The first story I covered that day was about a dead black guy buried alive while digging a sewer line.
They were pulling his body out when I got there.
He was still wearing work gloves. They were old and tattered, and his fingers stuck through in several places. His eyes were open and filled with dirt. His dark brown skin was going blue-gray from death.
I took several shots of how it was.
The air was cold and my fingers were numb from the metal body of the bulky four-by-five press camera.
It was good to feel the warmth of the spent flash bulbs.
It was 1960 and my first job working for a newspaper, a small town daily in northern Ohio. My wife was pregnant with our first child and I was earning minimum wage covering barn fires, side walk sales and a cigar-infested council meetings in several crossroad farm towns.
Most of us shot our own black-and-white photos, processed the film and made prints of the best stuff. The we wrote our stories.
The dead guy was wearing a ragged Army field jacket and muddy work pants. His feet flopped as they lifted him on to a stretcher.
You could smell the odor that happens when some people lose control as they die. The chatter of distant police radios merged with the song of birds come early in late winter.
I got the man's name and the rest of it from the cops. "Nigger never knew what hit him," one cop said.
"It just happened," the construction foreman said. "Ground gets tricky when it thaws."
I drove back to the office. It was too late for home delivery, so I souped the film and pulled several prints of the rescue workers lifting the dead guy from his hole.
I showed the prints to the city editor.
"One of them reminds me of a 15th century Italian paining of them lifting Jesus from the cross,"I said.
"That and a dime'll buy you a cup of coffee at Virg Robert's Smoke Shop," the editor said behind the half-chewed cigar in his mouth.
* * *
I was eating a burger and fries at W.T. Grants wheen the Society editor came in and said the Sheriff's had found the body of a young girl who'd gone missing a couple of months back.
The Society Editor was a fat woman named Rita Mae. She wrote stuff about Job's Daughter's, the Grange and local people having visitors from the next county. She has several large hairs on her chin and her husband worked at a rubber plant in Akron.
What little that was left of he girl's body had been discovered by some kids skipping school to go fishing. Scattered ion a carpet of dead leaves, the The girl's bones were brownish-gray like old driftwood.
"Animals must of got into 'em" one of the deputies said.
Half-buried in leaves, her skull was off to one side andd missing the jaw. But you could see how her blonde hair and turned the color of old rope.
One of the detectives figured she'd been stripped and murdered in some other place.
"Dumped her here figuring nobody's find her," he said.
I took several shots of the men standing around in the leaves. It was warmer now and much easier to work the camera.
"Don't look at me," I said. "Look at the bones."
The girl had gone missing from a farm in thenorthern part of the county, and they were still trying to find her family.
The girl was 13 when she went missing.
"But she was real grown up for her age, of you know what I mean," the detective said.
They'd called the body crew from Bissler's to handle the girl.
"We could use some help making sure we get all of her," one of the guys from Bissler's told the deputies.
The were very careful putting each of her bones bones in a canvas bag. After which, they put the bag on a stretcher and carried it off through the sunlight, their feet shuffling through the dry leaves.
They'd found the girl's mother by the time I got back to the office.
But she wouldn't come to the phone when I called.
* * *