A misfit at police reporting, I was getting nowhere in my fantasy of catching up with Cousin Edwin. Worse, after a year on the job I was falling behind at the Sun. While I rode trolleys month after month from police station to police station, new people were being hired, assigned to police coverage for a month or two, then moved inside.
“Moved inside.” On the Sun those words were the stuff of police reporters’ dreams. They meant having your own desk, being sent on fascinating general assignments, getting a chance to write, and never having to humor a policeman again.
Patrick Skene Catling was the first competitor jumped over me for promotion. Catling was handsome, red-haired, athletic, graceful, witty, and English by birth, early schooling, accent, tailoring, and instinct, though American by citizenship. Mr. Dorsey hired him three months after me. The police reporters did not greet Catling warmly, for the news that he was being paid a scandalously high salary of forty-five dollars a week poisoned our hearts against him.
It angered me, since his previous newspaper experience was no greater than mine, and I’d been started at only thirty dollars a week. I considered myself a victim of social discrimination. This was probably so. Mr. Dorsey was notorious for loving everything English. “Dorsey is such an Anglophile,” John Wood said, “that the only gin he’ll drink in his martini is House of Lords.”
Sulky about the forty-five-dollars-a-week rumor, I gave in to my radical instincts. This insufferably snotty uptown newspaper for north Baltimore swells could find forty-five dollars a week for Englishmen but only thirty dollars for a man from the blue-collar wasteland of southwest Baltimore, I told myself. The American Newspaper Guild was then struggling to bring Sun reporters into its union embrace. I signed up after hearing of Catling’s astonishing salary and soon became a minor agitator and, in the eyes of the paper’s conservative old-timers, I suppose, a pipsqueak Bolshevik.
After meeting Catling, it was hard to go on hating him despite the high British gloss. He was my age and I soon saw that, like me, he was a man on the make, though in a bigger hurry maybe to make something of himself and more likely to be ruthless about it than I was. We shared a sense of humor that was on the cruel side, and we both loathed police reporting. Catling could also be insolent in the rude English style. This was new to me then and seemed amusing when directed at some authoritative blockhead of a cop too dense to see he was being treated as contemptible. I quickly came to enjoy Catling’s company, but when he was moved inside ahead of me I raged silently about the Sun’s injustice.
Then he was assigned one night to review a tired, roadshow production of Oklahoma! at Ford’s Theater, and the next morning the review carried his by-line. I was outraged, and then I started to read, and outrage turned to wonder. The review was a beautiful piece of writing, quite different from the usual dusty prose of Sun reviews. Catling had done something extremely daring by newspaper standards of the time: He had made the review a small personal essay, using the forbidden pronoun “I,” reminiscing about a moment during the war when he had been moved by hearing the music of Oklahoma! filtering through the short-wave radio aboard a bomber crossing the Atlantic. The piece sparkled, the writing so relaxed and entertaining, and not a cliché anywhere. It was completely alien to the Sun style, and yet they had published it. Catling had dared, had taken a risk, and they had not only published it but also rewarded him with a by-line.
I had to concede that Catling was not just a good writer, but obviously my superior. They had been right to move him inside ahead of me. I congratulated him on his writing and meant it, and continued cultivating him, hoping some of his skill might rub off. His Oklahoma! review left me with an important lesson about newspaper writing which I tucked away in my head for the day when my luck might change: Don’t settle for writing it the way it’s always been written; dare to write it differently, and maybe you will write it better than it’s been written before.
Catling was the only reporter I ever knew to fight for his newspaper prose with his fists. After drinks one night, he came back to the office after two in the morning to read his night’s story in the paper. Drink made him combative. Scanning his story in the paper, he spotted a printer’s error and decided it spoiled the whole story. He confronted the late-night makeup man and said he wanted the error corrected. Impossible, said the makeup man. The final edition was running on the presses. Stopping a press run after 2:00 A.M. to correct a typo on a minor story inside the paper was just not done, he said.
Catling said, nevertheless, it would be done this time, and the makeup man again said no, it wouldn’t. At that hour of the morning, with the paper pretty much shut down for the night, the city room was nearly abandoned. When Catling could no longer tolerate the makeup man’s defiance, he stopped arguing and started punching. The makeup man was an aging gent who floated peaceably through life on a haze of alcohol and cigarette smoke. He was no match for inflamed youth as represented by Catling. The witnesses were a copy boy and ancient Mark Ritger, the lobster man, whose job was to doze at the city desk listening to police calls until dawn. They said the makeup man never landed a blow, and never even tried. Catling lost the battle, though. The typo in his story ran through all editions.
Others less flamboyant than Catling and less talented were hired and moved inside ahead of me, and as I moved through my second year without relief, it sometimes seemed I was destined to grow old and die among the cops. Gradually, I adapted to the squalor of the life, began finding it easier to talk with policemen, began liking a lot of them, and began understanding that the good ones were just as appalled as I was about the wretched underside of Baltimore that was their place of business. Gradually, I became skillful at collecting the sad details of the city’s misery and started accumulating a pile of newspaper clippings whose headlines recorded the progress of my education:
MAN, 30, WAKES TO FIND ROOM IN FLAMES, DIES OF BURNS
MAN, 39, KILLED WHEN CAR ROLLS INTO STREAM
WIFE BEATER FINED $25
HOLDUP MAN GETS $25 FROM BARBER SHOP
BOILERMAKER BURGLAR GETS $29 FROM MUSIC STORE
BOY, 17, SHOPLIFTS PANTS, GETS 90 DAYS
TWO MEN JAILED FOR STEALING HAM IN LEXINGTON MARKET
MAN, 42, PLEADS GUILTY TO THEFT OF CAR HE HAD “AN URGE TO DRIVE”
Week after week, month after month, this tale of humanity’s sorrow unfolded ceaselessly, filling the wads of cheap copy paper I stuffed in my pockets for note-taking.
THREE RAILROAD MEN SERIOUSLY SCALDED IN DERAILMENT
FIREMEN RESCUE GIRL, 2, FROM GRANDMOTHER’S LOCKED BATHROOM
MAN, 64, BEATEN; SKULL FRACTURED BY THUG WHO GETS $240
MAN, 34, BABY 22 MONTHS, DIE IN MOUNT AIRY FIRE
The fire deaths were the most terrible if you had the awful luck to get there in time to see the bodies coming out. You were not supposed to get sick, and I never did because I kept my distance from the stretchers, but one night after a slum fire that killed a black family of five, including three small children, I saw the policeman who’d helped bring out the bodies get sick.
WOMAN HIT, KILLED BY BUS
HUSBAND FINDS WIFE HANGING FROM CELLAR BEAM
I hadn’t realized suicide was such a common part of the city’s daily routine. Every day brought one or two. A high percentage of suicides were by hanging, maybe because guns were not so common then. The Sun rarely bothered with suicide stories, though there were no instructions to hold them down. There were so many. Suicide just wasn’t news.
SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD STEALS 100 BARS OF SOAP FROM TRUCK
TWO BOYS, 14, ROB BOY, 18
MAN, 25, STRANGLES GIRL, 18
MOTHER SEES SON, 4, KILLED WHEN TRUCK HITS HIS WAGON
I rarely had to face mothers who had just seen their babies killed. That dreadful job was part of a policeman’s duty. I could come along later and copy his report in the police station and maybe hunt down a witness or two to add an interesting detail. It was the cop who collected the emotional scars. Now and then, though, I blundered into scenes that destroyed my fine journalist’s detachment.
One night I went to the South Baltimore General Hospital emergency room to check on a traffic accident and arrived a few moments ahead of the ambulance bringing the dead driver and his uninjured wife. As ambulance crew, cops, stretcher, dead husband, and surviving wife swept down upon me, I asked the closest policeman what he could tell me.
“Not now, not now,” he growled, brushing me out of the way.
The dead man’s wife, however, stopped, turned to me, and started pouring out a graphic account of the accident. Her face was chalky white and her eyes frantic. I wondered if she was in shock. I wanted to be away from her. It seemed obscene that I should be troubling her at such a time. I thought maybe she mistook me for an official she was obliged to talk to and didn’t realize I was a reporter, so I said, “I’m from the Sun.”
That only made her talk more freely. She gave harrowing details of the collision, the truck sideswiping the driver’s side of their car, what it sounded like, her husband’s cry at the instant of impact, her certainty a moment later that he was dying…
She could not be stopped. It felt embarrassing to be an intruder on this singularly horrible moment in her life. Normally I didn’t have to face the ragged, painful reality behind WIFE, 37, and DEAD HUSBAND, 40. When I did, there was always wonderful story material about pain, hysteria, despair, anger, and human breakdown in response to life’s nightmare moments, but this was material for fiction writers. There was no place for such stuff in newspaper stories. Newspaper stories were supposed to keep the reader informed about the world, not to immerse him in its agony.
Reporting these stories every night, I instinctively learned to protect myself against the numbing awfulness of them by thinking of the people involved as faceless cyphers: DEAD MAN, 30. BOILERMAKER BURGLAR. BEATEN MAN, 64. DEAD SON, 4. CONDEMNED KILLER. WIFE HANGING.
Newspaper legends, created by entertainments like The Front Page, had promoted the fiction that police reporters were ruthlessly cynical about human misery. The fact was quite different. We affected the cynical style and turned grisly events into tasteless jokes because that was a way to maintain our emotional detachment, and staying emotionally detached from what you were seeing was a way of saving your life.
The legend also insisted that police reporters led lives of romantic gaiety and carefree independence, thumbing their noses merrily at the world’s stuffed shirts, sassing mayors and managing editors, putting down whiskey by the gallon, and licking no man’s boots. Most police reporters liked the romantic aura which this legend lent them, and struggled to live up to it. Few succeeded. I certainly didn’t, though I wanted to. I found it impossible to make people think I was a romantic, carefree devil after they’d got a whiff of my clothes and recoiled from the smell of police stations and six-alarm fires.
Far more successful at it was Harry Riley, who worked for the News-Post. “Fire Alarm Riley” the cops called him, out of respect for the speed with which he arrived on the scene of whatever the story might be.
Riley cruised the city in an immense black Cadillac equipped with a police radio. At the first alarm signal he floored the gas pedal and roared through traffic at terrifying speed. The cops loved him. They took him aside and told him their secrets. Riley seemed to love the cops and love the work. He was a big, unkempt, red-faced man with black hair going to gray, big teeth, and a loud braying voice that sounded like the start of a riot. By baring his teeth and glaring wide-eyed at someone he wanted to disturb, Riley could make himself look like a dangerous maniac and enjoyed scaring strangers by doing so.
One Saturday afternoon when the Sun had sent a brand-new reporter over to the police headquarters pressroom, Riley burst into the room screaming, “I can’t stand it anymore! I’m going to kill myself!”
Sprinting to the window two floors above the street, he threw up the sash and wriggled halfway out, continuing to scream that life was no longer bearable. The other reporters, long familiar with Riley, sat tight and smiled wanly at the performance, but not the new Sun man. Leaping from his chair, he ran to the window, seized the back of Riley’s belt and, with mighty exertions, tugged Riley back into the pressroom. Feeling mildly heroic about saving Riley’s life, he was naturally crestfallen to learn that he’d been made the butt of another of Riley’s jokes.
No other police reporter could match the joy Riley took in the work. Only a small boy could have done that. Riley had somewhere acquired a coffin and an old secondhand hearse that had clear glass panels on the sides. On Saturday nights, when the streets were busy, he liked to put a companion behind the steering wheel, then climb into the rear and stretch out flat on his back in the coffin, which was readily visible through the hearse’s glass panels. The companion then drove the hearse into heavy traffic. When the traffic flow was stopped by a red light, giving motorists alongside a chance to study the hearse’s somber contents, Harry rose slowly to a sitting position in his coffin and bared his huge teeth in a hideous grin at the cars around him.
I admired Riley’s carefree spirit, but it signified a boyish delight in police reporting that I could never share. I wanted to be moved inside and to put police reporting behind me forever. For that I needed skills very different from Riley’s. One skill I needed was mastery of newspaper lingo. As an English major in college, I knew that each discipline had its own language and that succeeding in your chosen line of work required you to learn to talk and write the appropriate form of English. Newspapers, for example, were not written in Shakespearean English, nor even in formal modern English. There was a distinctive lingo that made a newspaper story read differently from anything else, and I set about learning it from reading the paper intensely.
A big fire, I noted, was not just a fire, it was a “holocaust” or a “multimillion-dollar blaze.” A young man holding up a gas station with a gun was not just an armed youth, he was a “bandit.” If he panicked, squeezed the trigger, and killed somebody, he was a “slayer.” Until arrested, he was “sought.” Being sought, he was the “object of a manhunt.”
This language was formal, unvarying, and trite. Hailstones were “as big as golf balls.” Heavy rainfall was a “deluge.” Thunderstorms “battered.” Smoke from million-dollar blazes “cast a pall.” Gunfire “erupted.” People never jumped into the water to prevent drownings, but always “plunged.” People who jumped from high places to kill themselves always “leaped.” Bodies of people murdered with a good bit of bloodshed were found “lying in a pool of blood.”
Working on the News-Letter, I’d discovered a large talent for grasping newspaper clichés, and now intense daily study of the paper persuaded me that, though I might not be the prose writer Catling was, I could write newspaper copy like a professional if the Sun would only move me inside.
I studied newspaper writing under Paul Banker and Jay Spry, the regular rewrite men who took the material I phoned from police stations and turned it into news stories. By reading the paper next day to see how they had turned my facts into stories, I slowly learned the tricks of news writing: how to compress a complicated story into a few paragraphs if space was tight, how to expand a flimsy story into an entertaining tale when the city editor needed something to brighten the back page, how to write hard news leads and feature leads, how to use the short, telling quotation for maximum effect, and a hundred other small skills.
Banker was the finest writer on the local staff. Spry was the most careful. They embodied what Mr. Dorsey meant when he told newcomers that learning the business on the Sun would qualify them for a welcome on any paper in the country. Banker and Spry were as different as the New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times. This difference extended even to their dress and physical appearance.
Banker, a Yale graduate only four years older than I, was as Ivy League as the Herald Tribune in his Oxford shirts with button-down collars, soft tweed jackets, natty bow ties, loafers, and gray flannel slacks. He was tall and trim, broad-shouldered, with wide cheekbones and wide jaw, broad pleasant smile, voice low and pleasant, the picture of easy relaxation in a job that kept him constantly under heavy deadline pressure. He wore his hair in the fashionable close-cropped military style of the era, and, except for a cigarette habit, seemed as unflappable as it was possible to get in the newsroom of a big metropolitan daily during the pandemonium of an approaching deadline.
When I phoned with a story that was slight and unimportant, but funny and offbeat, I prayed to get Banker, whose wit and natural talent for writing might turn it into a small gem.
Jay Spry, though only thirty years old, had the old-timer’s weary, seen-it-all look about him. His wardrobe was like mine: basic country-boy undistinguished. Baggy slacks, mismated shirt and necktie, and neither one much to look at. He had the kind of hair that won’t stay combed. This, combined with a slight puffiness around the eyes, made him look as though he’d just got out of bed.
Banker and Spry worked at facing desks pushed up flush against the city editors’ desks. They consulted constantly throughout the night with the city editor and with each other. Rewrite at the Sun was a position of power, and both could handle the city editor’s job when he was absent, and sometimes did.
On rewrite, Jay was the man for eight-alarm fires, and you had better come to the phone with the correct identification of every fire company on the scene; the name of every fire chief, including middle initial; the identity, address, and job of the person who turned in the first alarm, what he was doing when he first noticed the fire, how many people he was doing it with, what part of the structure was burning when he noted it, and the time and method of sounding the alarm.
It wasn’t enough to tell Spry that blazing shingles had fallen on a parked car. He would send you back to the scene to get the correct color of the car, its make, its model year, its owner’s name, its price at time of purchase, how much the owner still owed on it, why it was parked at that particular location, whether blazing shingles had ever fallen on it in the past, whether it had previously suffered any similar battering whatsoever, be it from hailstones, lightning strikes, flowerpots accidentally pushed from third-floor windows…
Whining, as I sometimes did after being sent back for the fourth time with orders to find out if the car had white sidewall tires, was a grave error. Immediately Spry launched into an endless lecture on the urgency of thoroughness in journalism. It was garnished with long-winded anecdotes about famous news stories in which white sidewall tires played vital roles. You couldn’t understand what the sidewalls of the tires had to do with the eight-alarm fire that was consuming the pants factory? Well, when you had a little experience of newspaper business you would know that writing a fire story requires a great many precise details. A reporter wasn’t much good, was he? if he was sent to an eight-alarm fire and just stood there gazing at the spectacle for an hour, and then went to the phone with nothing to say except, “It was a big, spectacular, beautiful fire with lots of flames.” A reporter had to get in the habit of noticing details, just like a good detective. And incidentally, while you’re checking on those tires, find out if the car’s front end is out of alignment, and…
That was Spry, a one-man school of journalism preaching the vacuum-cleaner philosophy of reporting then practiced by The New York Times, though not with the demanding exactitude Jay brought to it. His passion for thoroughness made him determined to study every page of every paper published every day in Baltimore and vicinity. Since he was usually a week or two behind in this labor of Hercules, he always traveled to and from the office with twenty-five pounds of old newspapers under one arm, hoping to catch up on his reading on the streetcar.
When he left the paper in 1952 for a public relations job, a mock edition of the Sun mourned his departure and suggested perpetuating his memory with “a mound of aged newspapers garlanded with wreathes woven from clippings of the 32,959 purse snatches he wrote during his long tenure on the city desk.”
By 1948 it looked as if I would stay in the police districts long enough to cover 32,959 purse snatches. That summer Bill Gresham, my know-it-all pal from the News-Letter, had been taken onto the Sun staff. We were good friends by then, very good friends. I had introduced him to George, Al, and Mimi, and he had become a regular at the weekend parties and a hanger-on at the basement apartment. Despite friendship, however, I was prepared to throw a scene if the Sun moved Gresham inside ahead of me.
He was a natural at police reporting. Before he had been two weeks on the job he had established warm relationships with several of the most important lieutenants and sergeants on the force, including some I suspected of also being the most corrupt. Cops liked him. Maybe it was the Edward G. Robinson tough-guy face and the no-nonsense way he went at them when he wanted to know something. Maybe it was his self-assured air. He had the gift of speaking to people as though he were twice as smart as they were, so they’d better level with him because he didn’t intend to put up with any foolishness.
A later generation would have called him “a take-charge guy.” When he arrived on the scene of the crime, exhaling great clouds of cigarette smoke, mouth set in a firm straight line, demanding to know who was in charge and what was going on, even the crustiest cops greeted him as a colleague. He was the police reporter as tough guy par excellence. He had no patience with my tentative, polite style of dealing with cops.
“You’re wasting your time being nice to those bastards,” he told me. “They just think you’re soft if you treat them like gentlemen.”
Bill’s grating style irritated other reporters, and he made enemies freely. I took him with me to dinner one Saturday night to meet Catling, whose indifference to the American convention of artificial politeness I thought might appeal to Bill. It was a disaster. Catling, who had money to squander that night, ordered a fine sherry before going on to a lavish meal that must have cost him four dollars. The sight of such capitalistic self-indulgence outraged the old-fashioned radical that was part of Gresham’s complicated soul. The fact that Gresham could afford only hamburger and coffee intensified his anger.
As each course of Catling’s meal arrived, Gresham greeted it with an offensive comment. When the sherry was served, Bill said he considered sherry an odd drink for reporters, who ought to be content with beer. The soup smelled unappetizing to him. When it gave way to the roast beef, Gresham announced that it didn’t look worth the vast price Catling was paying for it. Through all this, Catling ate with unruffled aplomb. After the beef came a plate of salad. The ingredients included several black olives.
“What is that mess?” asked Gresham, pointing a fork at Catling’s salad and wrinkling his nose in distaste.
“This,” said Catling with the faintest of smiles while spearing an olive on his fork, “happens to be a plate of sour grapes.”
At this time Maryland’s wheels of justice began to activate the gallows at the penitentiary again. There was a midnight execution, and Caulfield was talking shop to me on the phone later that day when he said, oh, by the way, “You can have the next hanging.”
I had dreaded this since learning that the police reporters took turns at the duty of witnessing executions. I knew I could beg off by telling Caulfield that the idea of watching the state kill a man was so repugnant to me that I couldn’t bear to watch it. This would have been only partly true. Of more immediate concern to me was fear that the horror of the thing would make me behave badly in the execution chamber and that I would embarrass myself. Reporters were supposed to take such stuff in stride, all in a night’s work.
If I begged off, Cauley would understand and not hold it against me. I had got to know him as a gentle, civilized spirit incapable of malice. Still, word would pass through the city room that instead of exulting in my chance to see an execution, I had actually turned it down. When this got back to Mr. Dorsey, he would surely snort, mutter something like, “He’ll never be a newsman,” and doom me forever to the backwaters of journalism.
So when Cauley said I could have the next hanging, I suppressed an urge to cry, “Absolutely not!” and said something like, “Great,” and tried to put it out of mind.
Then I had an inspired idea. Who was the toughest, rough-and-readiest police reporter in all of Baltimore? The one man who would relish the opportunity to watch a hanging? Hah!
Bill Gresham and I were having our evening meal at an East Baltimore Street cafeteria that had good fried eggplant.
“I’m at the head of the line to cover the next hanging,” I told him, hoping I made it sound as if I thought myself the luckiest guy alive.
He bit.
This barbaric form of punishment, I said, was becoming so rare that in a few years it might not be practiced anywhere in the world. Being one of the last people able to say I’d seen a hanging would be a distinction. Dreary though police reporting might be, it had a few rewards and this extraordinary opportunity to watch an execution was one of the best.
Bill thought I was too young, too unfamiliar with violent death to do well at a hanging. His experience in the war, seeing the big bombers explode in the air around him, killing his comrades in an instant, had qualified him to gaze without flinching on any horror man could contrive. In short, he wanted me to let him take my turn at the death house.
After that I had only to play Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence. There was no chance, I said, that I would pass up my crack at a hanging, even out of the deep friendship I shared with Bill. And so on until I reluctantly surrendered.
When the summons to death-house duty came, I told Caulfield that Gresham had pleaded for it so movingly that I couldn’t deny him the right to go in my stead. Caulfield didn’t care. Hangings didn’t make much of a story. The Sun gave them only a few colorless paragraphs for the record, unless some remarkably gaudy killer was involved.
Gresham went in the spirit of artistic inquiry. He wanted to experience American society at its most savage. He was in for an unusual demonstration of it, for that night there was to be a rare group execution. There were three men to be hanged, and it would be done consecutively, one after another.
From talking to reporters who had gone through it, I had an inkling of what it would be like. A handful of people assembled at midnight in a small, harrowingly intimate whitewashed space deep inside the penitentiary walls. The room would be high. A door opening on a platform at the second-floor level. The door would open, some men would appear on the platform. There might be a few words. Sometimes somebody said, “Good-bye” to a cop who had put him there. Then, all very quickly, the black hood, the noose, a nerve-rattling clap as the trapdoor opened, the body twitching and dangling at witnesses’ eye level. Sometimes it was over quickly. Other times it did not work as it was supposed to, and instead of breaking the neck, the rope worked only as a slow strangling device until the doctor, applying his stethoscope, finally announced that the sentence had been executed.
The night Bill took my place, with three to be hanged, it took a long time. Bill managed to get out on the street before he started to vomit. Afterward he was sick for days, and after that had nightmares for months.
Several years later, Bill became a close adviser to Theodore McKeldin, one of Maryland’s most successful politicians. When McKeldin became governor, one of Bill’s jobs was to review all death sentences for the governor’s approval. As long as Bill held that job, McKeldin effectively abolished capital punishment in Maryland by simply commuting death sentences.
Not long after Bill’s ordeal, Cauley got me on the phone at the Western Police Station one afternoon and said, “When you report to work tomorrow, come into the office.”
“Is there something wrong?”
“You’ll be working inside for a while.”
He’d said the magic word: inside. I was finally being moved inside. After almost two years of my life out there in the lower depths, I was finally going to work inside. It was like the end of a long sentence to hard labor. Inside. I was being moved inside. I felt as Edmond Dantès must have felt when he finally escaped the Château D’If. Caulfield was moving me inside. Caulfield was a wonderful editor.