Montpelier
I watched the dueling events on the 29th of April: the White House Correspondents’ Annual Dinner and President Donald Trump’s One Hundred Days rally in Harrisburg, Pa. The differences were striking. There wasn’t a black tie, I dare say, within a mile of the Harrisburg event. And there certainly weren’t any “Make America Great Again” baseball caps in the correspondents’ ballroom. There wasn’t any president, either, for the first time in many years. This was just as well. The current one doesn’t take ribbing and roasting quite as cheerfully as did, for example, the last two, and would have been very uncomfortable with the keynote address by Daily Show comedian Hasan Minhaj. Among other zingers — “Frederick Douglass isn’t here, and that’s because he’s dead. Someone please tell the president!” It’s best he wasn’t there.
Two of my heroes, however, were there — Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the dogged Washington reporters whose relentless chipping away at the stone wall of lies and silence surrounding another president eventually led to an unprecedented resignation. President Trump, in Harrisburg, to roaring applause and enthusiastic boos, described the correspondents’ dinner thus: “A large group of Hollywood celebrities and Washington media are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom. I could not possibly be more thrilled than to be more than 100 miles away from Washington’s swamp with much better people.”
Woodward and Bernstein spoke instead of the ineffable value of a free press. It was pretty inspiring stuff, especially in the light of popular attacks on “the fake media.” It doesn’t take much imagination or historical knowledge to remember that among the first steps of a would-be fascist leader is the need to demonize the media and plant seeds of suspicion between them and the people.
It reminded me, too, that once upon a time I wanted to be a newspaperman myself. Now I wonder, “What was I thinking?” but at the time (mid-1950s), it seemed like a very romantic thing to do. Working late at night in clouds of cigarette smoke under green-and-white hanging light fixtures, on old desktop Royals, banging away against a deadline to bring breaking news and hard-hitting commentary to the waiting world.
We lived in Syracuse at the time, which was served by two vigorous papers, the morning Post-Standard and the afternoon Herald-Journal. Someone I knew was a friend of the publisher of the Post-Standard, so I started there. I still remember the faint dismay I felt when I realized that the world of journalism hadn’t been holding its breath in anticipation of my arrival. It was clear from the publisher’s encouraging, but unpromising response that the ladder into the upper echelons of the hierarchy was a lot longer than I had fantasized.
But it was a job, which is what I needed. Copy boy, at $1.50 an hour. Essentially a gofer, on call to run copy from reporters to the appropriate editors, and from editors to the composing room, and — the most difficult part — twice each shift to run across the street for coffee and doughnuts. You can have no appreciation of the quirkiness of reporters until you’ve done a coffee run for about 30 of them. Everybody wanted a different style of coffee and a different flavor of doughnut, and each of them handed me a dollar or two, expecting exact change. At the end of my first run, the publisher asked me how I’d done. When I complained I’d lost about two bucks, he said, “Let this be the last time that happens. This can be a big moneymaker for the right boy.” Which, afterward, it was.
We were encouraged to use the teletype machine in the copy boys’ room, to become used to it in the event we were promoted. Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s use of endless sheets of paper, I wrote letters, all in teletype font caps, that stretched, in one case, from the third floor window of a Mount Holyoke College dormitory all the way to the ground below.
There was one reporter all of us copy boys hated. Blustering, imperious and forever reminding us of our subhuman status, he covered city hall and the crime beat (an interesting combination, now that I think of it). When he returned each evening from his investigations, loaded with notes and florid with municipal whiskey, he shouted for coffee and lit up a large glass hookah, which he kept in a bottom drawer of his desk. One evening while he was away we borrowed the reservoir part of the hookah, exchanged the water in it for green men’s room soap, and put it back.
Mack Sennett couldn’t have staged it any better. He rolled two pieces of paper separated by a sheet of carbon paper, into his typewriter, gazed ceilingward for inspiration, and touched off the hookah. He took a long, thoughtful drag, gasped, coughed and looked down at his lower drawer. “Where are those %$#@! copy boys?” he screamed. “Bring them to me at once!” He leaped up and scanned the room for us. We learned all this from other, friendly reporters. We couldn’t have seen it; we were crouched behind the farthest linotype machine in the composing room. Nobody snitched on us, not even the feared city editor, Mr. Strom. He gave us a wink and a thumbs-up.
It was a good job, penurious though it might have been. If I hadn’t had other fish to fry, I might have stayed. I remember vividly “putting it to bed” each night about 2 o’clock, hanging it up, and heading home — a 2- or 3-mile hike through the dark, empty streets of sleeping Syracuse. What a great time it was to be young, vigorous, employed and in love with the romance of it all. The romance, sadly, slowly faded, along with the aroma — I’d know it anywhere even today — of the hot lead in the lino room and the smoke from Mr. Strom’s stogies.
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
