Page 50 June 6, 2014
DAN’S PAPERS
danspapers.com
Who (Continued from previous page) loft in the Bowery for $200 a month and drove a taxi. Then he walked into the offices of The Chelsea Clinton News, a free weekly newspaper in Manhattan, and asked if he could be an intern and work for free. They said yes, and also offered him a paying job writing up listings. “This did not work out well. I typed with two fingers. Took me awhile. I still type with two fingers. Still takes me awhile.” At The Chelsea Clinton News, he met Katie Kelly, who had left that paper to be the first TV reviewer for The New York Post and he told her how he’d like to be a reporter and she said there was a job opening up at The New York Post and she would set up an interview for him. “That led to an interview with Roger Wood, the editor. And he gave me my first job on a
“I went to one of the protests. I was covering it. The cops arrested me. We ran a photo of me in the ‘Post’ with the copy putting handcuffs on me.” daily, as Suburban Editor for Westchester, Queens and Long Island—they’d replate one page for each different area. And then the Post union employees, including the reporters, went out on strike.” The strike lasted for four months. “I was considered management. That meant I had the unenviable job of crossing the picket line to come into the building on South Street
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and just sit around. We couldn’t print or distribute the paper. So we had no paper. When the strike ended I was a general assignment reporter and joined the union. I still have my Newspaper Guild placard that I wore on the picket line the next time they went on strike.” Richard Johnson tells wonderful stories about his life and times as a street reporter. “The Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus came to Madison Square Garden (MSG) every year. The circus train would go to the railroad yards in the West 30s. And the circus would let certain select reporters ride the elephants to MSG. I got to do that one year. “I was just leaving the office when John Lennon was shot. I reported on it from the Dakota. “I was assigned the task of checking out the first scratch-off Lotto Tickets. Readers were saying that there was a scandal. The rumor was that before stores were selling the tickets, they were x-raying them and picking out the winners. My editor told me to get a bunch of tickets, find an x-ray machine and see if this were true. I called the Medical Examiner’s office, and yes, they had an x-ray machine and come on over. I got taken to the morgue. They gave me the full tour. It was horrible, watching autopsies. By the time they got to the spare parts drawer, I almost lost my lunch.” “And the Lotto tickets?” “There was no way to x-ray them. It was just paranoia.” He covered the protests held at Shoreham which, eventually, caused the shutdown of a nuclear plant being constructed there. “I went to one of the protests,” he said. “I was covering it. The cops arrested me. We ran a photo of me in the Post with the cops putting handcuffs on me.” During this time, Johnson became a father to Damon, and he and his wife moved to a co-op loft on 22nd Street between Fifth and Park—“prices were still low there then” he said—and he put in sheetrock and a bathroom and kitchen. Damon, 35, is now a painter in Brooklyn. In the Hamptons, Johnson covered the Roy Radin murder and the Barry Trupin attempt to build a French castle on Meadow Lane. Following Neal Travis, Claudia Cohen, James Brady and Susan Mulcahy, Johnson took over “Page Six” in 1985. But then Rupert Murdoch was forced to sell the paper, and builder Peter Kalikow bought it. After wage freezes and layoffs, it was just Johnson and Frank DiGiacomo doing the page. “And one day, four years later, I got a phone call from Robin Leach. They were doing a TV show they hoped would compete with Entertainment Tonight and they wanted me on board. They offered me a six-figure income, a good bit more than I was making. I went to the editor-in-chief of the Post, Jerry Nachman, and I told him I had this offer—I really just wanted to tell him about it and maybe get paid a little better—and before I could get to that, he put his arm around me and said ‘congratulations, I’m so happy for you,’ and so out I went. The show, called Preview: The Best of the New, lasted two months and then got cancelled. No surprise. We were calling it, Preview: The Worst of the Old. So I went back to print and began doing my column for The New York Observer.” (Continued on page 60)