One of my Associated Press heroes, Marcus Eliason, died last month in New York at just 76 years old. Following his death, I enjoyed reading social media post from other former and current AP reporters about Marcus’s intelligence, grace, humor, booming voice and bushy beard. And I remembered his impact on my own journalism, and on one story in particular.
That story began developing after South Africa was named host of the 2010 World Cup back in 2004, the year I returned to South Africa for my second stint there as an AP foreign correspondent.
I got busy writing about the country’s preparations to be the first African nation to host a tournament that outshines the Olympics in the eyes of some. I decided early on that I wanted to explore what hosting would mean to ordinary South Africans. One day, I was at a press conference about preparations at the headquarters of the national soccer federation, which was located across the street from the stadium being renovated to be the main World Cup arena. As I left the press conference, I noticed construction workers lined up at a group of tents and dilapidated trailers. I walked over and realized women in the tents and trailers were selling food to the workers.
I introduced myself to the women and started asking questions to hear their stories. Cecilia Dube told me about her dream of one day owning her own restaurant. Over the next year, I interviewed Cecilia many times. She allowed me to hang out in her trailer before dawn, when she was preparing breakfasts to sell to construction workers. I went shopping with her, tagged along when she went to business development classes, hung out with her in her apartment in downtown Johannesburg. When police came to clear Cecilia and her fellow food sellers from places where bureaucrats had determined they could not be doing business, Cecilia would call me and I would drop whatever I was doing and rush out to record what was happening in a notebook.
I quickly filled up many notebooks. You can imagine the first draft of my story was unwieldy. Some editors might have looked at that draft and wondered what it had to do with the World Cup. Marcus, the AP’s New York-based features editor at the time, looked at it and saw Cecilia – what she meant to me, what she could mean to so many people like her striving to improve their lives and those of their families, which she could mean to readers all over the world.
Marcus helped me whittle the material I had gathered down to the essentials, and came up with a wonderful headline: “For one woman, a different kind of World Cup dream.”
Another of my AP heroes, Charlie Hanley, wrote Marcus’s obituary for the AP. In it, he told us about Marcus’s early years as a trainee in the AP’s Jerusalem bureau.
“On June 6, 1967,” Charlie wrote, “the Arab-Israeli conflict known as the Six-Day War broke out. When the new hire arrived at work and was chastised for not rushing in earlier, he told of having to buy emergency groceries for his mother, dig a backyard bomb shelter, pick up stranded hitchhikers, and so on.
‘“Don’t stand there talking about it, kid,” an old hand growled. “Write it down.”’
Marcus went on to write down many vivid stories from Hong Kong, South Africa and the UK as well as Israel. Reading his work was an education in itself for me as a young reporter. As an editor, he generously shared his experience and expertise with reporters.
He knew there were ordinary heroes and dreamers to get to know around the world, and helped so many of us tell their stories.