I did not expect my mother to take it well when I told her Mimi was pregnant, and she didn’t.
“Hostages to fortune,” she said, staring past me toward something far, far away.
Please, not those old hostages to fortune again, I thought.
“When you decide to bring children into the world, Russell, you’re giving hostages to fortune,” she said.
I remembered when Doris and I were small and the grown-ups, sitting around chatting over the coffee cups after supper, talked about “hostages to fortune.” They always became terribly somber when somebody said “hostages to fortune.” It cropped up in sentences very much like the one my mother had just spoken:
“When you bring children into this old world, you give hostages to fortune,” they said. Or, “When you give hostages to fortune you’d better be willing to pay the piper.”
I knew what paying the piper meant—no fun without pain—but “hostages to fortune” had been a puzzle. A memorable phrase, but puzzling.
Now, though, when my mother dredged the famous words up out of the past, I knew very well what she was saying:
Children were serious, grown-up business. Parenthood meant my days of carefree independence were over. With children I would become a prisoner to the luck of the moment.
She was under the impression that I was a great success at the Sun, and probably feared that the duties of fatherhood at age twenty-five would handicap me in the competition with Cousin Edwin. I’m sure she also thought neither Mimi nor I was competent to rear children. Few people were, except her, as she saw it. Still, she loved children, the younger the better, and the prospect of having a brand-new baby to spoil quickly softened her attitude to the project. Our talk ended with her insisting that after the delivery Mimi and the baby must come stay at Marydell Road so she could care for them until Mimi recovered.
In breaking the happy news to my mother I was also preparing her for the possibility that I might need a loan, for the big new seventy dollar salary did not keep Mimi and me from being always desperate for money. It had not occurred to me that birth could bankrupt people until Mimi came back from the obstetrician with the price list.
The doctor alone wanted $100 for delivering the baby. What’s more, the hospital wanted a $50 deposit right away. Whether this would pay all hospital costs seemed doubtful as I scanned its prices: $3 a day for the nursery, $15 for the delivery room, $9.50 a day for a private room. Mimi agreed to settle for the semi-private room at $7 a day.
And this was just the beginning. Alone at home one day, I was visited by a Baby-Tenda salesman. He told horrifying stories of babies accidentally killed because parents too cheap to buy Baby-Tendas had let their little ones sit in the deadly, old-fashioned high chair. The Baby-Tenda was a new kind of seat for baby, something like the old-fashioned high chair, only better, more stable, completely safe, not likely to tip over, causing baby’s skull to fracture, incapable of strangling baby to death while father’s back was turned.
I would have nothing else, even after he disclosed the price of a Baby-Tenda, which was breathtaking. When my mother learned of this, she was outraged and called me several varieties of fool. She still had the old-fashioned high chair that my baby sister Mary Leslie had used and intended to give it to us.
I told her it was unthinkable that I would let my baby’s life be risked in a deadly, old-fashioned high chair just to save a few dollars.
“I’ve seen some prize fools in my time, Russell, but you take the cake,” my mother replied. “If you believe that Baby-Tenda salesman, you’ll believe the moon is made of green cheese.”
She had sold magazine subscriptions door-to-door in the Depression and was contemptuous of people who had no sales resistance. With iron in my voice, I told her I was taking the Baby-Tenda anyhow, which gave her the cue for one of her favorite observations:
“A fool and his money are soon parted,” she said.
Well, of course we also needed a bigger apartment. We found one in the corner building of a block of big brick row houses on Park Avenue. A nice neighborhood. Even a little hoity-toity, socially speaking. The rent was seventy dollars a month, a fifteen dollar increase over our first apartment.
“That’s an awful rent to pay for a basement apartment,” my mother observed.
“It’s not a basement apartment, it’s a ground-floor apartment,” I said, adopting the landlord’s terminology.
True, you did have to walk down a few steps to enter, and when you got inside and looked out the windows your line of sight was level with passing ankles. As my mother observed, there was nothing underneath us but Baltimore earth, and the furnace sat just outside our bedroom wall.
“Ground-floor apartment, my eye!” was her comment. “You’re living in a cellar.” In my mother’s world, people who moved down to cellars were moving down in the world, not up, and paid less rent, not more.
The baby arrived at dawn on a raw March morning in 1951. We named her Kathleen Leland because we thought Kathleen sounded pretty, and because Leland was an old name in my mother’s family, and because the two names together fell musically on the ear.
On the first day of her life I arrived at the hospital without a dazzling bouquet of red roses for Mimi. I wouldn’t have noticed this deficiency except for the dazzling bouquet of red roses on Mimi’s bedside table. They made me feel painfully empty-handed. I couldn’t have afforded roses, of course. The Sun didn’t pay rose salaries. But I should have brought something, though I didn’t know what. I had never in my life bought flowers, but there must have been one flower a Sun man could afford.
This was my second grave failure of the day. The first occurred at 7:08 that morning, the sacred moment of my daughter’s birth. At that moment I had been blissfully asleep in my bed at home. Mimi believed a father’s duty at such times was to pace the hospital corridor. The latter-day notion that he should assist the doctor was still unheard of, but he was supposed to be present in the hospital, an absurd, comic, useless figure reading out-of-date magazines and chain-smoking cigarettes by the hour. My failure could not be forgiven just because the doctor had sent me home with assurances that the baby couldn’t possibly arrive before breakfast. And now, the roses.
On first seeing them brought to her bedside, Mimi had forgiven me, had said to herself that I was offering these priceless blooms to atone for being asleep at the sacred moment, and had thought how sweet I was and how much she loved me. Then, lifting the card, she had seen that they were not from me. They were from Bill Gresham.
This destroyed my only defense, which was that the Sun kept me too broke to buy roses. As Mimi quickly pointed out when I tried it, Bill’s pay was even worse than mine, yet he could afford roses.
“Sure,” I said, “but Bill doesn’t have to buy a Baby-Tenda, does he?”
Sometimes it seemed the Sun had mysterious powers to know precisely down to the last penny how much we needed to survive for another week. And that, knowing this, it paid me just a dollar less, so that with each passing week we sank just a slight bit deeper into the quicksand. Then just when it seemed that all was lost, that the gas and electricity and telephone were sure to be cut off, that my only suit could never be recovered from the dry cleaner, that I would have to get a second job if I wanted a new pair of shoes—at that point of utter despair there would come a small salary increase, and it became possible to survive a few more months.
For the pay hikes we had the Newspaper Guild to thank. Frail though the guild was, it had got the Sun to agree to a contract of sorts providing a top salary of one hundred dollars a week for reporters after seven years on the job. My three years was worth sixty-eight dollars, but with the added money Ed Young had finagled out of the Sun, I was making eighty-two dollars a week when Gresham’s roses arrived. For a few months, Mimi was able to keep most of the bills paid up, and we could even afford Scotch and bourbon for Saturday night instead of the usual cheap blended whiskey that made you yearn for death if you took one too many.
Nobody at the Sun ever seemed too broke to buy whiskey. Poor people rarely are. Maybe alcohol is the luxury necessary to make poverty tolerable. We were not real paupers, however. Just miserably broke. We had no car and so little prospect of ever having one that neither Mimi nor I had even learned to drive. When we took the baby to visit Marydell Road, we rode the streetcar at ten cents apiece, babies free.
We had a radio with a secondhand phonograph attached to it by a couple of wires, but no television set, and no interest in buying one. They were prohibitively expensive, for one thing. For another, a world in which people sat silently in the parlor looking at a box that showed little moving pictures was so alien to our experience of the way people lived that it never occurred to us to want a television set.
There were signs, though, that television, like whiskey, was soon to become a consoling vice of the poor. On rewrite one night in 1951 I wrote a police story about a mother in an east Baltimore slum who was “shot to death while two small boys sat undisturbed in the next room with their attention glued to the televised gunplay of Hopalong Cassidy.”
The comfortable eighty-two-dollar-a-week life ended when a rat invaded our ground-floor apartment on Park Avenue. It was a small apartment, so it was easy to discover there was a rat among us. The sight of a long rat tail sticking out from under the daybed was the conclusive proof.
I was semiheroic. Armed only with a broom, I closed the hall door leading to the baby’s alcove, opened doors leading to the sidewalk and to the backyard, then suddenly yanked the daybed away from the wall while shouting fiercely for the rat to be gone. Faster than I could wave my broom, it fled out the door, across the sidewalk, and out of our lives.
Mimi moved almost as fast to find another apartment where an infant would be safer than in our ground-floor crib space. She found it on rustic, tree-shaded Evesham Avenue off York Road, in far north Baltimore. It had two bedrooms and a large living room, once a painter’s studio, with a high beamed ceiling and a huge window to catch the northern light. It was lovely. It was devastating. The rent was ninety dollars a month.
Obsession with money, like the loathing for Neil Swanson, made it easy to recognize Sun people. Yet if we were sullen toward the company because of the shabby pay, it also made us work better. Doing a good job at the Sun was the way to get a good job on a more generous newspaper. As Buck Dorsey often said when hiring a new reporter, you would never get rich working for the Sun, but after learning the trade at the Sun you would be qualified to work for any newspaper in the country.
The Sun itself offered a few possibilities for glory. It had one of the biggest Washington bureaus in all of journalism, with a dozen glamorous reporters who got Page One by-lines every day and must, I thought, earn princely salaries.
For drudges on the local staff, the Washington bureau was paradise and those assigned to it, giants. I knew them only by reputation, for they rarely set foot in Baltimore except on election nights, when they invaded the city room and commandeered the best typewriters to fill the night’s front page with the big national voting stories. Between editions they were given the freedom of a grand buffet and bar spread out for them in a room out of view to the local staff.
I was too worldly now to gawk at such gaudy stars, but with discreet inquiries I had each of them identified for me. There were Joseph Short, who knew presidents, and Philip Potter, who had covered the Chinese revolution and talked to Chou Enlai. There was Price Day, who wrote like a dream and had the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of India. There were national political reporters like Dewey Fleming and Gerry Griffin, who traveled the country on lavish expense accounts, and trouble-shooting veterans like Tom O’Neill, who might be sent halfway around the world on an hour’s notice to cover a story.
Tom O’Neill was the Sun’s legendary reporter, the man who could go anywhere, do anything, and do it better than anybody else, whether it was covering the Alger Hiss trials, exposing asininity and corruption in the Maryland legislature, covering a presidential election, or reporting the American attempt to undo the Iranian revolution and put the shah back in power.
I first glimpsed the majesty a Sun reporter could achieve during O’Neill’s coverage of the Iran story. His daily copy from Tehran arrived in cable shorthand and had to be retyped, often by me, in form suitable for the printers. At the end of the very first cable I handled, O’Neill added a message to Buck Dorsey. It said: BUCK, SEND FIVE THOUSAND IMMEDIATELY.
The five thousand O’Neill wanted sent immediately were dollars. It was a staggering revelation. It made me dizzy to realize that a reporter, without ceremony, without apology, without explanation, could tell the managing editor to send him five thousand dollars. Immediately. Five thousand dollars was more than my salary for a whole year.
Typing another O’Neill cable ten days later I got a second shock from the concluding message:
BUCK, SEND ANOTHER FIVE THOUSAND, DON’T KNOW WHERE IT GOES BUT IT’S GONE.
Here was a vision of what a Sun reporter could be if he could slip the chains of the local staff and become one of its “correspondents” in Washington or overseas. So far as I could see, no expense was spared to keep these dandies happy. O’Neill, for instance. He dressed like a capitalist: elegantly cut suits from the finest shops, a spotless gray fedora, shirts with French cuffs. Each Saturday he luxuriated in the sybaritic pleasures of the Lord Baltimore Hotel barber shop, which kept his thin silvery hair meticulously trimmed and his fingernails gleaming from the manicurist’s care. What’s more, he looked like an important man. Short, lean, and dapper, he carried himself like a marine general, shoulders squared, chin tilted up. His face was thin and delicate in the highbred patrician style, and the impression that this was a man of importance, not to be trifled with, was heightened by its cool, unsmiling expression, the authoritative look of a man who never had to be eager to please anybody.
Chances of getting a foreign assignment were hopeless. Since the end of the war, the Sun had been closing its foreign offices and now had only the London bureau operating. This was one of the paper’s prize plums and usually went to a creaky Washington veteran in reward for distinguished service.
The possibility of escaping into the glamorous world of correspondents never entered my mind. For one thing, I had little interest in government and politics and even less in the international scene. Aside from the big money that went with these jobs, the work didn’t really interest me. My goal was to become good enough at the business on the local staff to qualify for a living wage on another paper.
My closest Sun friends at this time were Bill Gresham, Jim Cannon, and Ellis Baker, and each was dealing with the money problem in his own way. Bill was using the Sun to cultivate the politicians who later hired him. Ellis Baker—we were not related—was attacking the Sun frontally as leader of the Newspaper Guild. Jim Cannon, whose limitless supply of gumption and get-up-and-go would have warmed my mother’s heart, simply got up and went at the first opportunity.
The opportunity was the Korean War. Cannon, then thirty-two years old, had been on the Sun two years, after getting his experience on a small paper in far upstate New York. Tall, dark, socially poised, and courteous in the formal southern manner, Jim was from Alabama and had done war service in the O.S.S. Ed Young took such a liking to him that he invited Jim to join him on the train ride up to Philadelphia for the Penn-Cornell football game. For Ed, a Cornell man, the game was a sacred ritual, and Jim got back heavily marinated in alcohol with “Far above Cayuga’s waters” roaring endlessly in his memory. Now and then Ed suggested they slip down to the Gayety burlesque house for the matinee, justifying it with the excuse that H. L. Mencken could often be seen there. “Let’s go see if Mencken’s down there,” he urged.
The Korean War broke out late on a June Saturday. Cannon desperately wanted to go. At work Monday, he told Ed Young, who said he would speak to Buck Dorsey. Cannon knew, however, that Dorsey was not the man to get him to Korea as a war correspondent. Only Swanson could do that, and Cannon knew it.
On an idiotic impulse, he marched out of the city room and right into the ogre’s office. That was how he thought of it afterward: “an idiotic impulse.” With two years’ experience on the Gloversville (N.Y.) Leader-Republican and only two years on the Sun, you had to be a little unhinged to think of bracing Swanson for one of the most important assignments on the paper.
You didn’t just walk in on the great man, of course. You had to get past Bill Perkinson, a Swanson factotum in a small front office. Confronting the Perkinson barrier, Cannon demonstrated the good reporter’s gift for ingenuity.
He noticed that Swanson’s office was separated from Perkinson’s only by a cheap partition that did not go all the way to the ceiling. Thinking Swanson might be able to hear over the partition, Cannon started speaking to Perkinson as loud as he could without actually shouting,
“In this loud voice,” he told me, “I said that I sure would like to go cover that war in Korea. I think I could do a great job, this is my dream, that’s a great assignment, and so forth, speaking to be heard over this partition.”
Perkinson said he’d tell Swanson, then sent Cannon back to the city room.
When Cannon was gone, Swanson emerged from his office and asked Perkinson, “Who was that?”
In the city room shortly afterward, Buck Dorsey summoned Cannon and said Swanson wanted to talk to him.
Within two weeks Cannon was off to war via London, Paris, Rome, and the Mediterranean, carrying a thousand dollars in cash and ten thousand in traveler’s checks. Swanson had a hunch that the Korean invasion was just a feint directed from Moscow, and that the Soviets might launch a heavy assault elsewhere. Europe was the obvious bet, so Swanson started Jim to Korea by ordering him to fly east.
After five weeks of London, Paris, a luxury hotel on the Riviera, and at sea with the Mediterranean fleet, Cannon was ordered posthaste to Asia, a seven-day journey that took him via Rome, Athens, Istanbul, Damascus, Karachi, Delhi, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo.
Those of us who had lacked the gumption to march into Swanson’s office and talk to Perkinson at the top of our lungs were in rages of envy. Cannon had done the inconceivable: With gall and cunning, he had broken free from the local staff and crossed over to the wondrous world of the correspondents, where giants had pockets stuffed with traveler’s checks and fired off cables saying, BUCK, SEND FIVE THOUSAND IMMEDIATELY.
When he reached Japan, two of three other reporters Swanson had sent to cover the war had been wounded, one very seriously.
“Whatever you do, don’t get killed,” was the farewell advice the other offered from his hospital bed as Jim departed for Seoul.
It was a good possibility. That winter he was traveling with a small unit of the First Marine Division near the Chinese border when a small plane dropped an urgent command for them to pull back immediately. Mao Tze-tung had just committed his forces to the war, and Cannon and the marines, totally ignorant of the new situation, were barreling headlong toward three divisions of the Chinese army situated scarcely a mile away.
The Chinese onslaught began immediately and turned into an American debacle. Cannon spent the next three and a half days without sleep, running for his life, desperately scuttling this way and that through the snow-covered mountains of North Korea to escape the encircling Chinese army. A year later he came back to the Sun a hero.
Alas, heroism did not qualify you for an expense account in Baltimore. Abroad, Jim had been traveling first-class at the Sun’s expense. Nobody seemed to care how much you spent on expenses once you left the city limits. When you came back, though, it was chin up and make do on the same old Sun pay scale. Cannon, who wanted to get married, had not escaped the local staff, after all. He was getting ninety dollars a week. Soon he did get married and started looking for another job.
Ellis Baker was a more complicated piece of work. Where Jim set goals and moved toward them without guile under a full head of energy, Ellis seemed driven by motives so complicated that they baffled those who knew him best, and maybe even Ellis himself. Outwardly, he seemed as calm as a stone Buddha, yet he took risks that suggested there might be emotional fires seething underneath the serenity.
There was never an unlikelier labor agitator. For one thing, Ellis was good Baltimore society, than which there was nothing more conservative. Good Baltimore society was likely to think unionism intolerable not because it was Bolshevism pure and simple, but because union people didn’t dress properly. It was impossible to have such a creature to dinner, much less marry your daughter.
Ellis, whose full name was Ellis Thompson Baker III, not only dressed like a proper north Baltimore toff, bow ties and button-down collars and seersuckers for summer heat; he also spoke in the prim and reasoned voice of the unimpassioned intellectual. He had been Phi Beta Kappa at Duke and was a writer of great subtlety. The thundering barn-burner rhetoric of the union hall was utterly beyond him. Outwardly he was the man of pure reason.
Nor did he look like an incendiary. Rotund without being fat, he moved at the stately pace of a contented monk strolling a monastery garden. His hands were small and delicate, and he had a thin man’s face: thin lips, thin pointed nose. His hair was always cut within a half inch of the scalp in the standard military whiffle of World War Two. Surrounded by two-pack-a-day cigarette puffers, he was a cigar smoker. His social pleasures were gin and Dixieland jazz.
Strangest of all, early in his career, Ellis had been marked for future glory at the Sun. Everybody said he had a brilliant future there. He would move steadily up the executive ladder and, very likely, end up running the paper someday. He had all the requirements: remarkable talents for writing, reporting, and editing; superior intelligence; administrative ability; good roots in Baltimore society. That mattered at the Sun despite its frequent editorial insistence that America was a classless society. Baltimore, in fact, was sharply divided along class lines, and the Sun was patrician, heart-and-soul. Good roots in Baltimore society mattered.
They were also dangerous. The small, snobby society that produced Ellis might say of one of their own who crossed over to the labor crowd that he was a traitor to his class. This might make them more unforgiving, more ruthlessly determined to destroy him than they would be toward someone like, say, Swanson who was middle-class and vulgar. Jim Cannon, who liked Ellis and worried about him, was convinced that his brilliant future would be cut off before it began by the vengeance of the bluestockings who mattered at the Sun.
Ellis had come on the paper in 1940 right out of college. Heart trouble kept him out of the war, which gave him a chance to master most of the jobs on the paper. By the end of the decade, proof of the Sun’s esteem was his $125-a-week salary, which was in a class with editors’ pay. Most Sun people assumed he would soon be made city editor.
He never was. Early in his career he had run afoul of Swanson. Swanson had asked him to move over from the morning paper to study the Evening Sun and recommend any necessary changes. Swanson was infuriated when Ellis reported vast room for improvement and proposed extensive changes. Ellis realized too late that what Swanson wanted was praise, not improvement. That was the beginning of the end for him with Swanson.
When I arrived in 1947, Ellis was leading the guild campaign to organize the newsroom, and the Sun ownership was resisting vigorously. Editorially the Sun had long been antilabor, but it did not seem to occur to Ellis that fomenting the cause of hateful unionism might destroy his brilliant future.
Or maybe it did, and maybe he willingly accepted the risk anyhow, because he wanted to do something for all the people who were groaning about the Sun’s sweatshop pay.
Or maybe he was so fired by inner anger about something or somebody at the Sun that he was willing to risk losing his brilliant future for the satisfaction of hitting out. He obviously detested Swanson. He also despised the paternalistic arrogance with which he thought the Sun treated the hired help. This was dramatically symbolized for him in a curious elevator ritual involving the publisher, Paul Patterson. Whenever Patterson boarded the elevator, its operator ignored all other passengers and sped it nonstop to Patterson’s floor. It was doubly galling to Ellis that after boarding the elevator Patterson spoke to no one, not so much as a “Good morning” to the whole group.
Sometimes Ellis acted as though he thought the union struggle was a gentleman’s game in which loser and winner would shake hands gracefully at the end and walk together to the clubhouse. As embodied in Swanson and Patterson, however, the Sun did not confuse cash flow and good sportsmanship. They gave their blessing to a company union intended to lure newsroom people away from the troublesome militancy of the guild. One day Ellis noticed the office mailbox stuffed with copies of a letter from the company union. In a playful mood, he wrote “Fink” on each envelope.
Buck Dorsey’s response was not playful. He told Ellis he had “compromised” his position on the staff and issued orders that he was no longer to work at the city desk. This was especially ominous because Buck Dorsey was on friendly terms with Ellis’s family and had always been fond of Ellis himself. If Ellis was alarmed, his spirits must have improved when he was assigned to Annapolis for the important job of covering a session of the legislature.
Then, on Easter weekend, with the legislature ended, he came back to Baltimore and a grave sentence. He had been assigned to cover the Eastern Avenue Easter Parade.
The Eastern Avenue Easter Parade! It was a glove in his face.
The Sun traditionally covered two Easter parades. Baltimore’s highborn folk paraded their spring garments up and down Charles Street. Covering this was a dreary chore commonly given to old-timers too worn out to whine or youngsters too green to be bored by anything.
Not to be outdone by the nobs, east Baltimore’s Bohemians and Poles held their own parade on Eastern Avenue, the blue-collar boulevard of the city’s ethnic proles. It was a small Easter footnote to the main event on Charles Street. The Ellis Bakers of the staff were not assigned to the Eastern Avenue Easter Parade. Ellis took the assignment as notice that the Sun had declared war and that he was the enemy.
In a way, Ellis won that war. He got the votes that defeated the company union and entrenched the guild permanently at the paper. He also negotiated the first guild contract with the company. It wasn’t much of a contract, but it was a first blow toward smashing the Sun’s nineteenth-century paternalism.
Then Ellis quit the Sun, walked away from the ruin of his brilliant future in journalism, and went to work as an organizer for the Newspaper Guild. The guild couldn’t match the $125 a week he got from the Sun, so he started his new career by taking a pay cut.
In the end, the money struggle drove all three of them—Gresham, Cannon, and Ellis—away from the Sun. I lingered on, grousing, desperate about unpayable bills, threatening to go elsewhere despite my love for Ed Young, but never making the effort. I began seeing a future in which, like poor old Walter, I would finally be retired with a rocking chair because I was too old to stay awake through the lobster shift.
To persuade myself that I was not too timid to at least growl at the Sun, I said yes when Ellis Baker asked me to sit on the guild committee that would negotiate our second contract. I thought this would probably be the death of any future for me at the Sun, but could afford to be brave since the future I foresaw had a rocking chair in it.
Then there came a miracle.