My first assignment at City News was humbling. I was assigned, as a copyboy, to the evening shift, from five o’clock on, and the demands on me were moronic. My most important task was to speedily churn out scores of copies of dispatches as they were produced. The stories, once edited, were typed onto a waxed-paper stencil that I would wrap around the drum of the office mimeograph machine. I would then begin cranking like hell. The copies I produced were routed into pneumatic tubes and sent flying to the bureau’s newspaper, radio, and television clients. It could be madness if there was big news—a double murder or a long-awaited jury verdict in a major criminal trial—and I would invariably be suffused by the end of my shift with the blue ink that I had to feed into the machine.
My other basic chore was even more inane. I could not finish my shift without doing a detailed scrubbing, with special soap, of the desk of Larry Mulay, the early morning editor who had been at City News since the days of John Dillinger and mob shoot-outs in the streets. I could have won three Pulitzer Prizes the night before and still be shown the door if Mulay’s desk did not pass his fastidious white-glove inspection the next morning. He would put on the gloves and run his fingers all over the desk, looking for signs that there was a copyboy who was not going to make it. An even more odious task came on Friday nights, when City News was responsible for forwarding the area’s high school basketball scores to all of its clients. I spent hours on the telephone recording scores for the bureau’s one-man sports desk, whose sullen editor took his miserable job far too seriously, as I would later learn.
Nonetheless, I was smitten. Most of the editors and reporters were cynics and wise to what can only be described as the Chicago way. The cops were on the take, and the mob ran the city. The City News reporters, with rare exception, ignored the corruption and, in return, were given access to crime scenes and allowed to park anywhere they wished as long as they displayed a press card on the dashboard. Chicago’s Outer Drive, its main south-to-north highway, was famously depicted by comedian Mort Sahl as the last outpost of collective bargaining. The bars stayed open after hours, and the cops got more free drinks than reporters did. Lenny Bruce was doing his thing a few blocks away at Mister Kelly’s nightclub on Rush Street, and Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk could be heard, over a beer, at the Sutherland Lounge on the South Side. The ambitious young reporters working the courthouses and police beats understood their mission was to live within the system and somehow help make the city work. The City News street reporters were, so I thought, the ultimate citizen cynics—wise guys full of badinage and constantly mocking all (especially a new copyboy). They lived totally in the moment. I, who spent so much of my life feeling as if I had little control of anything, was dazzled.
My eagerness to get on with it—to escape from desk cleaning and mimeographing and move out onto the streets—was annoying to the editors, especially to Bob Billings, the night editor, my night editor, at City News. Most of the reporters worked outside the main office, with its shabby desks, dirty floors, old typewriters, and marginal lighting. There was a copyboy, an editor, and three or four rewrite men; the important stories were phoned in to the office by the reporters scattered through the city, and put together by rewrite. The life-and-death rule was check it out before calling it in. One of the senior editors, Arnold Dornfeld, who lived outside the city and sometimes wore muddy boots that, to my horror, he enjoyed parking on Larry Mulay’s desk, had famously told a reporter, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” The guys on the street who did not get their facts straight or were consistently being out-reported did not last long. One of my jobs as a copyboy was to read all Chicago dailies for stories or details that our reporters missed, and paste copies of their better stories on the office bulletin board. The notices were known as “scoop sheets,” for obvious reasons, and I confess to being delighted to scoop away. There was a constant shuffling of reporters and I wanted in.
There was lots of time for chitchat, which was good, but Billings was almost constantly on my case—partially out of boredom and partially because I was a good foil. I initially saw Bob, a big guy with a square jaw, as a cliché in action. He had played football at the University of Illinois, talked tough, and was dating, as all of us somehow knew, the estranged wife of a Chicago police captain—an awesome feat that, given the reputation of the cops, put him at peril of his life. Bob, then in his late twenties, repeatedly made it clear to me that he was totally incompatible with a punk Jew from the University of Chicago who could not get sandwich orders straight and churned out blurry copies on the mimeograph. But I had begun reading the four Chicago newspapers daily, as well as The New York Times, and would occasionally point out information therein that our reporters did not have. I also always had a book, and Bob invariably wanted to know what I was reading. He would then loudly pronounce that the book, especially if it was a novel, was not going to help make me a good reporter. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that Billings was well read, far brighter and more open than he wanted others to see.
His interest in me provoked torture, too. One insanely miserable night in Chicago—heavy snow, a vicious wind off Lake Michigan, temperature well below zero—there was a police report of a routine fire in a manhole a few blocks from the office. I jumped when Bob asked if I wanted a reporting assignment—my first—outside the office. Cover the fire, he said. I dressed as warmly as I could and eagerly dashed to the scene of the crime, showed the deputy fire chief in charge my press card, and, taking out a notepad, asked, “What’s up?” The chief was mystified. It was just a fire in a manhole. No one was hurt. There was no story. Get the hell out of here, he told me. I returned to the office and reported the nonstory to Billings. What was the name of the fire chief? I didn’t know. Get out there and get it, he said. I did so. Write it up, said Bob. And so I did, treating the manhole fire with dignity and extensively quoting the deputy fire chief. Billings edited the story and had me run copies off on the mimeograph—all of which he trashed, as I knew he would.
A few weeks later my days as a copyboy were over. I was initially assigned as the overnight reporter at the central police headquarters just south of downtown, a promotion that clearly emanated from Billings. Over the next few months, I would learn the basics, both good and bad, of my newfound profession while always keeping the faith.
Lesson one came within a few weeks. A squawk on the police radio well before daylight said there were “officers down”—a double shooting on Roosevelt Road, a main thoroughfare just south of downtown. I had a ten-year-old Studebaker that needed a lot of care in the winter—four hours in the cold was more than enough to freeze the battery, and I spent night after night having to run the car every four hours, whether at home or at police headquarters—but luckily it was ready to go. I sped the mile or so to the scene.
What a scene. My police pass got me inside a marked-off perimeter, and someone told me the victims were Feds, two postal inspectors. An unmarked four-door sedan was crumpled up against a light pole. Bullet holes were all over the windows and doors. Two men were inside, heads back, with blood all over. I had only seen one dead man in my life—my father in his coffin before burial—but these two were goners. A very angry Chicago police sergeant was in charge, and I approached him, chirping out, “City News.” He said nothing. I asked if the victims were dead. The cop grabbed me by my jacket and shoved me, hard, up against a squad car. “Not unless they’re pronounced,” adding “you asshole,” or “you fuck,” or “you shithead.” He meant pronounced dead by a police coroner. No coroner was on the scene yet. What to do? I had a scoop, of sorts, because no other reporter had yet arrived. Should I dash to a pay phone and call it in? I was sure my mother loved me; did I need to check it out?
So I waited. The coroner came and made the foregone pronouncement. I then called it in, describing the scene to a rewrite guy and explaining that the names of the two agents—obviously undercover cops, because they were wearing street clothes—were not immediately available. I stayed away from the sergeant, but the coroner was nice.
The lesson? Being first is not nearly as important as being right, and being careful, even if it did not matter in the case at hand. That was in late 1959. The mistakes I made over the next five or so decades—and we all make them—would have been avoided if I always kept in mind what the sergeant had said about waiting for an official pronouncement.
The second lesson came a few weeks later, while on temporary night assignment for a week or two at police headquarters in Hyde Park, near the university. The process had quickly become familiar: hang around with other reporters; ingratiate yourself with the desk sergeant; buy him all the coffee he wants; help him, if he asks, with last week’s Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle; and wait for the radio to sound off. Late at night comes a report of a deadly fire in the black ghetto a few miles to the west, with many victims. Off I go.
A shabby wooden frame house, twenty or so blocks north of my dad’s cleaning store, was a pile of embers by the time I arrived. A cluster of bodies, wrapped in white sheeting, was lying in perfect order on a small lawn. They were wrapped by size—daddy bear, mommy bear, and three or four little bears. I was horrified. A distressed fire chief—or was it a cop?—told me that the best guess was that a father had gone berserk and set fire to the home, killing his wife and children, if they were his wife and children. I asked a lot of questions, but essentially got nowhere, though someone—perhaps a neighbor—gave me the names of those thought to be the dead, and some details about the family, if that was the family lying under the sheets.
What a story, I thought, but I knew how much I didn’t know. Still, I had to get to a pay phone and dictate what little I knew to rewrite. It was, I thought, a story that could end up on the front page. As I was yapping away, Mr. Dornfeld, he of the sometimes muddy boots, cut in on the call. There are traumatic events we remember all of our life, and I remember every word he said: “Ah, my good, dear, energetic Mr. Hersh. Do the, alas, poor, unfortunate victims happen to be of the Negro persuasion?” I said yes. He said, “Cheap it out.” That meant that my City News dispatch would report the following, give or take a phrase: “Five Negroes died in a fire last night on the Southwest Side.” It might also have included an address.
I thought, having worked for years in a family store in a black area, that I knew something about racism. Dornfeld taught me that I had a lot to learn.
There was one final lesson to learn just before I would go off for compulsory army training, after only seven or so months on the job at City News. It was my shameful, but unavoidable, involvement in what we now call self-censorship. I was back on overnight duty at the central police headquarters when two cops called in to report that a robbery suspect had been shot trying to avoid arrest. The cops who had done the shooting were driving in to make a report. Always ambitious, and always curious, I raced down to the basement parking lot in the hope of getting some firsthand quotes before calling in the story. The driver—white, beefy, and very Irish, like far too many Chicago cops then—obviously did not see me as he parked the car. As he climbed out, a fellow cop, who clearly had heard the same radio report I had, shouted something like “So the guy tried to run on you?” The driver said, “Naw. I told the nigger to beat it and then plugged him.”
I got the hell out of there, without being seen, called the bureau, and asked for the editor on duty. (It was not Billings.) What to do? The editor urged me to do nothing. It would be my word versus that of all the cops involved, and all would accuse me of lying. The message was clear: I did not have a story. But of course I did. So I waited a few days and then asked for and got a copy of the coroner’s report. The victim had been shot in the back. I took a copy of the report to an editor. He wasn’t interested. No one was interested. I had no proof that a felony murder had been committed other than what the killer himself had said, and he, of course, would deny it.
So I left the story alone. I did not try to find and interview the cop who bragged about doing the shooting, nor did I seek out his partner. Nor did I raise hell at City News. I shuffled off to six months of army training, full of despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship. I’ve hated both practices ever since while more than once having gone along with looking the other way. I had found my calling and learned, very quickly, that it wasn’t perfect. Neither was I.