Karl Gude

I couldn’t shoot Angel. I’d never killed anything that big before (just bugs, worms…). When Bill and I entered the barn she was the only cow that wouldn’t stand up for her meal. There was a dead newborn calf behind her and another one bouncing around the barn on long wobbly stick-legs. Twins. That morning Angel, one of the biggest and sweetest Holsteins on the farm, had sunken eyes and looked like she was in a lot of pain. A mystery to me…

We summoned the vet who told us that, near as he could figure it, Angel, a first-calf heifer, had given birth to the first calf, which tired her. Exhausted, she took a rest when the second one was only halfway out of her, which pinched the calf tight around its lungs causing it to suffocate. The calf kicked like mad to get out. Angel’s uterus was shredded, like paper.

So, we had to put her out of her misery. I still feel bad about it, too. Bill took the gun from my hand and fired before he lost his nerve and before I had a chance to think. Angel’s rope harness was gripped tightly in my hands just under her chin to keep her head up so that she wouldn’t lie down and the .357 was just inches from my head when it went of. It was incredibly loud and instantly I was on the ground with Angel on top of me. Nearly deaf, I yelled at Bill like there was no tomorrow.

That was the day I got into journalism, although I didn’t know it at the time. After two years in Vermont I’d had it with farming. I’d delivered 27 calves and most had gone fairly well. There were good times, but I was tired of the seven-day weeks, the death and the physical toll on my body (sounds like I’m describing my last job!). Plus, I had tried so many other jobs. A month later I was on a train to New York City, a place I’d never been, to try my hand as an artist.

We all have our stories. I’m still in shock that I ultimately made it to Newsweek and now to the School of Journalism at Michigan State University. By ALL measures in this life I should have been a carpenter or maybe even a jackhammer operator.

I liked the jackhammer. Power at your fingertips. I tore up a huge tennis court parking lot in the Bay area with a creepy guy named Vito Cañada. His real name was Tom, but he wanted to be a pro tennis player so he made up a name that would make him sound like one. He even operated the hammer in tennis shorts sometimes, which looked pretty stupid. They’d get torn up by the end of a week. I’d go through a pair of gloves a day because the rubber handle vibrating against my grip would tear huge holes in them. At night I had to take aspirin because my teeth and gums hurt from gritting them so much.

Anyway, Tom/Vito annoyed me, so every day I tried, and always succeeded, in tearing up more asphalt parking lot than he did. I’d turn around at the end of the day and see my plowed-up chunks spreading farther than his. But my heart was in it. His wasn’t. I’m still competitive over silly things.

Before all this I’d taught English in Bogotá for a year or so and tried carpentry and factory work in L.A. But, in my head, the best thing I’d ever done was being the cartoonist for my high school paper.

So I sold my pickup truck in Vermont and used the money to move to New York City to try and be a children’s book illustrator. I was worried because I’d never studied art nor worked as an artist, but I loved drawing and did it all the time. I put a portfolio together using crayons I’d bought at an art store on Broadway because they were cheap.

As luck would have it, six weeks later, at age 23, I was the director of information graphics at United Press International overseeing a staff of three. I didn’t even know what an information graphic was…

Space Lab was orbiting above us and about to crash and burn back to earth back then. My editor asked me to do a graphic about this re-entry so I enthusiastically combined cutout photos of Earth and Skylab and airbrushed flames off the craft (everyone knows that things burn up when they re-enter the atmosphere!). It looked really cool, or so I thought, and I went home feeling pretty good…

…until I saw the Washington Post the next morning. They had done a graphic, too. No flames here! Maps of orbital patterns showed where SpaceLab’s debris might fall along with the percentages of likelihood in those areas. They may have even had a cutaway of the thing showing what it was like inside. My graphic was a joke and it had gone out to over a thousand newspapers on the UPI network. I wanted to die.

So, I was now delivering graphics instead of calves, and there would be many more to come that should have been aborted!