Before our second summer at the Moonrise Motel Grant, by dint of much telephoning, exhorting, explaining, pleading, and even threatening, organized the motel owners in Banning into what started out as the Banning Motel Owners' Association, and later grew more inclusive and changed its name to the Banning Hotel and Motel Owners' Association. The purpose of this organization was to advertise Banning so thoroughly and so blatantly, principally by means of highway advertising signs, that even during the summer there would be more eager tourists than there were accommodations. Banning had two small weekly newspapers, and ever since we came to the motel I had been toying with the idea of working for one of them on a part-time basis, if I could get the editor's approval. At least ninety percent of the wrecks that occurred in Banning happened right in front of the Moonrise Motel; there couldn't be any question about that. I could write up the story of each wreck for the paper; and maybe the editor would have some ideas as to further work I could do. A few days before the first meeting of the new motel owners' association was scheduled, I bearded the editor of one of the Banning papers in her den. The story of the association's first meeting would be, I figured, a good opening wedge. I had always had a yen to work on a newspaper. It had struck me that in nearly every biography of great writers there was a sentence or two testifying to the fact that the writer had at one time been a newspaper reporter. And since, of course, I hoped some day to be listed among the great, I should attend to that little prerequisite. Reporting for a country paper would be an interesting experience, and with Grant home all the time, Donna would be able to spare me for two or three hours each day. The editor of the paper, a pleasant-faced woman of about forty, with short, curly dark hair, was very interested when I revealed my background of magazine writing, and the fact that I had written a regular column in a Los Angeles newspaper until we left that city. Her present "reporter," the most literate she could find in this small town, was a recent high school graduate who used such sentences as "he capitulated through the air," and "the drunk driver was convicted of auto-intoxication." We argued for about an hour. She'd like to have me work for her, all right, but she wanted me to work full time. Her office was large, airy and cluttered. Two huge old desks stood against each other, their battered tops nearly obscured by a litter of papers, pencils and telephones. A door at one end of the office led into a much bigger, still more cluttered room. From that room came the crash of machinery, and the voices of the men who were setting type, reading proof, putting the paper to bed, or whatever the technical terms are for whatever they do in such places. It was confusing, noisy, and somehow delicious.