Ellen Byerrum    Continued

The first dead body I ever saw was at my grandparents’ country club in Chicago. I was ten years old.

The body belonged to a mature black-haired woman wearing a pink suit and a pink hat, sitting peacefully on a round pink brocade sofa. I liked pink and she was pretty, so I stopped to stare at her. I thought she was asleep. But then someone thoughtfully placed a white towel over her face, perhaps to keep people from nudging her to wake her up. At any rate she was dead, and I was ten and my older brother and I were in the way. We were repeatedly shooed off, but we kept returning to see what was happening. When the body was removed, the wet spot on the sofa shocked me. That's what happens when you die, I remember thinking. Later 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 adventure with adults...
Photograph (C) Joe Henson

My grandparents knew the woman, so we went to the funeral. 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 didn’t belong to a country club, so the setting in itself was interesting, silver finger bowls, restroom attendants and all. 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 promised by my grandmother, 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, “The children didn’t see anything!” I never set the record straight. And the incident 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. In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that 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 inHis 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.)
         
With such lofty goals, after graduation I interviewed by phone for a 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, “You're hired!” A little warning bell rang in my head, but I said I'd give it two weeks. What I'll call “Sagebrush” was a shambles of a 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 until he fired you and in the next breath shouted out your next assignment. Another reporter Sweeney fired regularly would inform 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 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.                                                                             Continued