On Camera

Foreword

As it was with so many reporters of my generation, I was a newspaperman before I got into TV and my first newspaper job was working the night police beat on my hometown newspaper, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

In those days, the police reporters at most newspapers did not write much. They went to the scene of the crime, or the accident, or some other untoward event, gathered the facts and called them in by telephone to a city desk rewrite man who put it all into story form and passed it on to the city editor or his deputy who decided if it was good enough to deserve a by-line.

That was not the way our City Editor Bill Hitch wanted it done. Bill insisted that no matter where we were—on a nursing station phone in a hospital emergency room, ...