The Wonderful Room: The Making of a Texas Newspaperman
by Bryan Woolley
978-0-916727-74-1 || Cost: $10.95
Hardback , 64 pages
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The Wonderful Room first appeared in 2006 in The Dallas Morning News
In 1955, when Bryan Woolley was 17, he said goodbye to his family and went to El Paso to become a newspaper reporter. He attended college too, but it was his education in the Mexican border newsroom of The El Paso Times that really prepared him for the rough-and-tumble life he would live and love for 50 years. The Wonderful Room is a lively story of the cantankerous, boozy, cynical and somehow heroic characters who once inhabited the newsroom of a great American town.
TO HEAR BRYAN WOOLLEY READING:
CHAPTER ONE
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CHAPTER TWO
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CHAPTER THREE
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CHAPTER FOUR
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CHAPTER FIVE
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CHAPTER SIX
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CHAPTER SEVEN
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CHAPTER EIGHT (END)
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Critical Praise for The Wonderful Room: The Making of a Texas Newspaperman
- I loved Woolley's stories about newspapering in El Paso. They have the
feel and smell of the real world of the newsroom where I also grew up.
The Wonderful Room made me wish mine had been in El Paso.
— Jim Lehrer, novelist and PBS news anchor
- Bryan Woolley has written another gem, this one drawn from the days when editors wore weird green translucent visors, the kid reporters assignments served up drinks and smokes with Ty Cobb and Louis Armstrong, and he was lost in the rain in Juárez, long before anyone heard of Bob Dylan.
— Jan Reid, co-author of The Hammer Comes Down
- Bryan Woolley's writing is vivid and heartful, expansive with character and insight. You can read The Wonderful Room in less than an hour, but there's a whole world in it. It's a great big little book.
— Steve Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo
- In this memorable account of his first experience as a cub reporter, acclaimed Texas writer Bryan Woolley focuses on the main lesson he learned in "the wonderful room": newspapers have a special and "holy calling" to tell the truth to the reading public.
— Elroy Bode, author of In a Special Light
Reviews
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Jody Seaborn on highlights of the Texas Book Festival
Austin American StatesmanOct. 18, 2010
... As a West Texan, Laura Bush surely would have appreciated novelist and retired reporter Bryan Woolley's heartfelt ode to his native land during the panel "110 in the Shade: Writing About the Southwest" early Saturday afternoon in a Capitol Extension room. Woolley grew up in Fort Davis and his description of the region's space and light was evocative, resonating with this native West Texan and stirring a longing to revisit one of the best places Texas has to offer. Even though Woolley now lives in Dallas, and has lived in cities his adult life, because that's where the big newspapers and reporting jobs are, he said, "My soul still lives in the Davis Mountains." And he said that when he dies, he's asked his family to scatter his ashes in the Davis Mountains. "Even after death," he said, "I will still want the space and light."
Earlier during the panel, Woolley read from his slim memoir, The Wonderful Room: The Making of a Texas Newspaperman, about his days as a young reporter for The El Paso Times. He described a few of the crimes, suicides and fatal accidents he covered on the police beat. The audience was absolutely silent, mesmerized by Woolley's spare, direct prose--though some in the audience squirmed uncomfortably at the gruesome details.
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The Rambling Boy
Marfa Big Bend SentinelFeb. 17, 2011
By LONN TAYLOR
I cannot remember exactly when I first encountered Bryan Woolley's writing. I do remember that when I was working for the Dallas Historical Society in the late 1970s he was on the staff of the Dallas Times Herald and that we met once or twice. I moved away from Texas in 1979, and a few years later Woolley moved over to the Dallas Morning News. Occasionally someone would send me one of his feature stories, usually a piece of finely-honed writing about someone who did something peculiar for a living or about some odd corner of Texas. It was not until I moved to Fort Davis nine years ago that I realized Woolley was from Fort Davis; someone described a house that my wife and I were eyeing enviously as "the house that Bryan Woolley grew up in." It was then that I also realized that he had achieved heroic status in the Big Bend. People pointed out his boyhood home to strangers.
I soon found out why. I got hold of his 1977 novel, Time and Place, and quickly decided that it was one of the best novels about adolescence that I had ever read. The time and place in which the novel is set is Fort Davis in 1952, the year of the polio epidemic. The plot involves a young man coming to grips with the death of his best friend and with other pressures that are so painful at seventeen and so difficult for adults to write about. The place is accurately and evocatively delineated, but the plot and the characters transcend it. To say that Time and Place is a novel about Fort Davis is like saying that Catcher in the Rye is a novel about a prep school in Pennsylvania.
Woolley has written three other novels besides Time and Place as well as nine non-fiction works and two children's books. Now he has published a short memoir, The Wonderful Room. Like his Fort Davis novel, it is also about a vanished time and place.
The wonderful room of the title is the newsroom of the El Paso Times, where Woolley worked as a cub reporter from 1955 to 1958. In the pre-computer days of hot type, newsrooms were noisy, frantic places, with typewriters banging, telephones ringing, teletypes clicking, and reporters shouting for copy boys. Woolley catches this atmosphere perfectly, recalling not only the racket generated by the activity in the room but the vibrations of the presses in the basement. He tells what it was like for an 18-year old boy, fresh out of Fort Davis High School, to become a man in that room and the two cities, El Paso and Juarez, that were extensions of it.
Woolley's first chapter is actually about Fort Davis, where school superintendent George Roy Moore, recognizing Woolley's talent for writing, got him a job as a stringer for the El Paso Times when he was a junior in high school. Woolley wrote obituaries of prominent local citizens and feature stories about old-timers and mailed them off to Ted Raynor, regional news editor of the Times, who occasionally printed them and paid Woolley fifteen cents per column inch for the ones that were published. Woolley's mentor in Fort Davis was Barry Scobee, a retired newspaperman who was justice of the peace and county coroner and who showed Woolley how to write feature stories. Woolley remembers him as the happiest man he has ever known. He didn't have much money, Woolley says, but he told Woolley, "I never saw a coffin with saddlebags."
When he graduated from high school Woolley high-tailed it to El Paso, where he talked his way into a part-time job developing photographs for the Times's photographer. After being fired and re-hired a couple of times -- a common experience for newspapermen in those days, Woolley says -- he became a full-time reporter, and the rest of the book is about his experiences in that job. He covered the police station (and went along when the cops pulled an occasional corpse out of the Rio Grande) and interviewed visiting celebrities, including Conrad Hilton, Ty Cobb, Andres Segovia, and Louis Armstrong. He remembers Cobb as "a great and funny storyteller"; about his interview with Armstrong he says he remembers nothing "except that for fifteen minutes I was in the presence of a god" (Woolley played the trumpet in high school). He covered a strike at the ASARCO copper smelter, traded tips with a Juarez reporter who got him bullfight seats in return for movie passes in El Paso, and tried to rehabilitate a professional burglar who ended up burglarizing the bar that Woolley got him a job at and then hit the bar owner's home on his way out of town.
All of these make good stories, but Woolley's true genius is for catching the atmosphere of a daily paper's newsroom in the 1950s. I recently read an interview with Charles Portis, author of True Grit, in which Portis reminisced about his experiences as a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette in the 1950s. One of the fixtures of the Gazette was a 90-year old copy editor called Mr. Heiskell who insisted that Tokyo be spelled with an i and refused to allow reporters to use the word "evacuate" for fear that it would remind readers of a bodily function. Mr. Heiskell sometimes speculated out loud on how different things would be if Robert E. Lee had been able to use a scouting airplane at Gettysburg, Mr. Heiskell would have been right at home in Woolley's newsroom.
The Wonderful Room is a small book, only sixty-four pages long, but it is beautifully designed and illustrated with sketches by Dean Hollingsworth, who illustrated the chapters when they originally appeared as feature stories in the Dallas Morning News in 2006. It is published by Bryce Milligan's Wings Press in San Antonio and sells for $10.95, and it is a bargain.
In his preface, Woolley says that his book is a memoir of the days when newspaper reporters felt that they were doing something special and essential, even holy, "that First Amendment thing," he calls it. Now, he says, the few remaining daily papers are corporate products, tailored to what will sell to consumers. "I'm afraid our democracy is in big trouble," he concludes.
He's right. We need more reporters like Bryan Woolley.
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Lonn Taylor is a writer and historian who lives in Fort Davis. He can be reached at taylorw@fortdavis.net.
About This Author
Read more about Bryan Woolley HERE.
