The Winds of Barclay Street: The Amusing Life and Sad Demise of the New York World-Telegram and Sun

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© 2013 by John Ferris. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 10/11/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2271-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2270-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2272-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013917918

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CONTENTS

Preface

Nothing Was Strange

Our Very Own

Who Speaks for the Hoodwort?

The Winds

Meskil, the Eel, and the Lobster

There Will Always Be a Raunt

Millie, Agatha, and Cinder Ella

Green Grows the Chudnoff

Those Lovely Ships

Our Greenwich Village Friend

The Winged Ant Totters

How That Woman Cursed!

Lies. Well, Not All of Them

What’s New? Nothing

Hatch Loves Lucille

The Importance of Being

Bloodied and Damn Well Bowed

Whahyaree, Whahyaree

Away, Away

PREFACE

In the years following the death of the New York World-Telegram and Sun, I used to encounter men and women who had worked on the paper in my time or in the years before 1951, when I came to the paper; and as one might expect, the talk always turned to the people who had shared our days and nights at Barclay and West Streets. These meetings elated us as if we were survivors of some wonderful experience that had left its mark forever on our spirits; and invariably, before parting, one of us would say that something should be done—a book written—to preserve our memories of the place before the past faded completely, we were gone, and our warm, foolish history was forgotten.

The past was not likely to go away all at once, but it was receding at alarming speed and had begun to seem unreal. This was not surprising, because the present in those days at Barclay and West had often seemed unreal, impermanent, and trivial; and what evidence we could gather from the paper’s early life as a Scripps-Howard property fortified the suspicion that intimations of a freakish existence were there from the beginning. I don’t think that Roy W. Howard, the publisher, or Lee B. Wood, the World-Telegram’s executive editor, would agree wholeheartedly with me, but they would tolerantly smile; for while the paper was serious in its handling of serious news, its impulses were whimsical and clownish. Its editors not being bound by too many rules encouraged originality, irreverence, and buffoonery, and those virtues—in our view they were virtues—found expression in city room behavior. It was that side of the paper we were destined to remember most clearly, and it was that part I decided to write about—not the financial transactions of its owners, not our editorial policies, not the early famous-name columnists (including Heywood Broun, Westbrook Pegler, and Eleanor Roosevelt), and not the Pulitzer prizes and other honors that came our way. What I have written is not a history, but an episodic account of the most agreeable stories.

All of the writing, except the piece by Ed Wallace, is my own—the parodies, exaggerations, intramural jokes in which the truth became lost between fact and fiction, the absurdities that seemed true—all of this insinuated itself into the columns of the paper without tampering with the serious news.

The New York Telegram was sixty years old when Howard acquired it in 1927. In 1931 it became the New York World-Telegram when Howard bought the World papers, and in 1950 the name became the World-Telegram and Sun. It was only thirty-nine years old by our reckoning when it died, since we counted nothing that had gone on before 1927. Between 1927 and 1966, its presses had rolled through nearly twelve thousand publishing days—Sundays and holidays were idle days, and time was lost to strikes—and about seventy thousand editions. A man who researched a political story of the 1930s told me that copies of all those editions were stacked in a warehouse in a wilderness eighty miles from the University of Missouri School of Journalism at Columbia, Missouri. The only microfilm record of the paper is of the day’s final edition. Thus many of the feature stories we called overnights—stories written for use the following day in the first edition—have been lost, because many of them were killed as fresh daily news developed.

The lower Manhattan background that may seem intrusive is important, because we were all affected, consciously or not, by our environment: the waterfront, the ferries, the market, the streets. The ferries have long disappeared, as have the piers and the market; and the whole area south of Chambers Street has become a new city dominated by the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

CHAPTER 1

NOTHING WAS STRANGE

" . . . to the smoke, the foul air, the uproar, and the monkeyshines of the World-Telegram city room." (The Saturday Review)

There was no air conditioning ever, and there were no fans until the final years of the paper’s life. The windows, factory windows, rarely were opened more than a slit, because the slightest breeze ruffled copy, and a strong wind or a sudden wayward gust sent everything flying. So we toiled there on the third floor—not only the news department, but the Women’s Page, Sports, Amusements, Business, and Financial, all in one big room, 175 feet long, that ran from Park Place along the West Street side almost to Barclay.

In extremely hot weather, on those humid nights when the indefinable stinks that betrayed the presence of New Jersey across the river seemed unbearable, the lobster or early trick men, arriving between midnight and dawn, removed their shirts. From the far end of the room, near the morgue, which faced Barclay Street, one got the impression the paper was being put out by nudists.

Air conditioning was in its infancy in the early days of the Great Depression, when Roy W. Howard raised his ten-story waterfront plant across the street from the New York Telephone Company and the Barclay Street Ferry of the Lackawanna Railroad, which ran out of Hoboken. Afterwards, when the nation’s economy improved, any major alterations of the building were out of the question because of the expense.

A large ventilating duct ran along the ceiling from one of the West Street windows to the Production Department, which operated in a glass-enclosed section of the room; but the shaft frequently broke down, usually due to a mouse in the works—or so it was said. Nobody knew how a mouse could get in there, and nobody cared or thought it strange. Nobody thought anything was strange.

Once, a city desk clerk gave a copy boy a message to deliver to Murray Davis, a reporter who had set himself up in a small office at the rear of the room because his investigative work required privacy when he interviewed callers.

Do you know who Murray is? the clerk asked.

Of course I do, the boy replied. I see him back there now. He stared at the distant lighted cubicle, which had glass walls. He’s standing up, talking to someone on the phone.

But when he went back there, he found the enclosure empty. Murray, in fact, was at that moment in India in a press party accompanying Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy. The boy returned to the city desk and looked back at Murray’s office.

I saw him, he said. I swear I saw him before I went back there.

No one disputed him. It was only when one was away from the room for a time that one saw things as a little odd—as outsiders, for example, saw them on coming to the place for the first time, seeing the old scarred walls and the line of concrete pillars: pillars and walls that every few years received a coat of green and white paint and overnight, it seemed, reverted to griminess.

Fans that made the hot summers more tolerable were set up in the late fifties. Earlier, a young woman from Oklahoma who came to us for a summer of New York experience on the Women’s page asked Lee B. Wood, executive editor, for a fan. Wood gave her a tall floor fan; but it was several years later before management yielded to the pressure of the Newspaper Guild and provided others. The absence of fresh air had no noticeable effect on us. Smoking was forbidden by law, as numerous placards reminded us; but everyone smoked—cigarettes, pipes, cigars. There were periodic Fire Department inspections. The inspector was always an amiable man who invariably paused at the reception desk run by Madeleine Curran, an elderly, indefatigably chatty lady, who held him at bay for five minutes while she alerted the city desk, which sounded a word-of-mouth alarm. The inspector would walk through the blue haze without seeing a lighted pipe or cigarette; and when he finally retreated and bade Madeleine good-day, she sounded the All-Clear and everybody lit up again.

Madeleine was not easily balked or outwitted. For many years there had been a City Hall custom of turning away cranks and people with petty complaints by advising them to go to The Sun, at 280 Broadway, at the corner of Chambers Street. We never knew how The Sun handled them; its receptionist, a man named Chanler, was ninety years old and frail. After Howard bought The Sun, in January, 1950, the cranks started coming to the World-Telegram. Madeleine had no trouble getting rid of them. Maybe she sent them uptown to The Times or The Herald Tribune.

There was only one occasion when she was visibly upset, and that was an internal problem. We had an artist, a good-natured, inoffensive lush, a man of small tricks. If the traffic on Greenwich Street or West Broadway displeased him, he would ignore the red light and, twisting his body into a crooked shape, act the bewildered cripple, while cars and trucks screeched to a stop and women screamed if there happened to be a near hit. He bought a monkey one day at Trefflich’s animal supply store in Fulton Street, but his wife raised so much hell when he took it home that he brought it to work. Wood ordered him to get rid of it, saying the city room was no place for that kind of monkey. The artist returned it to Trefflich’s and got his money back, because he worked for the World-Telegram, and Henry Trefflich liked the paper, which gave him a lot of free publicity.

Lee Wood fired the artist one day without ceremony, and everybody wanted to know why. After all, the man did his work, half-drunk or sober. He was punctual and never sick. Madeleine liked to tell the story, and people liked to hear it because she told it so well. A gentleman of some dignity, she said, had come to see Mr. Wood, and as he was sitting near the reception desk, an elevator shot up from the ground floor, the door opened, and out lurched the artist, more stewed than usual. Seeing the man of dignity, he took an instant liking to him, staggered across the lobby, and threw himself onto the man’s lap. Madeleine was terribly distressed. The artist had put his arms around the man’s neck, and Madeleine tried her best to separate them; but at last she had to call Wood. It was very sad.

The city room became familiar to millions of moviegoers in the late fifties in a film titled Teacher’s Pet, which starred Clark Gable. We never knew why the World-Telegram was picked for the movie’s background, but one day a squad of busy men appeared, photographed the room from different angles, made many measurements, and after several days went back to Hollywood and reproduced our office on a lot.

The layout of the room was simple. There were ten rewrite desks arranged in pairs alongside the city desk, and beyond the rewrite desks were those of the reporters. The most conspicuous desk stood in the front row and for twenty years belonged to a woman reporter, Carol Taylor. Its drawers were crammed with old notebooks, pencil-scrawled publicity releases, and clippings. On top of the desk were several spikes heavy with notes and clippings. From time to time, someone on the night-side surreptitiously cleared the spikes.

The astonishing thing was that the daily bantering, the rude humor, the laughter, clowning, joking, and antics around the city desk—the spirit of mockery and irreverence constantly lurking in the background—never affected the quality of the work. We could be serious without being solemn. We knew what merriment and bright writing were. When the second Kinsey Report sent a new wave of prurience across the land, Bert MacDonald, the city editor, ordered a Whimsy Report on the sex life of the oyster, which said in part:

Oysters have no code. Oysters pet when they are young. Oysters pet when they are old. Oysters regret nothing. Most male oysters approach female oysters as they, the male oysters, would like to be approached by a sexual partner. This is comparatively easy for a male oyster, who can remember what it was like to be a female oyster the week before last.

Oysters know nothing of the meaning of promiscuity, infidelity, or Kinsey charts. They have no fear of poor posture, facial pimples, mental dullness, or what other oysters think of them . . . An oyster bed is a happy bed.

After Ella McAvoy, a telephone operator, told Norton Mockridge, MacDonald’s successor, that her ankle, once broken in an accident, ached that morning and that it was a sure sign a snow, her daily forecasts were recorded for a month and then printed alongside those of the Weather Bureau in a story and summation written in a pseudo-scientific style. Subway and bus riders and homeward-bound New Jersey, Westchester and Rockland counties, Connecticut, and Long Island commuters got more than closing stock market prices before dinner when they read the World-Telegram. Sometimes an ordinary story was quickened by a suggestion from Frank Kappler, an assistant city editor. It was Kappler who suggested The Frayed Edge of the Sea, a parody of Rachel Carson’s best-seller The Edge of the Sea. The parody used for background New York’s polluted river and bay.

The intertidal zone is sometimes invaded by urchins who come down through the crowded streets . . . urchins of stout spine and shrill yelp and taunting screams. I have watched them by moonlight, gay, boisterous, in faded tee-shirts and tattered sneakers, romping among the switchblades, dancing around middens of zip guns and garrison belts, or, in tender, relaxed moments, chanting in chorus some old half-forgotten cigarette or soap commercial dredged up out of babyhood’s memory.

Reporters who had the skill and the self-confidence to risk a curt denial could try almost anything. Once a rewrite man had to do a piece about an aged horse that had died in Patchogue, Long Island. What could he write about the burial of a horse! Well, with Kappler’s encouragement and the cooperation of Herb Kay, news editor, much could be done and done quickly. He started writing:

Old Smoky, the gentle horse who became a disposal problem when he died in Mrs. Lucy Cutler’s garage, went for his last ride today—in a truck.

At this point the tune of the song On Top of Old Smoky intruded, and the parody flowed:

In life he was cheerful, in life he was brave,

But now dear old Smoky lies deep in the grave.

Would it go? Kappler read it, raised his arm in salute, and passed the copy on. Kay read it and yelled, Keep it up! Let’s have more!

Maybe this