Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent and longtime executive editor of the New York Times
(1922–2006)
For seven years I lived with my five sisters and our parents, Sarah and Harry, among flowers and trees, dancing fountains, wilderness paths, birds singing in their ecstasy, and such stupendous quantities of a particular treasure as to send my mother into paroxysms of acquisition greed.
“Fresh air!” she would announce. And then from her lips came the command that rang through every apartment in the Bronx neighborhood every day: “Go grab some fresh air! Out! Fresh air!”
As other American pioneers and gamblers kept moving west, the Jews of New York kept moving north toward fresh air. For Harry and his Pirate Queen the road led from the tenements of the Lower East Side in Manhattan to Decatur Avenue in the Bronx, where young warriors waited in ambush to pounce on the new kids and eventually declare peace. The adult pioneers worked six days a week and every hour of overtime they could get. They saved every penny with pleasure, looking down from the peak above the sea to the pass above the fruited plain-Mosholu Parkway station, far north, only a few miles south of the New York suburbs boundary line.
Beyond the station, as far as a housepainter’s eye could see, stretched Van Cortlandt Park. The ride on the subway was usually an hour or more each way. Coming home, fresh air awaited, ready to be consumed in large gulps, a reservoir never dry. And during the day, breathing the paint or the lint, a workingman knew that at least at home the wife and the children were breathing that fresh air, all day long.
The pioneers stood and gazed at their children and then went to the bank with their deposit books every few months.
Paradise was known as the Amalgamated, for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union, which built good housing for its members. Members of other unions were eligible to buy apartments too. Papa’s credentials were his card in the housepainters’ union and the bankbook of his life savings.
By the time we moved into our apartment Sarah and Harry had been on the waiting list for about two years.
They both knew Harry would make a living as long as he could climb a painter’s ladder or crawl out a window to a scaffold. With overtime here and there he could come up with the eighty dollars a month to meet the maintenance charges. They never again might have such a chance, a great park across the street, four bedrooms, living room, nice big kitchen, and “double exposures,” which gave the apartment cross ventilation from the breezes of park-fresh air whenever you raised a window sash.
Harry and Sarah went to the savings bank, took out one thousand dollars, almost all the money they had saved. They took the cash to the office of the union cooperative and put it on the table. They were gambling that money, and every dollar they would be able to put together from Harry’s work, for God knows how many years. They figured that with good luck some months Harry would make enough to pay off some of the cooperative’s loan for the rest of the apartment, in addition to the maintenance. In the months he was short, the building management would almost always wait another month.
We lived in those co-op buildings the first years of the thirties, when the only thing thriving in America was hard times. The eight complexes consisted of half a dozen six-story apartment buildings, each built around a courtyard that blossomed in the spring and flowered almost until the snow provided inexhaustible hills of snowball and snowman. Just across the street was our forest, Van Cortlandt Park, which not only sent out sweet perfumed fresh air for generations of workers’ children twenty-four hours a day but also provided a golfing link. Golfers, who were not experts, hit balls into the hands of boys waiting to scoop them up and run to return them for a nickel apiece.
Twenty-five years later, when I was an American correspondent in Eastern Europe, I saw Polish workers and their wives in a shabby seaside resort on the Baltic going for a walk in the nearby forest or marching for hours along the narrow beach, up and down, up and down. They went back to the little boardinghouses for meals and rushed outside as soon as they could for what else? Fresh air. Then they sat in wooden chairs to put their faces into the pallid sunshine. That week on the Polish Baltic I was a boy again and the workers were my parents.
In 1967 I was appointed an assistant managing editor of the New York Times and immediately set off for Europe to share the magic moment in journalistic history with the foreign staff of the paper.
The first stop was London, where Anthony Lewis, then the bureau chief and a brilliant correspondent of lucidity and range, gave a dinner party for me at the Garrick Club. During the cocktail hour there was one of those sudden drops in the noise level and the voice of a British member of the staff could be heard clear and true as a royal trumpet: “Tell me, Abe, do you think there will ever be a Jewish managing editor of the New York Times?”
Everybody froze, glass in hand, a living tableau. I turned slowly, martini still half raised, heard myself say, “Well, I sure as hell hope so.” There were a few titters, and somebody decided it was time for dinner.
Sure enough, justice triumphed, and a couple of years later I was back in London, this time to celebrate with the crowned heads of Europe my appointment as managing editor.
The morning after my arrival, I picked up a copy of the Times of London outside my hotel room door—Claridge’s—saw “Up from the Slums of the Bronx to the Editor’s Chair, Page 3” on the front page. I knew they were singing my song and turned the page.
I saw it at once: a long story from the Washington correspondent of the Times, a kind of strange-customs-in-faraway-places piece in which the writer tried to explain to the British public exactly how it had come about that a poor boy from a slum in an exotic part of New York seldom visited by tourists, who attended a free college with the social prestige of a herring, whose parents were born in Russia and who also happened to be, well, Jewish, actually became managing editor of the most important, powerful, and prestigious newspaper in the United States.
It was written with a sense of kindly wonderment, as if explaining the customs of Ugandan tribesmen to the British audience.
There was a certain poignancy in the piece, discernible perhaps to only two people: the author and me. The writer was Louis Heren, who had been the correspondent in India of the Times of London during my years there. He had told me often that though he stood high in the regard of the proprietors of the Times of London, he and they knew he could never become its editor. He was born a Roman Catholic and had compounded that initial error by attending the wrong schools.
I sent Louis Heren a message of thanks, also informing him that the Pirate Queen would have been furious if she knew that Mosholu Parkway1 would ever be described as a slum.
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Note: This excerpt from Abe Rosenthal’s unpublished memoir is printed here with permission from Shirley Lord Rosenthal. It is the only contribution in this book, aside from my own, not derived from a live interview.