James T. Cain

James T. Cain survived 20 years in the newspaper trade as a reporter, writer, photographer, and editor, with stops in St. Louis, West Palm Beach, Connecticut and someplace called Jerseyville, Illinois. Along the way, he met dozens of characters, a panoply of American lives, each worth at least a small mention in the catalog he kept, everyone with a much larger story hinted at, but told only to themselves.

He was educated at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where his first tight-rope act was the traverse of a steep slate roof in order to climb in the window of the room where he’d locked himself out.

Following college, pursuing the kind of experiences a writer needs, Cain traveled extensively, and worked at any job available. In San Francisco, he was a bicycle messenger, almost a margins clerk and a telephone solicitor for Time magazine and Big Brothers. In Montana, there were jobs driving a bulldozer and servicing prophylactic machines in beer-soaked bars. As an ironworker, he helped build a nuclear power plant in Illinois and helped an illiterate old man with the union tests. All the time between, Cain tended bar in what Newsweek called “a grim little river town,” Alton, Illinois. That job once included serving two men who had just killed another, a experience revealed to him when he covered their murder trial two years later.

Cain’s newspaper career began in the farming town and county seat of Jerseyville. He performed the public relations required of any small town editor (Elks dinners, Moose dinners, Chamber of Commerce dinners, Lincoln dinners, Jefferson dinners, tough chicken dinners). He learned everything, from photography to plate-making, but jumped ship for the big time, with the doomed St. Louis Globe-Democrat. The proud, young staff fought a courageous, yet tragic, daily battle with the last pride of Joseph Pulitzer, the much richer Post-Dispatch. He served as an assistant wire editor and later front-page editor when his news judgment seasoned, delighting in the excitement of news meetings, with city council indictments and wire taps of mobsters blowing each other up. He wasn’t yet 30.

Cain lived in St. Louis’s oldest and partly revitalized Soulard neighborhood, where the Great Cyclone of 1896 brushed aside brick buildings, lifted roofs from churches and buried people, just 90 years ago.

Despite bounced paychecks, the idealistic youth stayed on at The Globe to the bitter end. With the Globe gone, South Florida called. West Palm Beach, where he worked for two years at the Post, brought new adventures, with home invasions, burglary and policemen running through his yard after a suspected serial rapist, the policeman’s gun drawn, headed in the direction of his wife. Mugged on the way home from a 7-11 by rich kids on crack, he and his wife decided to escape to the Northeast countryside in Connecticut’s Farmington River valley. Working as an late-night editor, the foreign and national editor and later the front-page editor for The Hartford Courant, he had ground-floor seats for the invasion of Panama, the invasion of Kuwait, the first Gulf War, the Clinton-era adventures and the Oklahoma City bombing.

After 15 years of nights, Cain took a nine-to-five job editing and designing features and arts pages. He had always written for the newspaper, never losing the astonishment that someone would pay him to do something he loved. Now, he wanted to fulfill his lifelong dream: telling stories.

Cain lives in Hartford, with a magnificent 24th story view (counting the non-existent thirteenth floor) of Connecticut’s state capitol, insurance citadels and the rising moon. He has two sons, who just may take over the world.