http://www.projo.com/news/efitzpatrick/edward_fitzpatrick_6_04-06-10_QDHV732_v29.397acf0.htmlEdward Fitzpatrick: Crusty reporter still trusts in his nose for news01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 6, 2010
He didn’t care for either ticket in the 2008 presidential race, so he wrote in Bill Cosby for president and Mike Ditka for vice president.
He was incredulous when a reporter at a competing newspaper retired and local Republicans threw him a party. He said: If you do your job right as a reporter, your farewell party will be in a phone booth.
And he wasn’t about to back down when the head of the firefighters union got in his face about a story he’d written describing how firefighters had tossed the mayor from a union picnic. He told him: Look, if my house catches fire, I don’t want you to come anywhere near it. Let the damn thing burn.
At 6-foot-2, wearing an old corduroy sports jacket with patches on the elbows, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, and a thick mustache, Marv Cermak is my idea of a newspaper reporter.
In one of my first jobs out of college, I covered City Hall for the Daily Gazette in Schenectady, N.Y. At that time, Cermak, who worked for the Albany Times Union, had been covering Schenectady for longer than I’d been alive. Seven years ago, he stopped working full-time and now writes a weekly column. I thought of him the other day when I saw that a blog (“All Over Albany”) had said, “We think Marv needs a blog.”
At age 78, Cermak still uses a black AT&T rotary phone, and he could be your average blogger’s grandfather. When I asked him, he said, “What the hell would I want a blog for?” In his view, “Bloggers sit home and read stuff and take shots.”
But while many bloggers offer little more than a snarky comment and a link (as opposed to actual reporting), some blogs are great, and I can think of three reasons why Cermak would excel: He knows everybody, he knows what’s going on and he works his butt off. No blogger I know has spent more time talking to police officers, politicians and real people than Cermak. (And certainly none carried a gun while covering the mob in the late ’70s, as he did.)
Plus, Cermak’s take on the world is as quintessentially Schenectady as a headline about General Electric Co. job cuts. (“All Over Albany” noted the Washington Post once described Cermak as “grizzled.”)
The other day, Cermak’s doctor told him he was doing well, considering that American men die at age 74, on average. He told the doctor he doesn’t give a hoot about dying — that he walks the streets late at night “looking for fatal gunfire” because it would sure beat dying of cancer or a stroke.
Of course, Cermak isn’t really looking for gunfire, but he is walking the streets in the wee hours. For years, he worked the night shift at Albany’s now-defunct afternoon paper, the Knickerbocker News, and he remains a night owl. The other night, he was downtown counting vacant storefronts when a couple leaving Proctor’s Theatre asked if they could help him. He said: I’m not a homeless person, for crying out loud, I’m a reporter.
While he’s as crusty as a loaf of bread from Perreca’s Bakery, I’ve never known Cermak to be mean or petty. He’s sincere and big-hearted, and he laughs heartily when he recalls, for example, how former Schenectady Mayor Frank J. Duci would warn people that he was getting angry by saying “You’re getting my dandruff up” — and how Duci would call a run-down home “a real sore eye” (instead of a real eyesore.)
Amid new technology, old-fashioned journalism holds value. While future reporters won’t need ink in their veins, they will need Cermak’s nose for news.
efitzpat@projo.com
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