Weekend Column: Like Father, Like Son

By Gus Saltonstall

I did not go through childhood wanting to be a reporter. I did not study the craft in college.

I did know other things, though.

I knew I liked waking up early in elementary school to read the paper with my dad. I’d make my way through the sports page, circling RBI statistics and cutting out images, as he flipped through the other sections.

I liked mastering the art of folding a newspaper.

More than anything, I liked that the newspaper time before breakfast was ours. Nothing else was happening. Nothing else was moving. A period where my mom and sister would still be in bed.

My dad was a reporter for more than 20 years.

He started out at Middlesex News in Framingham, Massachusetts, then headed west to the Tri-Valley Herald in Livermore, California, and the Oakland Tribune in California, and finally, back east to the New York Daily News — where he worked for more than a decade.

He had various roles at the Daily News, but among them was covering City Hall, specifically Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. He also covered the World Trade Center attacks in their immediate aftermath.

In 2001, he won a Polk Award for his investigative coverage of corruption at a major charity.

My dad eventually chose to get out of the newspaper world as the state of the journalism industry continued to falter in the mid-2010s, and now happily works in a different field.

What he did, though, was show me what it looked like for somebody to enjoy their profession on a day-to-day basis.

When it came time to decide on what I wanted to do following college, I came incredibly close to taking a sales job. I ended up declining the offer, and at the time, I’m not sure I understood why.

But, the more I look back at it, the more I realize it was because I knew it wouldn’t be something that got me excited every day to go out the door and complete a job.

My dad showed me what that looked like, and armed with the knowledge that I had enjoyed my past college internship at the West Side Rag, and that I wanted to write in some form, I applied and got an internship in the New York City journalism world.

Looking back, there is a simpler and more unconscious reasoning to the decisions I made.

I wanted to do what my dad did.

It’s something I think a lot of people with fathers in their life can resonate with.

I wanted to do the thing that the man who always seemed 10-feet tall did. I wanted to make him proud. I wanted to tell him about stories and call him when somebody sent me an email asking — “Any chance you’re related to David Saltonstall?”

To end with:

For years, my dad’s ringtone was “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones.

In the same way a specific smell can transport you, whenever I hear that song, my brain jumps to him.

The chorus of that song includes the line, “just a shot away,” but I went through the majority of my life thinking it was “just a shout a way.”

Purposefully removing the context of that line from its meaning within the song, I think my incorrect interpretation of the line is the sentiment that encapsulates my feelings toward my dad.

He’s always just a shout away.

Whether it is a quick call, or to get help on finding the right word for a lead paragraph, to tell him something good or bad, to share a story, or in those rare cases where something has gone wrong and I need help — he’s always just a shout away — and he’s always there to support and help how he can.

I’m incredibly grateful for it.

Happy Father’s Day, dad.

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