A Cub Reporter Makes the Front Page
By Amy Satterthwaite Pappas
The year is 1987. I am 25 years old, a cub reporter only a few weeks into my first job at a daily newspaper. My beat is Caroline County, Virginia, and my young heart shatters the first time I set eyes on the little town of Bowling Green. Crap, nothing is EVER going to happen in this backwater. I want to be on the front page, not boring readers over farming and church festivals. I pray for something juicy to go down.
That more tears are shed over answered prayers is the heathen gospel.
It happens. On a Friday afternoon, a proper citizen of Bowling Green stops by the new movie rental shop on Main Street. He is shocked to notice some X-rated films, and rents one. Just to horrify himself, mind you. He marches the movie straight to the Sheriff’s office—and the next thing you know, the guy who owns the movie shop is on trial for obscenity.
Obscenity in Bowling Green? Hallelujah! I’ve got my juice and my first front page byline.
The day of the trial, I dress for the courtroom (and I hope the cameras) in a houndstooth blazer and matching skirt from J.C. Penney, with pantyhose and black heels—the same outfit I wore to my job interview two months before, a serious suit for a girl reporter who hopes she looks serious and will be taken seriously.
My editor, Rusty Dennen, is excited for me. He’s in his 30s, a freckled redhead who loves journalism and fishing. He tells me to stand up for myself and ask interesting questions. They want the story for Page One. Go get it.
The Caroline County courthouse is nearly 200 years old, gracious and dignified as a temple. I am front row, and to my dismay, the only reporter who shows up. Judge “Mac” Willis explains to nearly no one that for a movie to be legally obscene, two things must be true—that it goes against the standards of the local community, and that it contains absolutely NOTHING of culturally redeeming value. Just trash from start to finish. I shudder at the thought.
Judge Willis says he’s retiring to his chambers to watch the movie with attorneys from both sides. I realize he’s about to rise, so I stand up first and clear my throat. “May it please the court, the press would like to be present in Chambers,” I hear myself say. Rusty will be proud of me. I’m proud of me, even if Judge Willis says no. But what he says is, “Suit yourself, then.”
We all follow Judge Willis out of a door behind the bench, down an ancient hallway, and into an office no bigger than your laundry room to watch a movie called Sex Asylum II.
We’re waiting for the movie to rewind. Judge Willis, a good friend of my newspaper’s publisher, is in his early 60s. He sits in the back of the room, behind his desk. The attorneys are men from out of town. A bailiff stands just inside the crowded room. Luther Morris, the Caroline County Clerk of the Court, pulls in a chair for himself and is elbow to elbow with me. These men will watch me as I watch my very first pornographic movie. You are such a dumbass, Amy.
Please remember it’s the 80s. There’s no internet porn, just magazines and—very recently—VCR rental tapes. If you want smut, you have to sniff it out. I have no brothers who might have stashed a dirty magazine in their rooms. The sum of my ribald experience was a date in college where we ended up at a strip club, plus a horrified peek at a friend’s Hustler magazine. Is there anything worse than Hustler?
As it turns out, yes.
It’s a windowless room, a cage, really, and I’m a young woman trapped inside with five old men to watch people have choreographed X-rated sex. I shouldn’t even be here in this filthy little town. I’m sweating and fighting for shallow breaths, and the movie hasn’t even started. My skirt is way too short with my legs crossed, so I uncross those legs in those black heels and draw even more attention to my dumb, dumb ass. The lights go out and it’s show time.
I have no intention of grossing you out with the things I learned that day. Just the movie’s premise is enough. Two young women are off to see a concert. Their car breaks down and they must walk to find help. They see a grand mansion up ahead. It begins to rain. The poor things are soaking wet! The men at the mansion let them inside. Except, surprise! The building is an insane asylum for the sexually depraved, each with his or her own fetish. Oh, and it’s a sequel, if you can imagine.
Ten minutes in, everyone on screen is naked and multi-tasking. My brain shuts itself down. I’m all body and my body is boiling hot, my skin red and warm to the touch. My pantyhose strangle my legs, and my legs sweat through the nylon. I’m queasy and rigid with embarrassment. I want to die. No, I want to live. I want to get up and run and never see anyone I know ever again.
My eyes close shut without me telling them to. Pure survival. Darkness. God, but the noises are sickening. Does anyone else know my eyes are closed?
I sneak a sideways glance. Luther Morris is staring right at me. He looks concerned. I bet he hears my heart thudding. I lower my eyelids to half-mast and straighten my posture. I look like I’m praying but I’m definitely not. I’m pretending I’m invisible.
“Let’s take a break everybody,” the judge croaks from his chair behind my head. “We’ll resume in 10 minutes.”
The lights come back on, which is awful because I know what I look like—a red-faced, frightened baby. No one speaks. The men file out. I don’t trust myself to stand yet and forget all about Judge Willis until he is standing over my left shoulder, asking me, “Have you seen enough, Miss Satterthwaite?”
I nod. “Yes, your honor,” in a voice I hate.
Judge Willis comes around all the chairs and sits next to me. He speaks quietly, telling me he’s obligated to watch the entire thing before he rules on the obscenity charge, and that he figures the rest of the men are going to finish the movie too. But that I am welcome to sit in the courtroom by myself and wait for his verdict.
I am out of there before the others return. The empty courtroom is an air-conditioned holy place. I pray for a game plan—a story for my story because I can’t just waltz back into the newsroom and admit I lacked the stomach to sit through a porno. It’s my job to stay and witness. I represent the free press. I could still run away and never see anyone again.
Especially Rusty, my editor. He’s going to think I’m weak. But wait, I can probably bluff Rusty by acting all nonchalant. Yeah, it’s not like the newspaper will actually print the gory details. I’ve seen enough to have the gist of it, and with quotes from the lawyers and the judge’s ruling, I can easily write the story. My first front page byline from Caroline County.
Judge Willis worries me, though. He plays tennis with the publishers of the newspaper. What if he makes a funny story on the tennis court about their new reporter who can’t handle what she asks for?
I’m working myself up all over again until I remember our old city editor, Jim McKnight. He’s Rusty’s boss. McKnight is a devout Catholic conservative, and he embarrasses easily. He’s my grandfather’s age. If things go wrong, I can always confess my sins to McKnight. I envision myself doing it: McKnight is livid, berating Rusty for sending an innocent maiden on such a lewd mission. I believe in my vision and am outraged on my own behalf.
The men return to the courtroom, They don’t look at me. Judge Willis rules that the movie is legally obscene and orders the movie store owner to pay a modest fine. The owner is not in court; in fact, he will close his store soon after and leave Bowling Green for good. I’m back in the newsroom before everyone is done for the day. Rusty sees me walking in.
“Well, how was it?” he asks, grinning.
“Obscene,” I say, “Legally and otherwise.” I rehearsed this rejoinder in the car on the drive back, and deliver it with the glibness I intend.
Rusty meets me at my desk. “Look, you aren’t going to be able to describe the X-rated stuff,” he warns me, needlessly. “Was it gross?”
I assure him it was, but I don’t let him see my face when I answer. I write the story up tight, dry, and fast. I’m caught in a nightmare and I want it done. My article ends up on the bottom of the front page. It goes out over the Associated Press wire and a few other papers pick it up. Juice is juice, after all.
In the days and weeks that followed, I am kept too busy learning the ropes to brood. I suppose Judge Willis is too much of a gentleman to make a spectacle out of a mortified girl reporter. I never hear another word about it except from old Luther Morris, the Clerk of the Court, who sees me out on stories in Bowling Green later on and asks me with a straight face if I’ve seen any good movies lately.
***
Amy Satterthwaite Pappas lived and wrote and raised two children in Fredericksburg, VA before moving back home to the Charlottesville area in 2010. She fools around with writing and painting when she’s not fighting the wild woods from taking over her Crozet property or entertaining a captive heavily-medicated audience at her father’s Memory Care facility.
Amy’s original reporter ID from 1987, tucked into the band of her hat at a recent newspaper reunion. Photo by Norm Shafer.
