Everyone needs heroes, but who will volunteer?

by Bernard Casserly

My dad died on the Fourth of July in 1930 when I was 12 - the oldest of five kids. The Great Depression and I had no heroes whose lives I wanted to follow. My grandfather was a policeman, and my favorite uncle was an ex-marine, but I wasn’t interested in their careers.

My heroes came mostly from the silver screen, and they were usually reporters in melo dramas like "Five Star Final" or "The Front Page." Somewhere I have a composition I wrote in the eighth grade at the Ascension school. It told how I wanted to be a newspaperman. I illustrated my piece with a sketch of a guy at a typewriter wearing a hat with a press card.

When we are young we need heroes to inspire us. Sometimes they just give advice to start us on the right path. That’s what happened when I finished high school in January 1935. I went downtown one wintry day to get a job as a hotshot daily reporter

Frank Murray, a lanky genius at the typewriter, was on the city desk of the Tribune on Minneapolis’ "Press Row" that day. I never dreamed of the ways our paths were to cross in the years ahead. I must have been a sight: a skinny runt of a kid (I had been the senior class "mascot" because of my height - probably five-foot-five.) I wanted a job. I said.

Skip forward two weekly and two daily newspapers and five years in the Merchant Marine. Frank and I were then fellow reporters on the Minneapolis Star. We were also leaders in the Guild of St. Francis de Sales, for Catholics working in the media. We both wrote obituaries in addition to our regular beats, but Frank was the top writer.

He wrote biographies of leading citizens who were elderly or very ill. His stories were filed in the library (called the morgue), where they could be quickly set in type when the Grim Reaper called. Unfortunately, Frank died at an early age, ahead of many folks whose obits he had written. The old monsignor who spoke at Frank’s funeral said he was playing a trick on the Star reporter who had written his biography. He was giving Frank’s notice, the preacher said, instead of the other way around.

Something else happened at Frank’s funeral. Monsignor Richard T. Doherty, the see’s Catholic Action director, stopped me at the cemetery. We were burying the man who was set to become the editor of the Catholic Bulletin, the archdiocesan weekly, he said. Was I interested? I gulped. The monsignor said he would set up an interview with Archbishop William O. Brady if I liked. I liked the idea, the archbishop liked me, and I got the job.

I remembered Frank and the role he played in my becoming editor of the Bulletin for a quarter century when I picked up our paper the other day. Now called the Star Tribune, it quoted a story he had written predicting freeway driving problems. It was published Jan. 1, 1957, the year that Frank died and I joined the Catholic press.

Frank Murray was not my only hero. I’ve already mentioned two. Monsignor Doherty, a former St. Paul newsman, became my mentor and the one who proposed me for the editor’s job. Archbishop Brady hired me to run his paper and backed me to the hilt for five years until his sudden death in Rome in 1961. When delegations came to see him about firing me, the archbishop usually told them to go downstairs to talk to me instead!

Not all my heroes were newsmen, priests, archbishops - or even Irish! I don’t know Mitchell V. Charnley’s ethnic background, but he was my favorite professor. A former newsman, he taught "Introduction to Journalism" and other classes, developing in me a love for journalism, improved style and grammar, and belief in my communication skills. It seems my heroes, all of them gone, were great communicators. Their influence on me was profound and I reflect their teachings today. They also inspired me to become a mentor - or at least a model - for my employees, my fellow workers and associates, and those who read my scribbling today. What career might I have followed if Frank Murray had told me to get lost and quit bothering him long ago?