Ellen Byerrum
The first dead body I ever saw was at my grandparents country club in
She was dead. I was ten and my older
brother and I were fascinated. And in the way. We were repeatedly shooed off, but we kept coming back. When the body was removed,
the wet spot on the sofa shocked me. That's what happens when you die, I remember thinking. Two men rolled
the sofa away, never to reappear. When you're a kid, this stuff is radically interesting! And my brother and I never discussed this
little adventure with the adults...
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The adventure continued: We went to the funeral. (My grandparents knew the deceased.) I believe the cause of death was natural, no
foul play suspected. It was a country club, after all, not a hotbed of homicide. My parents didnt belong to a country club,
so the setting in itself was fascinating. Silver finger bowls. Restroom attendants. A dead body was just an added plus in my young
life. The next summer we went back to Chicago, and my father, my brother and I witnessed an armed robbery on a bus. Chicago, as my
grandmother had promised, was a cauldron of crime! Nothing very exciting ever happened in my hometown of Denver, at least
in my quiet neighborhood. Except that time the jet from Lowry Air Force Base crashed into the house in the next block. But I
digress. At the service for the woman in pink, I distinctly heard my grandmother, in her compellingly gruesome fur
wrap with the fox head biting its tail, whisper loudly, Thank goodness the children didnt see a thing! I never set the record
straight. And The Case of the Corpse on the Pink Sofa had no effect on me. None whatsoever. Of course, I did grow up to be a mystery
writer...
I always knew I wanted to write, but I thought I had nothing to write about,
so I went into journalism. Full disclosure: Being a journalist like Bob Woodward of Watergate fame held absolutely no interest for
me. My role models? Brenda Starr. Lois Lane. Hildy Johnson, played by Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, based on the
play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. My heroines were all fictional, beautiful, smart, sassy, and very well-dressed.
(They still are.)
After graduating with such lofty goals, I interviewed by
phone for a small-town reporting job posted by my journalism school placement office. My editor-to-be (I'll call him Sweeney)
had just two questions: Do you have a car? Do you have a camera? I said yes to both. Sweeney shouted over the phone, You're hired! A
little warning bell rang in my head, but I said I'd give it two weeks. The town I'll call Sagebrush was a shambles of a boom
town where tumbleweeds and tractors, ranchers and miners rolled in through the dusty streets, and it took me two years to roll out.
Sweeney was a local legend, a lunatic whose saving grace was that he loved his little Daily Press with a maniacal joie de vivre.
You didn't really work for Sweeney till he fired you--and in the next breath shouted out your next assignment. Another reporter
Sweeney fired regularly would tell me, This time he means it! He never did. He called me Scoop when he fired me. (He
didn't mean it.)
Local teachers used the paper in high school English classes.
As a bad example. The typos were superb. The Daily Press police log once reported that a local man, fully identified by
name and address, was cited for having his dong [sic] loose and at large. They may have meant his dog, but he never complained,
and no one in Sagebrush would have been surprised either way.
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