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Name: David Alter
Degree and Year: BJ '50
Title: Author, Former Newspaper Reporter and Aerospace Writer
City and State: Longmont, Colo.
David Alter, BJ '50
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David Bear Alter was born in New York City in 1924. At the age of 3 or 4, his parents moved to a tiny upstate New York hamlet named East Nassau along the Vermont and Massachusetts borders.
The settlement, at the time about 75 strong, was among the Colonial Dutch land holdings settled during the early 1700s by Killiaen van Rensselaer. Alter's home was among the earliest in Rensselaer County.
East Nassau, one of many New England hollows along the Massachusetts, Vermont and New York State lines, is the setting for Alter's latest book, Intrepidations & Funny Business, which is a "sort of fictionalized semi-autobiographical account of my unorthodox life," Alter said.
The book is told in 65 unique short stories as Alter and his wife of 52 years trek back in time to the 1920s and 1930s to his childhood home in East Nassau. The book is just the latest accomplishment in Alter's "unorthodox" life and career in journalism, which included a stop at the Missouri School of Journalism.
From Soldier to Journalist
On his 17th birthday in 1942, in the midst of World War II, Alter dropped out of high school to enlist in the Marine Corps and saw action at the invasion of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. Discharged in 1945, Alter completed high school and earned a degree in journalism in 1950 at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
In one of the short stories of Alter's book, he credits Dr. Frank Luther Mott, dean of the Missouri School of Journalism from 1942-1951, as his mentor:
"Journalism under the tenets of Dr. Frank Luther Mott at the University of Missouri was demanding. We learned such guidelines as 'The truth is its own defense' and 'A public service is a public trust.' We were taught to write like we want to be heard and ask...ask...ask questions. Dig into the shadows of the story. Be accurate and respect a person's right to be quoted accurately. There is no such thing as 'off the record;' take it in confidence, but don't pretend that what is said doesn't exist and don't promise what you can't provide. Exercise conscience. Write to inform, educate, and entertain. You won't always please."
With such rigorous journalism training, Alter began his career. He had freelanced historical stories, several on covered bridges, during college prior to a newspaper reporting career that spanned 11 years. Alter progressed from a small daily in Pontiac, Ill., to newspapers in Davenport, Iowa, and Shreveport, La. In Shreveport, he met his wife and current writing partner. Alter then moved on to newspapers in El Paso, Texas; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Chicago, Ill.
Investigative Reporting and Other Stories
Alter wrote police investigative stories that appeared in detective magazines during the 1950s. He received the Pall Mall Award for investigative reporting for a story that ultimately freed a man wrongly accused and imprisoned for an armed robbery he did not commit. While a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, Alter wrote 95 by-lined stories that include his work on detailing life on Chicago's Skid Row; interviewing Roco De Grazia, Al Capone's colleague; and writing a variety of undercover crime stories.
One of his most memorable Tribune stories was a Page One article he wrote in 1957 or 1958 about a traditional outhouse in Waukegan, Ill.
"Placed along the railroad tracks in public view, the county declared it a nuisance and ordered it removed. I had tied (the story) in with James Whitcomb Riley's memorial piece, Ode To The Out House," Alter said in his book. "It brought dozens of laudatory phone calls and letters from readers. Among them author and poet, Robert Frost, saying: 'Thanks, David, for putting a smile in my breakfast coffee.'"
Frost invited Alter to visit him in New Hampshire, but Alter never found the time to make the trip. Frost died in 1963, and Alter calls the experience an "unfinished memory."
The Space Age and Beyond
Alter was lured from the Chicago Tribune in the 1960s by a west coast aerospace firm to write about the Atlas ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile). He later moved on to become a writer for the Apollo and other space shuttle programs at NASA's Johnson Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas. Alter authored the award-winning Apollo News Reference Book commissioned by Rockwell International, builder of the Apollo spacecraft that carried astronauts to the moon. The News Reference Book was the news media's encyclopedia of lunar space flight.
Alter and his wife, Lynette, are parents of a son, Paul, and a daughter, Deborah. An ardent critic of today's medical practitioners and hospitals, Alter conducts research in the health care field. He is driven by his opinion that medical practitioners "are too much enamored with their fees and less with their patients." Alter currently lives in Longmont, Colo., where he has authored historical articles for several Colorado publications.
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