Hong Kong journalist Francis Moriarty reflects on his storied career

SON OF A SOLDIER My father was in the army during the second world war and later he was sent to Korea. My family was from Massachusetts, in the north of the United States, but we lived in Georgia, in the south. You might as well have said you grew up on Mars. My father was a staff sergeant and, in Korea, he got sick – standing around in frozen rice paddies – which was the beginning of a lot of health problems for him. We moved back to Massachusetts in the mid 50s, and my father died at the age of 44, when I was 17 and had just graduated from high school. Later, my mother worked at General Electric in Pittsfield. When they moved out of there, they left 16,000 people out of jobs. My sister is 12 years younger than me, and I have a half brother from a later relationship by my mother.

OPPOSING FORCES I graduated from high school in 1964. Originally I went to a Catholic high school, but we had some problems, that school and me, so midway through my junior year I moved to the local public high school. I went from being an honours student to the world’s worst greasy twerp. It was the time of the Vietnam war, but as the “sole surviving son of a totally disabled veteran who had died because of his disability”, (due to draft dispensations) even if I had enlisted I would never have seen combat. Over time I became very strongly against the war in Vietnam and I spent the next years of my life actively involved in the anti-war movement.

HUNTING AND PECKING I studied American civilisation at Williams College, a liberal-arts school in Massachusetts. I then went to graduate school for journalism studies, at the University of California, Berkeley, but I didn’t start my career in journalism in California. I’d worked on my hometown paper years earlier, while at the Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield. I started out on the sports desk. That’s where I learned to hunt-and-peck type with two fingers and to write headlines – on an old Royal mechanical typewriter.