The Boys of Summer Read online

  The Tribune was housed in a twenty-story building of buff brick that squatted on the block between Seventh and Eighth avenues, from Fortieth to Forty-first Street. The garment industry ran right to the rear doors and, two hundred yards east on Fortieth, the old Metropolitan Opera House presented a façade of soiled yellow brick. The region was eclectic; in the old Tribune neighborhood garment buildings, garages and orange-drink stands mixed into Manhattan drabness. Visitors entered the newspaper offices at 230 West Forty-first Street under bright globes stenciled with the Herald Tribune logotype. There was no hyphen between “Herald” and “Tribune,” which was a good thing for visitors to remember. Tribune men cared about such details. It was “the Journal hyphen American,” they said, but “the Herald space Tribune.”

  Production logistics ordered the lower stories. The second and third floors, really one prodigious room, contained eight high-speed presses whose roar, while producing 35,000 newspapers an hour, would have pierced the deafness of Beethoven. When a newspaperman speaks of the music of rolling presses, he is either faking or has had so much to drink that he will next sentimentalize appendicitis. The fourth floor was given to compositors, who set type and made up the pages inside sturdy frames of steel. Editorial—reporters, copyreaders, editors and, for that matter, copyboys—worked on five. Walking into the fifth floor from the Forty-first Street elevator, one passed banks of offices given to editorial writers and executives and random critics. Then, following a wide corridor, one burst upon the newsroom, a huge open pit which was usually but not frequently painted pale green. Reporters sat in banks of desks, extending from the Fortieth Street wall toward the center of the room, where the city editor reigned, surrounded by demigods. The office of George Anthony Cornish, the managing editor, occupied the extreme southeast corner. It was carpeted and contained a bust of Adolf Hitler that had been pierced and chipped by fusillades fired from Garrand rifles.

  The path of prose was downward. Stories written and edited on five were cast in lead on four. Mats became plates and were fixed to the presses on three. Finished newspapers, produced, cut and folded by those astonishing machines, rode conveyors to street level. There they were bound and thrown into delivery trucks, which gathered nightly in Fortieth Street, blocking traffic and then fanning out through New York City, tanks setting forth on familiar maneuvers. At the Fortieth Street entrance a sign read “EMPLOYEES ONLY.” The word “employee” was a mark of the plain face of newspaper life. A hospital or an advertising agency would have used “staff.”

  Each day’s tension described a parabola. On the fifth floor of the Tribune, the curve rose steeply toward 8:30P.M., the hour at which all material for the city edition was to clear editorial and stories and headlines, locked together with metal clips, clanked down a chute to the composing room. People who had to write the stories and compose or edit the headlines were invariably lifted along the curve. Some, like Kallgren, vented pressure through sadism. Others drank and smoked and, although only Winders fainted, I saw at least two reporters stuck for prose and near a deadline begin to cry.

  “It’s upsetting like nothing else in the world,” Bob White said, late one night, after the first episode of crying. A reporter had sent a copyboy for coffee and pound cake. When the boy returned with coffee and raisin cake, the reporter began a diminishing outcry with a scream. “No. No. No. I don’t like raisins. I won’t eat the goddamn cake. Why couldn’t you do what I said?” And he started to sob. “Not everybody can take the life,” White said. “Not everybody should try.”

  “I’ve never really seen a place like this, Bob, or people like this either.”

  “I don’t imagine you would have, growing up in Brooklyn. But don’t panic. After a while, you’ll find good things, like whisky, flow more freely around this place than tears.”

  The Artist and Writers Restaurant, a handsome, somber establishment with a sixty-foot bar of polished dark wood, attracted most of the business. Leo Corcoran, the head bartender, measured martinis with such precision that a crown rose above the rim of the glass and one did best to lean over to the first sip. The Artist and Writers was called Bleeck’s, pronounced “Blake’s,” for its owner, who had operated a speakeasy and not allowed women into the bar until 1935, at which time a Tribune reporter grumbled, “Next they’ll be buttering the steaks.” Bleeck’s was on Fortieth Street, directly under a garage. With several of Leo’s martinis inside him, a baseball writer missed an assignment when he looked out the back window and saw torrents. “ ‘S rainin’,” he said. “I’ll write a rainout story at five o’clock,” and he returned to the martinis. The day was cloudy but dry. Workmen had been washing cars on the garage roof and the “rain” came from their hoses. Colleagues eventually filled in the man, and the story he wrote on the game he did not see was passable, although poorly typed.

  The drinking press was variously furtive, as in sneaking a quick one to “get the damn lead off the ground,” gregarious, as when a story was finished and approved, and contentious. Irascibility and combativeness struck people unpredictably when the parabolic tension bottomed, leaving a man adrenalin for which he had no proper use.

  The production of an enormous newspaper, Joe Herzberg has suggested, is nothing less than a miracle. “It never ceased to surprise me,” he said years later, while bearing the title of “Cultural News Editor” at the Times, “that somehow a finished newspaper emerges every day.” But the achievement of the Tribune then and of the Times then and now relies not on divine assistance but on mundane organization. Once lines of copy flow are established, once responsibility for various essentials—page make-up, photo selection, caption writing—is distributed and once the mechanics of production are subdued, the creation of a half million newspapers a night is no more miraculous than one day’s output of automobiles at Flint, Michigan. A technological marvel is no miracle.

  The immeasurable difference between producing cars and producing newspapers is pursuit of the horizon. A car begins with specifications, that is to say limits, within which production workers succeed or fail. If the front discs are not quite ready for 1972, there is plenty of time. Install them in 1973, or ‘74 or ‘75. A newspaper has no specifications. “Nothing ever written,” F.P.A. observed, “was too good to appear in a paper.” The editor planning his news section wants the world in miniature. The reporter starting to type remembers Marlowe’s mighty line. Newspaper work, good newspaper work, begins with passionate striving. The rise or fall of newspaper tension is unique.

  At the Trib, only copyboys were immune. It was no more difficult at 8:20 to walk a story from the wire room to the foreign desk than it had been at 5:15. Sure of ourselves, observing without involvement, we humored Benny Weinberg, took the measure of the people around us and tired the clock with debates.

  The newsroom cast was troubling and impressive. A young Hunter College graduate who was assistant women’s page editor raised her left arm and snapped fingers when she wanted coffee. Seeing a male obey the wordless order made her smirk. “But I really think,” one of the two night copygirls pointed out, “that if she must order coffee that way, she ought to shave her underarms.” A chubby Navy veteran served George Cornish as night secretary and wandered among us, an emperor amid clowns. When we ignored him, he drove into conversations, remarking that $240 a week was too much to pay for an editor, whose name he mentioned. He had access to his employer’s files, and knew everybody’s salary. The police reporter Walter Arm was a hero for his ability to write succinctly and quickly. The foreign correspondent Homer Bigart was a hero because totalitarian governments were always expelling him and, besides, he was said to have been a copyboy for seven years. The ancient columnists, Mark Sullivan and George Fielding Eliot, seemed irrelevant even then, but we admired the radio-TV critic, John Crosby, although he never spoke to us, and the music critic, Virgil Thomson, who was extraordinarily accessible, and Red Smith, whom we never saw. Smith filed columns by wire and expense accounts by mail.

  The prettiest girl
—newspaper offices are depressingly funetional —worked as secretary to the foreign editor. One day the Washington wire teletypist, a volatile man whose hobby was nude photography, summoned his courage and bought her dinner in Greenwich Village. She accepted the meal, but not the donor. A few days later he displayed a dozen pictures of the girl, whose name was Gerry, as she walked about her kitchen, fully dressed. “Goddamn prude,” he complained. Later Gerry showed me photographs of herself in a bathing suit, taken while she spent a vacation in the Maritime Provinces of Canada. She was black-haired and trim with an appealing little swell to her belly. In our sudden intimacy, I said I was beginning to weary of fetching coffee whenever a hairy witch snapped fingers. Gerry said I had to be patient. I started to frame a reply, but someone shouted, “Copy, copy, copy,” and the music fled.

  Mostly, the hours droned in abstract discussion. “Who,” asked Willard Hertz, the man from Columbia Journalism, “is the greatest American novelist, and what is the greatest novel? Two parts.” Willard was a bulky, bright Clevelander, whose father was a judge. While working as a police reporter in Lorain, Ohio, Willard had eaten an Oh! Henry bar during a police autopsy, he claimed. The literary answers he demanded were Mark Twain and Moby Dick. Anything else precipitated argument. “But, Willard,” said Henry Goethals, a tall, bony ascetic whose grandfather supervised construction of the Panama Canal, “there isn’t any single answer to that sort of question.”

  “Oh, yes,” Willard said. “Huck Finn is a fine novel, but Moby Dick is unsurpassed.”

  What was a better war book, Three Soldiers or All Quiet on the Western Front? Did Thomas Wolfe really hate Jews? Was Spoon River Anthology or Winesburg, Ohio closer to the tortured heart of America? Was Henry Wallace a populist like Bryan? Would Stalin exploit or respect him?

  The debates rang, until someone called “Copy,” but they picked up again at once; so that being a night copyboy at the Herald Tribune was to audit lectures by untitled professors and to attend continuous disorganized seminars of bright graduate students. My own surest area was baseball, and with spring Henry Goethals asked whom I considered the best of hitters.

  “Stan Musial in Ebbets Field.”

  “What about Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio?”

  “Nobody hits like Musial in Brooklyn.”

  “Would you take me to see him?” Goethals said. “I don’t believe I’ve been to Brooklyn but once.”

  We met at a YMCA near Central Park. I led Henry to the subway, and after forty minutes we reached the Brooklyn Museum station, where we walked out onto the sunlit mall of Eastern Parkway. “Say,” Goethals said, “this is nice.” I showed him the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and the lot behind the Museum where we had played hardball. He nodded and gazed at long rows of apartment buildings, studying them as one might study Tasmanian vistas. “This must have been an interesting place to grow up,” Goethals said.

  We entered Ebbets Field through a rotunda, floored in white tile with inlaid designs of crossed bats. “Built in 1912,” I said. “Fine place to see a game. You’re very close to the field.” Our seats were in the upper deck between first base and home.

  In the first inning, Harry Taylor mixed a curve and a fast ball and got two quick strikes on the Cardinals’ Number 6. Musial then lined a pitch against the right-field wall for a double. He hit the wall again next time up; no Dodger pitcher got him out that afternoon. Years later in a club car Musial recalled the day. “I not only got five-for-five,” he said, “I got every hit with two strikes.” At the time, the afternoon established me as a man of authority. It was a small step from lecturing the old Harvard football captain on baseball to countering Hertz’s claims for Sherwood Anderson with my own for Edgar Lee Masters. Spoon River stirred me, and beyond that Masters was a man with whom to identify. A Chicago newspaper had dismissed him once as an inept writer. Long afterward the same paper requested a series of special articles and drew from the poet a thunderous, triumphant “No!”

  Each copyboy was permitted to discuss his future with Joe Herzberg semiannually by appointment. You lost all immunity then. Suddenly, sitting in the center of a loud, busy, important newsroom, you had five minutes in which to tell a preoccupied man, whose budget was tight, why you, of all people on earth, were best qualified to join the Tribune’s reportorial staff. Naked pleas embarrassed Herzberg. His hands shook more violently when a copyboy approached and he grabbed a newspaper and started turning pages.

  “I was, uh, wondering, sir, if there was, uh, any chance of my getting a reporting job?”

  “Better come back and see me in the fall.” The newspaper he held snapped and rattled. “Go on. Go on. I’m listening. Is that all you have to say?”

  “Uh, I see you’re looking at the gardening section.”

  “Yes. It’s a fine thing to grow plants. Almost everything human is in flux. There’s a permanence to transplanting a tree.”

  “About my career …”

  “In autumn. Try in autumn. Nothing now.”

  “Yes, sir. And I certainly will do some serious gardening between now and then.”

  After each rejection, we complained about Herzberg. Someone called him “Flowerhead Joe.” But we were learning, from him and from the gentler people like Bob White, and just as surely we learned from one another.

  Will Hertz could have followed his father into law and comfort in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Goethals, son of a physician at Harvard Medical School, walked his own path. A young man’s rebellion is no less determined because it is individual not collective, and as we took the measure of one another, down boisterous newspaper nights, we came to learn styles of rebellion and to sense that the Herald Tribune attracted people who longed to fight endemic wrongs, and who sought a life of new experiences rather than a repetition of what was prosperous, time-worn and safe. Exploring one another’s lives, while a great newspaper clamored around us, we strode from boyish loneliness and provincialism toward the greater loneliness of what it is to be a man.

  If doors were not opened, they could be wedged. Beach Conger, the travel editor, sometimes assigned copyboys to write articles, for $5 or $10, insisting only that the writer really have seen the place he described. This rule became mandatory after a boy named Herbert Zucker sold an article, extolling Waycross, Georgia, as a second Valhalla. Taking Zucker’s prose as sterling, another copyboy, Ed Morgan, visited Waycross on a motor trip following his marriage to a daughter of Avereli Harriman. “We went far out of our way to get to Waycross,” Morgan reported on his return. “Zucker left out that Waycross is hard by Okefenokee. We had to drive miles of bad road through the swamp in 100-degree heat. We kept running into swarming insects so we had to keep the windows closed. When we got out of Okefenokee, we found ourselves driving past thousands of ruined cars. Waycross seems to be the principal auto graveyard in the South.” Morgan, tall and restrained, then said, “Nice piece, Herbie.”

  William Zinsser, the young drama editor, assigned me to interview a female ice skater for the Sunday paper, pointing out that in a few weeks at Madison Square Garden the skater would play before the equivalent of a full year’s attendance in a Broadway theater. Zinsser liked anomalies. Later he sent me to an off-Broadway production of Juno and the Paycock. “Everyone calls O’Casey the greatest playwright alive,” Zinsser said, “but he can’t get his stuff on Broadway.” Preparing, I read five O’Casey plays in three days, which would have been a semester’s worth of work at NYU if NYU admitted that O’Casey existed. Juno is not the best, but it ends with the remark, “The whole world is in a terrible state of chassis,” one more instance, I wrote, of O’Casey’s brilliance. Zinsser printed the first three-quarters of my story, and a day later seven New York newspapers published advertisements for Juno, with the legend, “Brilliant—Herald Tribune.”

  The sports department was a world detached, with its own copy desk, its own teletypes and its own tigerish independence. Stanley Woodward, the sports editor, found George Cornish so grievously cautious that he p
ublicly referred to the managing editor as “Old Double-Rubber.” Woodward was an enormous, myopic man, who had pitched and played guard for Amherst, where he studied non-Shakespearean Elizabethan drama under Robert Frost. “I didn’t care much for their stuff,” he said, “and Frost didn’t either.” Woodward, a scholar and innovator, was called “The Coach.” At one standing, he was said to have consumed eleven of Leo Corcoran’s martinis, with no other sustenance except salted peanuts, and left Bleeck’s vertically under his own power. That was a record, and still endures.

  By using what he described as a scouting system, Woodward assembled the finest sports staff in the country. The Coach studied out-of-town papers, and when he spotted a good story, he began a file of the writer’s work. If it was consistently excellent, Woodward waited for an opening, then brought the man to New York with talk of “the big time” and possibly a pay raise. He found a remarkable racing columnist, Joe H. Palmer, on a magazine called The Blood Horse. Palmer had been a university teacher lacking only a thesis for his doctorate in English. “One leg a Ph.D.,” he said of himself. Palmer occasionally composed subheads for his racing columns in eleventh-century English. Woodward calculated that Red Smith, working for the Philadelphia Record, was writing 500,000 words a year. “Most was excellent,” he said. “I reasoned that if we cut his work load in half, damn near everything would be excellent, which is what happened.” He had also attempted to hire John Lardner while the two shot dice in the belly of an aircraft carrier riding into the Battle of Midway. “When this damn war ends,” Woodward said, “I want you to be my sports columnist.”