The Jews in America Trilogy (135 page)

He was thirteen now, and had begun to think about owning his own newsstand. With his own stand, he could sell both
Tageblatt
s and
Forward
s. He would be buying from Metropolitan News, instead of selling to them. Two of his brothers, Lew and Morris, were now old enough to help out, and their mother could fill in while the boys were at school. There was a small stand for sale uptown, at the corner of Forty-sixth Street and Tenth Avenue. It was hardly the best neighborhood in town. It was also enemy territory, in that it was largely Irish Catholic. In fact, that particular section of the West Side was already known as Hell's Kitchen. Still, the idea of newsstand ownership appealed to him, but the price—two hundred dollars—made it seem out of the question, though he could not help talking about it, and how he would run it, if only two hundred dollars could somehow miraculously be delivered into his hands. It was then that a strange stroke of luck occurred.

Returning home one evening, David noticed a mysterious stranger standing near the doorway of the Sarnoffs' tenement house. It was a woman, and she did not seem to be from the neighborhood—she was too well dressed, and her English was too precise—but she engaged him in conversation. Was it true that his father was too ill to work? (Never in good health, Abe Sarnoff had literally starved himself while working at his trade as a painter in order to send for his wife and children, and was now bedridden as a result.) Was it true that the thirteen-year-old David was now supporting his entire family? Was it true that he sang in the synagogue choir, and picked up an extra dollar or two singing at weddings and bar mitzvahs? Was it true that he needed two hundred dollars to buy a newsstand?
When he had answered all these questions in the affirmative, the woman handed David Sarnoff an envelope, and then slipped quietly away into the night. In the envelope was exactly two hundred dollars. Was it a miracle, or luck, or a bit of each? David Sarnoff would not know the answer until many years later.

As the proprietors of their own newsstand, the Sarnoffs moved out of their Monroe Street tenement into slightly larger quarters, closer to their new business, on West Forty-sixth Street. And now that his mother and brothers were set up in business, with David himself making twice-daily rounds with his cart to collect his papers for his stand, he decided that this might be the moment for him to secure a regular salaried job. Schooling for him was over, and in those days there were no working-paper requirements for someone his age to take a full-time job. While peddling newspapers he had learned a great deal about the power of the press, and had even used this knowledge to good advantage at Stuyvesant High School. In an English class, his teacher had been discussing
The Merchant of Venice
, and had held up the character of Shylock as “typical” of Jewish cruelty and greed. David Sarnoff had protested this interpretation, and had been hauled into the principal's office for disrupting the classroom. The principal had tried to smooth things out between David and the teacher, but the teacher had been adamant: either David Sarnoff would be banned from his classroom or he, the teacher, would resign. With that, David mentioned that some of the Jewish newspapers, with whom he had connections, might be interested in the fact that New York's public schools were teaching anti-Semitism. Miraculously, the tables were turned. David was restored to his English class, and the teacher's resignation was accepted.

Experiences such as this had led Sarnoff to think about a career as a newspaper reporter. A reporter's life was considered an exciting and glamorous one in those days, when dozens of New York dailies competed fiercely with one another for scoops on the biggest stories, for circulation, and for advertising space. The newspaper reporter had to be quick and resourceful, and often had to involve himself in scrapes and daring adventures, as he kept his finger on the pulse of the big city. And so, one afternoon, Sarnoff took himself down to the offices of James Gordon Bennett's
New York Herald
, in Herald Square. Bennett,
the father of sensationalist “yellow” journalism in America, had turned the
Herald
into one of the most powerful papers in town. Directed to the personnel department, Sarnoff was told that he could be used as a messenger at five dollars a week, plus ten cents an hour overtime, and was handed a uniform and a bicycle. There was only one problem: his new employer was not the
New York Herald
at all. It was the Commercial Cable Company, whose offices were next door. He had walked into the wrong building. Thus, through luck again or happy accident, the future board chairman of the Radio Corporation of America found himself, not in the newspaper business, but in the fledgling radio and electronics industry—the very industry that, in Sarnoff's lifetime, would help account for the demise of most of New York's newspapers, including the
Herald
.

As it happened, one of Commercial Cable's biggest subscribers then was the
Herald
, and much of Sarnoff's work involved delivering telegraphed dispatches to and from the newspaper. In order to understand the priority of the messages he was transporting, it behooved him quickly to learn the Morse code. He thus, while barely in his teens, became aware of the increasing importance of radiotelegraphy—“wireless,” as it was called—as a medium for transmitting news. In his spare time, he began reading everything he could find on the new communications method, and during slow periods of the day he was permitted to practice on the telegraph key, and to tap out coded conversations between his Herald Square office and a young counterpart who worked in Commercial Cable's downtown office on Broad Street.

Great strides had been made in the field of radio communications since the turn of the century. In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi's brainchild had demonstrated his global possibilities when a faint signal, beamed across the Atlantic from the Cornish coast of England, was received at Saint John's, Newfoundland, and it was not long before actual voices and scraps of music were being transmitted, albeit often very indistinctly, across the primitive airwave frequencies in addition to dots and dashes. It did not take much imagination to realize that, as techniques were perfected, the airwaves might be used to transmit entertainment, and not just news, from one part of the world to another, and that this entertainment might have
commercial value, much as the movies did.

The United States Navy had gone so far as to undertake a feasibility study to determine whether or not radio signals might one day be used to replace its flocks of carrier pigeons. But the commercial possibilities of radio had failed to catch the imagination of the general public—perhaps because the technology was so hard to envision. It was easy enough to understand how the human voice, or an electric current, could be made to travel through a wire. Every child, after all, had rigged a telephone of sorts using two paper cups and a string, and the use of business and residential telephone service was expanding rapidly. But that sounds could also travel electronically through the empty ether was a difficult concept to grasp, as was the theory—which was being explored by scientists even then—that one day a system would be devised whereby the air could also be filled with thousands of invisible colored pictures, which could be picked up by millions of home receivers. To the public, radio remained an interesting little gadget, the bailiwick of a few scientists and operators scattered in a handful of stations in remote places, but of no significant social importance. When plans for the British White Star Line's great flagship,
Titanic
, were announced, and it was learned that the vessel would be equipped with a radio communications system, most people assumed that this was no more than a promotional gimmick. When David Sarnoff tried to explain radiotelegraphy and radiotelephony to his mother, Leah Sarnoff could not understand it, and so had no idea what her son's new job entailed. This embarrassed her. When friends asked Leah what young David was up to, she told them he had become a plumber, to which they replied, “That's nice!”

Plumbing, however, was about the only enterprise David Sarnoff was not involved in. Every morning, before reporting to work at Commercial Cable, he spent four hours collecting and delivering papers to the family newsstand. In the evenings, when he was not studying electronics, there was choir practice. In the year 1906, however, when Sarnoff was not quite sixteen, two interconnected events occurred that provided a temporary setback to his career. The Jewish High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, were approaching, and Sarnoff asked his employer for these days off, without pay, explaining that he was needed in the choir. He was bluntly told not only that
he could have the days off but that, for asking, he was fired. This was a double blow because, simultaneously, his usefulness to the choir as a boy soprano was also coming to an end for natural reasons. His choirmaster had already docked him a nickle off his wages for failing to reach high C.

It was not long, though, before he found another job, with the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. The job was lowly enough—as an office boy. And the starting pay was only $5.50 a week, with no allowance for overtime. But its importance was that he was now working for the inventor who held the first patent for wireless telegraphy using electromagnetic waves—Marconi himself, who had also developed the antenna principle. The successor to Marconi's company would be called the Radio Corporation of America.

For the next few years, Sarnoff worked for Marconi, steadily moving upward in the ranks: to an assistant radio operator, with a salary of sixty dollars a month, and then to full operator, for seventy dollars a month. Much of his time was now spent in a series of remote outposts and on ships at sea, as a “sparks” for shipping companies that had installed the Marconi systems. In the spring of 1912, he was back in New York, where the John Wanamaker department store had placed a radio station on its top floor. A similar station had been installed in Wanamaker's Philadelphia store, and the stated purpose of the two stations was to facilitate interoffice communications and ordering between the two branches. Actually, it was more of a public relations stunt. Wanamaker's had suspected that, like Morris Kohn's electric train, the presence of a radio station in the store would draw crowds, and they were right. Shoppers congregated outside the glass window of the little studio to watch young David Sarnoff briskly sending and receiving messages between New York and Philadelphia over the newfangled wireless. The station's top-floor location served a double purpose. The reception was better from there, but it was also true that, in order to see the show, Wanamaker's customers had to pass through all the other selling floors, which featured other temptations. It was one of the first commercial uses to which radio had been put.

In the early evening of April 14, 1912, David Sarnoff, wearing his headset and punching his little keys and buttons, was doing his routine job at Wanamaker's—a job that may
have begun to seem a bit boring, and even somewhat demeaning, since he was essentially an entertainer performing for spectators. All at once he received a faint and alien signal. It came, he quickly determined, from the S.S.
Olympic
, fourteen hundred miles away in the north Atlantic. Once he had asked that the message be repeated, its import was clear. The
Titanic
, bound for New York, had struck an iceberg at full speed, and was sinking fast. The
Olympic
was steaming to its rescue. Immediately, Sarnoff focused his radio's full power on the
Olympic
's signal, which repeated the SOS message again and again.

The
Titanic
, hailed as the crowning glory of the British shipbuilding industry and the pride of the White Star Line, was the largest, fastest, most luxurious ocean liner in the world. Its building and launching had been much publicized, and it had been touted as “unsinkable.” This was its maiden voyage, and aboard it for the gala crossing were hundreds of prominent Americans and Europeans. One of the worst marine disasters in history was under way.

While trying to radio other ships that might be in the area, Sarnoff telephoned the newspapers, and within hours special editions were on the streets. As the night wore on, Wanamaker's kept its doors open, and crowds of friends and relatives of
Titanic
passengers, along with the merely curious, poured in, begging for news of survivors. Presently a police barricade had to be set up to protect Sarnoff from the mob, and give him the quiet he needed to transcribe his signals. Only a few special people were allowed into the studio with him—Vincent Astor, whose father, John Jacob Astor, was on the ship, and the sons of Isidor Straus, the head of Macy's, who was also aboard. Meanwhile, in Washington, President William Howard Taft ordered all other radio stations in the United States shut down so that nothing might interfere with the signals Sarnoff was receiving at Wanamaker's. At 2:20
A.M.,
Atlantic time, the news was heard that the
Titanic
had sunk.

For seventy-two hours, Sarnoff sat at his post listening, as, intermittently, the names of known survivors, who had been picked up by the
Olympic
and other radio-equipped vessels that had been in the vicinity, came trickling in. Then came the lengthening list of those known to have perished, and the word from White Star officials admitting a “horrible loss of life.” John Jacob Astor's name was among the casualties. So was
that of traction heir Harry Elkins Widener, who went down clutching a 1598 edition of Bacon's essays, and whose mother would donate the world's largest college library to Harvard in his memory.

Then came the tales of heroism and courage. Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus had each refused to enter a lifeboat without the other, preferring to go down together. Benjamin Guggenheim, of the copper-smelting family, had ordered his valet to dress him in his evening clothes, and refused to don a life jacket, since he wanted to go down like a gentleman.
*
There were tales of cowardice, too—of men who shouldered women and children aside to clamber aboard lifeboats first, of men who had dressed in women's clothing in order to do the same, of at least one man who had forced his way into a lifeboat wielding a pistol. In all, the total number of lives lost came to a staggering 1,513, and of the 2,224 aboard only 711 had been saved.