Thirteen Months, Three Papers

Nothing more devastating can happen to a reporter than to have the newspaper that you are a part of go out of business. That's the way the first job I had in New York City came to an end. The Herald Tribune went under. I had been there less than a year, yet that brief stretch was some of the best of times for me as a reporter. Just to say that the Herald Tribune was special misses the point. There was not another newspaper like it, not in New York, not anywhere.

The Trib came close to being what a reporter believes a newspaper ought to be. The staff was a collection of brilliant writers, editors and artists with an almost obsessive drive to keep improving the model of a newspaper. And that included everything from the way stories were written and presented, to the photographs and the very design of the newspaper. That's a part of the reason it was called a reporter's paper. Every reporter who worked there had a personal story of what set the Trib apart.

Mine had to do with my first big piece. It was about the way life had turned out for a Puerto Rican kid in East Harlem who was known on his block as The Actor. The name was hung on the kid when he wound up with a role in a movie starring Burt Lancaster that was filmed in his neighborhood. I'd gotten compliments from editors. Excited, I waited for the first edition of the paper to come off the presses. What I saw was stunning. The article had been cut almost in half. I felt it was no longer my story. I headed for a bar to drown my sorrow.

"Did you see the paper yet?" asked City Editor David Laventhol as he spied me at my desk the next day. Before I could respond, he added, "I mean the final edition. Did you see that?" I hadn't. He grabbed that paper and thrust it in my direction. "Look at your story," he suggested. I did. I was flabbergasted. There was my story, just as I had written it. Laventhol explained. A first edition of the paper had been brought to his house. Once he saw the way my story had been chopped up, he called the city room, ordered an assistant to get a copy of the piece as I had written it, and had my story restored when the presses were stopped between editions. That's what set the New York Herald Tribune apart. But in New York City in 1966 the Trib was up against the mighty New York Times, and with mounting labor problems and bleeding circulation, it couldn't hold on.

I wound up at the New York Post. The Post was a job that allowed me to stay in New York City. I never liked the newspaper. As I was to learn, as an afternoon paper The Post required a different set of skills. The afternoon paper was mostly instant journalism. You covered a story and phoned it in to a rewrite man, dictating the facts as best and as fast as you could. The rewrite desk put the story together and filed it and then shared the byline. I never liked that.

It was at The Post, however, that Ted Poston came into my life. He had been the first black reporter to break through on a New York daily. The Post hired him in 1935 and sent him south to cover lynchings and the fight against Jim Crow politics. By the time I arrived at The Post, Ted didn't get out of the office much. He worked rewrite. At 60, various ailments had slowed him down. And yet he was one of the most remarkable people I ever met in journalism. You never knew when he was really hurting. He always presented a happy face. He liked to crack jokes. He was a master storyteller. And in the city room, he had the respect of everyone. He was good at his work and he was never too busy for a cause. He had helped organize the Newspaper Guild and he stayed a strong union man.

From day one at The Post, Ted took me under his wing. At the end of the day, we'd sit for hours. He would tell me of his time as a columnist at the Pittsburgh Courier and of his stint as editor of the black weekly in Harlem, the Amsterdam News. He told of heading up the "Negro news desk" at the Office of War Information in Washington during World War II. He described in detail what it was like going to Russia in 1932 to take part in making a documentary film on American racism.

In a way, he used the events he had been a part of to give me courses in black history. I learned from him of Langston Hughes, perhaps the most famous of black writers. To encourage my writing, he'd give me books. He'd always include a note. "Check this out: a collection of Langston's newspaper columns."

Some nights we'd stop at a cafe and have drinks. On one of those occasions I told him that I wanted to move on, that I was going to call the Times. He was encouraging. "There's so much more you'll be able to do over there," he said. I kept him abreast of my talks with Abe Rosenthal, the Times' managing editor. When I told him that I got the job, he was so happy for me, I thought I saw tears in his eyes. On the day I left The Post for the last time, Ted got on the elevator to the street and walked with me all the way to the train. Not long after that his health really began to fail. He died at age 68.

It was four days before the first of spring, 1967, and the colored kid from Clearfield had made it all the way to the top, to The New York Times, the most important newspaper in the world. On my first day as a Timesman, I made a bit of history too, writing a bylined story. I got a note from Rosenthal. "Nice start," Abe wrote.

And as it happened, the very month that I was breaking through at the Times, Bob Maynard was leaving the Gazette and Daily in York to join the staff of The Washington Post. The two of us, virtual rookies together seven years earlier in Pennsylvania Dutch country, had accomplished the climb to the peak of our business.