Glory

BILL MURRAY came onto the old Washington Times-Herald at the bottom of what has become known as the 1949 recession. He was hired as a copy boy, and he was one of the many at the time who had a college degree. He had not planned to be a copy boy. In fact, he didn’t even know that such a calling existed until he was loosed into the World and began looking for a newspaper job. He looked in four cities, and the only thing offered to him was the job as copy boy on the TimesHerald. Because he was almost broke and too proud to go home again, he took it along with an advance on the first week’s pay.

He did reasonably well, all things considered. He wasn’t fired during the first four weeks, and at the end of six months no one prevented the IBM machine in the payroll office from granting him a fifty-cent-a-week raise to $31.50. Since he appeared regularly for work, the paper assumed without asking that he had found a way to subsist on the princely salary it paid him.

For the first six months he labored at the copy desk. He ran copy from the slot to the desks and back. He dashed upstairs to the composing room with late bulletins. He went after coffee and cigarettes and aspirin for the headline writers and the desk men. He marked race-wire copy for the afternoon editions. He endured the sadisms of the slot man, who hated copy boys, doing daily battle with his impulse to bury scissors or spindle between the slot man’s shoulder blades. At the first opportunity he got himself transferred to city desk, whose copy boy (it was said) got first consideration on appointments to the reporter staff. Further, the city editor, a pudgy, crew-cut, exrewrite man named Ringgold, was less obtrusively obnoxious than the slot man.

Murray worked hard around city desk for about a month. That was the length of time it took him to realize he had merely traded masters without diminishing his slavery. It was true that Ringgold was not so hard a man to work for as the slot man had been, but that was only because Ringgold’s misanthropy expressed itself in a glittering wit that loved itself too well to care about breaking its objects. Ringgold made a man feel like dirt and was satisfied with that; the slot man, of course, had to grind the dirt into the floor as well. The slight difference in the two men soon became negligible in Murray’s mind, especially as it became obvious to him that Ringgold knew him only as “Copy!” and resisted learning any other name. The final stroke in Murray’s disillusionment was delivered when a spot opened up for a general assignment reporter and the paper imported someone to fill it.

Ordinarily, a copy boy’s story, except for some random and engaging incidents, would have ended where Murray now found himself. He was a nobody without prospects of any kind. Or at least he had none apparent to him at the moment. He did as most copy boys do as soon as they accept the hopelessness of their place. He went after the scraps available to him. He rewrote handouts because his name went at the top of each. He took dictation from reporters for the same reason. He sat at the city desk telephone box during lunch hour, partly because he had a glum pleasure in barking “City desk Murray” into the receiver, partly because he hoped to fall in the way of something that would bring him a place on the paper. He did filler book reviews and several small Sunday features. He attended citizens’ association meetings in the evening and did his lest to write neighborhood trivialities in banner-headline fashion. He played poker with the photographers and night men, living on coffee when he lost and gorging food when he won. He learned how to be available when he had to be and how to pass the buck to a newer and less sophisticated copy boy whenever he could get away with it. He assumed, without really meaning to, the bored, tired manner of newsmen; developed that keenness of mind that spots newsworthy angles in situations and a repertoire of small talk and ironic incident, came to doubt that much in the world was worth the trouble. He hated the paper with a passion that only a mauled ego can engender.

UNLIKE most copy boys, who just give up and go away or at last find a place, all without particular incident, Murray got his revenge. Not, to be sure, in the manner of Lubin, the chief copy boy, who ran berserk one day, rounded up two dolly baskets of trash, wheeled them into the sanctum reserved for Colonel McCormick, upended them, and kicked the mess all over the office (he would have gotten away with it, too, if he hadn’t left his jacket behind). And not in the way of Robey, who climaxed his stay on copy desk (and at the Times-Herald) by casually opening the compressed air tube to the composing room and feeding in four bulletins without bothering to put them in the cylinders, chanting to himself the while, “Shove it . . . shove it . . .” And not as did Fissell, one of the night copy boys, who did some careful art work with acid on a negligee ad in the make-up bank and filled in certain portions of the female form usually left blank in newspapers.

Murray came by his revenge accidently, but honestly.

One day all hell broke loose in the newsroom. A particularly important hearing on the Hill drained off a good number of the reporters to chase down all the angles, charges, and countercharges about an error committed in United States foreign policy fifteen years before. Hardly had the first bulletins come down from the ant heap of senators, witnesses, reporters, cameramen, and public on the Hill when advice reached the newsroom of a particularly complicated sex murder. Off went another phalanx of reporters and photographers to document this fine bit of Americana. Copy boys had of course gone along on both jaunts to run photographers’ negatives back to the newsroom. The two events came somewhere near cleaning out the newsroom. The third — a spectacular warehouse fire — did it. When the frantic reassignments were completed, there remained just five persons in the newsroom: the slot man, Ringgold, two desk men, and Murray.

Ringgold put Murray on the telephone box and detailed the two desk men to take dictation at Murray’s direction. Murray found himself in the novel position of telling someone to do something.

At first he was timid about it. A reporter would call with a bulletin and Murray would ask one of the desk men to take it. He caught on fast, however, and soon no longer asked. An evil delight flickered in him when he found that he could call out, “Callow, take Edwards on three,” and the foreign editor would snatch up copy paper, run it into the typewriter, snap on the headphones, and take Edwards on three.

Murray ran the copy himself. He snatched it from the typewriters before the desk men, carried it to Ringgold and from Ringgold to the slot man. After the slot man put a head on it, Murray shot it upstairs to the composing room in a tube cylinder. Along with this he answered the wildly jangling phones. He was soon swamped. He tried to keep up for perhaps four minutes. It was hopeless. He decided a change in things was in order. On his next trip back to the copy desk he steeled himself and told the slot man to shoot the copy upstairs himself. To Murray’s amazement, the slot man made no protest.

From that moment there was no holding Murray. He smiled secretly and malignantly. He snapped at the desk men to take so-and-so on suchand-such telephone, and when they didn’t move along through the stacked-up calls fast enough, he signaled sharply at them to speed it up. Their harassed glances, their wild grabbing at phones, their yells at the operator to get that damned connection straightened out gave Murray an intense, almost indecent, pleasure.

Then he discovered he could make the slot man jump. In the middle of a jangling by what seemed every telephone on city desk, Ringgold flipped a piece of copy at Murray, chanting in his flat way, “Copy copy.” Murray, answering two phones at once, pressed both mouthpieces against his shoulder and yelled “Copy!” Nothing happened. He took a deep breath and said, “Hey, slots, copy here,” and immediately involved himself once more in the two telephones. But not before catching out of the corner of one eye the way the slot man leaped up as though struck and came running for the bulletin.

“Getting too big for your shoes, boy,” the slot man muttered, snatching up the bulletin.

“Just do your work like a man,” Murray returned, putting every last ounce of six months’ fury into a phrase the slot man loved to belabor copy boys with. Several minutes later he told Ringgold that he had too many calls stacked up for the two desk men to handle. Ringgold agreed to his proposal that the slot man be put on dictation, too. Murray turned around casually and yelled, “Hey, slots, get on the other typewriter over there and take Tisby on four.”

The slot man stood up, enraged. “Dammit, Ringgold,” he began.

Ringgold did not even look up from the copy he was marking. He merely lifted an arm and pointed to the typewriter. Slots went. Murray felt like singing.

The moment arrived when the calls got ahead of the three taking dictation. Murray stacked them up until a reporter called with the scoop on the sex murderer. Here was no waiting matter. A deadline was right on top of them, and this was something that had to get in. Murray grabbed up a piece of copy paper, reached for a nearby typewriter on a wheeled table. In the middle of the movement genius lighted on him. He rolled the typewriter in behind the desk, cleared his throat, and commanded, “Ringgold, take Evans on six.”

Ringgold looked up, startled, opened his mouth to tell Murray to go to hell, saw in the same glance the three men bent over their phone sets and Murray pointing frantically at a flashing light on the phone box. Murray flicked a piece of copy paper at Ringgold, who sighed, smiled crookedly, ran the paper into the typewriter, and picked up his phone. In a moment he was banging out Evans’ story.

Murray jerked up the receiver on the phone box and barked, “City desk Murray.”

A serene female voice, oldish, said, “Could you please tell me the dimensions of the Lincoln Memorial?”

Murray made a face, covered the mouthpiece, looked at the four men clattering .typewriters, smiled, brought the mouthpiece back to his lips, and said sweetly, “Just one moment, please, ma’am.”

He set down the receiver, walked casually back to the reference book table, unhurriedly found the requested information, brought the book back to the desk, and began reading off the information so the woman could jot it down. She told him how the other two newspapers in town had cut her off and how considerate and helpful he was. The pleasure, Murray said, was all his own.

Ringgold, the slot man, and the two desk men went on pounding out copy.