Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

Finally, on a late afternoon in the last week of May, I took the IRT down to the old Post building at 75 West Street, went in through the Washington Street entrance, and rode the elevator to the second floor. I followed a gloomy marbelized corridor around to the back and then, for the first time, stepped into the city room.

Looking for someone? a tall, bespectacled man said.

Yes. Jimmy Wechsler.

All the way in the back.

The room was more exciting to me than any movie: an organized chaos of editors shouting from desks, copyboys dashing through doors into the composing room, men and women typing at big manual typewriters, telephones ringing, the wire service tickers clattering, everyone smoking and putting butts out on the floor. I remembered the day I saw Dan Parker walking out of the Daily Mirror building and the newspapermen hurrying to the bars of Third Avenue. They’d all come from a place like this. But this wasn’t a rag like the Mirror; this was the Post, the smartest, bravest tabloid in New York, my paper. All these men and women were doing work that was honorable, I thought, work that added to the ideals and intelligence of the world. I wanted desperately to be one of them.

Wechsler was a small man with a large head and thoughtful eyes. He was wearing a bowtie and suspenders. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He took me into his inner office and I sat beside a desk littered with newspaper clippings, magazines, letters from readers, copies of his book. While we talked, he smoked cigarettes and sipped coffee. Near the end of our chat, he leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

Have you ever thought about becoming a newspaperman? he said.

I mumbled something in reply, but I don’t remember what. It must have been something like, Only all my life.

Well, Wechsler said, call me in a couple of days. Maybe I can get you a tryout around here.

At 1 A.M., on June 1, 1960, I was back in the city room, clumsily disguised as a reporter, and my life changed forever.

IN HUMILITY and arrogance, I started to learn the newspaper trade. I was humbled by what I did not know, in the company of so many skilled craftsmen; I was arrogant enough to believe I could learn to do what they did. My teacher wasn’t Jimmy Wechsler; for the first eighteen months I worked nights while he worked days and we seldom saw each other. He allowed me in the door, but a man named Paul Sann kept me there.

I saw him for the first time at six o’clock in the morning of my first shift at the Post. I had walked in that night full of fear and trembling, not knowing what to expect, carrying a copy of Under the Volcano to read on the subway home if they threw me out. The assistant night city editor was Ed Kosner, younger than I was by a few years. He parked me at a typewriter and asked me how much experience I had. When I told him absolutely none, he laughed and without pause explained the fundamentals. I would write on “books,” four sheets of coarse copy paper separated by carbons. The carbon copies were called “dupes.” In the upper left-hand corner I should type my name in lower case and then create a “slug,” a short word that identified the story for editors and typesetters. The slug should reflect the subject; a political story could be slugged POLS. But if it was a story about a murder I should not slug it KILL because the men setting type would kill the story. With that simple lesson, he gave me a press release and told me to rewrite it in two paragraphs, and my career had begun.

All through the night in the sparsely manned city room, I wrote small stories based on press releases or items clipped from the early editions of the morning papers. I noticed that Kosner had Scotch-taped a single word to his own typewriter: Focus. I appropriated the word as my motto. My nervousness ebbed as I worked, asking myself: What does this story say? What is new? How would I tell it to someone in a saloon? Focus, I said to myself. Focus. . Near dawn, there was a lull as the editors discussed what they would do with all the material they now had in type. Beyond the high open windows, the sky was turning red. I walked over and gazed out and saw that we were across the street from the piers of United Fruit, whose bananas my grandfather had shipped from faraway Honduras a half-century before. I wondered if he had ever docked at this pier, ever looked up at the building that housed the New York Post. When I turned around, Paul Sann was walking into the city room.

He had a great walk, quick, rhythmic, taut with authority, as he moved without hellos across the city room to the fenced-off pen at the far end, where he served as executive editor. He was dressed entirely in black, with black cowboy boots, carrying the morning papers under his arm. From where I sat, I watched him go to his desk, light a Camel, take a cardboard cup of coffee from a copyboy. His face was gray, urban, Bogartian, his mouth pulled tight in a tough guy’s mask, his gray hair cut short, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses which he shoved to the top of his head while reading. He immediately began poring over galleys, a thick black ebony pencil in his hand, marking some, discarding others, making a list on a yellow pad. Around seven, the other editors gathered at his desk to discuss the flow of the paper. Sann always wrote the “wood,” the page-one headline (so named because for decades it had been set in wood type). Then he moved into the composing room, where the trays of metal type for each page were laid out on stone-topped tables. He was still there when my shift ended at eight and Kosner gave me a goodnight. Sann didn’t talk to me that night. He didn’t talk to me for weeks.

But in the weeks that followed, as I started going out on fires and murders, knocking on doors in Harlem and the Bronx at three in the morning, I came to understand that Paul Sann was the great piston of the New York Post. Wechsler gave the paper its liberal political soul; but Sann made it a tough ballsy tabloid. Wechsler pressed for coverage of civil rights, Cold War sanity, the reform politicians of the Democratic party; Sann was skeptical of all living beings, and leavened the political coverage with murders, fires, disasters, and gangsters. They didn’t much like each other, and their conflict was discussed almost every morning after the shift ended, at the bar in the Page One, a block away from the Post.

One guy wants a newspaper, said Carl Pelleck, the best police reporter in the city. The other guy wants a pamphlet.

Yeah, someone else said, but without Wechsler, it has no identity, no function, no soul. It’ll die.

Listen, it’s gonna die anyway. It won’t last past New Year’s.

The uncertainty about the paper’s future didn’t bother me; I was still working at the studio, and if the newspaper did go down I wouldn’t starve. But in the meantime, I’d have had the best time of my life. I just hoped it would last long enough for me to learn the trade. During my three-month tryout, I watched Sann from a distance and got to know other newspapermen up close, in the morning seminars at the Page One. I loved their talk, its cynicism and fatalism, its brilliant wordplay, as we stood at the bar and watched the stockbrokers coming up from the subways to trudge to Walk Street while we waited for the first editions to arrive. When the papers landed on the bar, the seminar would begin. This was an often brutal analysis of stories, headlines, and writing style, presided over by an immense, burly, mustached copy editor named Fred McMorrow, attended by two old pros named Gene Grove and Normand Poirier. They were funny and merciless. About my stories. About others, their works, themselves, and most of the human race.