Paul Jablow
Contributor
BSR Contributor Since July 31, 2018
Paul Jablow spent more than three decades in newsrooms in North Carolina, Baltimore and Philadelphia before retiring from the Inquirer in 2003. He has since freelanced, joined a local improv group, and added to an enormous collection of recorded jazz. A native of New York, he lives in Bryn Mawr.
My professional career probably started in my senior year at Harvard, in the office of my creative writing course instructor, Mr. McCreary. “Jablow,” he said in a soft Boston accent that I remembered for decades after forgetting his first name, “you write damned well, but you’ll never be a fiction writer. You write like a journalist.”
Mr. McCreary wore tweed sports coats and had a yellowing mustache and looked enough like William Faulkner that his advice seemed instantly credible. I followed it for decades.
After Harvard came Columbia University and a master’s degree in journalism and then 30-plus years in newsrooms in North Carolina, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. It was a wonderful business, filled with amazing characters and amazing stories. Our mantra was, “You couldn’t make this stuff up.”
How else could a kid from New York cover Richard Nixon and Martin Luther King’s funeral, come home with his suit covered with dust from a steel plant or attend a Klan rally wearing a suit so the rednecks would mistake him for a fed? I left the newspaper business and the Inquirer in 2003, at the dawn of the Great Downsizing, to teach, freelance, and work on a stillborn novel, ignoring Mr. McCreary’s advice at what turned out to be my peril.
Several years after I did a freelance piece that quoted a local hardware store owner, he asked me, “Are you still writing?”
“Charlie,” I replied. “Why don’t you ask me if I’m still breathing,”
Website: pauljablow.com Twitter: @paulJ1940
