Mornings with the mayor

Almost 10 years ago, I took a position as a newscast writer for WBUR. Mine was the early morning shift, and my job was to arrive at 4 in the morning and start putting together the local news portion of Morning Edition. The other part of my job was to call some of the people about whom I was writing - local lawmakers, state officials, an occasional bereaved relative, and get "tape" (what most non-journalists call soundbites). I'd often wince while the phone rang, imagining it jangling in someone's bedroom. Then I'd plunge forward: "I'm sorry to call you so early, but we'd love to get your take on this latest report that..." [insert local issue here.]

By far, the person I called the most was Mayor Tom Menino. When I first began, one of the first bits of information I was handed was the mayor's phone number at his home in Hyde Park. I was instructed that whenever there was a Boston-specific story he was worth a call, and the best time to get him was between 5:45 and 6:30 in the morning. Any time before 5:45 a.m. was indecently early; after 6:30 he'd be off on his typical whirlwind day.

So I'd call. Snowstorm? Phone the mayor about his snow-removal and emergency plan. A reported spike in gang violence in the city? Ask the mayor about policing strategy. Red Sox in the World Series? Let's hear from the mayor.

Often his wife, Angela, would answer. She was always friendly. Often, she'd ask me to call back. "He's in the shower," she'd explain, in her thick Boston accent. It seemed like such an intimate thing, especially for someone as low in the newsroom chain of command as I was, to know exactly the moment when the mayor of one of the world's most cosmopolitan, internationally renowned cities was washing up for the day.

I'd call back a few minutes later, and he would almost always make himself available. "He's out of the shower," Angela would say and hand him the phone and I'd hear her say, "It's Abby." And he'd take the phone and begin with, "Hi Abby..." It was the kind of familiarity I would expect from a small town, and it typified, for me, what made Boston under Mayor Menino so unique: it was a big city and a small town, all rolled into one.

"Good Morning Mayor," I'd always start, after introducing myself, and telling him that I was rolling tape. Then I'd ask him about - well, whatever the headline was that morning. He almost always gave me something I could use, to make our news that much richer.

Every once in awhile I would get the chance to do a story in the field, and if the mayor was there I would eagerly re-introduce myself. "I'm Abby from WBUR! I'm the one who always calls you early in the morning!"

One time, one of my colleagues returned from an interview with the mayor and told me that the mayor had told him I was his favorite WBUR interviewer. I cringed. Good journalists are supposed to be dreaded by their sources. What kind of journalist did it make me if the mayor of Boston actually liked being interviewed by me? My colleague sent me an MP3 of the mayor talking about me, and I never listened to it.

Until about five years later, when I first heard that Mayor Menino was ill. I was living in New York by then, and no longer interviewing newsmakers before sunrise. So I opened up iTunes, and listened to the clip.

There is his unmistakable voice, the way of talking that earned him the moniker "Mumbles."

"Abby's my favorite person. She calls me in the morning. Abby. This is Abby. Mayor, what do you think about this? I don't think anything about it. I give her a hard time sometimes. But, you know, she's a good person," he says. "She's a very good person."

The truth is, I always thought the same about him, a big-city mayor always willing to take calls and graciously answer questions from an early-morning news writer just trying to gather some tape to make newscasts a little more interesting for listeners. If the mayor really liked taking my calls, maybe it means I wasn't a very good journalist, but I'm glad that for a couple years, our lives intersected in those pre-dawn days.