IT was a bright summer’s morning, in 1931, when I walked into the City News Bureau to receive my first start in Chicago journalism.
The late Isaac Gershman, then directing the bureau, gave it to me.
He began by assuring me that his list of applicants was already so long that there was no point in his even asking my name. Then he asked it anyhow! His newshawk’s intuition had gone to work. And, like the man of action Isaac Gershman was, he acted on that intuition.
“Add this man’s name to our list of applicants!” he instructed his secretary.
His secretary happened to be out of the room at the moment. But, like the woman of action she was, she returned.
Gershman looked up the moment she entered the room.
“What can I do for you?” he asked me.
“You were going to put my name on some list.”
The man reacted swiftly. “Put this man’s name on some list!” he told the young woman.
I told her what my name was.
She put it on some list.
“I’ll phone you as soon as we have an opening,” she promised. To other applicants, I sensed, she merely said “We’ll phone you.”
When she came back from lunch she told me to go home.
But what if the opening should materialize while I was on my way home? By the time I got back to the bureau it might have closed again! I decided to play it safe by staying in the area. I went to the Little Paris Burlesk on South State. That was right in the area.
My relationship to the City News Bureau has remained intensely personal ever since. Much of the credit for this goes to the Little Paris Burlesk.
Now transpired one of those mystical coincidences which, looking back through the mists of four decades, will baffle science: The Little Paris did not close its doors until 1959, the same year that the White Sox won their first American League pennant in four decades!
No sooner had the White Sox won the pennant than Emmett Dedmon of the Sun-Times sent for me and Fire Superintendent Quinn set off airraid warnings at midnight. I was to write human interest stuff from the grandstand.
“Mr. Dedmon,” I responded courteously, “thank you for giving me my second start in Early Chicago Journalism,” saluted briskly and left. I cabbed out to my parents’ home on the Northwest Side to give them the good news. A stranger came to the door. I’d forgotten that my folks had moved in 1936.
I ought to have remembered as they’d moved the day after I’d run away from home. That’s something else I’ve never been able to figure out.
The moment each game was finished, I cabbed north to Dedmon’s office, composing my story on the way. Dedmon, wearing a green eye-shade, would be striding up and down shouting things like, “Hit that story! The presses are rolling! Get on the streets before the Trib! Scoop ’em!” To which nobody paid the least attention. It wasn’t until some years later, when I chanced to see a revival of “The Front Page,” that I realized he’d been doing Hildy Johnson.
Whether Hildy would have sent me to Los Angeles, had the Sox extended the series, is one of those great Ifs of history which scholars will debate into infinity; like whether the Weathermen did, or did not, spring Dr. Leary; or whether he got himself out by failing to realize he was in. In which case I fail to see what difference it makes.
Considering that my second start in Early Chicago Journalism had lasted three days longer than my first start, I was gathering momentum. How often now I look back, nostagically, wishing that the Little Paris was still open so I could get away from the hurly-burly of the press room. Or did I miss my big chance by not applying at the Northwest Side News?
I owe my next beginning to the Sun-Times. For it chose a moment, when the world seemed strangely quiet, to express a feeling it had had for some time but hadn’t been able to place before:
“We have had a feeling which has persisted for some time that squalor is going out of fashion in Chicago. Perhaps this is largely due to the postwar war on slums, our mayor’s efforts in tidying up the streets, the popularity of cheering colors and the wide interest in art and music shown by the public.
“All these, and more, have added up to a feeling that the good old-fashioned, smelly squalor immortalized by men of literary genius is definitely on the way out.”
What overpaid idiot wrote that editorial I never troubled to inquire. All I’m sure of is that, if Roman Pucinski can get elected to public office, anybody can be a managing editor.
As Goldie Hawn once put it: different strokes for different folks.
Back in the Chicago American press room Dirty Maggie had been thinking, for some time, that I needed a fresh start. When two old-time thieves were curbed, on North Broadway, by a squadrol, and I happened, by some strange chance, to be sitting between them in the front seat, Maggie sprang into action.
When a stick of marijuana was discovered under the dashboard she became really eager. And when Otto Preminger’s Man with the Golden Arm materialized, in the same week, for a rerun on Otto Preminger’s TV sets, she grew hysterical.
The proof of my innocence was incontestable: had I been aware that there was a stick of tea under the dashboard, it wouldn’t have been there when we were busted because I would have had it smoked to the final ash by then.
‘‘The man who wrote a novel about a narcotics addict himself appeared today in narcotics court,” Maggie put it on the wires coast to coast. Then she phoned the arresting officers to determine whether the car we’d been curbed in hadn’t been stolen.
What a beauty of a scoop! I can see it now: “Writer trapped in hot-car ring! Claims dope in car was not for sales purposes. Divorced author, once found guilty of typewriter theft in Texas, out on bond pending trial.”
Unhappily for Dirty Mag, there was a bill of sale for the car. And, as Papa Hemingway might have put it, it was a good bill. Judge Wendt, apparently unimpressed by Mag’s screeching, looked sympathetically at the state’s attorney, asked him “What has the loser got to say?” and dismissed the case in less than five minutes. The driver of the car, however, was fined for going through a yellow light.
But the Prosecution for the American wasn’t ready to accept dismissal of the case that readily.
“Congratulations to Nelson Algren on beating the narcotics rap!” she topped her column the following morning.
Different strokes for different folks.
“The more we put into welfare the worse the immorality becomes,” was the theme of a column of Jack Mabley’s, which gave me my third or fourth local start—I’m losing count.
“We are making it profitable to have babies out of wedlock.” The columnist advanced the concept that the higher incidence of immorality on the South Side, as compared to the suburbs, is directly proportional to the incidence of public welfare.
Not pausing to consider that adulterers who aren’t on welfare aren’t tailed by caseworkers.
“The soaring rate of illegitimacies,” he warned all homeowners between Chatham Fields and Lake Forest about overdoing generosity, “shows that the more help you give, the more indolent the recipient becomes! Where will the vicious cycle of bastardy end?”
Somewhere between Winnetka and Glenview would by my guess.
Yet the ploy worked well enough to lend him momentum toward a managing-editorship.
So it isn’t surprising that the same columnist pulled one of the weirdest U-turns, transforming himself from a wild bull into a bunny-man, in the history of Early Chicago Journalism.
In the same crusading tone as he’d warned the suburbs about the vicious cycle of bastardy going on in the ghetto at their expense, he anticipated the purposes of the antiwar demonstrators during Convention Week of 1968. According, I assume, to orders from above.
But there it was: hippie chicks were going to work as hookers in order to put LSD into delegates’ drinks, beat-up cars were to be abandoned on the thru ways in order to jam traffic. LSD would be dissolved in our drinking water—the whole gamut of fantasies that makes frightened men buy newspapers.
“The defense is massive manpower,” Mabley warned.
And saw the consequences of his own irresponsibility.
Horrifying View of the Police Slate he reported, having witnessed police beating up a cripple in the course of their rioting. He was so outraged at such useless cruelty that he put down his head and charged the whole police department. He charged so hard that he charged offstage.
When he next materialized he was wearing a bunny-suit and was organizing a defense fund for policemen indicted on charges of brutality.
His organization of the fund was so successful that now Chicago police need have no further fear of clubbing anyone, crippled or able-bodied; so long as they take off their badges first.
“I was involved in the fund,” he explained later, “because after the convention disorders, when there was public speculation on federal indictments of policemen as political balance for the indictments of eight radicals, I thought the idea was so outrageous I said I would start a fund to defend the policemen the day any indictments were returned. I didn’t think the federal government would have the nerve to indict. But... the awesome federal government went into action to try to put these policemen into prison... the cost of proving their innocence, in money and the emotional impact on the men and their families, was terrible.”
The cost of putting people into prison for protesting the most cowardly military assault in American history, and the emotional impact upon them and their families, however, is just another touch of brightness to lighten the gloom of our subway decor.
A fighter who’d just been knocked out by Archie Moore, came around to Moore’s dressing room to ask for Moore’s autograph. But he was moved by awe. Mabley just feels that a bunny-suit is more becoming to his personality.
“I don’t think a newspaper should be like a mean dog,” Mike Royko once commented, “that trots down the street, slashes your leg and keeps on trotting.”
What Royko didn’t figure was on the mean dog doing a U-turn, coming back to take another slash and then keep trotting.
A few years ago I was introduced to a fortyish-looking fellow who told me his name was Gershman. As he was a newspaper man, I recalled I’d once met a man of the same name, several decades ago, at the City News Bureau.
“That was my father, Isaac Gershman,” the younger Gershman assured me.
“Then I have a message for him,” I thought quickly, “tell him if I don’t hear from him in the next six months I’ll be forced to seek employment elsewhere.”
Well, how would you feel if you’d been Rod Serling when Ron Ziegler came along?
Different strokes for different folks.
Different clowns for different towns.