CHAPTER 3

Cub Reporter

BEING A JOURNALIST has been my only life’s ambition. Early on I wanted to be a sportswriter.

My father and most of my uncles, on both sides of the family, were excellent athletes. I was not, even though I attempted—and failed at—every sport imaginable. In my sophomore year at Joliet Township High School, I became a manager on the varsity track team and Don Kienlen, the track coach, had me submit the meet results to the Spectator, a local weekly. I did more than that. I submitted newspaper-style accounts. The Spectator was a shopper’s paper that didn’t even have a sports section, but it welcomed my stories. At age fifteen I was a regularly published writer (of overblown prose).

In my junior year, I became sports editor of the student weekly J-Hi Journal, and now was submitting my track reports to the daily Joliet Herald-News. In my senior year, I became the newspaper’s first Joliet Township all-sports stringer, at ten cents a column inch. My boss at the Herald-News was its newly hired sports editor, Robert Bigelow Laraway, the first of many professional mentors I would have the luck to learn from. Bob Laraway was a brilliant underachiever. He had writing skills, imagination, and charisma—everything except a dedication to work and an ability to stay away from strong drink. He was only twenty-five but already had been a sportswriter on the prestigious Champaign News-Gazette. That made him a commanding figure in my eyes.

Laraway delegated a lot to me, and at age sixteen I became a regular bylined writer (“By Bob Novak”). Soon Laraway asked me to come in on Saturdays to help with the rush of sports news for the weekend papers. Until then, my mother (who had been a private secretary) had typed up my longhand reports. Now I was forced to type under deadline pressure. I improvised a hunt-and-peck system that I still am using as I type these words.

In the summer of 1948 after my senior year, the Herald-News hired me (at $42.50 a week) as a full-time staffer. Every summer for the next few years, I worked on the sports page and anything that came after the ten a.m. sports deadline. The Herald-News was my school of journalism. I learned the formula for writing obituaries, how to lay out a page and write headlines, how to cover police news without getting sued for libel. I learned to bluff when I didn’t know much about the subject, covered a gangland slaying, and when the woman who usually wrote such things was having a baby, I did a weekly home furnishings feature.

The Herald-News avoided controversy. It ran canned anodyne editorials and only one syndicated columnist, Drew Pearson. One summer I came up with the idea of listing, by actual addresses, all the many illegal bookies in Joliet. John Lux, the paper’s publisher, called me into his big private office—the only time I set foot there. “Bob,” he told me, “we think you’re the best young reporter we’ve seen in a long time. You remind me of myself when I was your age. But let me give you some advice. It’s always better to be a ‘builder-upper’ than a ‘tearer-downer.’” John Lux was very kind to me, but I never dreamed of taking that advice.

         

IN DECEMBER 1947, I was covering a holiday high school basketball tournament at Centralia in southern Illinois for the Herald-News, when I met Jack Prowell. He was not yet thirty but already a legendary figure in Illinois sports and newspaper circles: the Champaign News-Gazette sportswriter who personally selected the high school football and basketball all-state teams and whose column (“Prowling Around with Jack Prowell”) was read all over Illinois by coaches and sports editors. I was drinking beer in the hotel bar with other sportswriters (though I was only sixteen), and Prowell took a liking to me. A few months later, he offered me a job for that coming fall when I would be a University of Illinois student. I was elated—but not for long. My father absolutely forbade it.

He considered me, quite accurately, immature even for my sixteen years. He prophesied, also accurately, I would have a tough enough time as a spoiled only child away from home and mother for the first time without having to shoulder a full-time job.

At Illinois, I was the beneficiary of a splendid education in the liberal arts. Instead of taking journalism and relearning the craft taught me at the Joliet Herald-News, I majored in English to open a new world—especially poetry. I most enjoyed Milton, John Donne, Shakespeare, Yeats, and, in particular, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. My studies in modern American literature deepened my love for Hemingway and Fitzgerald and excited unwarranted ambitions to be a novelist. After all, didn’t Hemingway start as a newspaperman?

Those ambitions were dampened by my friendship with Stanley Elkin, a moody, witty classmate from Chicago who would become one of America’s great novelists in the second half of the twentieth century. We took many classes together, including some in creative writing, where it was clear Stan was so far superior to me that I had better concentrate on newspapering.

A liberal education lets the mind roam to distant places. Reading Dante’s Inferno, I was intrigued by Bertrans de Born—a medieval nobleman who raised hell in the south of France, raiding and burning down castles and making a general nuisance of himself. Dante consigned him, in death, to stand sentry at the gates of Purgatory with his severed head in his hand, because “in life, he was a stirrer up of strife.” His fate intrigued Ezra Pound, who depicted de Born in his Cantos. Stirring up strife seemed to me a proper role for a journalist.

         

AS SOON AS my father vetoed my working for the News-Gazette, I turned up at the student newspaper—the Daily Illini—and presented myself to the sports editor. I was no mere high school neophyte, I made clear, but an experienced professional journalist. I had a letter from the Herald-News to prove it.

By my sophomore year, I was covering the varsity track team and spending one night a week in the sports “slot” (copy desk)—assignments that usually went to seniors or at least juniors. By my junior year, I was heir apparent to sports editor Al Shrader, whom I helped cover varsity football and basketball.

Getting to be sports editor was no minor matter at Illinois. Two Daily Illini staffers—editor and sports editor—were routinely tapped for MaWanDa, the select men’s society that included the class president, Inter-Fraternity Council president, and major sport captains. I had excellent grades, including straight As in the first semester of my junior year, and was scheduled to graduate with honors. I envisioned my yearbook entry: MaWanDa, sports editor, honors graduate.

There was no other junior even competing to be sports editor. Then I learned that Morris Beschloss, a senior who had covered gymnastics for the past two years and was isolated from mainstream sports at the university, was planning to take a postgraduate for the sole purpose of becoming sports editor. Morrie was a pleasant small town boy from Taylorville in southern Illinois who had no enemies and no particular writing or editing talent.

Beschloss was said to be lobbying members of the faculty-student committee that selected the sports editor. I had not approached them because I knew I had the job in the bag, The committee always took the advice of the outgoing sports editor. That was my friend Al Shrader. We had been guests in each other’s homes and the closest of collaborators in putting out the sports section. Over the last year, I had been his stand-in.

In my long life, I never have had a shock to compare with the news that the board had selected Beschloss as sports editor. I thought I would die. A half century later, I cannot recall it without feeling the pain afresh. For years to come, I was tormented by puzzlement over how the publications board could reject Al Shrader’s recommendation. Illinois coaches (with the exception of the gymnastics coach) were stunned, So, I believe, was every staffer on the Daily Illini. The bookie who ran the illegal parlay cards and bookmaking operations in the college town stopped me on the street. “Bob, who is this guy?” he asked. “What can I do to turn this around?” He had close connections to the mob. I thanked him for the thought.

Outside my small circle of friends, there were few tears shed for me at my own fraternity house. Although I would have been the first AEPi to make MaWanDa since before World War II, there was private rejoicing that I got what I deserved for my arrogance. The younger members detested me. One brother whom I had mercilessly taunted for his lack of sophistication could not wipe the smile off his face for days.

The Beschloss editorship was, just as I suspected it would be, undistinguished, free of mistakes, and equally free of successes. His column was pedestrian, and I think he wanted the job as a matter of campus politics rather than getting ahead in journalism. I never thought he would be a professional newspaperman, and in fact he became a rich and successful businessman by running the factory he took over from the man whose daughter he married. To the greater world, he is best known as father of the brilliant historian Michael Beschloss.

Al Shrader and I were reunited in the 1970s in Washington, when Al took over promotions for the Evening Star. We always had a good time together, enjoying each other’s company. Then, one night over drinks after dinner at Shrader’s home in the Virginia suburbs, he told me something he thought I should know. He had recommended Morrie Beschloss to the board twenty years earlier.

“Why?” I asked, astounded by the news. “Because,” Shrader replied, “I thought Morrie would get along with the young reporters, and I worried that you would have trouble, would be too demanding. I was wrong. It was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. You would have made one of the great sports editors ever. I’m sorry.”

This incident changed my life. It taught me that politics for me was a lot like sports. I was a lot better reporting it than practicing it. I am not a person who is easy for a lot of people to like. No stirrer-up of strife is ever very popular. For the short term, my reaction to this disappointment brought disastrous consequences.

         

WHEN I LOST the Daily Illini editorship, I immediately telephoned Bert Bertine, sports editor of the Champaign-Urbana Courier. (I felt I had grown too close to Jack Prowell to work for him at the News-Gazette.) With a combined population of sixty thousand, the twin college towns of Champaign and Urbana had two competing afternoon papers. And did they ever compete—especially in sports. Each had a four-man sports staff, and they were intent on getting exclusives.

Bertine knew me from covering events the past couple of years, and hired me in a second when I called—to start when the next school year began in September. It would be a magical time, helping Bert cover varsity sports in the most successful year ever (1951–52) for the University of Illinois.

The high point was taking a student special train to Los Angeles to cover the Illinois-Stanford Rose Bowl game. Train porters complained in wonderment that they ran out of booze for the first time ever on a Chicago-LA run. I helped Bertine with pregame feature stories, took a train up to San Francisco to cover the East-West Shrine Game, and on Rose Bowl day covered the dressing room of the badly beaten Stanford team (where players I interviewed included fullback Bob Mathias, the defending Gold Medal Olympian in the Decathlon and future Republican congressman from California).

It was heady stuff but strange thoughts about covering sports started to enter my head. I worried about the Korean War, about the coming presidential election, about where the country was going. Isn’t that what I ought to be reporting and writing about?

         

WHEN I ENTERED the Courier city room one morning in the spring of 1952, Bertine gave me a quizzical stare, then commented: “Well, if it isn’t the ex-student.” His sources inside the university had informed him that I was about to be expelled on charges of flagrant nonattendance of classes and illegal harboring of an automobile (which was prohibited for students). He had the word before I did.

I quit attending most classes my senior year, and skipped just about all class assignments. I was working well over forty hours a week for the Courier ($1.25 an hour, with time and a half for overtime), but it wasn’t just the burden of time. When I felt betrayed by the university on the Daily Illini, I lost interest in the university (though I maintained perfect attendance in Military Science classes, to protect my army commission).

My heavy class schedule for my first three years meant I needed only ten credit hours a semester my senior year to graduate, far below the norm of fifteen hours. I performed well enough in taking exams to actually get an A in Modern Drama and Bs in Modern European History and Municipal Government my senior year, even while skipping classes and doing no assigned work.

I did not write a single line for my long-anticipated honors thesis and hardly started what I was supposed to hand in for advanced creative writing, flunking both.

My problem was English Literature from 1789 to 1837, taught by Professor Paul Landis, one of the most beloved figures on campus. I had loved Landis’s famous Shakespeare course taken my second semester in school (he gave me an A). Although I attended few of his lectures my senior year, I was sure I could ace his final exam. But Landis’s toughness was belied by his cherubic demeanor. Since I did not attend enough of his classes, he ruled, I could not take the exam. He flunked me, and I fell one hour short of the 120 needed for graduation.

Far from being an honors graduate, I wasn’t even going to graduate. That was certain. The question was whether I would be expelled, taking away the hours I did earn my last semester, and making sure I would never graduate. Significantly, expulsion would prevent me from getting my second lieutenant’s commission in the U.S. Army Reserve as scheduled.

I was summoned to appear before a student-faculty disciplinary committee, and I tried my best to display the contrition I genuinely felt. I was told, however, that the student members thought I was arrogant and voted to expel me. All that saved me was a faculty member of the committee: wrestling coach emeritus H. E. (Hek) Kenney, a venerated figure. Coach Kenney knew me a little bit, argued that I was a good guy who got mixed up in his senior year after an exemplary three-year record and should be cut some slack. Not for the first or last time had I benefited from the patronage of an older man. I was not expelled, I was commissioned as an army officer, and I was only one hour short of graduation.

         

WITH THE KOREAN War ended, the army was clearing out its excess officers—including me. Jobless, my army career ended, I returned to Joliet to my parents’ home. I went job-seeking in Chicago (including a visit to the Sun-Times) without success. Al Orton, the Chicago bureau chief for the Associated Press, said he would love to hire me if a position opened up anywhere. I was skeptical. I did have one newspaper offer—from the Joliet Herald-News. But I did not want to settle down in my hometown. I still hoped something would turn up but stopped actively looking for it. Weeks rolled by. My routine was to sleep late, watch the Cubs on television in the afternoon, and then go out drinking. I was flat broke and living off my parents.

At the end of August, I got a phone call from Al Orton. The Omaha Associated Press bureau needed a vacation replacement for just twelve weeks. Would I be willing to take it? Would I!