for world peace. He described for me their concern about the possibilities of biological warfare. Much more serious, they believed, than the threat of a nuclear war. He went into great detail. That may have been my first "science" article. Ski-U-Mah paid me $20.
A few months later, Victor Cohn (yeah, the same one who was later a founder of the National Association of Science Writers) phoned to ask if he could visit us in our Veterans Village quonset hut. His city editor on the Minneapolis Star-Journal wanted a feature story and photos. Hardly a science stor--well, maybe the sociological aspects. I told him he would get two veterans; my wife had been in the Navy medical corps when we met. The photographer was delighted because our first-born was taking her first steps. I knew who Vic was because I had seen his byline on many stories about scienctific research at the University, but theStar-Journal did not have a "science writer." Nor did any other newspaper that I can recall.
In January of 1948, I hitchhiked westward and got a job on the Alamosa (Colorado) Daily Courier, covering the courthouse, city hall, state college basketball games, and other things. One courthouse office intrigued me: The Upper Rio Grande Conservancy District. The door was always locked, no lights on. Then one day I encountered an engineer unlocking the door. I knew he was an engineer by the boots, dark green twill trousers, sheepskin jacket and broad-brimmed Stetson. I asked if he had a story.
"Sure. You can write about the flood we're going to have next June 22."
For the next two hours he guided me through charts, graphs and tables he kept on snow depths in the mountain watershed, water content of the snow pack, average daily temperatures, the quantities of water in mountain reservoirs (measured in "acre feet") and of river flow at various times of day (in "second feet," or cubic feet per second past a given point). He talked about riverbed capacity, diminished by silting and willow growth, and eroded levees. The river had not been well-maintained since before World War II. He told me of measures that needed to be taken, but said he was having trouble getting the ear of Washington. I wrote the story and the politicians on the city council got on phones to their friends in Washington. Commitments were made for dredging the channel and repairing the levees. Immediately.
Was it science writing? Primitive perhaps, but I think so. While in Alamosa, I also wrote about the Great National Sand Dunes built by nature, just east of town and how fairly recently a potato had been developed by a midwestern university especially for the San Luis Valley's 92-day growing season. It was that short growing season that drove us out of Alamosa a few months later, night temperatures still plunging into the freezing range in mid-May.
I got a job on the Albuquerque Journal. I covered courts and picked up real estate transfers, marriage licenses and divorce decrees and other important stuff, In the third week of June our AP and INS (remember that one?) teletype machines began carrying Upper Rio Grande flood warning stories. On June 22, the "flash bulletin" bells dinged on the wire machines and the stories told how Alamosans were holding their breaths and crossing their fingers as the river crested within an inch or so of the tops of the repaired levees.
Soon the Journal's city editor let me take on the middle Rio Grande, formerly his beat. I wrote about how the big federal reclamation projects were making possible greater cotton crops, but also how Elephant Butte Dam had slowed the river's velocity, causing it to silt and back up into what had long been identified as a natural desert swamp, appropriately named San Marcial by early explorers. I wrote about "transpiration" through the leafy salt cedars that proliferated, putting so much water into the air that the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District could never deliver all the water it was supposed to under the compact terms to Texas and Mexico. I reported a geological scheme for correcting the problem--by drilling an alternate channel through a large deposit of volcanic rock running parallel to the river.
A U.S. forest ranger invited me to ride La Luz Trail with him, the first trip of Spring, up the face of the Sandia Mountains. All the way to thre crest he talked about the flora and fauna, the geology, the air, and Rio Grande Valley, which we could see thousands of feet below. I got better at listening that day, and when we stopped to rest the horses. I got out my pencil and paper and wrote furiously.
We moved to California the summer of 1952 and I joined the staff of the Glendale News-Press. Glendale's fortunate proximity to the epicenter of the early morning July 10 Tehachapi earthquake got me first crack at that story, including a national byline on AP. For the next week I learned and wrote a lot about seismology. Otherwise, not much science to report there; but on the side, a Hungarian immigrant music scholar hired me to put his college textbook on the mathematics and physics of tone scales and harmonics into decent English. I got an extra $25 for an article about his work in our Sunday supplement.
The Fresno Bee, for eight years, let me write about the San Joaquin River and other water resources. Very soon I was writing about very deep wells and their access to deposits of both salt water and fresh water. I learned about shearing actions of the earth which crimped the well-pipes and stopped the water flow. Then there was the ingenious local photographer who invented a camera he could lower into the wells and get pictures of the blockage. After that he developed a "swedge," (a hydraulic swelling wedge) which could reopen the blockage in many cases and put a $200,000 well back in business.
My favorite story, looking back, was the late summer day when a state ranger phoned and invited me to drive out to the arid western side of the county and "see the million dollar barley fire we're trying not to put out." A welder repairing a seam of a huge steel silo had inadvertently set fire to the barley inside at that point. A salvage enginner from San Francisco, noting that it never rains in the San Joaquin Valley in July, rented all the canvas he could find and spread it around the silo. He borrowed two of the huge vacuum machines used by the Port of Stockton to suck copra from the holds of ships from the Middle East, and began pulling the barley out of the silo. He poked steel reinforcement rods inside the silo to track the fire's path. He kept the vacuum machines as far away from the fire's course as possible, of course, and saved about 90 percent of the $1 million worth of barley. I wrote about pyrology.
In 196I I left newspapers for a while and entered politics as a deputy to Alan Cranston, then state controller One of the attractions was the controller's membership on the state lands commission. I got to write about the natural science of California's great state parks and oil development on state lands. Offshore oil drilling was a hot topic. I wrote about slant drilling, which enabled an oil exploiter to steal oil from a neighbor's well. More exciting was the idea engineers brought to the lands commission for ocean-floor drilling, which would avoid the visual pollution of ugly acres of drilling and pumping platforms and towers. The engineers said they could drill and cap off the wells at the ocean's floor and pump the oil ashore and inland to appropriately located refineries. I ghosted an article for Controller Cranston's byline and we sold it to Harper's.
A few years later I was working in Washington, D.C. for Congressman Phillip Burton (D-San Francisco). Early on, Phil gained some seniority on the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. With help from the Sierra Club he introduced three really good bills to preserve land for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks and the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. We didn't get any of them passed that term, but a few years later, thanks to some deaths, retirements and fortunate election losses of senior members, Phil became chairman of the National Parks Subcommittee and he, who never owned a pair of hiking boots in his entire life, more than doubled the acreage of our national parks, through the science of politics. And if you don't think politics is a science, you never saw Phil Burton at work.
In the 1970s I was working for Congressman George Miller and again wrote a lot about water, the San Joaquin-Sacramento Rivers Delta in particular.
When Flo and I had moved back to California in the late '70s, I sold quite a few freelance articles, but didn't make much money. Flo, who had a steady job, was getting nervous. Every Sunday she read the classifieds to me. I ignored her. I was teaching a couple of college courses in advanced newswriting. Wasn't that enough? Then one Sunday in the late summer of 1977 she looked up from the Chronicle classifieds:
"Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at UC Berkeley needs a science writer," she said.
"I'm not a science writer," I replied.
"You can fake it," she said.
To keep peace in the family (our four children were long gone and on their own by now), I pulled out my resume and wrote a cover letter. The first sentence: "I am not a science writer. However...." Then I made a list of all the pieces I had written over the years that might qualify as "science" stories. It was pretty long. I got the job.
That's when I became a science writer. I know, because that was the classification on my personnel forms. For the next dozen or so years I got to write about science in all the disciplines practiced in that multi-faceted national laboratory. When friends asked me, I told them I write about science in plain English. Some of my leftwing friends confused Lawrence Berkeley, which I knew had no classified federal contracts, with Lawrence Livermore. Those friends accused me of selling out. "Not on your life," I told them. "I'd go on welfare first."
Since retirement over a decade ago, I have found freelance and contract jobs that keep me qualified as a science writer--in my own mind, at least. It was great fun to spend some months in Newport News, Virginia, teaching people at the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF, now the Jefferson National Laboratory) how to write about their science in plain English. I've also done a lot of writing about biomedical science and up-to-date technology for assisting people with disabilities in many activities. This writing was for various do-gooder, bleeding heart, raggedy-ass, nonprofit organizations; for which I have special d-g,b-h,r-a, n-p rates.
It keeps me busy...and out of the pool halls.
