The Boston Evening Transcript: Virtuosos Without an Audience

THE Transcript’s quarters, on the corner of Washington and Milk streets, were part of a weirdly allocated old building in which the papers “counting room,” which could just as well have been tucked away under the roof, occupied the choice ground-floor space. Instead of yielding a handsome rent from some retail establishment, the room was given over to the desks of various clerks and typists in the advertising and circulation departments. Most of the advertising people seemed to prefer their desks to the rigors of finding customers in the world outside, and there was always the chance, of course, that the telephone might ring while they were out. I cannot recall that I ever met anyone from the circulation department during my years there, nor did I ever know the name of any circulation functionary. No one, as I have said, was really interested in circulation. There was a fleet of smart red trucks which the paper chartered to deliver our editions to distribution points, and the owner’s name, Harry Lofchie, was emblazoned on each, and a brave show they made, backed against the Milk Street curb and waiting for papers. Some were well laden, but the implication that vast numbers of people were standing by throughout Greater Boston, eager for the next edition, was weakened somewhat when a sizable truck, complete with driver, would pull out with a solitary bundle of Transcripts, bound for heaven knows what onebundle destination.

In the Washington Street doorway, at the foot of an interminable flight of well-worn stairs, was a large brass sign:

Like many other features of the Transcript, the sign was long out of date, since most of the editorial and news staff were on the same floor at the top of the stairs. Halfway up were the sales and fitting rooms of Dunne, the great tailor, where, it was believed by the city staff, the city editor bought his suits at half price by accepting, with proper alterations, the suit of a customer who had died before it had been completed. In any case, the city editor was the only presentably dressed person in the entire establishment, and the legend persisted that this was why he had been tapped for the job, rather than because of any comprehension of news values.

A partnership of two young lawyers, Lurie & Alper, rented offices just below the city room, and various departments and personalities of the Transcript were scattered in closetlike odd spaces throughout the building. I recall looking out a back window on one occasion and seeing a kind of delivery basket traveling from one wing of the building to a window somewhere in Dunne’s, and I was informed that this was a transaction between the needleworkers in the rear and the fitting rooms up front. Over everything, especially the windows, lay a heavy deposit of grime, so that one had the impression of a permanent overcast outside.

I doubt that the entire furnishings of the news and editorial areas, including the typewriters, would have brought $250 from any kind of purchaser. The desks, as battered as the swivel chairs that went with them, many of the latter with the back support broken off, were fit for firewood and no more. Most of the desks had a folding top which disappeared when the occupant pressed a button, an action which at the same time caused a typewriter to emerge from a concealed well. The trouble with these was that the locking catch was worn, and when the typewriter was up, a vigorous stroke on the keyboard would cause the typewriter to sink suddenly from view, while the desk top would swing up and out and fetch the unwary typist a smashing blow on the head. There were two or three such desks where no staff man would sit, but visitors who wanted to dash off a note or announcement were always gestured to them with every air of hospitality.

Just off the city room, in the hall beside the elevator, was the toilet which served the news staff and “editors,” strictly a one-at-a-time accommodation, filthy and malodorous. Harvard men were relatively few among the staff, but such was the overpowering proximity of the university in the Transcript’s daily rounds that the toilet was always referred to as “the Harvard Club.”

THE Transcript was celebrating its one hundredth anniversary when I went to work there. Its roster included upwards of a hundred persons under the heading Editors and Reporters, although on examination this category was found to include office boys, telephone operators, and a fair number of individuals entirely unknown to the active news staff. In this latter group was a man who had contributed for several decades an anonymous column of witticisms which appeared weekly — it may have been semiweekly — on the editorial page. It had a title of its own, “Facts and Fancies,” and it was a thoroughly competent piece of work, but it is the simple truth that none of us had ever laid eyes on its author or heard his name; the editor who had taken him on in the first place was long dead and gone, and the “Facts and Fancies” man, who transacted his business with the cashier and never asked for a raise, was as near to a genuine nonentity as an active contributor to a daily metropolitan newspaper could be.

It was against this background of facts that the city room was thunderstruck one day to be handed a Hollywood story that a major studio — MGM, as I recall it — had acquired the script of what most certainly would be an “epic,” and that said “epic” script had been written by the “Facts and Fancies” contributor — perhaps I should say “editor” — of the Boston Evening Transcript.

Evening-paper news was, in those days, an extremely high-speed affair, and for a time we were afraid that other papers would corral this new local celebrity, our own man after all, before we could. One of our most experienced reporters, Bigelow Thompson, was assigned to hunt him out and managed, aided by the police listing of Boston residents and a few shrewd conjectures from the counting room, to find him in a lodginghouse room off Huntington Avenue, where he had apparently spent most of his life. It fascinates me to recall that the “epic” in this case was a rip-roaring melodrama of Biblical days, full of martyrs, dancing girls, and legionaries, and that it was also a smashing success, earning handsomely for its proprietors and adding kudos to its already famous principals. In the hullabaloo the Transcript’s man seemed to drop even further into obscurity. I have no recollection of his name or of whether he ever repeated his success as a scenarist, but it is my impression that he continued to supply the “Facts and Fancies” column — a man who knew a good thing when he had it.

Any establishment of such great age has its complement of veteran employees, and at the Transcript some of them were spectacularly so. There was one aged spinster, an improbable sort in any company, who was pointed out to me as the “editor” of some equally improbable department. I asked how in the world such a woman and such a job had ever got together. The answer was: “Her father used to do it.” Changes came hard. It was characteristic of the paper that its column of notes on radio programs was one of the first and the best in print, at a time when other papers were still trying to find a happy formula for ignoring radio or putting it out of business. But for years after the radio receiver had become a self-contained unit in a cabinet, the cut at the head of the Transcript’s radio column continued to show a set on the order of an early Neutrodyne, all dials and wires, with a towering “loudspeaker” horn of a type that had vanished with the Model T. The devising of a long-needed two-column head for freaky news stories on page one was regarded as so venturesome, typographically, that the head was named after the editor of the paper, H. T. Claus, who had laid out the specifications for it.

I had only one encounter with the Transcript’s lawyer, an aged, bearded alarmist who seemed to live even further from the world of reality than some of our own eccentrics. It would have been fatal to any story to allow the Transcript’s lawyer to read it for possible libel. He would have taken it under advisement for a few days or weeks, unmindful of deadlines or our competitors, and eventually handed it back with a complex warning that it was clearly actionable — as almost any news story is if its subject chooses to sue — and to be published only at intolerable financial risk.

Since his quirks were well known to the news staff, no one ever dreamed of trying out a story on the lawyer. Chance it yourself or throw it away. Whenever I had anything fancy of my own that called for advice, for it would have saddened me to have cost the Transcript a libel suit in its days of need, 1 tried it on Lurie & Alper on the floor below, who enjoyed seeing a tart story in the paper and who helped me just for the fun of it.

The case which brought me into the lawyer’s office was pure idiocy all the way. A friend in charge of publicity for the Republican State Committee had given me a campaign song, of the most painful disabilities in all respects, which some local zealot had composed and donated to the committee in behalf of Mr. Hoover. The Transcript was, of course, Republican, but this did not deter it from going along with a small bogus story on page one, publishing the verses and conjuring its readers to sing or declaim them at every opportunity.

A day or two after the story appeared, the versifier threatened to sue the Transcript for breach of copyright. I was ordered to tell the lawyer the story and reassure him. Our interview began with a stern inquisition into who I was, my past, education, jobs, and such, as if I might be a Trojan horse, foully infiltrated into the Transcript ranks by rivals seeking to destroy the sheet. Above all, what could possibly have been my motives in turning in so trashy a jingle? He paid little or no attention to the facts surrounding the story, assuring me that the author could collect thousands from us (nothing more was ever heard from the latter). We parted in mutual disgust.

The Transcript’s purchasing agent — although we inclined to think the title was self-bestowed, since no one would have entrusted this individual with such weighty responsibilities as the procurement of newsprint and ink — was a specialist in obtaining trade discounts for the staff, invariably on merchandise in which we had no conceivable interest. A notice that we could buy baseball equipment from Iver Johnson’s for the next thirty days at a 10 per cent reduction might appear on the city room bulletin board, and the purchasing agent, pencil in hand, would come among us inviting orders. His must have been a frustrating life, for nobody ever seemed to need a first baseman’s mitt or a pair of shin guards. We’d make the old ones do for another season, we told him. Even more disappointing was the office reaction to his hopeful inquiries about minor supplies such as pencils or copy paper. Etiquette called for morose, even critical responses, and a typical conversation with him was eagerly attended by all within earshot:

“How do you like that new pencil?”

“What new pencil?”

“Why, that new Eagle Mirado No. 174 that you are using.”

“I hadn’t noticed it.”

“Well, don’t you think it’s better than Eberhard Faber’s No. 482?”

“No.”

“You don’t?”

“I should say not.”

“Oh.”

The purchasing agent did come into his own each year just before Easter. Through some deal with a wholesale florist, he offered a small discount on lilies, and it was not unusual for a hundred or more orders to come in to him from various departments of the Transcript. The pots of lilies were ranged over the floor of the city room to be picked up by their owners, all under the vigilant supervision of the purchasing agent. The lilies engulfed the room, and the story ran that one year the traffic was so heavy and the congestion so demanding that the purchasing agent simply keeled over in a faint, right in the midst of his blossoms.

Even in its leanest years the Transcript refused patent medicine advertising. No great amount of this would have been forthcoming in any case, since the paper held no appeal as a mass market for anything, but nevertheless the blandest curealls were advised to make their expenditures elsewhere, with one great exception: Cheney’s Asparagus Tonic.

Like the “Facts and Fancies” column, the relationship with Cheney’s, an ancient drugstore on Union Street just off Dock Square, antedated the Transcript staff, and no doubt their fathers as well. Embarrassingly, no literature from Swamp Root, or Beef, Wine & Iron, or Fellows’ Compound of Hypophosphites was a whit more exuberant than the claims laid down by Cheney for the wonderful Asparagus Tonic, but the copy never varied from year to year.

Cheney’s advertisement appeared each spring, occupying one of the Transcript’s broad seven-to-apage columns. Its timing was in the good old spring-cleaning-and-renovation theory, which governed the use of many tonics, and an impressive display of Asparagus Tonic bottles in Cheney’s store window coincided with the Transcript advertisement. As I recall the advertising copy, it was largely a duplicate of the label on Cheney’s bottle: an astonishing list of ills large and small — virtually everything but fractures — which the tonic would alleviate or end altogether. It was indeed a sign of spring, and I think we all enjoyed its recurrence. The tonic is still available at Cheney’s, and I dare say many Transcript readers continue to swear by it, although the offer on its label has been narrowed somewhat by the passing years and by the skepticism of a despotic bureaucracy in Washington.

THE Transcript had no rewrite men as such. A reporter who went out on a story either dictated it (with all punctuation) by telephone or rushed in and wrote it in the office. Everyone was a rewrite man in taking small stories from correspondents in the metropolitan area. On big out-of-town stories, the reporter sometimes had a Morse operator and messenger of his own, and in later years a teletype, and once in a great while the paper sent out two men, to spell each other, on some especially massive trial or hearing where practically verbatim coverage was expected. Ordinarily one Transcript reporter was enough, so it was held, even though he might find himself up against a team of three or four people from each of the other papers. Relations with the other papers were full of warm friendships. Most news and gleanings were shared, for the competitive result of a day’s work was not how much exclusive news a man rounded up but how much of it he could get past his city editor and into the paper. The city desks around town were altogether dissimilar: at the Globe, dull and cautious; the Traveler, a countrified lunge in the direction of The Front Page; Hearst, a tough and amiable group of competent professionals.

The Transcript city desk was like none of these. On a story of any magnitude or tension it tended to stay out of the line of fire, to leave it all up to the reporter, and to remain more or less incommunicado. On a big two-man story that we were covering for several weeks, a trial, it developed one morning that the principal defense witness had just been arrested on a narcotics charge. We put a bulletin to this effect on the teletype and asked whether anything more was wanted on that circumstance or whether to go ahead with the customary full coverage of the trial. It was about twenty minutes before the session was to open, and we hung eagerly over the teletype awaiting the answer. Just as we were rushing off to the courtroom, the machine stuttered out a reply.

“City desk,” so the message went, “wants to know dates you prefer for your vacations.”

The same city editor had been, many years earlier, the Transcript’s bicycle editor, from which post he was elevated to automobile editor as public interest in “the wheel” gave way to the wonders of the motorcar. He continued as automobile editor, more or less emeritus, and one of his perquisites as city editor was the annual junket to the opening of the New York Automobile Show, whence reams of publicity material would be wired to the Transcript under his by-line.

Now a pink-cheeked, graying, good-looking man whom everyone liked, the city editor came into the office one morning, Boston bag in hand, bound for New York on the three o’clock train. His was an enormously kindly, friendly personality, quite without the petty qualities of his predecessor, but abrupt, sensational, urgent news was not at all his metier. It disturbed for him what was otherwise a safe and agreeable day’s work, full of sociability and all sorts of small diversions. To become caught up in one of those headlong intervals of extemporization that suddenly impose themselves on a news staff was far from his desire at all times.

On this day all went quietly until 1:55 P.M. (It should be mentioned that the Transcript was a tenminute walk from South Station, and trains for New York left every hour on the hour throughout the day.) At this point the tapper in the city room began sounding a succession of alarms, and our man at police headquarters phoned in to tell us that the new stands at Fenway Park, under construction and almost completed, were on fire and that the flames had spread to two houses across the street. It seemed an excellent break for an evening paper in so solid a baseball town as Boston, but a look of anguish came over the city editor. For a moment he was stunned. Then he pulled himself together, put on his hat and coat in a leisurely way, and picked up his Boston bag. “I must be getting my train,” he said cheerily, and left.

There was no assistant city editor or number two to take over, for no one had ever troubled to define such niceties of organization. A characteristically fast and effective job of unorganized activity followed the city editor’s exit. “I’ll go out,” said Karl Schriftgiesser. “Anything is better than sitting around here.” An office boy took the city desk phone and assigned the incoming calls for the next hour. Our photographer Frank Colby decided to go along with Schriftgiesser. The makeup man was alerted. Various people started trying to reach the Red Sox business office, the contractor, nearby residents. At around 2:30 Schriftgiesser began dictating his story and Colby came in with some good pictures. Our two-man copy desk shuffled some sort of sequence into the smaller stories, and by three o’clock all was quiet once again, even before the city editor was pulling out of South Station.

The great mass effort of the Transcript staff came in the fall, when on each Saturday during the season we produced the Football Extra. This was a genuine tour de force; it would have been counted a distinguished piece of work anywhere, and it was undoubtedly the best thing of its kind in print. The Transcript was not a hard-drinking place; in fact I recall only two people in the news department who drank, needfully, in the office during the day. But the Football Extra was by way of being a real spree, an afternoon of gaiety, journalism, and alcohol. Best of all, in those Depression days, the Football Extra was a self-financing party for the participants: a man’s supply of rum for the afternoon cost about $2 or $2.50, whiie each of us got $5 for our services. We looked forward to it throughout the week.

The Transcript’s big Saturday edition, in which almost all its departments were included, closed at 1:15 P.M., and the first item in the afternoon’s agenda was the arrival of Billy the Bootlegger, delivering the rum for which he had taken orders the previous day. Billy was a smalltime hoodlum, an occasional longshoreman, and he used this latter role to reassure us about the quality of the rum he sold us; the real thing, from Martinique, right off the ship. He wore a cap, blue jeans, and a Navy pea jacket. I blush to realize the extent to which Billy’s getup reinforced his credibility with supposedly well-informed newspapermen, but if his rum was more probably from East Boston than from the West Indies, it was reasonably wholesome and neither crazed nor paralyzed his customers.

Everyone on the paper worked on the Football Extra; we were scattered all over the editorial rooms, wherever a typewriter could be set up. The sports staff was out covering the contests in which we were most interested, that is, the games of about half the Ivy League and four or five Good Schools. The paper had correspondents of its own at twenty or thirty other games and used A.P. stories for anything else. The end of the Harvard game, which was always covered by the sports editor, closed all the incoming stories, whether they were complete or not, so that the acute work period in the office began around 1:30 and ended, in a prodigious scramble, at about 4:00. In our handling of the copy, a man might be assigned three or four small games or one or two of the larger ones.

The stories reached us in bits and pieces, a hundred words or so at a time, delivered by office boys on the run. Our task was to edit and move along each fragment instantly to prevent any accumulation of arrears with the compositors. This was no great feat during the first hall of the afternoon, but as the Harvard game moved into its final quarter and Billy’s rum began to assert itself, the pace picked up considerably. By this time we were obliged to have a lead and head in type, representing the latest state of each game, and to replace these as changes in the game warranted. Whenever one of our games ended, we had, also, a final lead and head all ready to send up.

There was much visiting about and sociable drinking during the early part of the afternoon. Tension began with the succession of warnings on playing time remaining in the Harvard game. Our hope was to have our own games complete and with proper heads and leads, and the more information beyond the mere score that could be packed into a lead, the better. Yet nothing could be jumped, and it would have been thought disgraceful to have even a small error in a final score by reason of some hopeful gamble in the closing moments. Almost all the games were played within the same period, but a laggard correspondent might suddenly turn in, after a long silence, a block of copy that called for complete alteration of head, lead, and emphasis, with only a minute or two to do it in. It was, all in all, a stunt, and a good one. We were proud of the result: a solid page one of the best possible football coverage, with any amount more of it inside, and on the street not a quarter hour after the end of the Harvard game.

Whatever became of the Football Extra edition, once we had seized our own copies and made our way down the long stairs to Washington Street, was a mystery in all the six seasons I worked on it. Copies would not have reached the uptown hotels by 7:00 P.M. Newsboys with big pedestrian corners never seemed to have it. To look for it in the subway was absurd.

The Transcript’s own newsboy-in-residence was himself a rather mysterious figure. Small, dark, at times seemingly wizened, or at others merely young and skinny, he might have been twenty, or fifteen, or forty. His station was in the recessed doorway of the counting room, where not even the near passer-by would notice him. Across the street strong-lunged boys cried the other papers, but there was only one side to Washington Street, so far as the Transcript was concerned, and that was our side. I doubt that one could have found another copy of the Football Extra in the entire length of the street.

Our newsboy’s voice was never raised. When we passed him on our way home, as he brooded over his unsung and unsold stack of our wonderful Football Extra, we cursed him with all the bitterness of virtuosos deprived of their audience. If only that wretched newsboy would bestir himself. . . .

But he never did.

(To be continued)