My Life As a Muckraker (part one) As Told To Dr. Freud

Doctor, please pay attention. Your wife left some coffee for you. That should help.

There was another bizarre turn in my life. 

In the summer of my senior year at college, after struggling with my manhood for four years, I was hired by The Cleveland Press. It was the largest newspaper in Ohio. I was to be a COPY BOY. Yes, boy...B-O-Y. 

I took the job, of course, because it was my entryway into the profession of my dreams. But to be called "boy" 15 or 20 times a day, five days a week, was to say the least, 

unnerving. 

You understand Doc, don't you? 

Remember the cemetery? 

The broken little finger?

The Cleveland Press at E. Ninth & Lakeside
Photo courtesy of The Cleveland Memory Project

The press was a classic big city paper. One hundred twenty-five men, all in one room, all very busy, seemingly knowing what they were doing. We were working on eight deadlines a day, starting at 9 a.m. up to the Final Edition, at four in the afternoon.

(One inside secret. The Final always carried the number of stocks traded each day. That number was used by the gangster numbers guys to ply their trade. And then, of course, we crusaded in the paper against those racketeers, and allegedly helped put them in jail.)

The only other time I can remember holding the presses, was just before the final deadline on the day President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. lt was chaos, and I was caught up in it. (More on that later.)

The daily paper was pretty much the major source of news and information in those days. This was before computers, before cell phones, before cable news, before "alternate facts", before Trump. Remember those days, Doc? They were different. Truth mattered, and we did our best to get the truth, whatever that was, to 400,000 readers in the Cleveland metropolitan area.

The Cleveland Press city room 1955
Photo courtesy of The Cleveland Memory Project

Each reporter had a desk, typically messy, with at least one stack of paper and plenty of carbons. Remembers those awful carbons? Remember them, Doc? Carbon paper. Did they have them in Germany? Every news article, every movie review, every fashion story, had to be written in triplicate. It was messy, to say the least. Unnerving and slow. Remember white out? Every error had to be corrected on each of the three copies.

Once the reporters finally were finished writing, they called out "Boy!", and that's where I came in. I ran over to the desk, took one copy of the story to the city desk, (more about that later) and one to the copy desk...then took my place back in the center of the room again. It was not was intellectually stimulating, but if you kept your eyes and ears open, you could pick up bit of the routine.

For that, I made $35 a week.

The Cleveland Press City Desk

At least I was in good company, and I considered myself fortunate to have the job in those post war days, when the competition for jobs in journalism WAS FIERCE.

Among my colleagues, was Strobe Talbott, later to become head of the Brookings Institution in Washington. (I used to think Strobe was a funny name, but he turned out to be a pretty nice guy.)

Then there was Oliver Brooks, who ended up as a University Circle Inc. executive. And oddly, (in those days) a woman, Donna Shalala, who later became president of the University of Wisconsin and then Bill Clinton's secretary of Health Education and Welfare. Donna, I remember, was from Lakewood; a great tennis player. I often wondered how the guys felt calling her “boy” all day. It didn’t seem to hurt her ego. Who knows? Maybe it helped. That would be a good case to study, yes Doc?

Louis B. Seltzer

Well, I survived the summer in that hot, old city room as we called it. There was no air conditioning. A few of the windows opened part way. Yet our ultimate boss Louis Seltzer always wore a dress shirt and tie and a suit coat, maybe to show he was different.

And he really was.

In his book "The Years Were Good" he tells how he grew up on Cleveland’s west side, quit school after junior high and got a job as a mail boy at The Press. 

He eventually worked his way up to Editor. He knew the city and its people, a blue collar town and The Press, for the most part, was a blue collar paper. There were no aspirations to be another New York Times or a Wall Street Journal, or even a Chicago Tribune. It all started in the 19th century as the Penny Press, the first of the famous Scripps Howard Newspapers.

Perhaps The Cleveland Press was the first of the populist papers. In telling the news, we never forgot our readers. We never overlooked Parma or Garfield Heights, Kamm’s Corners, Buckeye Rd., or Glenville. It is said that we covered Buckeye Rd. (a primarily Hungarian neighborhood) like we owned it. Those were our people. We also helped put their councilman, Jack P. Russell, in jail. And many thought we elected most of the mayors and city councilmen in those days. Think of Celebrezze, Lochar, Voinovich.

We didn't care if the intellectuals in the Heights and Rocky River read The Plain Dealer. (The competition.) I understand many of the high brows in town did read The Press, but never talked about it. It was right for those days, Doc. We had an "editor" for almost everything. There was Ted Andrica the "Hunky editor" who went to eastern Europe to visit the relatives of our readers, for example. I'll get back to him, later.

When the summer ended, I went back to Ann Arbor to finish up my education.

Graduated with no distinctions. (No honors, a B minus average.) Not even a graduation ceremony.

I accepted an invitation from my fraternity brother Stanley May, to spend a week's vacation with his family in Toledo... yes Toledo. Mid-week I got a frantic call from my mother.

“Norman Shaw called, and wants to know where you are!”

Shaw was the number two guy at the Press. So I cut my vacation short, and headed home on the "Mercury" (the streamlined train that ran along Lake Erie from Cleveland to Detroit with a stop in Toledo) to begin my career as a journalist.

But it wasn't that easy...

Next: Sending a boy to do a man’s job.