The great ogre at the Sun was Neil H. Swanson. He bore the grand title of “Executive Editor of the Sunpapers,” which since 1942 had made him supreme editorial boss of both morning and afternoon papers. After seven years in that exalted position, he had managed to make himself loathed and feared by almost everyone under him, except for the few yes-men who formed his entourage.
Now in his early fifties and on his fourth marriage, Swanson was tall and fleshy with blond hair going gray. He wore steel-rimmed eyeglasses, chain-smoked cigarettes, and behaved like a cross between General Douglas MacArthur and a movie producer’s dream of a dynamic newspaperman.
The movie influence may have come from Cecil B. De Mille. Swanson had written a historical novel about the American frontier titled Unconquered, which De Mille converted into a colonists-and-Indians epic with Gary Cooper and Paulette Goddard. Swanson then signed a publisher’s contract to write thirty historical novels, most of which were never written.
Among other extraordinary claims to singularity, Swanson boasted that at the age of twenty-two he had served as a World War One army officer on detached duty with a French outfit called the chasseurs à pied.
Swanson’s imperial military manner and boyish pleasure in pushing people around to show who was boss contributed to making him villain-in-chief of the Sun. On a paper that esteemed dignity, understatement, and the diffident manner, Swanson’s theatrical antics and determination to make life a melodrama in which he was the star were bound to sour the atmosphere. Though competent enough about some parts of the news business, he seemed absurd, contemptible, and embarrassing to a staff that considered the Sun one of the country’s great newspapers and thought it was demeaned by Swanson’s show-biz personality.
As usual with self-absorbed executive whizbangs, Swanson was isolated from reality by his own tendency to surround himself with people whose incompetence was offset by eagerness to lick his hand while sheltering him from simple truths. By 1949 this had given him a dangerous sense of security, and he was a supreme boss with a thoroughly intimidated staff that yearned to see him destroyed.
One of the most prominent yearners was Edwin P. Young, city editor of the Evening Sun. Young was then in his early forties and had been with the paper fifteen years. Among most Sun people, Young was as beloved as Swanson was hated. Most thought him the best editor the paper had, and some thought him the best editor in the world. Among those who worked for him, feelings ranged from admiration to utter devotion.
This was bound to provoke Swanson’s hostility. Swanson may have been a poseur, but he was no fool, and he was quick to sense that Ed Young was not only a rival of sorts, but also one who did not regard the Swanson way of governance with proper respect.
Thirty years afterward, when both men had been long gone from the Sun, Ed Young, at my request, wrote his reflections on the Swanson of 1949:
“I disliked Swanson from the outset, and, while I wasn’t so idiotic as to confront him, he knew what I thought.
“Of course he was a complete fraud from a to izzard, and how he sat astride a formerly great newspaper for fifteen years—or just long enough to ruin it—might be described as a mystery, except that it has happened, and is still happening, to newspapers all over the lot. It really is a laugh that newspapers, which make a fetish of investigating everyone else under the sun, are so often in the hands of charlatans.”
This was in reply to a letter in which I recalled a vague memory of Swanson wearing puttees in the newsroom and asked Young if I could possibly have seen such a spectacle.
“You are completely correct about the image [Swanson] was trying to project. You didn’t see him in puttees. You saw him in a trench coat, with Sam Browne belts, buckles and more damned rings than a merry-go-round has, plus an expensive and entirely incongruous brown felt hat… He often appeared on the news floor in this rig, and I always refrained with difficulty from busting out laughing. But, and to the point, the puttees were there, even though you didn’t see—only sensed—them.”
As for Swanson’s detached duty with the chasseurs à pied in 1918: “Pure Swanson hokum… The fact seems to be that Swanson never saw military service of any kind.”
Though the dislike between Swanson and Young was to become a great blessing to me, in the summer of 1949 I knew neither except by reputation. I accepted the popular view that Swanson was an ogre to be avoided at all costs, but had still never laid eyes on him.
I was equally familiar with Ed Young’s reputation for excellence and had seen plenty of evidence of it in the Evening Sun. He had developed a staff of talented writing reporters every bit as literate and clever, I thought, as the celebrated staff of the New York Herald Tribune. They included superb feature writers like Jacob Hay, John Goodspeed, and James Bready, whom I had met over Evelyn Waugh, and fine reporters like Bradford Jacobs, William Manchester, and Burke Davis, who not only had the gift of making every story seem special but also found time to write books.
Our city editor on the morning paper was a quiet, workmanlike man named Bill Wells whom Swanson had promoted from the sports department. Wells’s policy was to do his job judiciously while keeping his lip buttoned and his head low. As a result, dullness was the overpowering characteristic of the morning paper’s newsroom.
All this was about to change at the very time my private life was suffering through the great Ocean City fiasco.
Swanson had long intended to do something terrible to Ed Young and had often been about to strike, only to be distracted by more pressing business. Once he had the inspired idea of burying Young in an assistant editorship of the Sunday supplements, a job widely regarded as a fate not quite worse than death, but almost.
Before Swanson could execute this plan, H. L. Mencken got wind of the plot and intervened with Paul Patterson, the company’s president and publisher. Patterson’s power was even mightier than Swanson’s, and Mencken was Patterson’s old, old friend. As Ed Young heard the story, Mencken urged Patterson to stay Swanson’s hand, arguing that “Young is a good man.”
Swanson dared not defy Patterson, of course, so Young was temporarily saved. Then, indisputable justification for getting Young out as Evening Sun city editor:
Lee McCardell, one of the paper’s finest reporters, was being brought home from Europe after a long and dazzling career. Swanson decided to honor him by making him city editor of the Evening Sun. No one could object despite McCardell’s lack of editing experience. Ed Young would have to go.
Buck Dorsey, whose eye for picking talent I came to appreciate only later, said, in that case, why didn’t he take Young as city editor of the morning paper?
It was not the happiest thing that could have happened to Young. He was losing the fine staff he had built on the Evening Sun, and would have to start over with the anonymous bunch that worked for Bill Wells. The morning paper also meant night work, with hours from five in the afternoon to two in the morning, and the end of most social life. Still, it was an important job, and Young respected Buck Dorsey.
So it was that two weeks after I finished ruining Mimi’s vacation that summer, my regular letter informed her of news more momentous for me than I yet knew:
“Bill Wells returned from his vacation Monday to learn that he was no longer city editor of the morning paper. In a series of swift moves General Swanson has shaken his swagger stick and heads have rolled. Lee McCardell is returning from Germany to become city editor of the Evening Sun; and Ed Young, erstwhile city editor of the evening paper, comes over to our side to fill Bill Wells’s vacancy. Poor Bill is booted down to the position of makeup editor of the Evening Sun. So I have a new boss.”
Ed Young made his first appearance in the newsroom a few nights later. He did not fit my notion of what a great editor should look like. He was stocky, had a big baritone voice, a penetrating gaze, and a bright red complexion, which, I later discovered, turned purple when he drank, which was often, though rarely on the job.
He wore three-piece, slightly threadbare Brooks Brothers suits that seemed a size or two too small for him, and since he always wore his collar and necktie blocked tightly under his chin and kept his vests and jackets buttoned, he looked like a man encased in painful corseting. There was a story that he inherited this wardrobe from his wife’s brother and was too desperate for money not to wear it. I never knew whether this story was true, but I did know Ed was miserably paid.
For his first few nights on the job, I watched from my desk far back in the newsroom as he took charge of the city desk. All buttoned up inside those constricting suits, he seemed supercharged with energy. He was perpetual motion. The hands worked constantly. They fiddled with his jacket buttons and bits of copy paper, darted to the top of his head to straighten his hair, twisted a paper clip, toyed with a rubber band, readjusted the angle of his eyeglasses. Then he was up and headed off with quick, short, nervous strides to deal with the night managing editor or the copy desk or a reporter or just to get a drink from the water cooler.
In constant motion even when he was sitting down, he suffused the air with energy and a sense of urgency notably missing from the newsroom before his arrival. The old newspaper cliché about a man electrifying the atmosphere did not seem silly when you talked about Ed Young.
From his first night on the job, the Sun at last felt like a real newspaper.
Toward the end of his first week, those short, nervous steps brought him back to my desk. He extended his hand and introduced himself, at the same time saying, “Why didn’t anybody tell me about you?”
I mumbled something in my fake, bashful-boy style, which he immediately cut through, saying, “From now on, you’re going to be doing important things around here.”
With that, he pulled up a chair, sat down, and asked me to talk about myself. I was surprised to find it was easy. It was like talking to a loving father, something I hadn’t done since I was five years old. I dropped the bashful-boy act. This was a man I could trust, a man I could talk to honestly. I told him my tale of misery: the rotten salary, how I was so desperate for money that I was thinking of looking for work in Washington and New York.
He listened intently. He really cared, I thought. This man really cared about me. During my recital, his face registered sympathy for my plight, anger at the way the Sun had treated me, and determination to get me payroll justice.
Finally, rising, looking me straight in the eye, he said, “I’m going to do something about this. Give me a little time, will you?”
Give him a little time? He could have all the time he wanted. In those few minutes of talk I had joined those who thought Ed Young was one of the marvels of American journalism. This was my kind of editor. I loved him instantly. Long afterward, I realized that I had been searching for a father since I was a child and that Ed Young was the first one I thought might fill the bill.
Somehow, Ed Young did get me a raise. It did take time, several months, and how he did it was a mystery, because he couldn’t even get a raise for himself, but he did it, and by the end of the year I was making a gaudy seventy dollars a week. This was enough to get married on if you were young and foolish enough to believe in happy endings, which was precisely how young Mimi and I were, though I pretended to be a hard-bitten realist who expected nothing of the future but failure, poverty, and despair.
Ed also made good on his promise to provide more challenging jobs. By fall I was working rewrite almost as regularly as Banker and Spry. Working beside Young on the city desk taught me respect for journalism. Until then I had taken the wiseguy view that it was a trivial, second-rate business for boozers, incompetent romantics, and failed writers.
My ambition to outshine Cousin Edwin reflected these attitudes. Nothing could have been more arrogant or foolish than the notion that, without any special education or training, I could someday match Edwin’s achievements. I didn’t think of them as achievements but as adventures, as fun for grown-ups. That’s how I thought of journalism before Ed Young: fun for grown-ups.
Serious men, I thought, wrote novels. Until Ed Young I clung to my college dream of becoming a great novelist, as opposed to the kind of hack who wrote for newspapers. After working with Ed Young, I grew up enough to smile at the childishness of this idea, and I finally put it aside forever. By then, at age twenty-four, I had tried enough fiction to know I had no talent for it. Worse, I did not even enjoy writing it. Though always bored by it, I had kept at it only because of conviction that it was the noble art that serious writers ought to pursue, while journalism was a raffish and unworthy pastime, like hanging out at the racetrack or running a burlesque theater.
Ed Young rarely lectured, so he never pointed out that for a man who enjoyed writing news and hated writing fiction, becoming a good journalist might be a happier goal than being a bad novelist. Everything about the way he did his job simply insisted that journalism was serious work for serious people.
Confronted with the morning paper’s dispirited and underpaid staff, he refused to surrender to the anger and resentment he felt for Swanson, but set out to breathe life and fire into his new crew. It was a revelation to me. Obviously he thought the work was important, the way doctors, scientists, and novelists thought their work was important and deserved the best they could bring to it, however miserable their circumstances.
So he went scurrying around the city room with all cylinders pounding, doing his utmost to make all of us feel we were vital to an important enterprise.
“Why didn’t anybody tell me about you? From now on, you’re going to be doing important things around here.”
He must have addressed half the staff with variations on this theme in those first days in the newsroom. When Jim Cannon, another reporter, turned in his first piece of copy to the new regime, Ed scanned it, popped up from his chair, hurried back to Cannon’s desk, introduced himself, and, pointing to Cannon’s copy, said, “Where have you been all my life? This is wonderful stuff.”
Though badly paid and ill treated by the company, he had unflagging enthusiasm for the work and no patience with the reporter who didn’t. One of the worst sins you could commit was not working at your assignment as if it were the most important story in the paper that night. After Pat Catling, a man Ed considered too frivolous about journalism, left the Sun and wrote a newspaper memoir titled “Better Than Working,” Ed’s comment was, “How would he know?”
Money and its lack were the curses of the staff Young inherited. Everybody had a tale of financial despair. John Carr, who had a big family, was so desperate for money that when his only belt broke he could not afford a new one. So he came to work with a necktie girding his waist to hold up his pants.
Carr, a witty and sassy New Yorker with the light touch of the natural feature writer, offended stuffier hands with his necktie belt. Never mind that Carr was simply too broke to buy a belt. They viewed it as an impertinent demonstration against the Sun’s sweatshop pay. Among faithful old Sun hands, poverty was something to be accepted gracefully, for not everyone was privileged to work for the Sun.
The skimpy pay, even for stars of the local staff, left reporters vulnerable to financial seduction by the politicians they covered. Keeping a good political reporter seemed impossible, with Maryland politicians luring them away with decent wages. One left to take work with Governor William Preston Lane. His successor quickly found better pay on Mayor D’Alesandro’s payroll. Al Quinn, who was covering City Hall when Ed Young came, was soon to opt for the living wage offered him when Theodore McKeldin became governor.
My old college pal, Bill Gresham, now an intimate friend, got the juicy job of covering the Republican side of the scandalous senatorial campaign of 1950. It was a national sensation because of the way the Republicans contrived to defeat the veteran Millard Tydings with a handsome, dim-witted Baltimore lawyer named John Marshall Butler. The Republicans, heavily financed with money from Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s Red-hunting supporters, managed to sell Marylanders the comic fiction that Tydings, a conservative mossback loathed by all good liberals, was a secret pal of famous Communists.
It was a wonderful story, topped off by the irony that Maryland’s Democratic liberals had been trying unsuccessfully to get rid of Tydings for a generation. How it finally took the Red hunters to do him in was a story Bill Gresham did not report in the Sun, though he told Mimi and me some of it privately over Saturday night drinks. Bill had the makings of a first-rate investigator, but at fifty dollars-a-week he was not inspired to do an aggressive reporting job on the sleazy Butler campaign.
Irony piled on irony here. Bill had been a celebrated campus radical at Hopkins and a great late-night singer of “Joe Hill.” Now the world was turned upside down. He was meeting a lot of Republicans he liked. And finding that they liked him. What’s more, they were treating him as a fellow who was clever about politics, a cunning man of the world who understood how things worked, which he was. He was as vulnerable as the next fifty dollars-a-week reporter, and maybe more, to the flattering attention of important men. In any case, he was picking up a lot of fascinating information he didn’t feel free to print in the Sun.
After Butler’s election surprised the Sun’s readers, Bill quit the paper and began what was to be a long career as a high-level factotum for fancy Republicans, including Governor Theodore McKeldin and Senator J. Glenn Beall.
Among the oldest employees, the pay was disgraceful. White-haired Miss Muller, well into her eighth decade, was getting sixty-five dollars a week. The paper’s two oldest employees, Mark and Walter, who had been with the Sun since the gaslight era, were in the same pay class.
Too feeble for real work, they handled the “lobster trick.” This was the silent time between the hour we put the morning paper to bed and the dawn when the first Evening Sun people started arriving at work. From two in the morning until dawn, Mark or Walter sat nodding at the city desk, monitoring the police radio, theoretically prepared to summon everyone back to work if the Second Coming should occur at Baltimore and Gay streets at four o’clock in the morning.
The company was rumored to have a retirement plan, but its details were secret, and it seemed to be applied only rarely. Ancient and faithful hands, like Mark and Walter, were simply kept on at token pay until they ran down. Emmett Kavanaugh, the business manager, justified their negligible salaries by calling them “aged incompetents.”
I was working the rewrite desk the night ancient Walter was retired, so had a close view of the ceremonies. Harry Black, the principal owner of the paper, showed up. This was an immense honor for Walter, but it was hard to tell whether he appreciated it, because he seemed baffled about where he was and why, and who Harry Black was, and why he, Walter, was standing in the middle of the city room with people making speeches at him, instead of nodding over the police radio and dreaming about a time in 1892 when he worked at the first typewriter ever used in the Sun building.
Ed Young was at his desk beside mine that night, so we both had the same view of the ceremony taking place right in front of the city desk. When it was over and Walter had tottered off, Ed, looking unusually agitated, glanced at me, then grabbed a sheet of copy paper, wrote something on it with a grease pencil, folded it a couple of times for secrecy, and thrust it to me.
Since it was obviously meant to be private, I held it on my lap under the desk before opening it. It said: “Hurrah for the Guild!”
This was treason, bold, pure, and simple. The Newspaper Guild, which had recently unionized the news staff, was struggling with no success at all to lure the Sun into the twentieth century on things like money, sick pay, and retirement. The Sun ownership viewed the guild as a vicious Bolshevik apparatus whose members yearned to dance on the graves of men like Harry Black and Paul Patterson after filching their wealth and putting them to the guillotine.
As a management man, Ed Young was raising the clenched fist by committing his secret guild sympathies to paper. Not that he would have been punished much for it if I had handed the incriminating paper to Swanson. By then Swanson had made it clear that nothing good was ever going to be done for Ed Young again.
Still, it took courage, I thought, to put his sentiments on paper in that atmosphere, and I smiled at him, nodded agreement, tore the paper methodically into tiny bits, and dropped them in the trash can.
Not long afterward, I was surprised to discover that the newsroom editors had built up a sullen mass of resentment about their own salaries. When Jim Cannon, after long searching, found a job in New York with Time magazine, he came to the newsroom to say good-bye to old friends. When he got to Dan Meara, night managing editor and Buck Dorsey’s chief assistant, Dan asked Jim if he minded telling him what Time was going to pay.
“Nine thousand dollars a year,” Jim said.
Dan was visibly shaken.
“Good God!” he cried. “I never expect to make that much money as long as I live.”
The strange thing was that almost all of us, even those who were driven away, loved that paper and believed it was a good paper and could even be a great paper if we did the best work we could for it. This was probably why so many of us gave our hearts to Ed Young. He embodied our conviction that we were doing something terribly important and ought to keep doing it well even though the people who owned it and ran it didn’t seem to understand why we cared.