Even cosmopolitan suburbs respond to call of the wild
Sooner or later, every reporter will have an oddity from the animal kingdom somewhere in his or her portfolio. Mine was a cat nursing three baby rabbits along with her own litter of kittens.
It was with a good deal of remorse about the direction of my career as a young reporter in a small, rural town that I hauled my Minolta 35-mm camera out to the caller's remote farmhouse to check out her claim that her family cat had somehow decided to adopt some apparently motherless bunnies. Sure enough there was the happy little rainbow family in a cardboard box. the mom splayed out on a comfy pile of cloth while little blind kittens and bunnies sucked away at her pink belly.
I shot the picture, oohed and aahed appropriately along with the matron and her two young daughters, collected some cute quotes of astonishment and drove back to put it all in the paper.
It wasn't Woodward & Bernstein, I knew, but hey, it was kind of weird and, what the heck, maybe people would find it interesting. Imagine my surprise when someone told me a couple of days later they'd heard my story read on the air in Chicago.
Chicago? I wondered. This is the way I get out of Hooterville? Writing about a cat nursing a couple of baby bunnies?
True enough. Someone had sent my story and pictures to Larry Lujack and he'd used it in his running bit "Animal Stories."
I should have known. After all, to reflect on the defining news event of that era, it took just one brief mention of the family dog to save Richard Nixon's political career and two and a half years of intense investigative reporting to end it.
People respond to animals.
I would have ample opportunities to reinforce that lesson in the coming years, including the fish tale built around a Michigan man who reeled in, literally, a minnow, giving him no doubt the only event short of his obituary that ever was deemed sufficiently newsworthy to get him profiled in the newspaper.
In just the first month and a half of this year, animals have figured prominently in several popular Daily Herald stories. There were the snakes making their home by the hundreds in an abandoned home on the Lake County Forest Preserve. The badly burned hawk that rose from the ashes of a fireball created when a plane crashed near Sugar Grove. The controversy over feral cats in Mount Prospect. The suburban pups competing in the famed Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. The menace of Asian carp. And, of course, the ongoing debate over dealing with coyotes in Wheaton and, no doubt, elsewhere in the suburbs.
When you think of great journalism, I doubt the first image that comes to mind is that of a cuddly puppy in distress or a bird's heroic fight for life. But, if we needed no other validation, the fact is that every animal-based story we post at our Web site on www.dailyherald.com quickly comes to rank among the top five most popular of the day.
It will take a more astute sociologist than myself to explain this phenomenon. But I do know this: It's one of many areas in which I've had to revise my youthful prejudices about news judgment. Clearly, stories about the curious behaviors of our furry, feathery or finny friends in the animal kingdom aren't just the stuff of small towns hungry to fill up space in the local paper. They're slice-of-life tales, and we all are drawn to them, no matter where we live or how sophisticated we may consider ourselves to be.
• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.