Howard Fenn

On the morning of April 19, 1995, I was sitting at the AP bureau in Kansas City, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup that had a bite mark in the rim because I had a nervous habit I never broke. The first wire hit at 9:03 a.m. Central. A bomb had gone off in Oklahoma City. The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Within twenty minutes, I had filed my first bulletin. Within an hour, the phones were ringing so constantly that someone unplugged the one nearest to me because the sound was making it impossible to think. I filed eleven stories that day. I ate a sandwich from a vending machine at four in the afternoon. I drove home at midnight and sat in the driveway for ten minutes with the engine running because I did not yet know how to walk into a quiet house after a day like that.

I spent thirty-eight years at the Associated Press. I started in the Kansas City bureau in 1986, fresh out of the University of Missouri with a journalism degree and the particular confidence of a twenty-two-year-old who believed that telling the truth was a straightforward enterprise. It is not. It took me about six months to learn that. It took me about thirty years to get comfortable with the complexity.

The AP teaches you things no other job teaches you. It teaches you that the first report is almost always incomplete and frequently wrong in at least one specific way. It teaches you that the word “allegedly” is not a decoration but a load-bearing wall. It teaches you to count. How many people were in the room. What time the vote happened. How many votes. You learn to distrust round numbers because round numbers are usually estimates and estimates are usually wrong. You learn to read a press release the way a mechanic reads an engine noise: not for what it says, but for what it is trying not to say.

I covered the Midwest for the first decade. Farm crises, floods, elections, plant closings, tornadoes. I covered the 1993 Great Flood from a boat in a neighborhood in Des Moines where the street signs were the only evidence that streets existed. I covered the Oklahoma City bombing and its aftermath for three weeks. I was reassigned to the national desk in Washington in 1998, where I covered Congress, two presidential campaigns, September 11 from the bureau while my colleagues were at the Pentagon, the Iraq War authorization vote, the 2008 financial crisis, and a slow accumulation of smaller stories that mattered more to me than the big ones but that nobody remembers because the news cycle had already moved.

I came back to Kansas City in 2012. I requested the transfer. Washington had given me everything it was going to give me, and what it had given me included a sense that the distance between the people who make the news and the people who live inside the consequences of the news is wider than anyone in Washington is willing to admit. I wanted to cover the consequences again. I spent my last twelve years at the AP back in the bureau where I started, covering the region, filing three to five stories a day, working the overnight desk on election nights, training younger reporters who typed faster than I did but who had not yet learned that speed and accuracy are different virtues.

I retired in 2024 at sixty. My wife, Margaret, told me I would last three months before I started writing again. She was wrong. I lasted six weeks. I started The Day because I missed the discipline of the daily file. Not the institution, not the bureau, not the meetings about metrics and platform strategy that had slowly replaced the meetings about what was actually happening. I missed sitting down every day and asking: what happened today, what does it mean, and what did people miss? That is the only question I have ever known how to ask, and I have been asking it since 1986, and I am not finished.

The Day is not an opinion column. I do not have opinions in print. I have facts, and I have context, and I have thirty-eight years of pattern recognition that I deploy the only way I know how: by telling you what happened today and then telling you about the time something very similar happened in 1994 or 2003 or 1971 and what came of it. I believe that history is the only antidote to panic. I believe that most of what passes for breaking news is actually a chapter in a story that started decades ago, and that if you read the earlier chapters, the current one makes more sense and is less frightening.

Every quote in this column is verbatim. Every claim is sourced. Every link goes to the original reporting by the journalist who was actually there. The Sunday Evening Review is never the primary source. I do not break news. I organize it. I give it structure and proportion and historical memory, and then I get out of the way.

I live in Kansas City with Margaret, who taught high school English for thirty-one years and who still corrects my comma splices, which she considers a moral failing. We have two grown children. Our son, David, is an engineer in Denver. Our daughter, Claire, teaches second grade in Lawrence. I have three grandchildren who call me Grandpa Howard, which I prefer to any byline I ever received.

I write The Day every afternoon at the desk in our sunroom, which faces west, which means I write into the light, which Margaret says is poetic and I say is just the way the house is oriented. I file at four. I have never missed a deadline in thirty-eight years and I do not intend to start now.