Read The Boys of Summer Online
Authors: Roger Kahn
“Don’t worry,” Thompson said, “ball players haven’t overturned a plane in flight yet, not that there haven’t been some crazy enough to try.” The late sun lit the cabin. “Slowest trip I can remember. I’m afraid you’re going to miss your game.”
“I guess I can wait until tomorrow.”
“You can afford to. You’ll see a ball game every day from now until October.” Thompson winked. “You had better like baseball, young man.”
And writing, I thought. At twenty-four, I was passionately fond of both.
Ball players were returning to the Hotel McAllister in Miami when I finally checked in. I recognized Reese, wearing Puck’s expression, and the soldier bulk of Gil Hodges, and Carl Furillo with a face from Caesar’s legions. It surprised me how many Dodgers I did not know. I had begun to consider the absence of black players—they were not welcome at the McAllister—when someone poked my ribs and cried, “Hiya, Rudolf.” It was Harold Rosenthal, who was abandoning the job I would take. He was a round, stooped man of thirty-eight, with crinkly brown hair and eyeglasses, respected at the
Tribune
for deft writing. “You know Vinnie,” Rosenthal said. “This is Vin Scully. We’ll get a Scotch.” Scully had a long-chinned, rather handsome face, under a shock of red hair. He was the number three broadcaster on the unit which Barber led.
“Into the gymnasium,” Scully proclaimed.
“Yes,” I said, vaguely. “Hey, Harold. How was the game?”
“Eech,” Rosenthal said. He waved his right hand in a deprecatory motion. “Into the gym.”
When drinks came to our table near the bar, I tried again. “How did it go tonight?” I said.
“What?” Rosenthal said.
“The game.”
“We win, 5–3. Forget it.”
“Just an exhibition,” Scully said.
I still wanted to talk baseball, to draw out the men.
“Pitching good?”
“Whoop,” Scully cried. “There goes one.”
“One what?”
“You know why I call this place the gym,” Scully said. “You’ll see more whores chasing more ball players than in any other place in the world.”
“And breaking the New York A.C. record for the sixty-yard dash time after time,” Rosenthal said.
“Time after time,” Scully sang, in a pleasant baritone voice.
The Miami baseball field possessed some of the gingerbread modernity that characterized the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The stadium roof was a cantilevered arch. Tubes of neon served as foul poles. The press box consisted of individual booths where reporters sat glassed in and comfortable. “Wow,” I said. “This is going to be all right.”
“Now listen,” Rosenthal said, “if you’re gonna cover this club, there are a few things you better learn right away. First, don’t use words like ‘wow.’ Second, when you get excited, you talk too fast. Third, get your hair cut. This is no place for a Jewish musician.”
“Right. I know what you mean.”
“You don’t know what I mean. Now when there’s a night game, you file for the Early Bird by two in the afternoon. Three pages. For the next edition you sub.
‘Preacher Roe was on the mound before 8,000.’
You know how to do that? Then you sub-all afterward. You’re not down here for the goddamn sunshine.”
“Is it very hard?”
“Is what very hard?”
“The pace. Is that why you’re giving up the club?”
Rosenthal sighed. His round cheeks puffed and deflated. He had come to the paper in the Depression, he explained, when it was hard for a Jew to get a decent job. He’d been forced to wait years to be hired. “Isn’t that something?” he said. “Now I’m walking away from the best sportswriting job in New York.”
“Why?”
“I can’t bring up a family this way. It’s two weeks at home and two weeks on the road most of the year. My wife finally had enough and said, ‘What’s it going to be, the marriage or the team?’”
Rosenthal’s large, sad face hung open for an instant. Then he said harshly, “Come on. Let’s go see the Hun-yaks.”
“Hun-yaks?”
“The people you’re down here to write about. The ball players.” He led me under the grandstand, through a door marked “No Admittance” into a dressing room tiled in pumpkin-colored slabs, where Jackie Robinson was standing up and saying, in great excitement, “It wasn’t a heart attack. Nothing like that. It was just a muscle strain in my chest.”
“Robinson,” Rosenthal said, “is not afraid to be dramatic.”
“I’m a fan of his,” I said.
“That’s your problem,” Rosenthal said.
“Who’s the horse-faced guy in the corner?”
“Cox.”
“Bill Cox.”
“Billy Cox,” Rosenthal said. “Don’t go doing that in the paper. It was
Bill
Terry but it’s
Billy
Cox.”
“Okay,” I said, “but please, Harold, not so loud.”
“You’re talking too fast,” Rosenthal said, “and, Christ, remember that haircut.”
The players were dressing before lockers that lined the pumpkin wall. “Okay,” Rosenthal said, “let’s go down the line.
This is Pee Wee Reese,” Rosenthal said. “He’s the captain. Good morning, Captain. Here’s the new fella.”
“He won’t get anywhere hanging around with me,” Reese said. “You told him that, didn’t you, Harold?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I’m not good copy,” Reese said and flickered a smile.
“Look, I’m just glad to meet you. I’ve been watching you play for a long time.”
“Well, I’ve been playing for a long time.” He winked at Rosenthal, whose elbow nudged me to move.
“This is Jackie Robinson,” Rosenthal said. “Hey, Jack,” he shouted. “You’re okay?”
“Yeah,” Robinson said. “It was just some muscle pulls. The cardiogram was negative.” Robinson shook my hand warmly over a fierce look, a large, handsome and commanding man.
Proceeding, I met Clem Labine (“He’s got sense; he won’t need the players’ pension”), Carl Erskine (“classy guy”), Preacher Roe (“a pitching scholar”) and Roy Campanella. “You’ve got to be a little careful with Campy,” Rosenthal said, behind his hand. “Roy kind of exaggerates. He gets carried away.”
Suddenly Reese’s head was alongside Rosenthal’s. On the way to the field he had paused to eavesdrop. “Isn’t that
right,
Pee Wee?” Rosenthal refused to be embarrassed.
“Well,” Reese said slowly, “let’s put it like this: with Campy catching, on a close play at home plate nobody has ever been safe.”
After a while we went upstairs and Rosenthal introduced me to an unusual-looking man, whose features seemed a cross of Amerindian and south Italian. Dick Young, of the
Daily News,
was blinking against daylight.
“Young will take care of you till you get set,” Rosenthal said.
“Yeah, sure,” Young said. “Anything you want.” He sat in the press room, stirring a Scotch and soda with a large plastic swizzie
stick shaped like a pair of crossed bats.
“Harold,” I said, “I’m gonna take care of myself.”
“You can’t do it right away. Don’t you understand? This job is too big.”
“I’ll give you what you need, kid,” Young said.
I shook my head. Vin Scully joined us. He began to talk about a friend who worked in Europe. I’m no goddamn novice, I thought as Scully spoke. “This guy travels,” Scully said, “to Florence, Paris, London. Well, we travel, too.
Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis.”
Rosenthal and Young laughed. What’s wrong with Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and St. Louis? I thought. The names excited me. I had never been to any of the cities that Vin Scully, at twenty-five, dismissed in a worldly way.
Rosenthal left Florida and the team on Monday, March 25. It was an off day; no game was scheduled. My first problem, then, was to decide what to write. “Today’s story,” Young announced, “is Clem Labine.” The pitcher had developed a swelling on the inside of his right forearm, near the elbow.
“The trainer says it’s nothing,” I told Young.
“Yeah.” I was following him through the lobby of a Miami Beach hotel called Sea Gull, nicknamed Siegal, where the manager gave sportswriters a cabana without charge.
“Well, if the trainer says it’s nothing, how can we make it a big thing?”
Young entered the cabana, changed into a bathing suit, pulled a bridge table into the sun and started to type. “Because it’s
not
nothing,” he said. “You talked to him this morning?”
“Sure.”
“Well, so did I. He’s really worried.”
After a while, I typed:
MIAMI, Fla., March 26—A muscle knot about the size of a small potato cropped up in Clem Labine’s forearm today and threw a kink
into the Dodgers’ plans for the 26-year-old pitcher who is Manager Chuck Dressen’s choice as most likely to succeed Don Newcombe as the team’s big righthanded winner.
A discussion of Dodger pitching followed. When I finished, Young gave me his story and examined mine. He had written a similar piece, except that the muscle knot, in the
News,
would be “the size of an adult walnut.”
Loneliness hit me at night. I had felt the Miami Beach sun, tried the surf outside the Siegal and written my first Dodger story. Now, on a warm, restless March evening, there wasn’t anyone to talk to.
“What are you doing?” Someone approached as I stood in the marble lobby. I spun. It was Clem Labine. “How about a movie?” he said.
“Sure. Say, Clem. How’s the arm?”
“About the same as it was at 11 A.M.”
Labine was a well-built, handsome man, with a pointed boyish face under a careful crew cut. He wore light slacks, a tomato sports shirt, and a pale sports jacket that fit beautifully. “There’s something nearby,” he said, “called
Moulin Rouge,
about the French painter Toulouse-Lautrec.”
Near the box office, Labine pushed in front of me and bought both tickets. “I asked you,” he said. For the next two hours, while I watched Jose Ferrer hobble and Zsa Zsa Gabor whirl, while a haunting sentimental song resounded and the astonishing palette of Lautrec brightened the screen, even as Ferrer-Lautrec grown weary but not old lay on his deathbed, I could not forget that at my elbow, indeed my host, was a gentleman whose career I had discussed clinically, as though he were of cardboard, and whose end in baseball I had considered only in terms of Dodger games won and lost, which is to say inhumanely, for the 350,000 daily readers of the New York
Herald Tribune.
Three days later, Labine was throwing to a catcher in the bullpen of empty Miami Stadium as I walked by. “Hey,” he said. “Stand in there.”
He wanted me to assume a normal batting stance, to help with his control. I buttoned the cardigan I was wearing, fetched a bat from the dugout, trotted back.
“What’s the bat for?” said Rube Walker, the catcher.
“Help me take a normal stance.”
“Don’t swing now,” Walker said. He had no mask.
Walker squatted and Labine threw a sinker. Although Labine was not regarded as very fast, and was complaining about his arm, the ball exploded past the plate with a sibilant whoosh, edged by a buzzing as of hornets. I had never heard a thrown ball make that sound before. The ball seemed to accelerate as it came closer; an accelerating, impossibly fast pitch that made the noises of hornets and snakes.
“That looked all right,” I said to Walker.
“Don’t turn around, for chrissake.”
“Oh.”
“And it was outside.”
“Stand in there,” Labine called. He threw a dozen sinkers, closer to me, and after that began to break his curve. Because of certain aerodynamic principles, a righthanded pitcher’s curve starts toward a righthanded batter’s left ear. I watched the baseball approach. It closed with me. I was paralyzed. Then, at what seemed the last millisecond, the spinning ball grabbed air and hooked away from my head and over the plate. Labine threw another curve and a third, wincing.
Through a resolute act of will I held my ground. The impulse was not simply to duck, but to throw away the bat and throw my body to the thick-bladed Florida grass. “Bailing out,” ball players call this. Resisting was the totality of my strength. I could no more have swung, let alone hit, one of Labine’s pitches than run a three-minute mile.
“Okay,” Clem said to Walker. “Enough.” He turned and bit his lip and shook his head. “I just got to,” he said to himself. “I just got to.”
I passed him, stunned, and said, unthinking, “Hang in.” I went upstairs to the press room and drank an early Scotch and then another. I began to sweat, and then the shock of standing in gave way to something deeper. This was not my game, I knew. All the baseball I had played was irrelevant to sinkers that hissed like snakes and curves that paralyzed. What an odd arena for catharsis, the press room of Miami Stadium. This wasn’t my game, that the Dodgers played. I didn’t want to play this other game. It was too full of menace. It was the knotting of young muscles and killing self-demands.
A fast ball would shatter the human temple.
I didn’t want to play this game.
I had never wanted to play
this
game.
“What Labine have to say to you out there?”
It was Dick Young.
“He said his arm still hurts.”
Well, thank God, and the hell with it. Now there was a world ahead to write.
The
Herald Tribune,
toward which I hurried on a biting February afternoon in 1948, had begun imperceptibly to decline, although, as in Hadrianic Rome, existing glories obscured the onrushing dark. By the time the
Tribune
died in 1966 it had become an inconsistent and rather shrill newspaper, most valuable for its modest intrusion on the constitutional monopoly of the
New York Times.
But the
Tribune,
two decades before death, burned with élan, dedication, unpretentious intellectuality, and a sure and certain sense of its own place.
“Here we write,” Bob White, a bespectacled, cherry-nosed newspaperman said in the small hours of a Tuesday night. “Up at the
Times
they copyread. We have a newspaper here on Forty-first Street. They have an insurance company on Forty-third. This is
the
writers’ newspaper in America.” I was sitting beside White on the rewrite bank, near the center of the city room. In a midtown restaurant earlier, fire had sprung from the kitchen, charring tables and threatening after-theater drinkers. White had permitted me to listen on headphones as he took
details from a dead-voiced legman. “Damage moderate, mostly to kitchen. No panic. One woman sprained her ankle, and needed first aid. Unidentified.”
“Say again.”
“She’s unidentified.”
“Get her name, when we’re through, Sid, and call me back.”
“It’s late.”
“I’m here till 4
A.M.,
Sid.”
Like any good rewrite man, White was able to compose a complete reportorial account of six hundred words within twenty minutes. He encouraged me to try the story also, and in an hour or so I handed him three pages. It was 2:15
A.M.
Besides White and myself, the working staff consisted of a copyreader who lay snoring on a wooden bench set beside the horseshoe of the main copy desk, two men playing gin rummy on the so-called night desk and a grizzled deskman in the sports department, who had gotten drunk and was muttering and making occasional shouts, “Bitch can’t do that to me.” White ignored the ambient noise. “I don’t know if writing can be taught,” he said. “But I don’t know that it
cannot
be taught either. I like this late trick. Fellow who had it before me, Ed Lanham, used the slow hours to write short stories. He must have taught himself a lot. He got a contract from
Collier’s
and sold one story to Hollywood.
The Senator Was Indiscreet.
I didn’t think it was as funny as some other people did. Anyway, try to go lighter on adjectives. Nouns and active verbs carry writing. Or that’s what I think. Take this story of yours and try crossing out every adjective, and see how it reads and then, if you feel up to it, try again. It might work better.”
“Thanks, Bob,” I said, “but you need certain essential adjectives, don’t you, like ‘hot’ and ‘cold’?”
“Right, but in this particular case I don’t think you need to describe the fire the way you did as hot. As far as we know, it was an ordinary fire and fires ordinarily are hot, aren’t they?”
The
Tribune
was rich in teachers, who demanded only that one show an occasional spark, plus an abiding passion to learn. With a litter of newspapers before him, Ring Lardner sent his eldest son, John, to work at the
Trib
once, sharpening native gifts and taking instruction. Teaching techniques varied, to be sure, but the idea of teaching younger men was one unquestioned tradition at the
Tribune.
Another was that the brightest pupils, on pleading for a $5 weekly raise, would be turned down, then leave for
Time
magazine, or the indiscriminate opulence of public relations, or Hollywood.
By 1948 night copyboys earned $24 a week. When I was hired, my colleagues in austerity included an M.A., a prize student at Columbia Journalism and a bustle of B.A.s, including a former Harvard football captain. We reported at 4
P.M.
and stayed until midnight, with everyone rotating—myself on the night of the restaurant fire—the shift that spanned 8
P.M.
-4
A.M.
We shaped up at a plaster pillar, beside two communal telephones and the wood bench where the late copyreader, who worked from midnight to 8
A.M.,
had learned to sleep.
On my first hour at work, I tried to catch the eye of the city editor, my father’s acquaintance, Joseph G. Herzberg, a frail and deep-voiced man, whose hands shook. Finally, at 5:15, he nodded icily. I bounded past Herzberg’s secretary to shake hands and when I reached his chair discovered that one cannot shake a hand that is not offered. I reddened. Herzberg turned very slowly, annoyance in his eyes.
“I just wanted to thank you for hiring me,” I said.
“Oh, did
they
hire you?”
“For nights.”
“Oh, well, give my regards to your father.”
He turned and I walked back the path that I had lunged. Benny Weinberg, a stooped ashen man of forty, the night head copyboy, shook his head and clucked. “You shoul’n’ta dunnit,” Benny said. “Mr. Herzberg doesn’t like to be bothered by copyboys.
Now I’ll prob’ly catch it, ‘cause
you
spoke to him.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Weinberg,” I said and almost added that
Joe
Herzberg was an associate of my father’s. I held my tongue, but not in resistance to gaucherie; rather, at the
Trib
I was determined to rise or fall entirely on my own.
In the pure performance of his craft, a copyboy carries about pieces of paper on which newspaper stories are written. Most copy went from reporter, or teletype printer, to the foreign, national or city desk, then on to the general copy desk and finally to the night editor’s table, a sort of field headquarters. Benny Weinberg described each route and peril in exquisite detail. “Don’t come up too quick behind Colonel Ball, on the telegraph desk. He very much doesn’t like to be startled. You know not to bother Mr. Herzberg again. The night editor likes you to move quick. Keep alert. You’re responsible for answering the two phones. You pick them up and you say, ‘Editorial.’ Am I going too fast? Don’t be afraid to ask questions.” Copy-boys, M.A.s included, also suffered small drudgeries. We filled paste pots, changed typewriter ribbons and fetched coffee. In one instance a reporter flipped a cigarette to the floor and ordered: “Stamp out that butt.” The copyboy glowered but obeyed. For every visible copyboy, two dozen applicants had mailed résumés to the city editor. At the bottom of the
Herald Tribune,
as in a valley of fumaroles, one was conscious of pressure from underneath.
The most frightening figure on the floor was a pale, hairless creature who was named Everett Kallgren and called “The Count.” He was night editor. Customarily, we were summoned with the cry of “Copy,” which meant a story had to be moved and would someone please do it. Kallgren eschewed “Copy” for the denigration of “Boy!” The Count possessed a ringing, nasal tenor that twanged like a $1.98 fiddle but carried like a Guarnerius del Gesù. “Boy,” he twanged on my third night at work,
fixing me with eyes of gelid blue, “bring me three-eighths of an inch of copy paper immediately.” Someone snickered. Benny Weinberg pointed me toward a green supply cabinet beyond the foreign news desk.
“Got a ruler?” I asked Ben.
“Boy,” jeered the Count, meaning hurry up.
“Guess,” Weinberg whispered, desperately.
I brought Kallgren his paper. He measured and cried, “Boy.” Then he crumpled a superfluous eighth inch, while I blanched.
If a headline displeased him, Kallgren wrote a critical comment in red pencil and cried, “Boy. Take this over to …” He would then identify the offending deskman by name. Sensitivity in males excited the Count, and once he found someone whom his notes rattled, the man became a consistent victim. A tall, pale deskman named John Winders actually shook before Kallgren’s temper. “Boy,” the Count twanged one night, “take this head back to Mr. Winders. Tell him it’s wooden. Buy him an ax. Find him a verb. Show him this note.” As the copyboy walked the fifteen feet from night desk to copy desk, Winders, an excellent and committed journalist, fainted in his chair.
The
Tribune
was housed in a twenty-story building of buff brick that squatted on the block between Seventh and Eighth avenues, from Fortieth to Forty-first Street. The garment industry ran right to the rear doors and, two hundred yards east on Fortieth, the old Metropolitan Opera House presented a façade of soiled yellow brick. The region was eclectic; in the old
Tribune
neighborhood garment buildings, garages and orange-drink stands mixed into Manhattan drabness. Visitors entered the newspaper offices at 230 West Forty-first Street under bright globes stenciled with the
Herald Tribune
logotype. There was no hyphen between
“Herald”
and
“Tribune,”
which was a good thing for visitors to remember.
Tribune
men cared about such details. It was “the
Journal
hyphen
American,”
they said, but “the
Herald
space
Tribune.”
Production logistics ordered the lower stories. The second and third floors, really one prodigious room, contained eight high-speed presses whose roar, while producing 35,000 newspapers an hour, would have pierced the deafness of Beethoven. When a newspaperman speaks of the music of rolling presses, he is either faking or has had so much to drink that he will next sentimentalize appendicitis. The fourth floor was given to compositors, who set type and made up the pages inside sturdy frames of steel. Editorial—reporters, copyreaders, editors and, for that matter, copyboys—worked on five. Walking into the fifth floor from the Forty-first Street elevator, one passed banks of offices given to editorial writers and executives and random critics. Then, following a wide corridor, one burst upon the newsroom, a huge open pit which was usually but not frequently painted pale green. Reporters sat in banks of desks, extending from the Fortieth Street wall toward the center of the room, where the city editor reigned, surrounded by demigods. The office of George Anthony Cornish, the managing editor, occupied the extreme southeast corner. It was carpeted and contained a bust of Adolf Hitler that had been pierced and chipped by fusillades fired from Garrand rifles.
The path of prose was downward. Stories written and edited on five were cast in lead on four. Mats became plates and were fixed to the presses on three. Finished newspapers, produced, cut and folded by those astonishing machines, rode conveyors to street level. There they were bound and thrown into delivery trucks, which gathered nightly in Fortieth Street, blocking traffic and then fanning out through New York City, tanks setting forth on familiar maneuvers. At the Fortieth Street entrance a sign read
“EMPLOYEES ONLY.”
The word “employee”
was a mark of the plain face of newspaper life. A hospital or an advertising agency would have used “staff.”
Each day’s tension described a parabola. On the fifth floor of the
Tribune,
the curve rose steeply toward 8:30
P.M.,
the hour at which all material for the city edition was to clear editorial and stories and headlines, locked together with metal clips, clanked down a chute to the composing room. People who had to write the stories and compose or edit the headlines were invariably lifted along the curve. Some, like Kallgren, vented pressure through sadism. Others drank and smoked and, although only Winders fainted, I saw at least two reporters stuck for prose and near a deadline begin to cry.
“It’s upsetting like nothing else in the world,” Bob White said, late one night, after the first episode of crying. A reporter had sent a copyboy for coffee and pound cake. When the boy returned with coffee and raisin cake, the reporter began a diminishing outcry with a scream. “No. No. No. I don’t like raisins. I won’t eat the goddamn cake. Why couldn’t you do what I said?” And he started to sob. “Not everybody can take the life,” White said. “Not everybody should try.”
“I’ve never really seen a place like this, Bob, or people like this either.”
“I don’t imagine you would have, growing up in Brooklyn. But don’t panic. After a while, you’ll find good things, like whisky, flow more freely around this place than tears.”
The Artist and Writers Restaurant, a handsome, somber establishment with a sixty-foot bar of polished dark wood, attracted most of the business. Leo Corcoran, the head bartender, measured martinis with such precision that a crown rose above the rim of the glass and one did best to lean over to the first sip. The Artist and Writers was called Bleeck’s, pronounced “Blake’s,” for its owner, who had operated a speakeasy and not allowed women into the bar until 1935, at which time a
Tribune
reporter grumbled, “Next they’ll be buttering the steaks.”
Bleeck’s was on Fortieth Street, directly under a garage. With several of Leo’s martinis inside him, a baseball writer missed an assignment when he looked out the back window and saw torrents. “ ‘S rainin’,” he said. “I’ll write a rainout story at five o’clock,” and he returned to the martinis. The day was cloudy but dry. Workmen had been washing cars on the garage roof and the “rain” came from their hoses. Colleagues eventually filled in the man, and the story he wrote on the game he did not see was passable, although poorly typed.
The drinking press was variously furtive, as in sneaking a quick one to “get the damn lead off the ground,” gregarious, as when a story was finished and approved, and contentious. Irascibility and combativeness struck people unpredictably when the parabolic tension bottomed, leaving a man adrenalin for which he had no proper use.
The production of an enormous newspaper, Joe Herzberg has suggested, is nothing less than a miracle. “It never ceased to surprise me,” he said years later, while bearing the title of “Cultural News Editor” at the
Times,
“that somehow a finished newspaper emerges every day.” But the achievement of the
Tribune
then and of the
Times
then and now relies not on divine assistance but on mundane organization. Once lines of copy flow are established, once responsibility for various essentials—page make-up, photo selection, caption writing—is distributed and once the mechanics of production are subdued, the creation of a half million newspapers a night is no more miraculous than one day’s output of automobiles at Flint, Michigan. A technological marvel is no miracle.