My guess is I was like a lot of other first-time co-ops when I landed in the Lowell Sun newsroom in January 1973. I was there to see what journalism is like in the real world.

Real world? Real boring. In the beginning, anyway.

Although I didn't know it, I was in the maw of a well-oiled co-op machine. The Sun had been taking interns since long before I got there, and its prevailing wisdom was to expose first-timers to the whole journalistic shebang. Thus, in my first three-month stint, I worked in the wire-service room, ran copy, wrote wedding announcements, and received obits.

When the Sun's librarian took ill, I assumed that role, in the area lovingly known at newspapers as the "morgue." After two or three days of my trying to find my way around there, a well-dressed man walked in and asked my name. I told him. He then asked if I was the Keeper of the Records for the Sun. I puffed up a bit, and said, "Yes, I am."

He handed me a subpoena.

I was being summoned to testify in an attempted-murder case. Years earlier, a member of the Hell's Angels had tried to shoot a Lowell police officer, and prosecutors at the Suffolk County Superior Court wanted to know what, if anything, might be in the paper's files that would help with the case.

Though I was never called to testify, I had a whole lot to talk about—stuff like the First Amendment—when I got back to Caroline Ackerman's journalism classes at Northeastern.

By July, I was working again at the Sun.

I had progressed enough to serve as a general-assignment reporter, mostly on the police beat. On July 31, I was pecking away at my Underwood manual typewriter, trying to ignore the fact that it was my twentieth birthday—there would be hell to pay that night at the Cask 'n' Flagon—when the police scanner began to chatter.

My designated mentor, a veteran police reporter named Nick Karagianis, soon had me by the arm. He hauled me out of my chair, and by the time we had jumped into a company car, I knew we were headed to Logan Airport.

A plane had crashed.

We drove like crazy down I-93—I stopped looking at the speedometer when I saw Nick had topped 90 mph at one point—and we were through the tunnel inside a half-hour.

Carnage awaited us.

A twin-engine DC-9 had crashed in the fog that shrouded Logan. Delta Flight 723 came in too low, undershot runway 4R, clipped a seawall, and broke apart, spilling passengers and burning fuel along the runway.

I wound up at a brown brick building about a mile from runway 4R. Ordinarily, the building housed the Logan Emergency Fire Department. That day, it was a true morgue.

Of the ninety souls aboard Delta Flight 723, eighty-eight of them lay on the floor of the building, their bodies wrapped in white sheets. One survivor was dead within the hour. The other, a twenty-year-old U.S. Air Force sergeant from Vermont named Leopold Chouinard, would linger for five months before succumbing to his burns.

Smoke, fog, and an unsettling stench still filled the air. Even though it wasn't anything we'd covered yet in journalism class, I figured that, when you're confronted with a scene that is simply so otherworldly, the best thing to do is focus on the work. So I tried to disassociate myself from what I was seeing.

Minutes later, at a hastily assembled press conference, airport officials told us that Flight 723 had come in from Grenier Field, in my hometown of Manchester, New Hampshire.

Disassociation was no longer possible.

Yes, I was a reporter from the Sun, but, first and foremost, I was a twenty-year-old kid from Manchester, and all of a sudden it was personal. As we scoured the list of casualties, I was being paid to look for names from Lowell, but what broke my heart was seeing the names from New Hampshire.

As a journalism major at Northeastern, I had always known what I wanted to do. But, from that day forward, I knew where I had to practice my craft. If journalism was my future, my future was back in my home state.

Why?

I learned that day that if you care about telling people's stories, if you truly want to chronicle the joy and sorrow, the comedy, tragedy, and incomparable richness that fill the rhythms of daily life, you can't do it with detachment.

You have to invest yourself in your work, not just intellectually, but emotionally. If you want your work to resonate with readers, it has to be personal. It's a lesson I learned—a real real-world lesson—on July 31, 1973.

John Clayton is a columnist at the Union Leader, in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the author of several books, including You Know You're in New Hampshire When . . . (Globe Pequot, 2005).