In 1966, not a word made it into The New York Times news columns that had not passed through one of the copy-editing desks in the well-worn newsroom on West 43rd Street. Reports from multiple wire services spilled through a small window at the back of the newsroom, along with  transcribed reports that came in by telephone or over the Reuter wire from Times correspondents. Even as an eighteen-year-old from the Midwest struggled for blasé, it was impressive. One night, a correspondent in Africa broke his dictation to ask that the State Department be notified because he was, at that moment, being arrested.

At a small desk under the window a hectic fellow scrawled an “F” or an “N” on foreign and national reports, tossed the paper into a tray from which a copy person (a boy in those days) delivered it a dozen or twenty feet to an in-tray on the appropriate news desk. Now and then something went to the Metro desk or to the arts and entertainment desk, called Soc-Obit.

At each desk, a news clerk tried to bundle related pieces (or just chopped the wire reports into manageable lengths) and passed them to an editor. On the Foreign Desk, the usual first editor was Jerry Gold, who worked beside the assistant foreign editor, Nat Gerstenzang. The paper’s poodlesque foreign editor in chief, Seymour Topping, had a separate desk among the ranks of mucky-mucks a safe distance from dirty sleeves and paste-pots. It was a busy place, especially around the National Desk, where a sometime slot man named Gladfelter had a habit of screaming. The day three astronauts died in a space capsule, I was sent scurrying across town to one of the TV networks, which had promised to share audio from the doomed men. (I don’t recall if the famous words from one of them, who exhaled into the fireball  “Fire in the spacecraft” made it into the morning paper.)

The Foreign Desk, where I occasionally sat in as news clerk or news assistant (typing up the story list dictated by Gerstenzang), had a crew of copy editors with the forced erudition of longtime news people. There was a German-Russophile exile Ted Shabad, a Finn (if memory serves), eight or ten others on a typical night. The only woman was Betsy Wade Boylan, who sometimes set up a desk across town when the U.N. was in session. Her husband, James Boylan, was editor of  Columbia Journalism Review. Betsy described one evening her culture clash with Boylan’s family in Iowa. Giving the New York girl a tour of the farmyard, Mom Boylan explained, “Now this is a cow, and this is a goat, and this over here is a pig . . . ,” to which Betsy replied, “And those little ones are shoats”—earning a “Heyuh?!” from the farm wife. Do New Yorkers ever tell stories in which they’re the butt? No matter, she was pleasant to young subordinates. I don’t recall what set the story off. Possibly she had noticed the deterioration of the support staff: one fill-in from Illinois and a regular news clerk, Barbara Bell, from Burlington, Iowa. Barbara, who had studied in Spain, soon was writing travel articles for The Times’s Sunday edition.

Jack Badner was the florid slot man, in charge of processing what his soldiers on the rim produced. Allan Siegal, in his mid-twenties, a few years later joined the team editing the Pentagon Papers on his way to an assistant managing editor post.

It was instructive to watch copy editing at a serious newspaper. Any story being worked might have several sources, as reporters from Associated Press or Agence France-Presse or a Times writer focused on different aspects. A copy editor might splice the pieces together, rising now and then to consult the Facts on File drawers that stood nearby. If the story carried a byline, information from other sources would be credited. A copy boy who filled in at the news window might, at night’s end, save stories in their raw form and compare them with what appeared in the newspaper. (Not quite sixty years later, I have a box stuffed with those lessons.)

On the National Desk, besides Gladfelter, there was a crew mostly middle-aged and later. Evan Jenkins was perhaps the kindest to underlings. But one evening, an aged fellow named Walters noticed the direction of my longing look toward the girl from Burlington and asked kindly what I was afraid of, “She’s only a hundred pounds.” 

Some of the old newspaper movies have it right. A National Desk copy editor would bring from his locker each night a waste basket half-concealing a brown-crusted spittoon.

Back in the arts section, Walter Kerr, the theater critic, would knock off his review by around 10, and a copy boy—sensing from a safe distance when each page was available—would rush it out to the Soc-Obit desk, from where it would go page-by-page by pneumatic tube to the composing room, possibly in time for a city edition. 

After the first edition, pages would get remade. Gladfelter would scream. More deadlines. By then the eminentos had largely departed. Earlier in the day a rank of assistant managing editors with the newsroom’s window seats would confer with the national, foreign, local and other editors about what was important. The roster included Theodore M. Bernstein, who in 1933 had collaborated with Robert E. Garst on Headlines and Deadlines, A Manual for Copy Editors. My third edition, from 1961, sixth printing, has crossed the ten feet to my desk as I write this. A foreword from a Columbia journalism professor repeats the hope that “although journalism may never become an exact science it should become a more exacting profession.” By that time Bernstein had begun a series of popular usage guides, Watch Your Language, that took up where  Fowler and Follett had left off. 

Also in the a.m.e. ranks was Abe Rosenthal, who became managing editor a few years later. His insolence toward lowlifes in the room—when I slighted him as among those getting the second round of copies of the Foreign Desk story budget one night, he puffed “Do you know who I am?”—falls away in his long tenure at the top, dedicated to keeping (or perhaps making) The Times a straight newspaper. (It couldn’t have been easy. Walter Duranty’s cover-up of Stalin’s famine, which won him a Pulitzer in 1932, has been disowned even by The Times. Herbert Matthews’s apologetics for Castro are blush-worthy. Arthur Krock, if memory serves, acknowledged concealing (along with his colleagues) Roosevelt’s frailty in 1944. The paper had numerous other embarrassments even before the latest generation decided that objectivity was a myth.)

The sleekest figure in the newsroom, who visited occasionally from his private office in crisp navy pinstripes and silver hair, was a former London correspondent, E. Clifton Daniel, the managing editor. Somewhere along the way he had married President Truman’s daughter Margaret, of piano fame. Assorted Sulzbergers were visible, including the publisher, Punch. A young Sulzberger sat in the ranks of metro reporters. I don’t recall if he was doing rewrite.

It felt like the center of someplace important. I’d gotten the copy boy job by a fluke, walking in, a day off the train from Moline, and asking if they were hiring. Most of that staff came from college students on work release. Antioch College supplied a friend I hung out with investigating Manhattan. (People really did sit staring by candlelight-through-a-jelly-glass at pictures of Jesus, as a synthesizer moaned.) Godard College supplied a small young man with a dense black beard who wandered the newsroom with The Tibetan Book of the Dead under an arm. There was John Conti, who I think  became a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Lacey Fosburgh, a Metro desk assistant, wrote sophisticated novels and married Joan Baez’s war-resister ex. Ellis Nassour, a diminutive Southerner, became a writer (Patsy Cline: Honky-Tonk Angel). Barbara Bell, who told me I should read Orwell’s “Marrakech” and whose favorite novel was One Hundred Years of Solitude, married an ex-Baltimore Sun  news editor, Sam Abt, and moved to Paris. Despite Mr. Walters’s optimism, I got to stand with her just once at Herald Square watching Christmas tree sales;  one drink in a Second Avenue saloon while Scott McKenzie urged all to head for Frisco, one dinner where they lit the  crêpes Suzette . Working on the International Herald-Tribune, Abt redeemed himself by getting Waverly Root to write his memoir,  The Paris Edition, 1927-1934. (Forty-five years after The Times, an allusion to “Marrakech” made it into “Marley’s Rescue” in Hitchcock’s. So, a year later, did a story about a young woman from Iowa, a Wall Street quant rather than a writer, who faithfully recounts a visitor’s admiring “Oooh, zat is of zee Gypsies!” in “The Gypsy Ring.” Not everything went to waste.)

Overseeing the copy boys were Steve Moran and his helper, Sammy Solovitz, whom Moran called “the miserable dwarf.” Both were good to work for. Both were remembered by The Times in obits, which recalled days when real newspapermen smelled of printer’s ink: Sammy’s obit celebrates a “wise-cracking, hard-living mentor to generations of copy boys.” Is wise-cracking still allowed? Hardly matters. Seems unlikely today’s diminished newsrooms have room for copy boys.

I haven’t visited The Times in forty years. For a while, in the mid-80s, I wrote Sunday Investing columns for the paper. In the early Nineties, Diana B. Henriques wrote a sweetly generous piece about an odd duck in Baltimore who published institutional research on bankrupt companies from a row-house garret—and oh, had a first novel about to be published.

A few years ago, The Times copy desks were abolished.

March 13 2023

We carried on in Newburyport, a small city good for such stuff.  A bar crowd that wasn’t too familiar but generally recognizable. A single newspaper office across a street and up an alley from the saloon. That she was married bothered me not at all. People were too smart to be in love. How could you be? On any late afternoon at the Grog, the radio was banging out “Maggie May.” The weird person coming in the door was distributing fresh issues of Screw magazine. Behind the bar, Magic Sarah dispensed drinks.
The Newburyport News is a rarity among small newspapers I worked for: still at 23 Liberty Street, still publishing a print edition. It was owned by Philip Weld, who had been in Merrill’s Marauders during WWII. In the early 1970s he was a catamaran sailor and owner of four small dailies (if memory serves) including one in Ipswich that employed a future best-seller writer and pundit, Joe Klein.
The pay was so miserable that the managing editor John O’Neil, who had a wife and children, had to moonlight a couple of nights a week on the copy desk at The Boston Globe, an hour’s drive south. That benefitted me, because John liked me and recommended me for a part-time gig as well. The city editor, Bill Coltin, picked up a few dollars whispering our stories over the phone to a wire service or other buyer.
I had phoned ahead, jobless and past desperate (having driven east from the Midwest job-hunting in a recession) and got hired as city hall reporter. Found a $15-a-week room at El Rancho Motel on Beach Road in neighboring Salisbury, the only heat that February a small metal box with a frayed cord. My first full day on the job, Bill Coltin took me out to the embouchure, where the Merrimack River meets the Atlantic, for my first nor’easter. If I could have afforded gas to Florida I’d have left that minute.
The job turned out to be fun. My first night covering a City Council meeting, Mayor Byron Matthews called me into his office, where a few of his pals were loitering, and told me if I wanted to get on in Newburyport I had to understand who ran things. My predecessor, who hadn’t understood, was an “asshole.” (The predecessor also was now a reporter for The Globe, the relevance of which fact the Mayor didn’t seem to grasp.)  The next eighteen months were reporter payback. A few dissidents on the City Council supplied an endless flow of material. It wasn’t a corrupt city, just one where things were done to serve good friends . . . with an occasional snub of Massachusetts’s open-meeting law. Matthews survived my version of friendly coverage, got re-elected at least a couple of times before landing a job with the state.
Newburyport had become slightly famous a generation earlier, partly for a book of sociology called Yankee City and partly because an earlier mayor, Bossy Gillis, ran the city from his gas station. I didn’t see the place before Urban Renewal gutted the downtown.  Whether the buildings that were lost were historic treasures or slums or both I’ve never learned. Redevelopment took decades. Today Newburyport is a pricey bedroom town connected to Boston by rail.
In the summer there was beach-trodding on Plum Island with my colleague and a bottle of Zapple wine. Or runs in an MG up US 1A to a roadhouse called Rye on the Rocks, drinks followed by friendly groping on the shore.
Was there ever any news of note? A Weather Underground squad raided the Newburyport National Guard Armory in September 1970, preparatory to a bank heist a few days later in Brighton, where a policeman was killed. But the paper mainly covered the town, with its squabbles and minor problems.
 The only things I wrote that I remember were a couple of opinion pieces. One essay my previous employer in Illinois had refused to publish; there were still statutes criminalizing encouragement of draft resistance. I posed what I thought was a reasonable moral question. If a party (the state, say) is threatening your life (with a military draft, say), and you could remove the threat by murdering someone on your draft board, never mind the pragmatic questions could there be a moral objection against doing so? The essay ran without any federal cops showing up.  The other, in which I tossed off what I thought was a Menckenesque aside about Christian Scientists as heathens, got me bawled out by the editor in chief. I hadn’t been hired, he pointed out, to vent my spleen. Turned out that either the Christian Science Monitor was being printed on our owner’s presses, or an edition of one of the owner’s papers was printed on Monitor presses. Seditious scribblings were one thing. Undermining business another.
Ned Brown, who edited the section for outlying towns such as Newbury and Amesbury, had hired a new reporter shortly before I came on, Perry MacFarlane. Her son, born a few years later, entertains me some Sunday evenings with Family Guy. One summer there was a festival at a park, not the Newburyport Commons where the courthouse sat. A few bikers may have roamed; I don’t remember. I also don’t remember if it was Perry’s husband who sang something about “only castles burning”; it wasn’t Neil Young.
When the string finally ran out and the paper decided it really had to have some communication with the Mayor’s office, they helped me land a place on the Framingham News. That enabled me to continue moonlighting on The Globe.
A few fragments of Newburyport made it into stories. Wood floors that seemed to stay cold into summer. Dead wisteria. Two creepy tales, “Mad Hare” (Mike Shayne, 1980) and “Evidence Seen” (Hitchcock’s, 1989), were set in that neighborhood. A crime story, “The Freezer” (Hitchcock’s, 2013), was set in neighboring Salisbury, which had a beachfront carnival that closed up in winter.  We remember what we can.
My friend got a job offer in Binghamton, my next post, but stayed behind with her divorce lawyer.
March 14, 2023

                                                                                                          Photo from 1972 Copyright registered by Robert L. Dalke. Used by permission. Reproduction prohibited.

Was Newspaper Work More Fun in the '70s?

When the Sun-Bulletin, a smallish morning tabloid in Binghamton, N.Y., was put to bed after midnight, a few of us would truck down the highway to a roadhouse in northern Pennsylvania that kept late hours. The drinkers were unmarried, or lightly attached—in any case, people who had nothing better to do than have a couple of beers with someone they worked with every day. 

The paper had been acquired a year or two earlier by Gannett Co., which was on a highly profitable growth-by-acquisition binge. The staff fit neatly into offices with the Evening Press, a long-time property, on Vestal Parkway across from SUNY Binghamton. The pay was skimpy; about $140 a week. That supported a bed-sitter with kitchen and bath on Front Street, from an easy-going landlord who liked to reminisce about nicking hippies a buck-a-hotdog during the Woodstock festival. I was coming from another small daily, in Framingham, Massachusetts. The move consisted of packing everything I owned (except for books that got shipped) into an MGB with a caved-in passenger side, driving a few hours out the Mass Pike and down through the Catskills. (Thirty-some years later a Catskills village at dusk colored a short story, “200 Big Ones,” in Hitchcock’s.)  One attraction of newspaper work in those days was that if one city, or its daily, lost its charm, there was usually another paper not too far down the road looking for reporters or copy editors.

Binghamton boasted that after Seattle it had the fewest sunny days in the U.S. (A quick Internet search disputes this claim.) Winters began in October and ended in May. There was a week or two good for sunfish sailing at Whitney Point Lake. In the cool summer, a trip into the surrounding hills to a drive-in could mean a fog-constrained return at 5 m.p.h. The saloon nearest the office mixed Neil Diamond with the beer and roast beef.  All in all, not a bad place. The paper’s city editor and I took painting lessons from Harry Litchfield, a disciple of the Ashcan School. The morning and afternoon light on the hills could have kept a good artist going for decades.

A reporter whose wife had departed traded insurance-agent suits for fringed jackets and set up a permanent floating house party outside town. Another colleague (pictured above) became a legend one night servicing all comers in a bathroom. (I took my piss in the backyard.)  A tipsy news clerk ran her car off the road one bright morning-after. As fun went, it was pretty gentle stuff. 

The only story I remember copy-editing in the year and a half I stayed aboard was about a man who shot his wife in the head with a deer slug. By itself, that was mundane—we couldn’t describe the messy kitchen for morning readers. But a reporter hung out at court overnight waiting for the perp’s first appearance. When the shooter saw the reporter, he called, “You want to write something? Tell them she was the greatest girl who ever lived!” For some reason he was let out on bail, to be arrested for backseat sex with another man that turned into robbery.

The Gannett connection offered promise. The business editor moved on to a post at the Pacific Daily News on Guam and later was deputy editor at USA Today.

Newspaper work was definitely more fun in the Seventies than today. Several of the papers I worked for in those years no longer exist. Gannett, after some corporate shuffling and asset-dumping, is a $3 stock. Its future, if it has one, is online; the once valuable newspaper assets count now as high-cost liabilities. (The company cut 20% of its journalism staff in 2022.)

But my memories of Binghamton are an undiluted pleasure. The boat rental at Whitney Point Lake made it into a novel twenty years later (relocated for story purposes). After leaving the paper, I spent a couple of months in Morocco and Spain, then returned to another of my friendly landlord’s units. That fall of 1973, I sat by the open window typing short stories that didn’t find the right (saleable) iterations for six or seven years. A young woman passed on the other side of Front Street one afternoon singing, “Why do you build me up buttercup, baby, just to let me down . . .” I still hear that high, sweet voice hanging in the air.
February 27 2023

I’ll add a note while the ink is still wet. This is my benign memory of a brief period of life, but is not how I experienced it. There is a splendid line at the end of John Updike’s story “Grandparenting” that sums up the lives of Richard and Joan Maple: “Nobody belongs to us, except in memory.” There’s a good reason we reminisce. The past is all locked up, of no present consequence, and we can remember it as we wish. (This is counter to a trope that used to be popular in mystery novels, and maybe still is: that sins of the past reemerge to demand payment from the present.) My experience of Binghamton was that I hated the place and despaired of my life, which I viewed—at the considerable age of twenty-four—as a failure. The move  turned out to be a tactical mistake. Besides working on a daily in Framingham, I had been moonlighting as a part-time copy editor at The Boston Globe. No sooner did I sit down at the Sun-Bulletin than a letter came from The Globe, inviting me to apply for a full-time slot. I didn’t. There was the allure in Binghamton of writing a style book for the paper (on my own time, of course). That seemed more interesting than twice the pay, which Boston offered. That Binghamton management didn’t give a hoot about a style book emerged gradually: whatever came over the AP, Gannett or UPI wires was good enough for them. If I’d backtracked to Boston, no telling what would have happened—I might even have met my future wife a decade sooner; she was a student at Tufts and Fletcher. Whether she’d have hit it off with a Globe hack the way she did a decade later with an unemployed hack who was determined never, that February of 1983, never to collect another W-2, I can only speculate. But if I hadn’t sat near that open window in '73, would those stories or books have gotten written? So I remember Binghamton fondly.

Thursday’s edition of The Sun in Baltimore carried an obituary for Roscoe C. Born, who died at 95. I hadn’t thought of him in years. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, when I worked at Barron’s, Roscoe was a Washington writer the magazine had inherited when Dow Jones closed down the National Journal. It’s hard to grasp that he was younger then than I am now, particularly as I viewed him as an aged gasbag trading on his better days. When his copy landed on my desk, he was a pain in the neck to edit; if he hadn’t asked a question, he couldn’t see why a copy editor should ask it. His Washington reporting was otherwise capable but could have appeared anywhere, lacking the liberal-market fervor that marked Barron’s. He had, I think, little interest in markets of any sort.

In any case, Roscoe came to mind this morning as I’ve been trying to avoid work, and his name brought to mind those of other Barron’s colleagues. Most of them are long gone. Jim Meagher, who had worked with Roscoe on the National Journal, died a few years ago in his eighties. We enjoyed talking because he had gotten his start at the Rock Island Argus, and we compared notes on whether that was a worse place to work than the neighboring Moline Dispatch.

The commodities writer, Dick Donnelly, keeled over one evening at home in his sixties. He’d had an ideal gig: four days a week of exchanging raunchy and memorably misogynistic jokes with commodity traders and one hurried afternoon pounding out his weekly column. 

Frank Campanella, who did the legwork on Alan Abelson’s iconic column (and was in his own right a sensible investor), died a few years ago. After I left the magazine my wife and I had a cheerful dinner with Frank and his wife at a French place in the forties and then went up to the Plaza for strawberries and cream and violins. 

Bob Bleiberg, the splendid editor (and probably the last editorialist in America to defend aluminum house wiring), died in 1997. Abelson went a year or two ago. Michael Brody, who wrote good free-market editorials but considered himself a Maoist, left Barron’s for Fortune, then left Fortune to grow grapes in California, and dropped like a shot bird one day when he was less than forty years old.

Googling around, I saw the glum news that the former foreign editor, Peter C. DuBois, died this March at age 80. Funny how things stick to you. Peter affected a slightly British manner, collected modern art, and called me “Bub.” Sometimes I call my son “Bub.” 

Peter Brimelow remains upright, author of books on stock market gurus and immigration. Jim Grant remains not only upright but six-five or thereabouts, thriving as editor of a Wall Street standby, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, and author of biographies of Bernard Baruch and John Adams, among other books. No point to this note except recollection.

October 10 2015

(William Morrow, 1985)“The best book ever written on insider trading.” Norman Fosback, Market Logic
Miscellaneous ArticlesBarron’s Financial Weekly (1977-1983)The Wall Street Journal (1982-2009)The New York Times (1984-1988)

Also: Financial World, Sylvia Porter’s Personal Finance, Trillion, The Baltimore Sun, Warfield’s, Baltimore Magazine,  Fortune, The Boston Globe, The Washington Times, Reason, The American Spectator
Just for amusement sake, evidence that some people can’t hold a job: The New York Times (copy boy 1966-67), The Moline Dispatch (reporter 1967-69), The Newburyport News (reporter 1969-71), The Framingham News (reporter 1971), The Boston Globe (part-time copy editor 1970-71), The Binghamton Sun-Bulletin (copy editor 1971-73), The Annapolis Evening Capital (copy editor 1973-75), The Baltimore Sun (copy editor 1975-78), Barron’s (associate/senior editor 1978-83). 

This is a shot I took of Ayn Rand at her last public appearance, in November 1981 at a conference of the National Committee for Monetary Reform in New Orleans. I don't recall what she had to say except she wasn't too keen on Reagan. Jim Sinclair rightly called the gold market over for the foreseeable future. My Barron's colleague Peter Dubois and his wife were in New Orleans on vacation, so we had dinner together, spent the evening berating the magazine's managing editor; figuring that the conversation made it a working dinner I put the bill on the expense account. Rand died the following March. The managing editor made a stab at outliving all of us.
June 6 2017

Nicolas Deak , in his late 70s, doing not so badly with a blonde at the NCMR.  In the inflationary 1970s and early '80s, Deak's company Deak-Perera sold gold bullion at retail shops in several large cities. A native of Hungary, he carried a concentration camp tattoo on a forearm. About four years after I got this cheerful picture, a shopping-bag lady who claimed she owned half his company made it past security at his office on Lower Broadway and shot Deak dead at his desk. Commodity traders are as sentimental as anyone on Wall Street. Dick Donnelly, who covered commodities for Barron's, picked up word from his contacts that there was a "bearish indication" for metals, because Nick Deak had taken an unscheduled delivery of lead.

Harry Browne (far left) explains monetary corruption or somesuch to idlers at the New Orleans conference. Browne (1933-2006) was the first writer with a financial opinion who made me a buck. His book How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation in 1970 recommended outre strategies such as buying Swiss francs. I missed Devaluation No. 1. But gullible still, I shipped my couple thousand in savings to Swiss Volksbank, and the profit from the second devaluation paid for a few months in Morocco and Spain (at $5 a day, to be sure). Later Browne ran for President as a Libertarian.

Nelson Bunker Hunt  (1926-2014) lectures on similar matters. A few years later he and a brother cornered the silver market for a while.

Stale Journalism