that afternoon. Years later in a club car Musial recalled the day. “I not only got five-for-five,” he said, “I got every hit with two strikes.” At the time, the afternoon established me as a man of authority. It was a small step from lecturing the old Harvard football captain on baseball to countering Hertz’s claims for Sherwood Anderson with my own for Edgar Lee Masters.
Spoon River
stirred me, and beyond that Masters was a man with whom to identify. A Chicago newspaper had dismissedhim once as an inept writer. Long afterward the same paper requested a series of special articles and drew from the poet a thunderous, triumphant “No!”
Each copyboy was permitted to discuss his future with Joe Herzberg semiannually by appointment. You lost all immunity then. Suddenly, sitting in the center of a loud, busy, important newsroom, you had five minutes in which to tell a preoccupied man, whose budget was tight, why you, of all people on earth, were best qualified to join the
Tribune’s
reportorial staff. Naked pleas embarrassed Herzberg. His hands shook more violently when a copyboy approached and he grabbed a newspaper and started turning pages.
“I was, uh, wondering, sir, if there was, uh, any chance of my getting a reporting job?”
“Better come back and see me in the fall.” The newspaper he held snapped and rattled. “Go on. Go on. I’m listening. Is that all you have to say?”
“Uh, I see you’re looking at the gardening section.”
“Yes. It’s a fine thing to grow plants. Almost everything human is in flux. There’s a permanence to transplanting a tree.”
“About my career …”
“In autumn. Try in autumn. Nothing now.”
“Yes, sir. And I certainly will do some serious gardening between now and then.”
After each rejection, we complained about Herzberg. Someone called him “Flowerhead Joe.” But we were learning, from him and from the gentler people like Bob White, and just as surely we learned from one another.
Will Hertz could have followed his father into law and comfort in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Goethals, son of a physician at Harvard Medical School, walked his own path. A young man’s rebellion is no less determined because it is individual not collective, and as we took the measure of one another, down boisterous newspaper nights, we came to learn styles of rebellionand to sense that the
Herald Tribune
attracted people who longed to fight endemic wrongs, and who sought a life of new experiences rather than a repetition of what was prosperous, time-worn and safe. Exploring one another’s lives, while a great newspaper clamored around us, we strode from boyish loneliness and provincialism toward the greater loneliness of what it is to be a man.
If doors were not opened, they could be wedged. Beach Conger, the travel editor, sometimes assigned copyboys to write articles, for $5 or $10, insisting only that the writer really have seen the place he described. This rule became mandatory after a boy named Herbert Zucker sold an article, extolling Waycross, Georgia, as a second Valhalla. Taking Zucker’s prose as sterling, another copyboy, Ed Morgan, visited Waycross on a motor trip following his marriage to a daughter of Avereli Harriman. “We went far out of our way to get to Waycross,” Morgan reported on his return. “Zucker left out that Waycross is hard by Okefenokee. We had to drive miles of bad road through the swamp in 100-degree heat. We kept running into swarming insects so we had to keep the windows closed. When we got out of Okefenokee, we found ourselves driving past thousands of ruined cars. Waycross seems to be the principal auto graveyard in the South.” Morgan, tall and restrained, then said, “Nice piece, Herbie.”
William Zinsser, the young drama editor, assigned me to interview a female ice skater for the Sunday paper, pointing out that in a few weeks at Madison Square Garden the skater would play before the equivalent of a full year’s attendance in a
Spoon River
stirred me, and beyond that Masters was a man with whom to identify. A Chicago newspaper had dismissedhim once as an inept writer. Long afterward the same paper requested a series of special articles and drew from the poet a thunderous, triumphant “No!”
Each copyboy was permitted to discuss his future with Joe Herzberg semiannually by appointment. You lost all immunity then. Suddenly, sitting in the center of a loud, busy, important newsroom, you had five minutes in which to tell a preoccupied man, whose budget was tight, why you, of all people on earth, were best qualified to join the
Tribune’s
reportorial staff. Naked pleas embarrassed Herzberg. His hands shook more violently when a copyboy approached and he grabbed a newspaper and started turning pages.
“I was, uh, wondering, sir, if there was, uh, any chance of my getting a reporting job?”
“Better come back and see me in the fall.” The newspaper he held snapped and rattled. “Go on. Go on. I’m listening. Is that all you have to say?”
“Uh, I see you’re looking at the gardening section.”
“Yes. It’s a fine thing to grow plants. Almost everything human is in flux. There’s a permanence to transplanting a tree.”
“About my career …”
“In autumn. Try in autumn. Nothing now.”
“Yes, sir. And I certainly will do some serious gardening between now and then.”
After each rejection, we complained about Herzberg. Someone called him “Flowerhead Joe.” But we were learning, from him and from the gentler people like Bob White, and just as surely we learned from one another.
Will Hertz could have followed his father into law and comfort in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Goethals, son of a physician at Harvard Medical School, walked his own path. A young man’s rebellion is no less determined because it is individual not collective, and as we took the measure of one another, down boisterous newspaper nights, we came to learn styles of rebellionand to sense that the
Herald Tribune
attracted people who longed to fight endemic wrongs, and who sought a life of new experiences rather than a repetition of what was prosperous, time-worn and safe. Exploring one another’s lives, while a great newspaper clamored around us, we strode from boyish loneliness and provincialism toward the greater loneliness of what it is to be a man.
If doors were not opened, they could be wedged. Beach Conger, the travel editor, sometimes assigned copyboys to write articles, for $5 or $10, insisting only that the writer really have seen the place he described. This rule became mandatory after a boy named Herbert Zucker sold an article, extolling Waycross, Georgia, as a second Valhalla. Taking Zucker’s prose as sterling, another copyboy, Ed Morgan, visited Waycross on a motor trip following his marriage to a daughter of Avereli Harriman. “We went far out of our way to get to Waycross,” Morgan reported on his return. “Zucker left out that Waycross is hard by Okefenokee. We had to drive miles of bad road through the swamp in 100-degree heat. We kept running into swarming insects so we had to keep the windows closed. When we got out of Okefenokee, we found ourselves driving past thousands of ruined cars. Waycross seems to be the principal auto graveyard in the South.” Morgan, tall and restrained, then said, “Nice piece, Herbie.”
William Zinsser, the young drama editor, assigned me to interview a female ice skater for the Sunday paper, pointing out that in a few weeks at Madison Square Garden the skater would play before the equivalent of a full year’s attendance in a
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