A lot of people work on Christmas. It comes with their jobs. As a TV news reporter for more than four decades, I’ve worked many holidays. I knew it was part of the deal when I signed up for this career. One holiday memory in particular stands out. I write about it in my memoir, Confessions of an Investigative Reporter: Stories I Couldn’t Tell on TV (coming in May 2020 from Koehler Books). Here’s an excerpt:
I was a reporter at Channel 9 in the New York market for twenty years. On Christmas night, 1989, I was in an editing room as my editor was finishing my story for the ten o’clock news. I think it was a traditional Christmas story about a soup kitchen. I was about to go home to my then-wife and two infant sons.
An assignment manager came into the room at around 7 p.m. and said the New York Yankees manager Billy Martin had been killed in a truck accident. It happened near Martin’s home in Binghamton, New York, three hours away. The assignment manager said I needed to head straight up there.
My photographer and I were greeted by a blizzard in Binghamton. A cop I interviewed told me that Martin’s pick-up truck was at a nearby garage. When we got there we were surprised to see the vehicle out in the open and not surrounded by crime tape. I had never experienced the ability to get so close to a vehicle involved in a fatal wreck. Especially since there was an investigation pending into whether Martin’s friend, who was driving and survived, was drunk (he was convicted of drunken driving.)
Since the garage was closed and my photographer and I were there alone, we could have touched the truck. To this day I can still see a grisly sight: strands of human hair, stuck to cracks on the passenger side of the shattered windshield. This was how I spent part of the holiday season. Three hours from home, in a snowstorm, looking at a dead man’s hair. Probably Billy Martin’s hair.
I didn’t use any tight shots of it. Too morbid.
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If you have to work on Christmas, I trust it will be joyous and safe. And nothing like my Christmas of thirty years ago.
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Thanks and Happy Holidays.
