Oral History Interview with Laura Miller, October 30, 2014 Page: 12 of 25
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booked the brand-new Crescent Hotel, the invitations were ordered, and he cancelled the
wedding. So I remember that morning I said to him, "You know, I am going to leave
Dallas now because you cancelled the wedding." He said, "Okay, but on your way home
from work today would you pick up my shirts at the dry cleaners?" And I said, "I think
you're missing the point. I'm moving." So anyhow, I left, literally that day. This is
another lesson learned, for all you young people looking for work. That day I walked into
The Morning News and talked to my boss and said, "Steve cancelled the wedding. I am
out of here. I'll be back in a week. I'm going to find a job." He said, "Fine." I took all of
my clips, and I flew to Washington, and I insisted that I be interviewed at every
newspaper between Washington and Boston.
Chase: Insisted?
Laura: I insisted. I said, "I am here. I have clips. I'm a good reporter. I'm aggressive. I
want an interview." So I got two offers. I got an investigative reporter job at The
Baltimore Sun, and then I interviewed in New York, and I loved the editor at the New
York Daily News. He said, "You should probably work on the city desk; we will call
you." So he calls me and says, "Listen, there is nothing in your clips to indicate that you
can write a column. Have you ever written any kind of editorial piece or opinion piece?"
I said no. He said, "So do you think that you can do it for the Daily News?" I said of
course, and we both start laughing. He says, "This is so funny. You're 27. You have
never written a column, and Jimmy Breslin is our columnist, and I have been looking for
a woman for two years." He told me he had asked all of these amazing, talented women
to write a column, and they all said, "I don't want to be compared to Jimmy Breslin. I'm
not interested." He said, "No one will touch this. You have no experience. You will
probably fail, but since you want to try it I'm willing to give it a chance." So he hired me.
He said, "If your columns are lousy, after three months I'm going to demote you to the
city desk and dock your salary." And I said fine. So I moved up. I got an apartment in
Brooklyn, and I worked in New York, and six months into the job, I was kicking ass
having fun as a columnist. I came back to Dallas one weekend and eloped with Steve. So
I kept commuting for six months, and then I moved back to Dallas. The Daily News
editor loved me, Gil Spencer. Such a great guy. He called Dave Burgin, who was the
editor-in-chief at the Dallas Times Herald, and said, "This intense woman is coming back
to Dallas because she married a Texan, and you should hire her as a columnist because
she'll stir things up down there." And Burgin said, sight unseen, okay you're hired. So
what was really fun was, you remember the Walker Railey story? There was a pastor here
in Dallas, very, very famous. He tried to kill his wife one night, and he failed, so she was
in a coma. That had just happened, like a couple of months earlier. The whole world
thought he had tried to kill his wife, but there was no evidence, and he hadn't been
criminally charged. Because he was so prominent in Dallas, the cops never handled the
investigation correctly and never got the evidence. The Dallas Morning News had a
reporter named Olive Talley who was a terrific investigative reporter, and she had been
breaking all of the stories about the investigation and the whole back story. And I
remember the first day I got to Dallas, I knew that I wanted to cover that story and I knew
that I wanted to find a way to beat Olive at her story. So I got to town, and they told me
to go to HR, and I said I'm sorry I'm too busy, and I drove to East Texas, to the parents
of the woman in the coma. The wife. They had never talked to anybody, and I got to the
house and I said I was with the media, and they said to leave. I said I have driven so far,
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Carter, Chase & Miller, Laura. Oral History Interview with Laura Miller, October 30, 2014, text, October 30, 2014; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth586995/m1/12/: accessed June 20, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting UNT Frank W. and Sue Mayborn School of Journalism.