My mother started me in newspaper work in 1937 right after my twelfth birthday. She would have started me younger, but there was a law against working before age twelve. She thought it was a silly law, and said so to Deems.
Deems was boss of a group of boys who worked home delivery routes for the Baltimore News-Post. She found out about him a few weeks after we got to Baltimore. She just went out on the street, stopped a paperboy, and asked how he’d got his job.
“There’s this man Deems…”
Deems was short and plump and had curly brown hair. He owned a car and a light gray suit and always wore a necktie and white shirt. A real businessman, I thought the first time I saw him. My mother was talking to him on the sidewalk in front of the Union Square Methodist Church and I was standing as tall as I could, just out of earshot.
“Now, Buddy, when we get down there keep your shoulders back and stand up real straight,” she had cautioned me after making sure my necktie was all right and my shirt clean.
Watching the two of them in conversation, with Deems glancing at me now and then, I kept my shoulders drawn back in the painful military style I’d seen in movies, trying to look a foot taller than I really was.
“Come over here, Russ, and meet Mister Deems,” she finally said, and I did, managing to answer his greeting by saying, “The pleasure’s all mine,” which I’d heard people say in the movies. I probably blushed while saying it, because meeting strangers was painfully embarrassing to me.
“If that’s the rule, it’s the rule,” my mother was telling Deems, “and we’ll just have to put up with it, but it still doesn’t make any sense to me.”
As we walked back to the house she said I couldn’t have a paper route until I was twelve. And all because of some foolish rule they had down here in Baltimore. You’d think if a boy wanted to work they would encourage him instead of making him stay idle so long that laziness got embedded in his bones.
That was April. We had barely finished the birthday cake in August before Deems came by the apartment and gave me the tools of the newspaper trade: an account book for keeping track of the customers’ bills and a long, brown web belt. Slung around one shoulder and across the chest, the belt made it easy to balance fifteen or twenty pounds of papers against the hip. I had to buy my own wire cutters for opening the newspaper bundles the trucks dropped at Wisengoff’s store on the corner of Stricker and West Lombard streets.
In February my mother had moved us down from New Jersey, where we had been living with her brother Allen ever since my father died in 1930. This move of hers to Baltimore was a step toward fulfilling a dream. More than almost anything else in the world, she wanted “a home of our own.” I’d heard her talk of that “home of our own” all through those endless Depression years when we lived as poor relatives dependent on Uncle Allen’s goodness. “A home of our own. One of these days, Buddy, we’ll have a home of our own.”
That winter she had finally saved just enough to make her move, and she came to Baltimore. There were several reasons for Baltimore. For one, there were people she knew in Baltimore, people she could go to if things got desperate. And desperation was possible, because the moving would exhaust her savings, and the apartment rent was twenty-four dollars a month. She would have to find a job quickly. My sister Doris was only nine, but I was old enough for an after-school job that could bring home a few dollars a week. So as soon as it was legal I went into newspaper work.
The romance of it was almost unbearable on my first day as I trudged west along Lombard Street, then south along Gilmor, and east down Pratt Street with the bundle of newspapers strapped to my hip. I imagined people pausing to admire me as I performed this important work, spreading the news of the world, the city, and the racetracks onto doorsteps, through mail slots, and under doorjambs. I had often gazed with envy at paperboys; to be one of them at last was happiness sublime.
Very soon, though, I discovered drawbacks. The worst of these was Deems. Though I had only forty customers, Deems sent papers for forty-five. Since I was billed for every paper left on Wisengoff’s corner, I had to pay for the five extra copies out of income or try to hustle them on the street. I hated standing at streetcar stops yelling, “Paper! Paper!” at people getting off trolleys. Usually, if my mother wasn’t around to catch me, I stuck the extras in a dark closet and took the loss.
Deems was constantly baiting new traps to dump more papers on me. When I solved the problem of the five extras by getting five new subscribers for home delivery, Deems announced a competition with mouth-watering prizes for the newsboys who got the most new subscribers. Too innocent to cope with this sly master of private enterprise, I took the bait.
“Look at these prizes I can get for signing up new customers,” I told my mother. “A balloon-tire bicycle. A free pass to the movies for a whole year.”
The temptation was too much. I reported my five new subscribers to help me in the competition.
Whereupon Deems promptly raised my order from forty-five to fifty papers, leaving me again with the choice of hustling to unload the five extras or losing money.
I won a free pass to the movies, though. It was good for a whole year. And to the magnificent Loew’s Century located downtown on Lexington Street. The passes were good only for nights in the middle of the week when I usually had too much homework to allow for movies. Still, in the summer with school out, it was thrilling to go all the way downtown at night to sit in the Century’s damask and velvet splendor and see MGM’s glamorous stars in their latest movies.
To collect my prize I had to go to a banquet the paper gave for its “honor carriers” at the Emerson Hotel. There were fifty of us, and I was sure the other forty-nine would all turn out to be slicksters wised up to the ways of the world, who would laugh at my doltish ignorance of how to eat at a great hotel banquet. My fear of looking foolish at the banquet made me lie awake nights dreading it and imagining all the humiliating mistakes I could make.
I had seen banquets in movies. Every plate was surrounded by a baffling array of knives, forks, and spoons. I knew it would be the same at the Emerson Hotel. The Emerson was one of the swankiest hotels in Baltimore. It was not likely to hold down on the silverware. I talked to my mother.
“How will I know what to eat what with?”
The question did not interest her.
“Just watch what everybody else does, and enjoy yourself,” she said.
I came back to the problem again and again.
“Do you use the same spoon for your coffee as you do for dessert?”
“Don’t worry about it. Everybody isn’t going to be staring at you.”
“Is it all right to butter your bread with the same knife you use to cut the meat?”
“Just go and have a good time.”
Close to panic, I showed up at the Emerson, found my way to the banquet, and was horrified to find that I had to sit beside Deems throughout the meal. We probably talked about something, but I was so busy sweating with terror and rolling my eyeballs sidewise to see what silverware Deems was using to eat with that I didn’t hear a word all night. The following week, Deems started sending me another five extras.
Now and then he also provided a treat. One day in 1938 he asked if I would like to join a small group of boys he was taking to visit the News-Post newsroom. My mother, in spite of believing that nothing came before homework at night, wasn’t cold-hearted enough to deny me a chance to see the city room of a great metropolitan newspaper. I had seen plenty of city rooms in the movies. They were glamorous places full of exciting people like Lee Tracy, Edmund Lowe, and Adolphe Menjou trading wisecracks and making mayors and cops look like saps. To see such a place, to stand, actually stand, in the city room of a great newspaper and look at reporters who were in touch every day with killers and professional baseball players—that was a thrilling prospect.
Because the News-Post was an afternoon paper, almost everybody had left for the day when we got there that night. The building, located downtown near the harbor, was disappointing. It looked like a factory, and not a very big factory either. Inside there was a smell compounded of ink, pulp, chemicals, paste, oil, gasoline, greasy rags, and hot metal. We took an elevator up and came into a long room filled with dilapidated desks, battered telephones, and big blocky typewriters. Almost nobody there, just two or three men in shirt-sleeves. It was the first time I’d ever seen Deems look awed.
“Boys, this is the nerve center of the newspaper,” he said, his voice heavy and solemn like the voice of Westbrook Van Voorhis, the March of Time man, when he said, “Time marches on.”
I was confused. I had expected the newsroom to have glamour, but this place had nothing but squalor. The walls hadn’t been painted for years. The windows were filthy. Desks were heaped with mounds of crumpled paper, torn sheets of newspaper, overturned paste pots, dog-eared telephone directories. The floor was ankle deep in newsprint, carbon paper, and crushed cigarette packages. Waist-high cans overflowed with trash. Ashtrays were buried under cigarette ashes and butts. Ugly old wooden chairs looked ready for the junk shop.
It looked to me like a place that probably had more cockroaches than we had back home on Lombard Street, but Deems was seeing it through rose-colored glasses. As we stood looking around at the ruins, he started telling us how lucky we were to be newsboys. Lucky to have a foot on the upward ladder so early in life. If we worked hard and kept expanding our paper routes we could make the men who ran this paper sit up and notice us. And when men like that noticed you, great things could happen, because they were important men, the most important of all being the man who owned our paper: Mr. Hearst Himself, William Randolph Hearst, founder of the greatest newspaper organization in America. A great man, Mr. Hearst, but not so great that he didn’t appreciate his newsboys, who were the backbone of the business. Many of whom would someday grow up and work at big jobs on this paper. Did we realize that any of us, maybe all of us, could end up one of these days sitting right here in this vitally important room, the newsroom, the nerve center of the newspaper?
Yes, Deems was right. Riding home on the streetcar that night, I realized I was a lucky boy to be getting such an early start up the ladder of journalism. It was childish to feel let down because the city room looked like such a dump instead of like city rooms in the movies. Deems might be a slave driver, but he was doing it for my own good, and I ought to be grateful. In News Selling, the four-page special paper Mr. Hearst published just for his newsboys, they’d run a piece that put it almost as beautifully as Deems had.
YOU’RE A MEMBER OF THE FOURTH ESTATE was the headline on it. I was so impressed that I put the paper away in a safe place and often took it out to read when I needed inspiration. It told how “a great English orator” named Edmund Burke “started a new name for a new profession—the Fourth Estate… the press… NEWSPAPER MEN.”
And it went on to say:
“The Fourth Estate was then… and IS now… a great estate for HE-men… workers… those who are proud of the business they’re in!”
(Mr. Hearst always liked plenty of exclamation marks, dots, and capital letters.)
“Get that kick of pride that comes from knowing you are a newspaper man. That means something!
“A newspaper man never ducks a dare. YOU are a newspaper man. A salesman of newspapers… the final cog in the immense machine of newspaper production—a SERVICE for any man to be proud of.
“So throw back the chest. Hit the route hard each day. Deliver fast and properly. Sell every day. Add to your route because you add to the NEWSPAPER field when you do. And YOU MAKE MONEY DOING IT. It is a great life—a grand opportunity. Don’t boot it—build it up. Leave it better than when you came into it.”
“It is a great life.” I kept coming back to that sentence as I read and reread the thing. No matter how awful it got, and it sometimes got terrible, I never quit believing it was a great life. I kept at it until I was almost sixteen, chest thrown back, delivering fast and properly, selling every day and adding to my route. At the end I’d doubled its size and was making as much as four dollars a week from it.
A few months after he took us down to see the city room, Deems quit. My mother said he’d found a better job. Later, when I thought about him, I wondered if maybe it wasn’t because he hated himself for having to make life hell for boys. I hoped that wasn’t the reason because he was the first newspaperman I ever knew, and I wanted him to be the real thing. Hard as nails.