The following article was written June, 2003, for a journalism class for Miami University.
I publish it here in testament to the spirit of a great journalist, Hugh Morgan, and my friend Dean Esmay.
They share, to some degree, many of the same gifts, and faults.
Enjoy.
OXFORD – Miami University English professor Hugh Morgan explained the terrible affect alcohol has had on journalists to his class Monday, June 9, including the affect on his life and his friends’ lives: “I found the major problem in my generation of journalists was alcohol.”
Morgan spoke passionately about alcohol abuse as he told the class how this affected lives and careers during his fifteen years with the Associated Press.
“I know ten [journalists] who died, and at least a hundred who never reached their potential due to alcoholism,” he exclaimed. The professor knows from painful personal experience just how much alcoholism hurts careers and lives; it killed two of his friends, and nearly him as well.
Morgan, who graduated in from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in journalism in 1958, received his doctorate in history from Southern Illinois University in 1974, while teaching there. He spent the first half of his career with the AP in the Southwest, including Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas. It was El Paso, Texas where he met Mel and Anne Geary.
“Mel Geary was my boss as managing editor for the El Paso Times from 1963 to 1966,” Morgan recalls. “He was a big guy; about six foot four inches tall, and an artist. He had four kids with his wife, Anne: three sons and a daughter.”
“Mel worked a ten-hour shift. He would come in about 4 p.m. and leave at 2 a.m., with a two-hour lunch break in the middle. During his break he would go home, drink, and come back.
“About once a month he would say ‘Let’s go over to Juarez [Mexico] and have dinner.’ It was a short trip; maybe a five-minute drive to Juarez, then a five-minute to the Remo Bar. They always had the same bartenders there.
“Mel always asked for ‘un vaso de agua’ (a glass of water) that was really two-thirds vodka and a hint of vermouth, with a lime peel. He called the peel his lunch. He would have about two-and-a-half of these during lunch, and he’d be blotto by the time we got back.
“Drinking caused a personality change in him. He would go from a gentle bear to a raging giant.
“When his boss, William Ignatius Latham –a laconic man- was promoted to editor in 1968, Geary was promoted managing editor.
“Mel was divorced in 1970. It really shook him up, and by this time his wife was drinking heavily as well. She would get drunk and call the office to yell about Mel’s drinking.
“Mel was fired from the Times in 1970, and found a job in Odessa, Texas, at the copy desk, where he worked on headlines and stories.
“He died in 1974 in a veteran’s hospital from alcoholism, at age 42. His wife had died a year earlier, in 1973, when she gagged on her own vomit.
“In 1973 I had moved to the state capitol bureau in Lansing, Mich., where my drinking got worse. At the time I was dating a difficult woman, who would sometimes be very rude to me. I could only argue with her when I was drunk. I broke up with her a month before the Labor Day weekend of 1974.
“That weekend I was at another guy’s girlfriends’ house. I got drunk as can be on a quart of rum, and woke up in the extra bedroom, in the deepest depression of my life.
“That Sunday I went to see a doctor (it was right across from the state capitol) who gave me a vitamin shot, looked at me and said ‘You don’t need it anymore.’ That’s the only reason I’m here today. Well, he did give me some anti depressants, but I used exercise as a substitute for booze. It’s a better high.”
Then Morgan told the class: “If you need chemicals to be you, there’s something wrong with you.
“For many college students it’s the first time apart from their family. They want to show their independence from their parents by drinking. They find booze to be a crueler parent.
“Alcohol interferes with your life. You make a lifelong decision when you start to drink. Binge drinking is not fun! It’s bull! It’s stupid, just stupid!
“There are better ways: exercise, studying, getting involved [in campus activities].”
He concluded “There are too many date rapes on this campus related to alcohol. Most of them go unreported.”