copyboy for seven years. The ancient columnists, Mark Sullivan and George Fielding Eliot, seemed irrelevant even then, but we admired the radio-TV critic, John Crosby, although he never spoke to us, and the music critic, Virgil Thomson, who was extraordinarily accessible, and Red Smith, whom we never saw. Smith filed columns by wire and expense accounts by mail.
The prettiest girl—newspaper offices are depressingly funetional—worked as secretary to the foreign editor. One day the Washington wire teletypist, a volatile man whose hobby was nude photography, summoned his courage and bought her dinner in Greenwich Village. She accepted the meal, but not the donor. A few days later he displayed a dozen pictures of the girl, whose name was Gerry, as she walked about her kitchen, fully dressed. “Goddamn prude,” he complained. Later Gerry showed me photographs of herself in a bathing suit, taken while she spent a vacation in the Maritime Provinces of Canada. She was black-haired and trim with an appealing little swell to her belly. In our sudden intimacy, I said I was beginning to weary of fetching coffee whenever a hairy witch snapped fingers. Gerry said I had to be patient. I started to frame a reply, but someone shouted, “Copy, copy, copy,” and the music fled.
Mostly, the hours droned in abstract discussion. “Who,” asked Willard Hertz, the man from Columbia Journalism, “is the greatest American novelist, and what is the greatest novel? Two parts.” Willard was a bulky, bright Clevelander, whose father was a judge. While working as a police reporter in Lorain, Ohio, Willard had eaten an Oh! Henry bar during a police autopsy, he claimed. The literary answers he demanded were Mark Twain and
Moby Dick.
Anything else precipitated argument. “But, Willard,” said Henry Goethals, a tall, bony ascetic whose grandfather supervised construction of the Panama Canal, “there isn’t any single answer to that sort of question.”
“Oh, yes,” Willard said.
“Huck Finn
is a fine novel, but
Moby Dick
is unsurpassed.”
What was a better war book,
Three Soldiers
or
All Quiet on the Western Front?
Did Thomas Wolfe really hate Jews? Was
Spoon River Anthology
or
Winesburg, Ohio
closer to the tortured heart of America? Was Henry Wallace a populist like Bryan? Would Stalin exploit or respect him?
The debates rang, until someone called “Copy,” but they picked up again at once; so that being a night copyboy at the
Herald Tribune
was to audit lectures by untitled professors and to attend continuous disorganized seminars of bright graduate students. My own surest area was baseball, and with spring Henry Goethals asked whom I considered the best of hitters.
“Stan Musial in Ebbets Field.”
“What about Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio?”
“Nobody hits like Musial in Brooklyn.”
“Would you take me to see him?” Goethals said. “I don’t believe I’ve been to Brooklyn but once.”
We met at a YMCA near Central Park. I led Henry to the subway, and after forty minutes we reached the Brooklyn Museum station, where we walked out onto the sunlit mall of Eastern Parkway. “Say,” Goethals said, “this is nice.” I showed him the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and the lot behind the Museum where we had played hardball. He nodded and gazed at long rows of apartment buildings, studying them as one might study Tasmanian vistas. “This must have been an interesting place to grow up,” Goethals said.
We entered Ebbets Field through a rotunda, floored in white tile with inlaid designs of crossed bats. “Built in 1912,” I said. “Fine place to see a game. You’re very close to the field.” Our seats were in the upper deck between first base and home.
In the first inning, Harry Taylor mixed a curve and a fast ball and got two quick strikes on the Cardinals’ Number 6. Musial then lined a pitch against the right-field wall for a double. He hit the wall again next time up; no Dodger pitcher got him out
The prettiest girl—newspaper offices are depressingly funetional—worked as secretary to the foreign editor. One day the Washington wire teletypist, a volatile man whose hobby was nude photography, summoned his courage and bought her dinner in Greenwich Village. She accepted the meal, but not the donor. A few days later he displayed a dozen pictures of the girl, whose name was Gerry, as she walked about her kitchen, fully dressed. “Goddamn prude,” he complained. Later Gerry showed me photographs of herself in a bathing suit, taken while she spent a vacation in the Maritime Provinces of Canada. She was black-haired and trim with an appealing little swell to her belly. In our sudden intimacy, I said I was beginning to weary of fetching coffee whenever a hairy witch snapped fingers. Gerry said I had to be patient. I started to frame a reply, but someone shouted, “Copy, copy, copy,” and the music fled.
Mostly, the hours droned in abstract discussion. “Who,” asked Willard Hertz, the man from Columbia Journalism, “is the greatest American novelist, and what is the greatest novel? Two parts.” Willard was a bulky, bright Clevelander, whose father was a judge. While working as a police reporter in Lorain, Ohio, Willard had eaten an Oh! Henry bar during a police autopsy, he claimed. The literary answers he demanded were Mark Twain and
Moby Dick.
Anything else precipitated argument. “But, Willard,” said Henry Goethals, a tall, bony ascetic whose grandfather supervised construction of the Panama Canal, “there isn’t any single answer to that sort of question.”
“Oh, yes,” Willard said.
“Huck Finn
is a fine novel, but
Moby Dick
is unsurpassed.”
What was a better war book,
Three Soldiers
or
All Quiet on the Western Front?
Did Thomas Wolfe really hate Jews? Was
Spoon River Anthology
or
Winesburg, Ohio
closer to the tortured heart of America? Was Henry Wallace a populist like Bryan? Would Stalin exploit or respect him?
The debates rang, until someone called “Copy,” but they picked up again at once; so that being a night copyboy at the
Herald Tribune
was to audit lectures by untitled professors and to attend continuous disorganized seminars of bright graduate students. My own surest area was baseball, and with spring Henry Goethals asked whom I considered the best of hitters.
“Stan Musial in Ebbets Field.”
“What about Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio?”
“Nobody hits like Musial in Brooklyn.”
“Would you take me to see him?” Goethals said. “I don’t believe I’ve been to Brooklyn but once.”
We met at a YMCA near Central Park. I led Henry to the subway, and after forty minutes we reached the Brooklyn Museum station, where we walked out onto the sunlit mall of Eastern Parkway. “Say,” Goethals said, “this is nice.” I showed him the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and the lot behind the Museum where we had played hardball. He nodded and gazed at long rows of apartment buildings, studying them as one might study Tasmanian vistas. “This must have been an interesting place to grow up,” Goethals said.
We entered Ebbets Field through a rotunda, floored in white tile with inlaid designs of crossed bats. “Built in 1912,” I said. “Fine place to see a game. You’re very close to the field.” Our seats were in the upper deck between first base and home.
In the first inning, Harry Taylor mixed a curve and a fast ball and got two quick strikes on the Cardinals’ Number 6. Musial then lined a pitch against the right-field wall for a double. He hit the wall again next time up; no Dodger pitcher got him out
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