Mayor Tom Murphy
In 1996 -- 27 years today -- a bunch of school kids armed with cameras and tough questions assaulted Mayor Murphy in his office. I pretended to be one of them.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS:
Mayor is cool under heated questioning by cub reporters
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
June 7, 1996
We were young, hungry and had the mayor of Pittsburgh surrounded in his own fifth-floor office.
We swarmed around his huge desk and we sat in his official chair. We snooped around his desktop.
Hmmm, several piles of important looking papers, a green metal turtle, two tiny flags, some kind of train-plaque and lots of big books like "The Book of Virtues" and "Reinventing Government."
We were the stinking media, Grade Three division. Junior journalists from Beltzhoover Elementary. Future Diane Sawyers, budding Ted Koppels.
It was our first assignment ever — part of some Fujifilm Co. marketing scheme called Fujifilm PhotoPals where we exchange news of our town with kids from other cities.
But we were about 25-strong and ready to rumble yesterday afternoon.
Each of us was armed with a 15-shot Fuji Quicksnap disposable camera and an index card on which we had written a question so tough Woodstein & Bernward would be jealous.
Right from the start the mayor tried to be tricky.
Are you the mayor?" our most skeptical reporter, doing his best imitation of Sam Donaldson, asked suspiciously.
"No, I'm in disguise," the smiling man in the beige poplin suit said.
But he couldn't fool us. We knew he was Mayor Murphy, even if he wasn't wearing running shoes and shorts. It said so right on his desk.
First softened him up with a little harmless chit-chat, then we started taking shots at him. Flashes were everywhere. We gave him our cameras and he took pictures of us sitting behind his desk. We were mayors for a nanosecond.
Some of us got so excited we lost our cool.
"Yes! I got a picture of the mayor!" one of us blurted.
The mayor was so smooth he didn't even need his bodyguard. The way he handled us, we could tell he was the father of three kids.
He knew how to talk just loud enough, and to keep us off balance with lots of questions, like at the start of the formal press conference, when he held up this big round white thing and asked us what we thought it was.
Yo, Mr. Mayor. What'dya think this is, pre-school Show & Tell? "Mister Rogers"? We're supposed to be asking the questions around here.
But now that you mention it, is that a bowling ball? A dinosaur egg?
"No. It's an ostrich egg," the mayor told us, standing in front of us, ready to take whatever spitballs we threw at him.
We're jammed eight-wide on his soft sofa, packed two and three into his easy chairs and sprawled all over his soft blue rug. He looked like he was starting to sweat, but it turned out it was just the hot lights from the Channel 4 cameraman.
Look out! The mayor is bombarding us with questions again.
“What do you think a mayor does?” he asked.
“Work?” one of us guesses.
“What kind of work?”
“Paperwork?”
Some of us thought that was a pretty cute answer, not to mention right on. But the mayor didn't take a breath. He was already talking about how going to meetings is a big part of his day too. And so is worrying about where to put schools and talking to the police to find out how to keep kids not much older than us out of trouble.
And how do you stay out of trouble, he asks?
That was so easy, we gave him two answers — "By being good" and "Not being bad."
But he was off and running again, telling us to stay in school and stay out of trouble. Yeah, he's somebody's dad all right.
Finally, when he could stall no longer, he asked us if we had any questions for him.
Did we ever! Up went our hands, out came our yellow and orange index cards. We hit him with our best stuff.
"Is being mayor a hard job?"
"Why do you like being mayor?"
"What's it like being mayor?"
"What's the worst part of being mayor?"
He hit every question out of the park — and without a press secretary!
Somehow he always managed to add a little lesson to the end of his answer about being good so someday our names won't show up on the police reports he hates having to read each morning.
We asked him personal stuff too, just like Barbara Walters would have.
Things like: Why are you always jogging Downtown? “To stay in shape and to see what's going on in different parts of the city.” And: Did you want to be a mayor when you were growing up? “No, an archaeologist.”
After he told us he didn't ever plan to be president some day, he turned the tables on us again.
"How many of you want to be president?" Five, maybe eight, of us raised our hands.
"How about doctors?" Five hands.
"Lawyers?" Five more hands.
The rest of us admitted that we wanted to be police officers, beauticians, homicide detectives, pediatricians, basketball players and a basketball player/astronaut.
By then, we were almost out of time. The mayor had a meeting to go to or something. He was talking about not messing around with guns again, and he said, "too many of us — in your neighborhood and mine — hear gunshots at night."
"That was the Army," our current-events specialist shouted out. Or was he our head comedy writer? Whatever, the mayor was not visibly amused.
"That's over now," he said. "One last question?"
"How much school do you need to go through to be mayor?"
It didn't matter how much school you go to, said the mayor, perhaps sending the wrong message to any of us who were interested in having his job and his neat office some day.
"You just have to go out and have people vote for you."
"Cool!" said one of us.
Nobody ever told us it was that easy. But maybe the mayor was just trying to pull one over on the media.