By C. Gerald Fraser (view Biography)
There are hard ways to get a job and there are easy ways. I got into journalism the easy way. Everyone should be so lucky.
From age 12, I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. One day, I told my godmother and she said, "You'll have to learn typing and shorthand."
I was born and raised in Boston. I don't remember how I hooked up with the Boston Globe, but when I was in high school I worked at the Globe as a copy boy on several big news nights – for example, election nights.
Initial journalistic experiences came on the University of Wisconsin's Daily Cardinal– a fine newspaper during my years there. I majored in economics.
After graduation, I returned home to look for a newspaper job. I don't remember whether I tried the Globe first, but whenever I did, I didn't get a job. One night, I accompanied a friend, Morgan White, who distributed the first edition of Boston Record, a morning tabloid, in offices in the Boston Herald, at the time a staid Republican broadsheet. Morgan and I went through the Herald newsroom long after the deadline. We delivered one newspaper to a man still at his typewriter and Morgan told him I was a college graduate who wanted to get into journalism. The man said he'd give me a job. He told me to go to the personnel office in the daytime and say that I had been hired. The next day I did. The personnel man told me, "I do the hiring here and I'm not hiring you." I later reported the episode to my would-be benefactor, who turned out to be a theater critic. He tried to make amends by giving me two theater tickets. I assumed that he had been a little drunk when he "hired" me. I applied to large and small newspapers in and around Boston to no avail.
During that year, after graduating from college, I lived at home and worked washing cars and, using a friend's credentials, including his name, Columbus Deloach, took a temporary job in the U.S. Post Office. I also trekked from Boston and New York to the West 136th Street offices of the Urban League of Greater New York. The League had a reputation for placing Negroes in white collar jobs, or trying to. I must have registered with the League at some point and they would telegraph me to come to New York for job interviews. I rode free on the train between Boston and New York because while I was going to college I worked summers as a dining car waiter on the New York Central railroad and I kept my identification card. A college roommate, Carroll Congo, lived in Harlem and I used to stay at his home overnight.
One telegram I answered brought me to their town house on 136th Street into a big room face to face with scores of hopeful young men just like me: Suited up, clean cut, and eager. That turned out to be a call for salesmen to sell five-inch television sets. The manufacturer, Pilot, reasoned that Harlemites, living in rooming houses or cramped in overcrowded apartments, would welcome a tiny television set. Carroll's father told me Harlemites wanted big television sets, consoles that no one could easily walk off with.
As the months passed, I modified my ambition and tried the black press. The nearest substantial black-owned newspaper was New York's Amsterdam News, a twice-a-week paper then. Thanks to the railroad I.D., I went there repeatedly. Tommy Watkins, the editor, always said he wanted to hire me, but he couldn't just then. But, come back. I did, again and again. In vain. His son now runs the pitiful Brooklyn-based Daily Challenge.
A Boston buddy, Frank Clarke, had heard me talk about my job hunting and my trials and tribulations with the New York Urban League. One day he said an Omega Psi Phi fraternity brother, an established older man in the real estate business, had just been named president of the League's Boston branch. A non-paying post, the president was usually someone with clout in the business community. I told Frank I was fed up with the League. But he persuaded me to see the realtor; I have forgotten his name. I met him and told him about myself, including my high school days' experiences at the Boston Globe. The realtor suggested that I go to the League's offices and Mr. Cooper, the Boston branch's executive secretary, would give me a reference to the Globe. Cooper, a tall slim man with almost no chin, interviewed me and asked, with an inflection in his voice that surprised me, "You don't have to start at the top, do you?" I said, "No, in the news reporting business you usually start off as a copy boy." Cooper wrote a name on a piece of paper the size of an index card. He instructed me to see that person at the Globe.
I didn't recognize the name. The Winship family owned the Globe and people with that name held significant positions. But I thought, give it a try. I went to the Globe, a building in the center of downtown Boston then, and, with bottled up excitement, stepped into the elevator. I expected to ascend to the seventh floor, or some high floor where the newsroom was. Something inside of me said show the elevator operator the name on the paper, tell him you want to see that man. I did. And, oops! He threw the elevator into reverse and we shot down. To the basement. I was imploding; Cooper had deceived me. I figured I would go through with the exercise to see how it ends, and it soon did. The elevator operator said take a left and I would find the man. Someone coming toward me asked if he could help me. I showed him the name on the paper and said, "I want to see this man." He asked in a rich Irish brogue, "What do you want to see him for?" I said, "I want to get a job." He said, "Oh, you can't get a job here. You're not in the janitor's union."
The Urban League had earned my everlasting contempt.
A year out of college, I decided to leave Boston. However, needing money, I went to work as a galley utility man – washing pots and pans – for the Eastern Steamship Lines, which, in the summer, ran cruise ships between Boston and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Near that summer's end, the assistant to the chef, an older man, died suddenly and I was promoted to his job. At least I had some upward mobility, I thought.
I planned first to try New York. If nothing happened there within a short time, I would move on to Cleveland. There had been news stories about the Ohio city's racial tolerance.
I think I applied to most of New York's dailies, there must have been 11 at the time. I skipped the blatantly racist papers – the Daily News and the Hearst-owned Mirror and Journal American. One day, I decided to try the Baltimore Afro-American. Planning to use my railroad I.D., again, I boarded a Baltimore-bound train in New York's Penn Station. I took a seat and behind me sat two white men speaking with heavy southern accents. Their speech grated on my nerves and conjured up visions of people in white sheets and burned black bodies hanging from trees. I said to myself, I don't want to go anywhere I hear that kind of speech. I got off the train in Newark and high-tailed it back to New York.
Somehow, I heard the Urban League was looking for someone to work as a reporter with Tex and Jinx McCrary. They were hosts on a popular morning radio program – a radio version of the as yet unborn Today Show. I had not come across a lot of aspiring black journalists around and Tex and Jinx were bona fide liberals, they had asked the League for someone, they knew what they would get. I thought, this is it. Bostonian. Big Ten graduate. A book full of clippings, as evidence of my journalistic skills. Good looking. Neatly dressed. Well spoken. I was ready. I was interviewed at the League by a tall, husky man (who later worked in the circulation department at the New York Times).
When I learned that I didn't get the job I was furious. I called the League and demanded to know, "Who was a better applicant than I?" Whatever the answer, it was unsatisfactory. I later learned that the job went to the daughter of a well-known black Philadelphia politician, Raymond Pace Alexander. As far as I knew, she had no journalistic experience.
Time passes. I don't know why, maybe I heard that Watkins had left the Amsterdam News, but I went back there. The new editor, G. James Fleming, had degrees in political science, journalism and sociology, had edited "Who's Who in Colored America." (After his Amsterdam News experience, he taught political science at Morgan State University.) He read my resume and gave me a free lance assignment: Do a story on the postal savings program which enabled people to bank at their local post office. At one place where I sought information, someone called the Amsterdam News to check on my authenticity. Fleming asked to speak to me and told me to come to his office. Curious, I climbed the four flights of stairs to the newsroom. He told me, "If I went to Harvard and you went to Harvard, I would give you a job because we were Harvard men. You went to Wisconsin and I went to Wisconsin, so because we are Wisconsin men, I am going to give you a job."
Like they say, it's contacts, who you know. It was that easy; I was on the staff of a newspaper thirty-five months after graduation.
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