General Assignment
Early on at the Herald Tribune, Portis demonstrated his versatility as a writer, excelling at the gimlet-eyed story on city eccentrics, the humorous first-person piece, and breaking-news reportage.
November 24, 1960
Court Rules: Lion Is a Wild Animal
A young Brooklyn longshoreman fought a spirited but losing battle in a Brooklyn courtroom yesterday for the right to keep a pet lion at his home.
After the drawn-out, somewhat tongue-in-cheek proceedings at Flatbush Magistrate’s Court, Magistrate Matthew P. Fagan resolved the issue with a concise decision: “I take judicial notice that the lion is a wild animal. I find the defendant guilty.”
The sentence was a $25 fine or ten days in jail. Anthony Ortolano, twenty-six, of 581 Carroll St., Brooklyn, the defendant, asked for ten days in which to raise the $25 and the magistrate granted the request, noting that Mr. Ortolano’s care of the lion had been exemplary.
The specific charge was Section 197 of the city’s Penal Law which makes harboring a wild animal capable of inflicting bodily harm a misdemeanor.
Mr. Ortolano’s troubles with the law began Friday night when Patrolman Thomas Higgins and another officer stopped a car at Union St. and Seventh Ave. to check on the automobile registration. In the car were Mr. Ortolano, three other men and Cleo, a four-month-old male lion, three and a half feet tall and weighing 125 pounds. Mr. Ortolano has since corrected the name to Leo in light of the discovery made over the weekend.
Leo and Mr. Ortolano were hustled off to the Bergan St. police station, where they cooled their heels while a summons was issued. Leo was taken to the Brooklyn shelter of the American Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
The trial began yesterday with Mr. Ortolano’s attorney, William Kunstler of Manhattan, asking the judge if the lion could be brought in the courtroom as evidence that he was friendly and tame.
“Oh hell no,” said Magistrate Fagan. “All these people in here would start running. And I wouldn’t blame them.” About 150 persons were in the room.
Then he turned to some officers and asked if they had their guns ready. “Don’t bring him in under any circumstances,” said the judge, “I will conduct this case outside.”
The judge, attorneys, witnesses, defendant and newsmen repaired to an alley outside the court where Leo had been brought in an ASPCA panel truck. The flap was let down to expose the lion, which was beating his head against the wire netting.
The judge opened court in the alley and read the complaint. Mr. Ortolano allowed Leo to lick his fingers through the cage. Then a noisy group of students from nearby Erasmus Hall High School joined the spectators and Magistrate Fagan decided to take the trial back inside. “I’ll take judicial note that I’ve seen the lion,” he said.
The testimony of witnesses followed.
Patrolman Higgins told of the Friday night arrest. He said that Ortolano had told the police that he had bought the lion two weeks ago for $350 from an animal dealer.
Mr. Ortolano said he had a leash on the lion at the time of the arrest and that the windows of the car were up. He said he had a steel cage for Leo in the backyard at his home.
To prove that the animal was tame, said Mr. Kunstler, he would call as witnesses two animal experts.
The first was Mrs. Helen Martini, of 1026 Old Kingsbridge Road, the Bronx, who said she had been an animal trainer for twenty years. Leo was not ferocious, but “very nervous,” she said. But when she was cross-examined by Irving Singer, Assistant District Attorney, she conceded that the animal belonged in a zoo.
Next came Bob Dietc, a zoo-keeper at Fairlawn, N.J., who said that he had trained Leo himself and that he was safe. “He’s only a baby, you could put him in your vest pocket,” he said.
Asked if it wasn’t true that the animal was unpredictable, Mr. Dietc said, “It’s my opinion that all animals are unpredictable, from chickens to birds.”
After the holidays the ASPCA will turn Leo over to Mr. Dietc who will keep him until he can sell him for Mr. Ortolano. Mr. Ortolano, who has been paying $3.15 a day for horsemeat for Leo, is busy getting together $25.
January 16, 1962
2 Men—1,700 Women, Peace Train to Capital
WASHINGTON
Twenty railroad coaches filled with women—tweedy, well-shod matrons for the most part—arrived here yesterday in a driving rainstorm to picket and demonstrate for peace in front of the White House.
Ink ran on their placards, their fur hats collapsed and hung limp over their ears, their tweeds constricted and steamed, but they marched on in the rain—for about an hour. There were 1,700 of them.
Most of them came from New York City, Westchester and Rockland counties, Long Island, and Fairfield County, Conn. They filled a chartered Pennsylvania railroad train that left New York about 8:30 a.m. with stops at Trenton, N.J. and Philadelphia to pick up more women.
The only men aboard were the conductors, the sandwich man, the engineer presumably, Abe Stafansky and myself.
Mr. Stafansky, a seventy-year-old butcher, saw something about the trip in a newspaper and decided to take the day off and come along.
“Fifty years I’m an American and I thought I’d like to see the White House,” he said. First discovered just outside New York, the women threatened to throw him off, but they relented under Mr. Stafansky’s charm.
Four reporters were thrown off before the train left the station. But it was through no lack of enterprise on their part, just a snafu in signals. They were at the front of the train where the policy at the moment was strictly no men. I was making my way forward and by the time I got to the front, we were speeding through New Jersey. (The women were sorry about leaving the others behind.)
The trip was first conceived at a meeting of women in New York last month. There is no formal organization, no officers, no dues, no rules. The women are just linked in their desire “to do something” for peace and disarmament.
Mrs. Ruth Chenven, of Manhattan, called the Pennsylvania Railroad and asked about chartering a train to Washington. Get 550 persons, she was told, and it could be done. The cost would be $12.50 per person round trip, including a box lunch.
The women called their friends, the friends called their friends, and the result was 1,300 women at Gate 12 in Pennsylvania Station yesterday.
The train started, then braked to a stop as shrieking late-comers from Roslyn, L.I., came running along the platform. They boarded and the trip resumed.
For the first two hours, women surged back and forth through the cars looking for seats. There were not enough. They made do with arm rests and took turns in the seats.
Mr. Stafansky and I did the best we could.
He found a seat and perused his “Morning Freiheit.” I retired to the men’s room—the only seat available—to eat my box lunch. Sanctuary there was brief. Within minutes the women were clattering at the door. Since it was a women’s train they assumed (Why shouldn’t they?) that both the men’s and the ladies’ rooms were at their disposal.
Mr. Stafansky showed me the article in the “Freiheit” saying that men, too, were permitted on the train. It was in Yiddish. He said he had called his boss and told him he was not feeling well, and could he take the day off?
Wouldn’t it get him in trouble if it came out in a newspaper that he was not sick, but on a women’s peace train to Washington?
“How could he know? My boss, he reads nothing. The stock market maybe. Put my name in the stock market, he might see it.”
The women chattered and worked on their placards (“Peace is the only shelter,” “No tests, East or West”) and blew up white balloons inscribed “Peace or Perish.” Others passed out tracts and booklets. One woman was collecting letters. “Any letters in here for the President?” she asked.
The majority of the women were thirty to fifty years old, almost all of them mothers, with a middle and upper middle-class background. But the rich were also represented, as were some humble homes in Brooklyn.
“Very few of these women ever dreamed they would be walking in a demonstration carrying signs,” said Mrs. Ruth Gage-Colby of New York, one of the powers in the movement. “They went along leading their happy, secluded lives and suddenly they’ve been jolted by this thing, this spectre of the holocaust. Their children come home from school and ask about shelters, and ‘Are we going to be burned up, mother?’”
Another marcher, Mrs. Valerie Delacorte, wife of Dell publisher George T. Delacorte, said, “I don’t know whether what we’re doing will have any effect or not. What can we do? Maybe the war will come but at least we protested, we cried out…”
The train arrived at 12:45 p.m. and the women took chartered buses to the White House. The President did not come out to greet them but at his press conference later, he said he had seen them.
“I recognized why they were here,” he said. “There were a great number of them. It was in the rain. I understood what they were attempting to say and therefore I consider that their message was received.”
After the march, the women gathered for a rally at the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church and then separated into small groups to call on their Congressmen.
One group paid a call at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency where they were given an audience by the deputy director, Adrian Fisher. Others picketed the embassies of the nuclear powers—the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France. They left Washington at 5 p.m.
June 19–22, 1962
This four-part series ran on consecutive days at the top of the Herald Tribune’s local section.
Tuesday, June 19, 1962
Those Awkward Moments with a Room Full of Smoke
YONKERS, N.Y.
Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it.
It satisfies no normal need. I like it.
Graham Lee Hemminger
(1896–1949)
A heavy calm lies over the Bates Memorial Medical Center, for it is midafternoon and rest period for those of us embarked on the Five-Day Plan to Stop Smoking.
This morning we drank a lot of fruit juice and water, did calisthenics and something called rhythmic breathing, had a vegetarian lunch and then went for a walk. Soon a nurse will come tapping on a door and we will file into a room to hear Dunbar W. Smith, M.D.
I smoke two packs of Camels a day and have no real desire to quit but J. Wayne McFarland, M.D., said, come on out anyway and we’ll motivate you. (There’s the call for the lecture.)…Just got back. Dr. Smith talked about chewing and digestion, using a big set of dentures to illustrate. (Said chew food thoroughly.)
Dr. McFarland and the Rev. E. J. Folkenberg, the originators of the Five-Day Plan are Seventh-Day Adventists, forbidden to smoke.
“We’ve had a lot of experience in helping people stop smoking in our church,” said Mr. Folkenberg, “so we decided to give others the benefit of our experience.” For the past two years they have traveled the country, giving their “group therapy” course, which involves no proselytizing for the church.
There are 12 of us enrolled in full-time, day and night courses here, for which the fee is $100, for room and board. Another 25 or so come out each night for the free session.
Art Rosenthal, who had the room next to mine, just came down the hall eating jelly candies from a bag and looking pained. A middle-aged man from Newfoundland, N.J., he said he smoked cigars during all his waking hours until Sunday night, when he checked in here. “I’ve got withdrawal pains,” he said. “Headaches, perspiration.”
Then Dr. McFarland looked in, and it was a little awkward because my room was full of smoke. “You ought to go get a prune to suck on to keep your blood sugar up,” he chided.
The hospital, a former tuberculosis sanatorium, is located on a hilltop, and there are a lot of woods and birds. The Seventh-Day Adventists bought it last year and are now refurbishing it. It will be open soon as a center for general medical treatment.
The Adventists also discourage eating meat, which explains the vegetarian diet. (Mr. Folkenberg said it was part of the course, since eating meat causes a craving for tobacco.) For lunch there was corn, broccoli, a nut cup, scalloped potatoes and a round slice of some grayish material.
“How do you like the food?” asked Miss Rosalie Naderson, of Manhattan, who is the gamest and most cheerful one in our group. Miss Naderson applauds at all the lectures and films, and she jokes around a lot. I said it was fine, except for the gray object. She laughed and said it was soya cheese, and was very good with some of the no-meat gravy on it. The gravy helped some.
Upstairs there is a big display of vegetarian food, including cans of Nuttena, Nuttose and Vegeburgers.
Along with the physical regimen of deep breathing, exercises and drinking a great deal of water (“to flush the nicotine from the system”) there is also a form of Coueism in the course. Instead of saying, “I will stop smoking,” which shatters the will, if you do light up again, you repeat over and over again, “I choose not to smoke again.” This is supposed to be more effective.
You also avoid smoking companions, and get up immediately after meals and go for walks to avoid the after-meal craving for a smoke. I don’t have the motivation so far, but Dr. McFarland says I will after I see a terrifying film on lung cancer coming up tonight.
There are no ash trays at this place, and you have to sneak around putting out butts on window-sills or flushing them down the johns.
Wednesday, June 20, 1962
Half-Way: A Two-Pack Tribune Man Trying to Stop
YONKERS, N.Y.
Well, we’re off coffee now, along with meat and cigarettes, and my head feels like a wheat gluten vegeburger, which was what we had for lunch yesterday.
It was smack in the middle of the Five-Day Plan to Stop Smoking, and a crucial day. Every one was drowsy and mopey. Every one except Miss Rosalie Naderson, who is still up to her old high jinks. During calisthenics, while doing a kind of side-way walk, she kept walking right out of the building. It was a joke.
Twelve of us are undergoing the course here at Bates Memorial Medical Center, a hilltop sanatorium owned by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Another 25 come out for each night session.
The Rev. E. J. Folkenberg and J. Wayne McFarland, M.D., have been conducting the therapy for about two years (with, they say, a success rate of 75 per cent), but this is the first time they’ve done it on a resident patient basis.
Mr. Folkenberg said yesterday that it may not be as effective as the outpatient method. “They may kick the habit here in these surroundings under a programmed routine, but I wonder if it will hold up when they return to work.” Those who come to the night sessions have to fight it alone during the work day, and theirs is probably a more solid victory, he said.
“Won’t it be all right just to smoke one, when it gets so terribly bad?” asked a woman at the Monday night meeting. “Well, we think it’s better to stop completely,” said Dr. McFarland. “It’s rough, I know, but the main thing is to get through that first week.”
Coffee is banned, he said, because it triggers an almost insatiable craving for nicotine with heavy smokers. For a substitute lift in the morning, he suggested a “cold mitten friction.” You take a washcloth soaked with cold water and rub your arms and chest vigorously until the skin has turned pink. This increases blood circulation and approximates the effect of a cup of coffee, he said.
Several reported some success with it yesterday morning.
Mr. Folkenberg gave a persuasive talk on will power at the night session. If you keep on repeating, “I choose not to smoke again,” he said, “and mean it,” it will actually prepare the body for the change and make it easier on the nerves.
One man at the night session said he had fought it all day, but could not afford to have a fuzzy mind on his job, and was there anything to be done about it. No, said Dr. McFarland, but the fuzziness would pass in a few days. “Don’t worry, you’re going to make it.”
I have more or less stopped smoking while here, rather than be a tempter. But I’m afraid I have been a nuisance in questioning others about their smoking habits.
“Will you please stop talking about cigarettes?” one woman told me yesterday. At any rate, no one has dropped out yet.
Thursday, June 21, 1962
Into the Stretch: Who’ll Be the First to Puff? The Man from the Trib, of Course
YONKERS, N.Y.
Another day of lethargy in this bee-loud glade, trying to kick the smoking habit. It appears every one will make it but me.
I did, however, beat a kid at ping-pong three straight games. He had little short arms and all I had to do was tip the ball over the net out of his reach. So much for his nicotine-free lungs. After that I had a romp with a friendly dog named Shep, and batted a few skinners with the softball.
Let’s see, what else: Kathleen Joyce, an English contralto, came in and favored us with some songs at the night therapy session. She sang “Danny Boy” and “D’ye Ken John Peel,” and we all joined in on “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”
In the morning she played the piano to give us the beat for our calisthenics. It was that song that goes “…this is the way we bake our bread, so early in the morning.”
A dozen of us are enrolled here at Bates Memorial Medical Center, a Seventh-Day Adventist sanatorium, in the Five-Day Plan to Stop Smoking. The course ends tonight and, despite my miserable failure, it has been of great help to the others.
Wesley Smith, a young man of 24 from Massachusetts, was smoking up to five packs a day when he came here. Tuesday he got by with a couple of drags, and yesterday he didn’t smoke at all. He has put up a good fight, and he seemed to be coming out of the drowsiness yesterday, which means that the tough part is over.
Amanda Meiggs, an actress, was one of the lightest smokers of the group. She smoked only one pack a day but decided to take the course because she was having trouble with her throat. She stopped Sunday and has not weakened yet.
The craving, though, seems to be just as strong in light smokers as in heavy ones. Yesterday, she said, was her worst day.
“I’m absolutely dying for a cigarette, and I know you’re sneaking out and smoking,” she said.
What to do when the urge becomes irresistible? The Rev. E. J. Folkenberg, who is giving the therapy, along with J. Wayne McFarland, M.D., suggested the following:
1. Invoke your willpower by saying, “I choose not to smoke. I choose not to smoke.”
2. Calm the nerves with a minute or so of steady rhythmic breathing.
3. If you’re inside, go out and walk, and ask for divine aid.
4. Take out your watch, keep an eye on the second hand, and force yourself to go without smoking for two minutes.
By the time you’ve done all this, he said, the craving peak has been reached and is falling off. “And you should be able to manage it then.”
The evening sessions are growing. About 40 persons came Tuesday night for the therapy.
At that session, Dr. McFarland asked for a show of hands of all those who no longer had a craving for tobacco.
No one moved.
Then the ebullient and ever-helpful Rosalie Naderson raised her hand and said she had whipped it. She stood and gave a moving testimonial to the efficacy of Dr. McFarland’s methods.
“It’s not so hard,” she said. “After all, we were not born with cigarettes in our mouths.”
Friday, June 22, 1962
As Confidently Predicted, He Puffed First
YONKERS, N.Y.
The how-to-stop-smoking course ended yesterday and the graduates were sent home with warnings ringing in their ears. Our ears, I should say, although I was the only one in our class of 12 who failed.
“All right, you’ve beaten the Number 2 health hazard in America, and now you’re wide open for the Number 1 hazard—overweight,” said Dr. Henry J. Johnson. “Food is going to taste a lot better to you now but you’re just going to have to restrain yourself. If you don’t, those pounds will creep up on you before you know it.”
Dr. Johnson, medical director for the Life Extension Examiners in New York City, was a guest speaker for the occasion. Someone asked him what the Number 3 hazard was. He said he didn’t know offhand.
He seemed to think that too much fuss is made over the act of quitting cigarettes. “I’ve had heart patients tell me, ‘Well, Doc. I guess this means no more smoking.’ I say, ‘Yes, that’s right,’ and they stop, just like that. I did it myself.”
Don’t dwell on your addiction and don’t pamper your weakness, he said, just stop smoking.
“We’ve helped you break away from smoking,” said the Rev. E. J. Folkenberg, “but only for a short span of time. What are you going to do next week, or three months from now when the craving suddenly hits you? Well, we hope we’ve bolstered your will power enough to handle those situations. When will it be safe to take a drink, or start on coffee again? I don’t know. That’s one of the things each of you will have to work out in your own way.”
Mr. Folkenberg and Dr. J. Wayne McFarland are administrators of the five-day course, which is sponsored by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It was conducted at the Bates Memorial Medical Center, a sanatorium here that was recently taken over by the church.
Dr. McFarland advised us to increase our intake of vitamin B-1 and several other B vitamins, for their beneficial effect on the nerves. Wheat germ, he said, is a very good natural source of B-1.
Miss Rosalie Naderson, a classmate, said it had been her practice for some time to take a teaspoon of wheat germ oil daily. That, she said, is equivalent to five pounds of wheat germ, which sounded like a lot of wheat germ to me, but she stood by her figure.
Dr. McFarland also said that fear was not the best motive for kicking the habit, but that it had its value, like the use of a switch in disciplining a child.
“We’ve come in for a lot of criticism for showing this film One in 20,000 (a color picture showing a lung removal operation), and don’t think we haven’t given a lot of sober consideration to the criticism. But we’re going to continue using it, and anything else we think will galvanize people to act.”
A testimonial was given by Miss Esther Renner, a secretary from Des Moines, who took the course seven months ago. She had tried to stop smoking several times before, she said, but she had no luck until she undertook this plan.
Her fingernails were of some interest. Each one had a dark brown line across it, at about the seven-month growth point. The nails were dark brown above the line and pink below it.
Dr. McFarland called them “nicotine lines,” and speculated that they marked the gradual exit of tobacco residue from her system.
At breakfast yesterday Miss Naderson said she rather regretted leaving the place. We were eating our wheat germ and other brown roughish things (even the sugar here has husks in it) and she was, in her manner, addressing us at large, as if we were all in a lifeboat together.
“This food is better than you get at the Waldorf,” she said. “And do you know why?”
“No, why is it better, Rosalie?” I asked.
“Because it’s prepared with love, that’s why. And there’s little enough love in the world as it is.”
You can never get ahead of Miss Naderson.
October 4, 1962
The Shattered Scene of Blast
Dazed and disheveled young girls wandered about in the parking lot just behind the [New York Telephone Company] building, many crying, some near hysteria. Inside was the familiar New York disaster scene, police and priests and firemen and ankle-deep water, choking white smoke and Bellevue interns in yellow helmets placing mangled bodies in wire baskets.
A half-hour earlier some of the girls, 100 or more, were having lunch in the basement-level employees’ cafeteria. The building is a long, low buff-brick structure with two floors above the basement. An oil-burning boiler stood in one corner of the basement, in a room adjoining the cafeteria.
Scarcely any one these days gives a thought to a boiler exploding, particularly in a new building, but suddenly at 12:07 p.m. this one went. It weighed at least a ton and it tore loose from its moorings and ripped across the cafeteria in a hellish explosion of steam.
“It was like a hurricane,” said Miss Diane Gerstel, 22, who was there. “There was a terrible gush of steam. You couldn’t see anything. I cried ‘My God, what happened?’”
Mrs. Gloria Salour, 23, was there, too, and she thought a nuclear bomb had fallen. “The walls cracked, smoke came pouring through. I thought it was the end.”
Directly above the boiler room, the blast punched through the concrete ceiling like a great fist, and flung girls and desks and filing cabinets all about the big accounting room on that floor.
Inside walls of cinder-block on both floors were shattered and buckled, but the outside wall near the boiler was not penetrated. Many of the outside windows were blown out and their metal frames twisted.
Some of the girls ran from the building, others helped drag or carry the injured out, and some climbed out the broken windows. Most of the dead were buried under the rubble near the boiler room or rather where the boiler room had once stood.
“They seemed to be coming out of every window and my son and I rushed across the street to help,” said Francis Holland, 48, who lives in an apartment building at 502 W. 213th St., across the street from the telephone building.
“They were bloody and their clothes were torn and some of them had broken arms. It’s about a six-foot jump from the windows to the sidewalk and we were grabbing them and getting them down.”
The victims lay there on the sidewalk screaming with pain, he said, but so many others were coming through the windows that there was no time for first aid. Within minutes, ambulances arrived from Fordham and Jewish Memorial hospitals.
Mr. Holland, security guard at New York University, said the windows of his apartment were broken by the explosion.
Most of the injured were women, he said, but there were some men, too. Few of them appeared to be burned.
Except for the burning oil from the boiler, there was little fire. There wasn’t much to burn among the plaster and concrete and metal office equipment, and the few small blazes that followed the explosion were quickly extinguished.
However, the ventilation system broke down. Both floors (they have low ceilings) and the basement were filled with smoke for more than an hour.
The girls at work on the top floor were knocked from their chairs and shaken up, but the blast did not penetrate through their floor. None of them was believed to be seriously injured.
The blast punched a bulge into the ceiling of the first floor, but did not quite break through into the second floor.
Considering the destruction, it would seem there must have been a terrific noise with the explosion, but there was disagreement over this.
Some of the girls said it was “tremendous” and “like an atom bomb” and others said it was “more of a muffled whoomp” and “like a garbage truck banging into a building.”
Thousands of people gathered on the streets around the building, and police had to put up barricades to keep them back.
The neighborhood, near the very northern tip of Manhattan, is composed of five-and six-story apartment buildings and small stores. Inwood Park is four blocks west from the telephone building, and the IRT elevated tracks run just behind the building on 10th Ave.
There were many stories of heroic conduct. A girl on the first floor said her office was on the verge of panic when Miss Celeste Meola, a section supervisor, took firm command and led the girls in an orderly line downstairs through the smoke and outside.
No one knew what had happened immediately, and there was a great fear of fire after the explosion, but many of the young men being trained for executives remained in the building to help evacuate the injured.
About an hour after the explosion, a policeman with a bullhorn began to call for all the workers from the building to report to tables that were being set up in the parking lot. They wanted to find out who was there and who was missing.
The girls, crying, shaking, some with blood on their dresses, formed lines and had their names checked off at the tables. Bodies were still being uncovered and carried out.
Upstairs in the girls’ long, wide-open accounting room, desks and cabinets lay toppled and covered with plaster under a pall of white smoke.
Papers and records littered the floor.
A pair of high-heeled shoes stood upright in a bare spot where there must have been a desk. A disembodied desk phone was on the floor ringing, its little red extension light winking. I wondered who was calling but I did not answer it.