On my first night as a police reporter I was scooped on a murder. It was a Sunday. I worked from 3:30 until midnight covering east Baltimore police stations and got home around one in the morning. My mother was waiting up to hear all about the launching of my career, and we sat over coffee for an hour while I told her what police stations looked and felt and smelled like, and how dull the night had been.
I was grateful for that dullness. Riding the streetcar to work that afternoon, I had been worried. What would I do if a big story broke that night? Aware that I knew nothing about police reporting, I realized my incompetence could be disastrous if something newsworthy happened in east Baltimore before midnight. Luckily, it was a quiet night. I phoned the city desk with a few dim items culled from the police reports, and at midnight reported everything quiet in east Baltimore and got permission to go home.
I went to bed feeling lucky and was eating breakfast at 10:30 next morning when the phone rang. It was Mr. Caulfield, early man on the Sun city desk.
“Did you cover the east side last night?” was his first question.
“Didn’t you notice that murder?” was his second.
Murder.
Instantly I knew calamity had struck.
“What murder?”
“Haven’t you seen the afternoon papers?”
I was still eating breakfast.
“Take a look at them,” Caulfield said. “Then come on into the office.”
There were two afternoon papers, Hearst’s News-Post and the Evening Sun. I was sickened by the huge headlines leaping off their front pages: MURDER IN EAST BALTIMORE. WOMAN BLUDGEONED TO DEATH. POLICE HOLD MAN IN SUNDAY SLAYING.
Sunday. East Baltimore. Murder.
Those monstrous headlines were jeers directed at me personally. “Some reporter!” was what they said to me. “Sunday in east Baltimore was your beat, and you couldn’t even find out about this unspeakable murder.”
Caulfield’s command—“Come on into the office”—was ominous. He was the man who had told me police reporters weren’t expected to come into the office. Somebody higher up, probably Mr. Dorsey, must have issued orders so severe that they could only be executed in the office. I dreaded to think what those orders might be. Mr. Dorsey might have decided that a man who could overlook a murder his first night on the job was too dim ever to be a newsman.
The humiliation I anticipated in the office was too painful to think about. One night during flight training in the navy, I had landed my plane without remembering to put the wheels down. Except for ruining the propeller, it was a beautiful landing that left me unscratched. When the plane finally skidded to a stop in showers of sparks, I stood up in the cockpit with spotlights playing over me while sirens screamed and fire trucks and ambulances roared to the scene. Standing there with my stupidity on brightly lit display before the entire squadron, I knew for the first time in my life what utter humiliation felt like. Going into the office to face Caulfield on this dreadful Monday would be even more painful. How could I face my mother and break the news that the next Edwin James had been fired after one day on the job?
I studied the murder story in the afternoon papers. It wasn’t the sort of thing that would have interested a movie detective like Nick Charles or Perry Mason. There had been a sidewalk confrontation between a man and a woman, and he had hit her with a brick. Taken into the Johns Hopkins emergency room, she was pronounced dead. Later the police had picked up the man and had him locked up at the Northeastern Police Station.
Reading through these dreary details, I was horrified to realize that I had held the basic material of the story in my hand the night before and paid no attention to it. Part of the reporting routine involved flipping through each station’s sheaf of daily reports the cops filed about the business they tended on their daily rounds: stickups, cats rescued from trees, purse snatches, fires, auto accidents, burglaries, pet owners warned to silence their barking dogs, assorted forms of violent death. Not all police reports were illiterate, but since becoming a Baltimore cop in those days depended on political connections rather than writing skill, most made heavy demands on the reader.
I had toiled through reports at Northeast and excavated a couple of routine items which I offered the city desk to show I was on the job. One of the many items I rejected was a barely legible document written in incomprehensible English. It seemed to concern a woman who had died at the Hopkins emergency room. No news there. People died in emergency rooms all over Baltimore every night. This particular woman, so far as I could make out from the report, had met a man on the street during her final day. I saw nothing unusual about that. The man had been carrying a brick. That was a bit odd, but hardly news, was it? The two of them had a discussion. That wasn’t very newsy either. Two people meeting on the street often have discussions. The man had done something unintelligible with the brick, subsequent to which he walked away. After a while the woman was taken to the hospital.
Reading the afternoon papers, I cursed the cop who wrote that half-witted report. I also cursed the desk officer who’d been on duty at Northeast last night. Silently, I cursed him unprintably. Too late, I knew now that he had hated me when I pushed through the big oak doors, smiled at him as genially as I could, and introduced myself.
“New reporter for the Sun… Baker… how’s the world treating you?… Anything happening out here tonight?”
He was a lieutenant, gold bars and silver hair, impassive face, an old-timer whose heart was not to be softened by a smile from a Sun reporter. My attempt to play the regular guy fell flat. He grunted once or twice in reply and shoved the docket to me. This was a record of everybody who had been arrested. It was routine stuff. A couple of men locked up for “disturbing the peace,” another for not making his child-support payments. It was quiet, all right. There was one man listed as “held for investigation.”
“What’s he being investigated for?” I asked.
“I wasn’t on duty when he came in,” was all the lieutenant offered.
That was when a careful reporter would have got on the phone to the policeman who’d made the arrest, but I was not even a reporter, let alone a careful reporter. During my indoctrination, I’d been told that docket entries reading “held for investigation” were commonplace and that these investigations were usually small chaff—minor burglaries, hit-and-run accidents, things of no news value.
So when the lieutenant brushed off my question and handed me the day’s file of police reports, I put the “held for investigation” entry out of mind instead of connecting it to the brick-toting man in the incomprehensible police report. As a result, I was now summoned to appear in the city room in shame and disgrace, a reporter scooped on a murder his first night on the job. Had any man in the whole history of journalism made such an inauspicious beginning?
Reporters used the small back elevator to the newsroom on the top floor. A central corridor divided the morning paper’s city room from the Evening Sun’s. Big window panels afforded a sweeping view into the Sun city room. The city desk was situated toward the far end of the room, and just beyond the city desk was the managing editor’s desk, which Mr. Dorsey used when not in his private office talking to the Washington bureau, interviewing job applicants, or doping the horses.
Through the windows I could see a half dozen reporters drifting around idly, the way reporters do when they have no assignment and are looking for trouble. Caulfield was sitting alone at the city desk, his back to the window. At the managing editor’s desk sat fierce Mr. Dorsey in his shirt-sleeves, feet up on the desk, hands clasped behind his head, talking across the room to somebody on the copy desk.
I had not yet heard Lyndon Johnson say, “It’s time to bite the bullet,” but that’s what time it was on that Monday afternoon. Standing outside the window, I collected myself as well as I could under the circumstances, opened the door, and went in, looking to neither left nor right, cheeks burning with shame, imagining that everybody in the room was staring at me, the pariah who had been scooped on a murder his first night out. Afterward, I realized that nobody could possibly have paid me the slightest attention, but that was long afterward, when I was wiser about newspaper life.
Caulfield didn’t notice me at first. When he did he seemed puzzled about who I was and what I wanted. Then, recognizing me, he tilted back in his swivel chair and asked, “What happened last night?”
I made a determined effort not to look toward Mr. Dorsey. If he caught me looking at him he might call me over and fire me on the spot. Before ordering me out of the office, he would say something cruel like, “And you thought you could be a newsman. Hah!” Caulfield at least seemed gentle. He was looking at me calmly, even with the hint of a smile as he waited for my defense.
In straightforward fashion I tried to tell him how I had happened to overlook the murder. It was no use lying. Somebody later told me Caulfield had once taught high-school Latin, so he must have heard every conceivable excuse for failure. Now, however, peering over his steel-rimmed eyeglasses, he looked flabbergasted by my explanation for missing the murder story.
Yes, I confessed, I had seen the police report. But nobody could have made sense of it, the way it was written. It was hardly in English. I tried to reconstruct that constabulary prose for Caulfield, saying something like, “All it said was that a female expired consequential to injuries occurring during the course of a conversation with a man carrying a brick in the course of which the same did something unintelligible to her head with same, to wit, the brick.”
Caulfield studied me as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “And that didn’t seem to you like something that might be worth looking into?” Caulfield said.
“At no point in his report,” I said, “did the cop state that this was a murder.”
“Didn’t you talk to anybody at the station? Anybody at all?”
Of course I did. I talked to the desk lieutenant. I asked him if there was any news, and he didn’t even mention there’d been a murder.
Caulfield studied me as he must have studied the class dunce in his days teaching Cicero. His voice was low, quiet.
“Nobody told you it was a murder,” he said.
Absolutely not.
His voice became a little louder now.
“You saw a report saying a woman died of head injuries—”
Exactly.
“—after a man with a brick did something in her presence with that selfsame brick—”
That’s right.
“—and it never crossed your mind that what he did with the brick might just possibly have been an act of violence, and if it was and the woman died, that it might just possibly have been murder?”
I saw what he meant.
“I shouldn’t have counted on the cops to tell me they had a murder,” I said, hoping I sounded sincerely contrite instead of merely stupid.
Caulfield never used coarse language, so refrained from cursing. Instead he lectured. A newspaper reporter, he explained, was supposed to be able to “add two and two and get murder.”
I said I understood that now.
“And you can’t expect the police to tell you when they’ve got news,” he said. “The police hate having news in the paper because news means the police might have to work harder.”
This was the only lecture Caulfield ever gave me on newspaper work. Usually he was satisfied to do his job quietly and go home. His lecturing now was a good sign because if he was going to fire me he probably wouldn’t be wasting his time trying to teach me something. This proved to be the fact when Caulfield said that Mr. Dorsey had ordered me to suffer a week of humiliation. I would not be trusted to undertake reporting duties again until next week. Until then I would have to tag along with the other police reporters and try to learn something about the work from watching what they did on their rounds.
There were worse things than being held up as a dolt before my fellow reporters. For instance, there was having to go home and tell my mother I’d been fired. With much unctuous groveling, I thanked Caulfield, promised always to use my head from here on, and assured him the Sun wouldn’t be sorry about giving me another chance.
Out of the agony of this episode I learned one of the most important lessons every journalist needs to know about the craft of newspaper reporting; to wit, that only a fool expects the authorities to tell him what the news is.
There were other lessons. About newsless Monday, for example. Because Sundays produced little news, editors could not be finicky about how they filled their Monday papers. The murder that caused my troubles would have got little space any day but Monday; it lacked gore, mystery, melodrama, scandal, or sex, the elements that made murder stories juicy entertainment for the public. Except for being murdered on Sunday, the lady would probably have been buried “back in the truss ads,” as reporters called the deep interior of newspapers. In fact, though editors of the evening papers splashed it in heavy ink in their early editions, they quickly busted the poor woman down to very small headlines as the day went on and the rising tempo of human activity churned up better stuff for later editions.
In newspaper terms, her death wasn’t much of a murder, but on a newsless Monday morning it was better than no murder at all. As I soon learned, whether something was big news, small news, or no news at all depended on a complicated mixture of factors, including what day of the week it was. There were no written rules, you just had to get a feel for the relative value of events. Before my police days, I’d had the innocent notion that murder was murder, and it was all equally bad. As a police reporter, I learned better fast. The gravity of murder varied. There was quality murder and there was ho-hum murder. In the jargon of the Sun newsroom, there was the “terrific murder,” the “good murder,” and the “little murder.” I soon learned to distinguish them so as not to waste the rewrite men’s time on busy nights.
Phoning the desk, I might say, “I’ve got a little murder.” To which the rewrite man might say, “Just give me enough for a couple of paragraphs. We’ve got a six-alarm fire on the harbor taking up most of the page.”
Saying “I’ve got a good murder,” however, got the city editor’s attention. It meant a story worth prominent play even on a busy night. Any number of things could elevate a “little murder” into a “good murder.” Was the victim “a prominent Baltimorean” or “a member of an old Maryland family”? If so, “good murder.” Could the rewrite man justifiably describe the victim as “statuesque,” the universally understood code word meaning “big breasts”? If so, “good murder,” especially if the murderer was still unknown and the cops could be persuaded to hint at sexual motives behind the crime. Multiple murders were “good.” So were murders of children.
The mass murderer, later to become a commonplace figure in American life, was unknown in Baltimore in those days. Now and then somebody with a pistol lost control of himself and killed two people in a single outburst, but the modern custom of killing strangers by the dozen as a deed of looney self-expression was still undreamed of.
The “terrific murder” was one so uniquely gory, so sex-drenched, so mysterious, or so diabolical as to be irresistible even to the Sun’s stodgy readership. Such murders featured dismembered corpses, “statuesque” women found dead in full nudity, husbands willing to kill to inherit a rich wife’s fortune or to replace a cool wife with a warm mistress, and similar elements beloved by connoisseurs of barbershop magazines like The Police Gazette and True Detective. The “terrific murder” was so rare that as a police reporter I never had the pleasure of covering one. One of my major disappointments in journalism was the discovery that murder was almost always uninteresting.
This did not prevent the judges of Maryland from sentencing people to hang for it. The sprawling Gothic pile of the Maryland penitentiary with its death house and gallows was situated in a scrofulous section of Baltimore a mere five blocks from the elegance of Mount Vernon Place. Each newspaper traditionally provided one witness to its periodic midnight executions, and at the Sun this duty fell to the police reporters. I dreaded the night when my turn would come. Being squeamish about such things, I was afraid I might behave disgracefully. Reporters were supposed to be hardhearted men capable of watching the fall of a stripteaser’s G-string or the drop of the condemned man’s body with equal world weariness and a suitable wisecrack for each. The approved style was demonstrated in the oft-told tale of the reporter who, after watching a botched hanging, phoned the city desk to ask, “Do you want a feature or a straight noose story?”
I wasn’t sure I could meet such high professional standards. Fortunately, there was a lull in the execution rate the summer I started at the Sun, so my test of manhood was put off for almost a year. In that time I tried to harden myself to the brutalities of life in Baltimore’s lower depths, but only partly succeeded. Though I tried to pass for a regular guy among the cops, they saw that I was faking it, that I was a college boy with no sympathy for what the police had to put up with. Saw that I wasn’t comfortable with policemen, that I didn’t have the regular-guy touch, that I could probably not be trusted to keep their secrets.
All that was bad enough. To make my life harder, most cops disliked and feared the Sun, and some took pleasure in making things difficult for Sun reporters. Baltimore was as segregated racially as Johannesburg. Neighborhoods, schools, movie theaters, stores, everything was segregated. It was an all-white police force, and the Sun was an all-white newspaper. It hired no blacks except for housekeeping jobs and covered practically no black news. Murders of black people were not “little murders.” They weren’t murders at all, as I discovered early that summer on phoning the city desk with details of a man who had died of head injuries after being bludgeoned. “You can’t hurt ’em by hitting ’em on the head,” said the night editor, hanging up on me.
Many cops, nevertheless, suspected the Sun of being soft on black people and especially on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an organization widely considered by policemen to be a Red conspiracy against the Republic. Police paranoia toward the Sun was rooted in a few editorials and some pieces in which H. L. Mencken had denounced people who took part in lynchings. Mencken’s pieces had been written years before I got to the Sun, but the Baltimore policeman of the late 1940s enjoyed nourishing a grievance, and no amount of evidence that the Sun was just as racist as he was could persuade him to give it up.
After a year on the job, I knew I was never going to be a great police reporter. I disliked the brutality of the policeman’s world, disliked the endless hours of idling in police stations, disliked the ignorance and prejudices of too many policemen. I felt sorry for the miserable, poverty-ridden black people whose troubles filled so much of the policeman’s night, but among the cops I concealed my sorrow. If they suspected I was not zealous in my racism, they might brand me a “nigger lover.” That could slam important police doors in my face, making the work even harder. All this made me dislike myself.
Yet there were gentlemen, princes, and men of wisdom among those policemen. My favorite was Inspector Koch, a small bundle of energy with a good deadpan cop face and a common-sense view of police work that was rare on the force in those days. At night, when he was often the man in charge of the entire department, he cruised the city in a limousine and could be a godsend if I was having trouble with some blockhead in one of the stations. One night a desk lieutenant at the Northern Police Station insisted he did not have a report on a shooting. I knew he did. Out on the street, the patrolman who wrote the report told me he’d turned it in at the station. The desk lieutenant’s insistence that there wasn’t any report infuriated me. I was yelling.
“You’ve got to have the report, damn it! The man on the beat told me you do!”
There was a bustle behind me, an opening door. The desk lieutenant looked beyond me and abruptly stood up, very respectfully, coming to attention. Turning, I saw Inspector Koch in his civilian clothes. We exchanged nods of recognition. “What’s the trouble here?” he asked.
Normally I wouldn’t have gone over the lieutenant’s head, but his oxlike stubbornness had infuriated me.
“I’m trying to get a report on a shooting, and the lieutenant says he doesn’t have it,” I said.
Inspector Koch spoke to the desk officer. “Do you have the report?”
The lieutenant nodded yes.
“Let me see it.”
The lieutenant reached under the desk, drew out a single piece of paper, and handed it to the inspector. He scanned it quickly, then tossed it back on the desk.
“Give it to him,” Inspector Koch said.
The lieutenant started to form a mild objection. “Are you sure we want it in the paper?”
“Give it to him,” the inspector repeated, and then said something to the lieutenant that was wonderfully profound:
“It happened, didn’t it?”
That was a sentence I was to use many times in years to come when dealing with desperate people who believed that terrible things didn’t really happen unless they were reported in the newspaper. “It happened, didn’t it? Keeping it out of the paper can’t make it unhappen.”
The Northern Police Station where Inspector Koch issued this observation was famous for its men’s faith in the theory that almost everything ought to be kept out of the newspapers. Its territory housed a good percentage of Baltimore’s rich and well-to-do and, hence, attracted the higher class of burglar looking for precious stones and metal. Occasionally some well-heeled burglary victim gossiped to some neighborly Sun executive about her loss, and the Sun executive passed it on to Mr. Dorsey, who told the city desk to have a reporter look into it.
My friend John Wood got such a tip about a jewel burglary one night while covering Northern. Wood was told that since the tip came from Mr. Dorsey the story was a top priority assignment. Naturally nobody at Northern had heard of any jewel burglary up there in months and months. Wood had been given a bum tip, they said.
Wood was a gentlemanly but persistent young North Carolinian who, like me, had come to the Sun thinking it would open doors to a writing career and found that it meant nights struggling with the forces of unreason. Wood explained that he was not working on a bum tip. The tip came from the managing editor of the Sun. The managing editor, he said, had heard of the burglary from the woman whose jewels had been stolen. All he wanted, Wood went on, was to get the police version of events from the official police report.
Well, the desk man said, everybody would sure like to help, but nobody there had heard of any jewel burglaries.
Wood demanded to speak to Captain Lusby. That was a bold demand because police captains, though less eminent than inspectors, did not normally submit to conversation with young reporters. In Captain Lusby, however, the Northern district had a remarkably civilized commander, a man of considerable polish. Dealing with the swells, as a captain had to do in that territory, required someone sensible and polite. And so Captain Lusby emerged from his office and even listened sympathetically to Wood’s plea.
When it was finished, Wood told us later, Captain Lusby replied with an absolutely persuasive explanation of why the report on that particular burglary could not yet be published in the paper without dreadful damage to the cause of law and order in Baltimore. Wood was persuaded, but Mr. Dorsey wanted the burglary story. Then Wood had a desperate idea.
“If I get Mister Dorsey on the phone,” he asked Captain Lusby, “would you tell him what you’ve just told me?”
Mr. Dorsey? asked Captain Lusby. Who was Mr. Dorsey?
The managing editor of the Sun, said Wood.
Captain Lusby said he would gladly explain the situation to Mr. Dorsey.
Wood led Captain Lusby to the Sun phone in the back of the squad room, lifted the receiver, and asked the operator to put him through to Mr. Dorsey.
This was a deed of great courage on Wood’s part, for Mr. Dorsey did not acknowledge the existence of police reporters, much less take telephone calls from them to discuss their work problems. It was not quite like an army private telephoning the Pentagon to talk shop with the Chief of Staff, but it was close. Wood was a man of courage, and when he found himself connected to Mr. Dorsey’s desk his courage did not buckle.
“Dorsey here.”
“Mister Dorsey, sir, this is John Wood up here at the Northern Police Station on that jewel burglary story you—”
Wood explained and explained while Mr. Dorsey listened, and finally Wood explained that he had with him at that very moment, right there at the telephone, Captain Lusby himself, who had kindly and humanely agreed to explain personally to Mr. Dorsey why publishing the story would do irreparable damage to law and order throughout Baltimore.
In finishing, Wood said, “I’ve got Captain Lusby right here, and he wants to explain it to you. Will you talk to him?”
As Wood was passing the phone to Captain Lusby, he heard Mr. Dorsey saying, “Talk to him? Of course I won’t talk to him. I wouldn’t wipe my ass on a police captain.”
After which, a click on the line left the captain holding a dead phone.
Wood told us the story late that night when we had all gathered downtown in the police headquarters pressroom for a midnight whack at the headquarters man’s gin bottle. Wood had been so shocked he couldn’t remember anything that happened after Mr. Dorsey had hung up.
All of us shuddered at the thought of how tough covering Northern was going to be from then on, and we cursed Mr. Dorsey for being callous to the plight of his police reporters, and while cursing him, also admired and envied him. How sweet it would be to treat those impossible cops with such rude contempt. That Mr. Dorsey. What a newspaperman.