by Roger Kahn
“Just roll them, Coach,” Lardner said.
“You ought to come off Newsweek, Lardner, and come back to honest work. Be a newspaperman.” It was early June and stifling. Both men were naked, except for towels.
“I don’t want to write every day,” Lardner said. “Can’t write that well that often.”
“You won’t have to. I’ll use you three times a week.”
“Expensive,” Lardner said. Actually, he was afraid newspaper work would consume all his writing energies. “I’d need five hundred dollars for the three.”
“Fine,” Woodward said, but the bargain was canceled by a Tribune executive who refused to authorize the salary. “Think of it,” Woodward remarked in his seventieth year. “My two regular columnists would have been Smith and Lardner, except for the goddamn zombi who vetoed me.” Woodward described the staff he had assembled with great pride submerged in archness. “One made journalism his major at Notre Dame. Another majored in Latin and Greek at Yale. Another came to this country from Scotland as a golf professional. Another was night editor of the Paris Herald. Another attended City College of New York and caught on because he did an outstanding job as the paper’s correspondent there. Another started as a copyboy. Another was the son of a famous big league player and got the ear of my predecessor because of that. Another was a theatrical press agent. Another was formerly an advance man for Singer’s Midgets.”
Woodward’s cries carried more lustily even than Kallgren’s. Once he roared at one of his best writers, “Sir! If you refer to Chicago as the windy city in my sports section one more time, out, Out, Out!’ Whoever the author, Woodward would not tolerate horrendous clashes of fearsome Tigers and snarling Wolverines, concluded in purple sunsets. He wanted, he said, to present his department “in such a manner that it would be intelligible to the nonsports reader, should one happen to fold back the paper at the wrong place.” He liked verbs of action and exact adjectives. He disliked “ding-dong battles, horse-hides, donnybrooks, myriads of colored lights, fetlock-deep mud, net tilts, grid battles, pile-driving rights and the act of rushing people to the hospital.”
The Reids fired this wholly remarkable and dedicated man while I was still a copyboy. Various versions ascribe different motivations. Woodward had balked at printing the scores of mediocre female golfers who were friends of the publisher. Woodward had refused to print the scores of mediocre male golfers who bought advertising space. Pressed by Mrs. Reid to list “the two most dispensable members of your department for purposes of economy discharges,” the Coach responded, “Stanley Woodward and Red Smith.” When the Tribune could no longer tolerate Woodward’s spirit, its vitality sapped. Newspapers like the Tribune and the old World attracted creative people and let them flourish. That was their strength, indeed their response to the encyclopedism of the New York Times. But with creativity comes unorthodoxy, iconoclasm and passionate, if sometimes misdirected, integrity. The World, not long before its death, fired Heywood Broun for attacking the executioners of Sacco and Vanzetti with too much frequency and ardor. Discipline was maintained and the World became weaker. The Tribune management replaced Woodward with Robert Barbour Cooke, a graceful baseball writer who was tall, poised and had been Whitelaw Reid’s classmate at Yale. Cooke, a man of generosity and reportorial talent, did not contest orders from above. Management believed that it was making life easier for itself by promoting Cooke. Actually, the evidence suggests it was inviting death by firing the most gloriously talented sports editor in the United States.
In time, Woodward and I became friends, but as copyboy I was known to him only as one more young man, scurrying to get cigarettes. Woodward tipped for personal services. When he wanted cigarettes, he stuffed a bill into your hand and said, “Buy yourself a pack, too,” or, “While you’re down at Bleeck’s, son, take a minute. Get yourself a glass of draft beer.”
“Mr. Marsh?”
I had summoned my courage and approached Irving Marsh, a gentle, white-haired man, Woodward’s assistant and now assistant to the new sports editor, Bob Cooke. He was scrawling a headline with his left hand. The sports department occupied a rectangle at the north side of the city room and Marsh sat at a large desk, guarding the entrance, an amiable Cerberus.
He looked up. “Yes?”
“I was wondering if there might be any chance of my doing some string work in sports.”
“What have you done?”
“Stuff in drama. I’ve got the clips right here. And then there are some things I’ve done with one of the rewrite men, Bob White. He can tell you.”
“Well, there’s nothing right now,” Marsh said.
“Oh.” I looked for a route of retreat. Marsh had been generous with baseball tickets; by bothering him for work, I was not only asking the improbable but risking his good will and Dodger passes as well. “Wait a minute, my friend.” Marsh looked up with a quick smile. “I didn’t say there wasn’t anything, anywhere. The AP is looking for someone to cover some college football in the fall. Go over in a few weeks and ask for Spike Claassen.” He turned quickly to a secretary and began dictating to avoid an outpouring of thanks.
At the Associated Press offices in Rockefeller Plaza the next day, Harold (Spike) Claassen said that if Irv Marsh had recommended me, I could certainly have the job.
“You won’t have to supply me with a portable,” I said. “I can get my own.”
“We don’t,” Claassen began. Then he sighed and said, “Never mind. Look, call me about September 15. I’ll give you your first assignment then.”
I drew a game between Wagner and another Lutheran college called Panzer, as in Afrika Korps, which has since dropped its name and become a division of Montclair State Teachers in New Jersey. I was to write 150 words and provide the score by periods. The essentials of Associated Press dispatches are speed, simplicity and artless, necessary organization. Each story is transmitted to hundreds of newspapers. A few may print all. Most carry a fragment. Some publish only the first sentence. The same AP dispatch that runs 150 words in the Philadelphia Bulletin may run 75 words in the Camden Courier-Post and 50 words in the Hartford Times. Readers of each newspaper are equally entitled to coherence. These conditions require a story to begin with the names of the teams, an indication of what sport is in question, a mention of the final score and, if possible, the winning play. One devotes succeeding paragraphs to significant moments, in the order of their importance, and, when space is so tight that real description is impossible, pertinent statistics.
The AP considers that it has beaten rival news services when its dispatch is used, and experience indicates that on a busy Saturday of college football, sports departments select the first story that arrives, regardless of merit. “You should have a finished piece in here,” Claassen ordered, “no more than fifteen minutes after the game.”
John Keats is said to have written “I stood tiptoe upon a little hill” in twenty minutes. He and Leigh Hunt were holding a sonnet-writing race, which Keats won both in elapsed time and in lyricism. There was no prohibition against lyric writing at the Associated Press. If in fifteen minutes a man was able to compress the facts of a football game into a story that could withstand amputation at any point and compose lyrically, he was welcome to go ahead.
The first assignment sent me to Staten Island, where Wagner won in the closing minutes. “A fourth quarter scoring pass,” I began, on a shaky Royal borrowed from my father, “from Chris Kartalis to Whitey Drown gave Wagner College a 14–12 victory over Panzer today.” By the end of the season, I was writing five-hundred-word stories, and after my eighth weekend Claassen handed me a check for $24. He was a genial, mild man, but frugal.
“That’s only three dollars a game,” I said.
“Budget,” Claassen said, and threw up his palms.
At the AP you learned formula and developed speed. The first is antithetic to creative writing and the second is largely irrelevant, but both are critical to the confidence of every newspaperman. There is never
a working day when the guillotine of deadline does not hang above one’s neck. It is a comfort beyond prayer to realize that when sweeter muses are struck dumb, one can always write a variation of AP Formula One, “A fourth quarter scoring pass from Chris Kartalis to Whitey Drown,” and neither win a prize nor utterly fail.
“What are you doing on Thanksgiving, my friend?” I was a daytime copyboy by now, but still stringing for the Associated Press.
“A football game for the AP, Mr. Marsh.”
“Well, if you can get out of it, I’d like you to cover a walking race for us. City Hall to Coney Island. Starts at ten. You can be home in time to have your turkey.”
“I’ve never seen a walking race in my life.”
“The clips, my friend. The clips. Can I put you down for it?”
The Herald Tribune morgue, opening off the city room, was richly grained with history. More than a century of newspapers were stored there, along with clips—filed clippings—recording a million events in a hundred thousand lives. Did you wonder how critics first responded to Look Homeward, Angel? The answer (with limited enthusiasm) lay in the Thomas Wolfe clips. How had the Tribune played the signing of Jackie Robinson? One found the date in the Robinson clips, then turned to a bound volume from 1946. The story made page one, but below the fold. A reader passing a newsstand sees only the top half of a full-sized paper; from that viewpoint, a story below the fold is buried. How did the Tribune cover the annual City Hall-to-Coney Island walking race? With variations of the AP Formula One lead.
“The stuff seems pretty heavy,” I told Marsh.
“Well, there’s your opportunity to show us something better.” In addition to preparing weekly assignments, contending with daily news conferences and helping put out a daily sports section, Marsh supervised All-Star Games in football and basketball that the Tribune promoted for charity and for publicity. Paper traffic at his desk was formidable, but now he paused. “I covered the race myself twenty years ago, just after I got out of City College. Did you get back that far in the clips? No? Well, the year I had it, a Turk won the race, so naturally I wrote, ‘The Turk brought home the Turkey on Thanksgiving Day.’”
Later, I telephoned the Transit Authority. Then, Thanksgiving morning, a German refugee led an intense, ragged band of walkers as they ascended the great arc of Hart Crane’s bridge. A number of motorists gazed with mild surprise. When the refugee, Henry Laskau, reached a Coney Island bathhouse first, an hour and a half later, he handed out cards. “If you could mention my importing business in the paper,” he began the postrace interview, “I would like that.” I could not. But thanks to the Transit Authority, I was able to point out in the lead that Laskau had traveled from City Hall to Coney Island in only twice the time the BMT required and he had been spared jostles, noise and the expense of the new ten-cent fare.
My reward was a by-line, $7 and a personal commendation from Bob Cooke. “I especially liked the part where you said, ‘On Ocean Parkway there was heavy traffic and the walkers slowed to a crawl.’ “ Cooke laughed.
“But I was serious. Runners slow to a walk. Walkers slow to a crawl.” Cooke was a big, athletic man who had played hockey at Yale and written baseball with casual wit. “I wouldn’t get too serious about a walking race,” he said.
Marsh, sitting at the next desk, winced. “I think he means he was serious about his story, Bob.”
“Oh. Yes. That’s right. You have to be serious about a story, even when it’s funny. Especially when it’s funny.” Cooke winked and turned to his own affairs.
As the department was organized, reporters specialized in distinct sports. Everett B. Morris and Marsh covered the important basketball, Jesse Abramson covered every important fight. The local major league teams, horse racing, hockey, golf, and tennis were individual preserves and each man protected his area according to the territorial imperative. As a result, all that was left for a stringer was arcana. One month, I found myself assigned to the Coast Guard cutter Tamaroa “covering” a motorboat race around Manhattan Island.
“Why don’t you look up the Circle Line time?” Bob Cooke suggested.
“I don’t want to repeat myself.”
“Listen,” Marsh said, “if one of the speedboats hits a log, someone may be killed. Don’t take it lightly.” Nobody was injured and the story was difficult, partly because 98 percent of the race took place out of sight. In another month, I reboarded the Tamaroa at anchor for a 150-mile motorboat race from Albany to Seventy-ninth Street. In the fall I drew cross-country races, becoming, as I told Marsh, a specialist in writing eyewitness accounts of events that took place out of sight. “Don’t be discouraged,” Marsh said. “In a few more weeks they’ll be walking from City Hall to Coney Island again, and you get to see all of that from the press car.”
Then, one perfect day in February 1950, Marsh telephoned. “You want to go on staff?”
“What?”
“Now don’t get excited. It’s not much of a job. We’re starting a new seven-o’clock edition and we need someone to work on the desk from one to nine, sending down racing results, if you’re interested. It pays about forty-eight dollars, and of course I’ll see that you still get to do as much writing as possible. I don’t want you buried on the desk.”
For six months, under the careful eyes of Cooke and Marsh, I worked on the copy desk, making type markings on racing results, from time to time writing a headline and acquiring a certain sense of professionalism. I was able to greet some of the sportswriters almost as an equal.
Blustery Everett Morris, retelling a basketball game, roared, cursed, reddened, cheered and expected you to share his emotions. Rud Rennie, forever bemused at damages the copy desk had worked on his prose, complained that, “All of a sudden, copyreading has gotten harder than it used to be.” Jesse Abramson, who covered track as well as boxing, tore passion to tatters over a closing burst in the Buermeyer five-hundred-yard run. The pervasive sense, however, was not sports, but literacy.
Al Laney, who covered baseball until the belligerent vulgarity of Leo Durocher drove him to golf, had been part-time secretary to James Joyce for half a dozen years in Paris. Laney, once night editor of the Paris Herald, liked sports, which he described with exceedingly long, exceedingly graceful sentences. I collared him one night in the Tribune cafeteria; to my surprise, he was anxious to talk about Joyce.
We sat on metal chairs at a little table under fluorescent lights that were too bright, and while a deskman at my right yawned, Laney remembered Joyce in Paris. “He was blind,” Laney said. “Did you know that?”
“I knew his eyes were bad.”
“They weren’t merely bad,” Laney laughed harshly. “For much of the time he simply couldn’t see. One day Sylvia Beach said, ‘Laney. You have a typewriter. Joyce needs some letters typed.’ I went to write, but I stayed to read. He would hand me a novel, any novel, that someone had sent him and say ‘Begin,’ and I would read. Sometimes after just one paragraph he would order me to stop. Sometimes I would read the whole book. Some were in English and some were in French.”
Laney was a slim man, who invariably wore a gray fedora. He had a black mustache, a passion for Mozart, and he mumbled.
“Al, did he tell you anything about writing?”
“Some things. It was hard to be certain when he was serious. But Joyce believed, and I heard this often, that once sound and meaning were very close, and that civilization had changed and corrupted language. He wanted to bring sound and meaning together again. You know, there are pleasant words and harsh words and what he was trying to do was to make the existing pleasant words stand for pleasant things, or, if he had to, make up new words, harsh or pleasant.”
The copyreader at the table excused himself.
“It was so long ago,” Laney said, and his voice trailed into the mumble. “Let’s get more coffee.”
When we came back to the table, walking past night secretaries, deskmen and a few printers from the early shift, and were seated again b
efore the dirty dishes, Laney put a hand to his forehead and looked beyond me and said again, “It was so long ago, but I’m certain he said this. Yes. I’m absolutely certain he said this. ‘When you write you must listen for sounds. And there is a sound that one word makes and there is the sound that one word makes upon another and there is the sound of silences between words.’”
“What else? Anything else?”
“Without the right sound, writing is worthless.” Laney gazed at a cream-colored wall. “He fired me, you know. One day there was an Italian novel and I couldn’t read Italian, so he let me go from the job of reading. Joyce fired me from the job for which I was not paid.”
After six months I was liberated from the copy desk. The so-called police action in Korea had turned alarming and Everett Morris, a commander in the Naval Reserve, was recalled to active duty. In the shuffle, I was assigned high school sports. During the fall of 1950 all the public school coaches of New York City refused to coach unless their salaries were raised. Technically, this was not a strike—the coaches were teachers and they continued meeting classes. But the effect, from my viewpoint, was the same. I was a high school sports writer with very little school sports to cover.
Irving Marsh talked very seriously. “High school sports may not seem like much, but the job you do is very important. People form their reading habits when they’re seventeen or so. If you get people committed to the Trib at that age, you’ll have won Trib readers for life.”
“But if this mess doesn’t get settled,” I said, “what will there be to write about?”
“As you say, the mess.”
I traveled to high schools, talked to coaches and athletes and wrote dozens of articles on schools without sports. In the beginning, Marsh asked me to turn in each piece to him. “Come here,” he said. “You’ve written an essay.”
