My Life As a Muckraker (part two) As Told To Dr. Freud (Sending a boy to do a man's job.)

I'm sorry I missed my session last week, Doctor, but I had a bad cold and I didn't want to give it to you. Your wife said it was your policy that I had to pay for missed sessions. I gave her my card. (He nodded at me looking not at all embarrassed. I was annoyed, but I didn't say anything.)

Just to sum up from last time Doc, you recall that I was hired by the Press right out of college, spent a few days in Toledo, then hopped the Mercury Streamliner to begin my career as a journalist.

You might expect that at my moment of triumph, I would have jumped off the train at the terminal, grabbed a bus, and headed to Ninth St. and the Press to report for work. Instead took a deep breath, and took the Cedar Hill trolley up to the Heights for home. I had to find a white shirt, a narrow tie, and get a haircut and shave.

The Cedar Hill trolley

Maurice Weidenthal, my grandfather

A few days later, with dreams of becoming some kind of hot shot editor, I walked into Norman Shaw's office and presented myself for the coronation, so to speak. After all, he did call my home asking about me, right Doc?!

Shaw was a fine looking, cool type with graying hair and a straight serious face. He was an Oberlin man, the son of a Plain Dealer editor. He was much the antithesis of Press editor Louis B.Seltzer, who left school after junior high to find his way in journalism. Kind of a balance at the top, which as it turned out, worked very well.

It wasn't long into our conversation when Shaw noted that his father, Archer Shaw, and my grandfather, Maurice, had worked together at the Plain Dealer at the turn of the century. He as associate editor, my grandad as politics writer and theater critic. I said to myself, it’s my name he wants, not me or my great talents. My ego sank. I was hurt inside. Yes, Doc, it hurt.

It sank even deeper when I was told that there weren't any real reporter or editing jobs open at the moment; that I would have to start as a copy boy. Oh my God, I thought to myself, how much can my fragile manhood take?

Enough of this “boy” stuff!

But I sucked it up, Doctor, and took the job, still at $35 a week. I forgot to tell you that part of the job was to clean and fill paste pots. Each writer had a coffee cup filled with paste, necessary to clip and paste copy after proof reading or edits. It was a messy job, especially when you consider how easy it is to cut and paste on the computer these days.

My plan was to do a first class job, even with the paste pots. (Which I became very good at, by the way.) I’d get to know the territory and become friendly with some of the big guys that I admired. One of them was Dick Peters, a genuine Yalie, who looked the part. Like Shaw, he was tall, with silvering, thinning, graying hair, in his early 40's and straight as an arrow. I learned that he’d been General Douglas MacArthur’s PR guy during the war in the Pacific. I fantasized that he was there when MacArthur made his famous return to the Philippines. Maybe he even wrote the line.

Peters lived on Princeton Rd. in Cleveland Heights with his father, who was the headmaster at University School. For some reason, Peters and I hit it off. After a few months of "boy" work, Peters approached me one day saying,

"We’re going to try an experiment in our department. We need young blood and we want you to join us.”

 I was stunned. Flattered.

“You start on Monday.”

I didn't quite know how to act. I had to buy more shirts and ties for my transition from filling paste pots, to being an editorial writer. It was a real coup. There were four men in the department. I would become the fifth. My job was to deal with letters to the editor, pick out the best, and confirm their authenticity.

I would also help in the back room laying out the page, proofreading, and making the morning deadline. It was cool. And I tried to act normal among my comrades who worked in the chaotic City Room.

After awhile I was given the latitude to crank out editorials on fairly non controversial subjects. One of my first ventures into the world of editorial writing, was a full page editorial I wrote for the Saturday page, calling for a rebuilding of the Cleveland Airport, which was, at that time, nothing more than a backwater pre war facility with no concourses or jet ways. We ran three rather large aerial photos of the three area regional airports; Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit. The other two were already in the construction stage. As usual, Cleveland was slow to catch up. We were entering a new era of jet travel, and Cleveland was falling behind, being dragged down by the small mindedness at City Hall, while Detroit and Pittsburgh were taking a regional approach.

Cleveland Hopkins Airport 1956

We did get some action, when the city announced it was tacking on two concourses to the existing building, but the basic small mindedness continues to this very day.

I learned a lot about the inside of the big city paper while working “up front”, as they called it. There was always this behind-the-scene tension between the local editors and the Scripps Howard owners. Scripps was conservative, and owned a chain of papers across the country. It also owned Cleveland's first television station, WEWS. (Remember Dorothy Fuldheim?)

Dorothy Fuldheim

The Press was populist liberal. Scripps didn't worry about the local stuff. It sold papers. But on major national matters, we were being watched.

Roy Cohn and Jospeh McCarthy

Those were the days of that evil man, Joe McCarthy. The editorial writers wanted to tee off on this man and the witch hunt. He was no Trump, but in those days, many felt he was a threat to the nation. He had destroyed the lives of many good people in his so-called Communist Crusade. His side kick was nasty New York lawyer, Roy Cohn, who in later years turned up advising Trump. 

Finally, aggressive lawyer Jack Welch, from Massachusetts stood up, as he defended members of the Armed services. 

He looked McCarthy in the eyes and declared,

“You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"

McCarthy eventually faded into obscurity, done in by growing opposition, good journalism, his own nastiness and alcoholism.

A lesson from history. 

The truth does matter.

Next: (My Life as a Cop Watcher )

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.