The Baltimore Sun needed a police reporter that spring. The managing editor mentioned it to an editorial writer who lectured at Hopkins, and the editorial writer mentioned it to a professor, who mentioned it to me and gave me a telephone number to call at the Sun. I was to ask for a Mr. Dorsey.
On the phone I talked to a woman with a deep, snobby, go-to-hell voice, and she told me to come in for an interview a few days later. I took my only suit to the cleaner for the high-priced overnight clean-and-press job, asked my mother to iron my best shirt, and polished my shoes for the first time in weeks. It wasn’t that I especially wanted to work for a newspaper. I was simply desperate for a job. Any job.
A few days later, looking unusually spiffy, I presented myself at the Sun building. This was not just a building. It was a pronunciamento in stone. Unlike the News-Post’s shabby newspaper factory, which I had visited with Deems so long ago, the Sun building was as stately as a monument, as grave as a temple to the god of truth, which the Sun, with “Light For All” as its motto, purported to serve. Gray and massive, it announced its importance with trimmings that included two dozen huge Greek columns, each two stories high, and three gigantic circular clocks set high into the stone walls and towering above the level of the top floor. To emphasize the point for anyone still uncertain about the Sun’s position in Baltimore, the building was situated at the geographical center of the city, the intersection of Charles and Baltimore streets. It was designed to make all who entered feel humble, and, in my case, it succeeded.
I went in through the front door. The receptionist guarding the elevator had apparently been hired to make visitors feel not only humble but also unworthy. I was still young enough to be intimidated by such gorgons, and when she examined me with an expression that said I simply wouldn’t do, I felt apologetic rather than insulted.
“Can I help you?”
I said I was there to see Mr. Dorsey.
“Do you have an appointment?”
I did. Oh yes, indeed, I had an appointment. I wouldn’t dream of disturbing her about seeing Mr. Dorsey if I didn’t have an appointment.
“Yes, I have an appointment,” I said, and, because that seemed inadequate, added, “I have an appointment to see Mister Dorsey at one o’clock.”
“You are early,” she said, and motioned for me to stand back from her desk while she dealt with a smartly dressed man who had come in behind me.
“May I help you?”
She sounded almost polite. Maybe it took fancy tailoring to make her behave.
“Mister Erskine of the New York Herald Tribune to see Myles Wolff,” the smartly dressed man said in an authoritative voice.
She lifted a telephone.
“Mister Erskine of the New York Herald Tribune is here to see Mister Wolff.” she said. Then: “Go right up, Mister Erskine. Mister Wolff is expecting you.”
This episode impressed me even more than the building. For all its elegant airs, the Baltimore Sun was still just a hometown paper, but the New York Herald Tribune was a legend. True, I didn’t know what the legend was, but I was aware that there was some magic attached to the Herald Tribune, just as there was to The New York Times. Those were great newspapers. I could sense some of the Herald Tribune’s greatness in the no-nonsense, big-town style with which Mr. Erskine had handled the receptionist. The discovery that a great paper like the New York Herald Tribune called on people who worked for the Baltimore Sun raised my respect for the Sun.
During these reflections, I was also busy feeling like a fool. The receptionist apparently intended to keep me waiting at her desk until one o’clock. Since there were no chairs for waiting visitors, I had to stand against the wall, as if being punished by the teacher. Well, I might not be from the New York Herald Tribune, but I was, after all, managing editor of the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, not Caspar Milquetoast.
“I’m going out and get a cup of coffee,” I told the receptionist. “I’ll be back at one o’clock.”
“Just a moment, please,” she said. “I’ll see if Mister Dorsey is in yet.”
She used her telephone again and, lo, Mr. Dorsey was expecting me, I could go right up. I walked past her and stepped into the elevator for the short ride to the top floor.
My problem that afternoon was that the day of reckoning was getting close. Day of reckoning. That’s what my mother called it.
“He who dances must pay the piper, sonny boy. The day of reckoning is coming,” she told me. “And don’t you forget it.”
Her warnings—there had been several—were provoked by the lovesick indolence which sapped my energies during my senior year at Hopkins. I should have spent those final months trying to launch my career as a writer. Instead, I had wasted them on love. In idle afternoons and long nights when I should have been polishing my short stories and getting a novel started, I was, instead, courting an enchanting young woman named Mimi. Obsessed by the joys of love, I found the lonely labor of writing impossible. The stories I wrote seemed empty, false, lifeless, and filled with wooden, bloodless characters. I lost all interest in writing them, and even began to glimpse the truth: that they were not very good stories and, worse, that I had no gift for writing fiction.
I was powerless to confront this bleakness. It was so much more pleasant to be in love with Mimi and let the future tend to itself. Something was bound to turn up, I thought. Surely something would turn up. Living at home at Marydell Road, however, made life hard for a lover. There, my mother, with hawk-keen eye, saw me devoting so much time to romancing Mimi that I had none left for writing. In June I would graduate from Hopkins without plans or job prospects.
“He who dances must pay the piper, sonny boy,” she said. “The day of reckoning is coming. And don’t you forget it.”
After graduation, aspiring writers in those days did not linger on in graduate school. Graduate schools were for students who wanted to become doctors, scientists, or professors. Anyhow, my claims to being a writer were unimpressive. I still hadn’t got around to starting the novel I meant to write. Worse, I had no idea what it would be about when I did start it. The short stories I mailed to magazine fiction editors were always mailed right back without a word of encouragement. Calling myself a writer would be laughable. “Amateur writer” was more like it, and in 1947 nobody was hiring amateur writers.
It was May before I finally forced myself to think about the future. Graduation, the day of reckoning, was only a month away. Piper-paying time was at hand. I started studying the help-wanted ads. There was a paper-box factory offering not bad pay for a vaguely defined job. I imagined working in a paper-box factory and felt sorry for myself: one of the nation’s great undiscovered young writers toiling, lost and forgotten, in an inhuman paper-box assembly line.
Then the professor mentioned the Sun, and there I was, in the elevator, an appointment to see a Mr. Dorsey, not really interested in newspaper work but even less interested in making paper boxes. Well, some great novelists had started as newspapermen. Ernest Hemingway, for instance. That was the way I wanted to go. The Hemingway route. A great artist of the written word. Novelists could become artists, while newspaper people could never be much better than hacks. Still, they did write, didn’t they? What’s more, they got paid every week. I began to feel reality taking residence in my soul. On the way up in the elevator, I decided not to let Mr. Dorsey see how little respect I had for newspaper work.
“So you think you can be a newsman,” were Mr. Dorsey’s first words.
We were in an office with a wide picture window overlooking the newsroom. I sat in the rigor mortis posture of the eager-to-please job hunter. Mr. Dorsey leaned back in a swivel chair behind his desk, smug as a hanging judge, and stared at me without the trace of a smile. He was Hollywood’s dream of a managing editor. Tall and lean. Iron-gray hair closely cropped. Eyes chilly gray, infinitely wise to the world. An imperious manner, and a way of holding his head that suggested arrogance, impatience, maybe danger. A dangerous man, I thought. Not a man to trifle with. Not a man to tolerate fools. Though we were both seated, he managed to make me feel that he was looking down on me from great height.
Still, when he said, “So you think you can be a newsman,” it didn’t sound like a sneer. Yet, it wasn’t quite a question either, so for a long pause I didn’t know whether he expected an answer. While I hesitated about what to say to this awesome man, his phone rang.
“I’ve got to talk to the Washington bureau,” he said to me. “It’ll only take a minute.”
Those words, “the Washington bureau,” had the same intoxicating effect on me that “the New York Herald Tribune” had produced a few minutes earlier. This was the big time, and for a brief instant at least, I was part of it.
“What the hell is Truman up to now?” Mr. Dorsey was saying to the Washington bureau man on the telephone.
My God! He was talking about the president of the United States, and the Washington bureau at the other end of the line was actually telling him what the president was up to. I was among people who really knew what the president was up to. In the News-Letter office we often talked about what Truman was up to, but it was silly, of course, because none of us had the slightest idea of what he was really up to.
“What’s your experience?” Mr. Dorsey was asking.
“I’ve worked on the Johns Hopkins News-Letter.”
How ridiculous that sounded when spoken to a man who had just talked to the Washington bureau.
“I’m the managing editor,” I blurted.
Mr. Dorsey snorted noisily.
Very close to panic, I almost said, “My mother’s cousin is managing editor of The New York Times,” but stifled the impulse. Managing editors probably all knew each other; suppose Mr. Dorsey telephoned Cousin Edwin and asked what he knew about me and found out Cousin Edwin knew nothing about me. I’d better leave him out of it.
“You realize you can never get rich in the newspaper business,” Mr. Dorsey said.
I scoffed at the idea that I might dream of wealth. “Rich?” I tried to smile the smile of a man calmly resigned to a life of penury. “I never expect to make a lot of money.”
“If you want money, the news business is the wrong line of work to get into,” Mr. Dorsey said, and sent me away with a handshake and a loud snort.
A week later the phone rang while I was eating supper at Marydell Road.
“This is Dorsey. If you still want to work for me, you can start Sunday at thirty dollars a week.”
I was flabbergasted. Thirty dollars a week. That was Depression pay. This was 1947. The price of coffee was up to fifty cents a pound and milk to twenty cents a quart. A pair of shoes cost $9. I’d been in New York a few weeks earlier, and the prices there were incredible. A theater ticket had cost me $1.50, the hotel was $4.50 a night, a sirloin steak dinner, $3.25. Thirty dollars a week was an insult to a college man.
“Well?” Mr. Dorsey asked.
“I’ll take it,” I replied.
I’d had very little competition for the Sun job. Two or three classmates at Hopkins had also talked to Mr. Dorsey. Why he picked me was a mystery. Maybe because of that empty title Leo had given me. None of my competitors could call himself a managing editor. Whatever the reason, the job was no prize. America was still a generation away from the glamorous and lushly paid Age of Media when the country’s brightest college graduates would be willing to kill for a newspaper job.
In 1947 newspaper work was for life’s losers. Men who dreamed of big money and rich wives went in for medicine, law, business, or engineering. Those like me, without talent for high-income work, might go to graduate school to become professors. Professors were poorly paid, but the social cachet was good. Newspapermen, by contrast, occupied the social pit. Respectable folks did not want their daughters to marry one. They were thought to be a vagabond crowd addicted to booze, vulgar language, bad manners, smelly wardrobes, heavy debt, and low company.
At Marydell Road we did not share this uptown view. The astounding success story of Cousin Edwin made journalism a glittering career in my mother’s imagination. With her schoolteacher’s respect for words, she would have been delighted if I had turned out to be a talented novelist, but a newspaper job was just as wonderful in her view. When I complained that the pay was insulting for a college man, she refused to sympathize with me.
“If you work hard at this job,” she said, “maybe you can make something of it. Then they’ll have to give you a raise.”
It had been a long time since I considered myself in competition with Edwin, so the idea of “making something” of the Sun job was far from my mind. Now that the job problem was settled, my hopes of becoming a fiction writer revived. Maybe I’d been foolish to think I could sell stories while still just a college kid. I probably needed a little more experience of the world, a little more writing practice before I could turn out really first-rate fiction. For this, the newspaper job would be a blessing. It would give me some writing experience and tide me over financially until I sold my first novel. Then I would quit the Sun and move to New York. Being a successful novelist wouldn’t be much fun in Baltimore.
I still had no idea what that successful novel would be about. Whenever I lifted my pen to start writing it, my mind began to drift, and drowsiness fell upon me so heavily that to keep awake I had to phone Mimi and suggest we go to a movie. Years later, after I had met hundreds of people who wanted to be writers but didn’t want to write, I was finally able to diagnose my problem: I wanted to be a great novelist, but I didn’t want to write novels.
My ignorance about journalism was as deep as my ignorance of the art of fiction. I knew, for instance, that the Sun was a morning paper, but I didn’t realize this meant I would have to work nights.
I knew almost nothing about my new employer except that it also published an afternoon paper, the Evening Sun, and that the Sun and Evening Sun collectively were called the “Sunpapers.” I was surprised to learn they had separate staffs, separate newsrooms, and separate editors, and were intensely competitive.
I was surprised to learn that the awesome Mr. Dorsey, though managing editor of the Sun, was not the supreme law of the Sunpapers, but that the Evening Sun had an equally powerful managing editor.
I was surprised to learn that above these two giants towered an even more magnificent figure, a widely dreaded tyrant named Neil H. Swanson. Swanson held the grandiose title of “Executive Editor of the Sunpapers” and justified it by behaving sometimes like Louis the Sun King and others like Cecil B. De Mille directing a Hollywood epic for the silver screen. Old-timers remembered Swanson on the night of his appointment as executive editor appearing in the newsroom shortly before midnight accompanied by his wife and another couple, all in formal dress, and led by two large Great Danes, which Mrs. Swanson held on a tight leash. Removing his dinner jacket, loosening his bow tie, and rolling up his shirt-sleeves, Swanson had said, “Now we’ll start to get out a newspaper!” It was a message foretelling the style of management to come.
Another thing I didn’t know was that a police reporter was the lowest form of life in the Sun’s universe. Titans like Swanson and Mr. Dorsey had no time for police reporters. Theirs was the world of foreign correspondents, war, diplomacy, global catastrophe, national politics, presidents. They dealt with the great reporters, men who could tell them what the hell Truman was up to now. What police reporters dealt with, I soon learned, were purse snatches, liquor-store holdups, traffic accidents, six-alarm fires, and lost pets. On rare occasions when our paths crossed, Mr. Dorsey looked through me as though I were invisible. The dreaded Swanson was so remote that our paths simply never crossed.
My main contact with power was Clarence Caulfield. He was day city editor, which was not as important as being city editor. “Cauley,” as everyone called him, came to work in the late morning, made early assignments, and left at six o’clock when the night city editor arrived to take charge of the city room through the busy night hours. It was Cauley I reported to on my first day at work. He was a red-haired, blue-eyed, freckled, genial, nervous wreck. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and scratched constantly at imaginary itches around his rib cage.
It was midafternoon on a quiet summer Sunday, and the newsroom was quiet and uncluttered. A couple of older gents of the green-eyeshade variety were seated at the copy desk smoking philosophically and brooding silently about whiskey, racehorses, and commas. Two or three men who looked like they might be reporters chatted quietly on the far side of the room. The silence of it was surprising. Movie newsrooms had shaped my vision of the business, and I had expected uproar.
Caulfield seemed all right, though. He got up and shook my hand and smiled a shy, boyish smile when I introduced myself, then absently scratched the side of his rib cage. We exchanged small talk, and I waited for him to assign me to a desk.
“I’m going to send you out to the west side tonight with Hunter,” he finally said. “It’ll give you a chance to learn where the police stations are, and Hunter will show you what the go-around is.”
After a little more talk about nothing much, I asked, “Where will I be sitting?”
“Sitting?”
“My desk, I mean. When I come in to write, where do you want me to sit?”
For the first time, Caulfield looked a little uneasy about me, gave his rib cage a vigorous scratching, and said, “You don’t come in to write.”
“I see. You mean I’ll have to write in the police station.”
“You don’t do any writing,” said Caulfield.
This was astounding news. No writing? One of the reasons for taking this job was the opportunity to get some writing experience.
“The rewrite men do the writing,” Caulfield said. “When you get a story, you ask for the desk and give it to a rewrite man.”
“Police reporters don’t do any writing?”
That was the way the job worked, Caulfield said.
“You mean I won’t really need a desk in the office?”
“Police reporters don’t come into the office,” said Caulfield.
“Never?”
“Well, they can come in if they want to visit now and then.”
“I see.”
“Of course, you come in every Friday to pick up your pay down at the cashier’s window, but you don’t have to come up to the office.”
I was first amazed, then disappointed. Amazed because I hadn’t known all along that police reporters didn’t do any writing. Disappointed because the writing was the one side of newspaper work I had looked forward to. Reporting had never much interested me, and now I had stumbled into a job that was all reporting and no writing.
Caulfield saw I had lost some of my fizz. Later I learned he had been a schoolteacher, which probably accounted for his sensitivity toward the young. “Do you like to write?” he asked.
“A little,” I said. I didn’t want to let on that I wasn’t crazy in love with reporting.
“If you do all right in the police districts,” he said, “you’ll get a chance to come inside and show what you can do on general assignments.”
That would mean a desk of my own, writing my own stories, he said.
How much police reporting would I have to do to earn a prize like that? Caulfield, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the future, scratched noncommittally and said, “Oh, you never know. A year or two, maybe, if you’re still here. Sometimes faster.”
A year or two, and I was already almost twenty-two years old, and not getting any younger. A year or two would be forever.