My detractors — even my friends — can lay out my numerous faults and foibles, but a lack of curiosity is not among them. Chronically curious is a fair label to slap on me.
My mother’s mother nicknamed me John-A-Runna (Thor is my middle name) for my incessant need to break into a run as a toddler and head off to see the world.
I wasn’t much older than 2 and under my late father’s erstwhile supervision on a sunny early 1960s Sunday morning when I — as we say in my birth state of Wyoming — lit out for parts unknown. I crossed a four-lane highway and wandered through a building under construction before a police officer scooped me up and returned me home.
As a teenager, I wrecked an elaborate plan by my father to sneak us out of a Mexican hotel without paying (my childhood occasionally trespassed into the realm of the illicit) when something caught my eye and I wandered off instead of slipping out.
People who don’t know me wonder why I stop complete strangers on the street to ask them about their dialect. I will stray off the beaten path to read plaques and inscriptions on statues and memorials and I can’t walk by any car built before 1980 without ascertaining its manufacturer or model.
Almost five decades in the news business convinced me that curiosity is the one proclivity required to do the job. Editors can patch up bad writing and, given sufficient time, help writers sharpen their craft. But bad reporting can’t be remedied if the reporter isn’t, by nature, curious.
News people who aren’t curious take information fed to them at face value. They don’t ask questions; more importantly, they don’t ask the next question. I learned that lesson quickly as a young reporter. Assigned to cover my first fire, I felt like a person with two left feet who had wandered onto a stage where a ballet was in full swing.
Fire scenes may look like chaos, but responding firefighters carefully choreograph their movements to save lives and keep themselves safe. My job as a reporter wasn’t to write about flames and smoke; it was to seek out, in the midst of chaos, water and people running in all directions, the people who survived the fire or rescued the survivors. That task required curiosity and the ability to talk to people and ask questions until I found the right person to interview.
Telling the news means telling people’s stories and I’ve never been able to forget the story of how a donkey brought Alfredo Lituma from his small Ecuadorian village to Lynn.
Lituma didn’t ride the burro across two continents. He attempted to calm the beast on a mountain trail and the animal bit Lituma’s nose off. He survived the initial trauma and hit the medical jackpot when the Por Cristo charitable organization helped Lituma — who, according to my former colleague Bill Brotherton’s 1991 story, had never seen a toilet or a television prior to the burro attack — undergo surgery in a Boston-area hospital before receiving a prosthetic nose, courtesy of North Shore Dental Porcelains Laboratories Inc. on Pleasant Street.
I’ve thought about Alfredo and his proboscis during the ensuing 30 years since he came to Lynn and wondered if he is happy and whatever happened to that burro.
I guess I’m just curious.
