Veteran Journalist Turns to Teaching

Story by Adam Steed

On paper, William Minutaglio is an intimidating man.

He is a Brooklyn, New York native; he has a Bachelor's and a Master's degree from Columbia University; he has worked for a number of the largest newspapers in Texas, including the Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News; he has written for, among others, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Outside, Details, Encarta, Talk, The Sporting News and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and was even a bureau chief for People; he has written books and is considered one of the nation's foremost experts on President George W. Bush and his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales; he has won several awards and has been recognized far and wide. Heck, Tom Cruise even bought the movie rights to one of his books.

So it was surprising to hear Bill Minutaglio, new addition to the journalism department this semester, laugh that easy laugh of his the first time. It was even more surprising to watch him hand teacher evaluation forms to his students so far from the end of the semester and plead for honesty.

Maybe it shouldn't be that surprising. Since this is his first time around the track as a teacher, his course, Narrative Feature Writing, has many of the earmarks of a professional-turned-professor: the subject matter is theoretical; the approach to class and requirements are fairly casual; and there are a lot of print-outs.

"It's laid back--that's a good thing and a problem," says Jake Roeschley, a journalism senior in Minutaglio's class. The consensus among his students is that learning from someone with real-world experience is great, but that they are used to a more rigidly-structured environment. Of course, this is exactly the kind of feedback Minutaglio is looking for.

"Speaking of office hours, it's lonely out there in my East German holding cell," he says, getting a few laughs as he describes his office.

Why teach, anyway? "I've done everything that I wanted to do in journalism."

He has had the opportunity to work at all different types and sizes of publications. His experience has afforded him several chances to give lectures, which introduced him to the idea of sharing that experience with people face to face.

"Bottom line: sounds corny, but there is no better profession than journalism. What I told [School of Journalism Director] Lorraine Branham was that I really want to convey that to students."

Minutaglio's love for the profession stems from a desire to know as much as he can about everything. He uses the phrase "jack of all trades; master of none" a few times. Aren't established men of news supposed to look and act like Andy Rooney? Those old white guys in suits, pontificating about the way things are and the way they should be; fatherly types who know and therefore should be listened to?

So who is this guy in an off-brand Polo and jeans, wearing no jewelry but a watch, and talking about how important it is to listen and to pay attention to the little guy?

Minutaglio (or "Minufruitio," as he sometimes laughingly calls himself in class) has been answering a lot of calls and sitting through a lot of interviews lately because of a book he wrote a little while back entitled The President's Counselor: The Rise to Power of Alberto Gonzales. Since the Attorney General has been under review by Congress, news people and pundits have taken a keen interest in his biographer. A career journalist himself, Minutaglio still isn't used to being interviewed or the perks that go with it.

"They offer to put you up in a hotel and drive you around in a limo," he says. "It makes me feel creepy. My kids are like 'take the limo to work! You can watch TV in the limo!'"

He would much rather be listening, learning the unbelievable story of some forgotten jazz musician from Houston or that guy you've passed every day this semester on Guadalupe but never looked directly at. Most of his newspaper career was been spent wandering the disenfranchised neighborhoods of Houston, San Antonio and Dallas, earning the trust of residents and presenting their stories to readers.

This is the sort of thing he has based a career on. When asked about why she hired him to write for the Dallas Morning News, Ellen Kampinsky, current senior editor for Glamour Magazine, mentioned "his wit, his exuberance, his desire to write the big stories and to do so in a fresh voice that owed less to daily journalism than to magazine-style storytelling."

Minutaglio went to Columbia College, the main undergraduate campus of Columbia University, in the '70s with an interest in Southeast Asian culture. He tried to learn Hindi, but figured out it wasn't his calling.

"I was an abysmal failure at that," he says, laughing.

It was in an Indian studies class that he met his future wife, Holly Williams, who was to become an internationally recognized dancer and who has taught dance and theater at UT since 1996. After graduation he decided to stay at Columbia and he enrolled in the Graduate School of International Affairs. He took an International Journalism class and fell in love with the subject.

"I had that little thunderclap experience and thought 'this is what I want to do.'" He switched to a Master's of Science in Journalism and never looked back.

Minutaglio says he was fortunate to be surrounded by enthusiastic people in the socio-cultural hotbed that was Columbia??s campus during the 1970s. He immersed himself, having found a source of fuel for his infinite curiosity.

From there, he came directly to Texas. He had interviewed with an editor from the Abilene Reporter-News. "The cool thing about that paper was that [the editor] traveled around routinely to interview journalism students, so we had all these people from other places," he says.

Arriving in rural Abilene from the big city was a bit of a shock. As years of experience had taught him, Minutaglio stepped out into the street to hail a cab when an elderly woman approached him.

"Why are you standing in the street?" she asked, to which he replied that he was waiting for a cab. She laughed.

"There are only two cab companies in town and one just went out of business. You'll have to call the other one."

After a year in Abilene, the ants in his pants carried Minutaglio to San Antonio, where he worked for the San Antonio News-Express. His first assignment under Editor Ron White (no, not the comedian) was to get in the car and investigate every roadside oddity he came across between there and Austin. He had the freedom to do practically any story he could come up with; and he did. He wrote about underground cock fighting in Texas and even "ran around for weeks with a homeless man."

Toward the end of his stay in San Antonio, Minutaglio took up as editor of the Lively Arts section, an opportunity he used to introduce poetry and a diverse array of cultural art to readers.

In the early 80s, the ants marched to Houston. Friend, journalist, and Texas lawmaker Maury Maverick, Jr. suggested that Minutaglio would like Houston because it was "all dark and smelly and big" like New York. It was here that he developed a deeper personal interest in writing about minority affairs, the inner city, poverty, and the disenfranchised.

It wasn't easy. People were sometimes skeptical of a reporter coming into neighborhoods that had never received news coverage. "I found that, the longer I hung out and tried to be honest, the more people opened up and shared their stories."

As perhaps a natural progression, with the desire to report on the under-reported came an affinity for Jazz and Blues.

"Houston was just gurgling with it at the time. Still is, but there were several iconic African American figures playing at that time."

While attending the funeral of one of those icons, Lightnin' Hopkins, Minutaglio met and befriended a man named Garcia Milburn, who ran a club out of a shack in his backyard. It was only open Monday nights, but "Blue Monday" was frequented by some of the best musicians in the business; Minutaglio became a regular visitor. In an interview years later with Minutaglio, Ray Charles said that when he was forming a band, he always had a particular affection for Houston musicians.

Next, the ants marched to Dallas. Minutaglio spent the next 18 years working for the Dallas Morning News at the height of its feud with the Dallas Times Herald. The spirit of competition and his own responsibilities as a Sunday writer afforded Minutaglio the time and resources to write 3,000- to-5,000-word pieces from Manila to Moscow, from war zones in Central America to East Berlin.

In 1996, his wife accepted a position at the University of Texas and the couple moved to Austin. By 2001, he was focusing on his magazine work and his books, including his update of his biography of George W. Bush, called First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty, published by Times Books in 1999 and then reissued in an updated version in 2001.

Also by 2001, Minutaglio finished another work called City on Fire, the story of the first successful class action lawsuit against the U. S. government after a shipment of fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, exploded and killed hundreds of Texas City residents in 1947. In 2003, he negotiated with Cruise-Wagner Productions for the movie rights to City on Fire.

Since then, he's worked as a regional bureau chief for People, written articles on President Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and others for Encarta encyclopedia, been a guest lecturer at various universities, been interviewed on National Public Radio and TV, and published his latest book, the biography of Alberto Gonzales. Today, he spends his time teaching a narrative writing course at the university, helping his wife raise their two children, ages 9 and 13, and answering phone calls about two of the most powerful men in the country. The ants must comfortable in the Hill Country, because Minutaglio and his family don't plan to leave Austin any time soon.