11
DICK STEPHENS, WHO must have been all of twenty at the time, chain-smoked Camels, drove a fast Mercury, and covered Urbana High School sports for the News-Gazette. The sports editor in those days was Bill Schrader, who called everybody “coach.” He promoted Stephens and grandly ordered him to “hire your own successor.” After talking to Hal’s dad, Harold Holmes, the managing editor, Stephens hired me.
In that September of 1958, just turned sixteen, I was working part-time for Seely Johnston at his sports shop, where I functioned by listening to everything said by Mate Cuppernell, a weathered salesman, and repeating it. If a customer was shopping for fishing lures, I’d say, “The cats are taking that Heddon spinner out at Kaufman’s Clear Lake.” I had never been fishing. Mate taught me how to spin-cast using a thumb-action reel and a plug at the end of the line. One day when I was demonstrating to a customer in front of the store, the plug flew through the air and snagged the back of a garbage truck. The line snapped. I was humiliated and quietly put the rod back on the rack. Later that day Herb Neff, the store manager, was out front doing a demonstration. He used the snap of the fiberglass pole that should have been good for fifty feet, and the plug flew five feet and stopped. He lost the sale and blamed me. He complained to Seely, who drove him crazy because every time he had a sale all written up, Seely would hurry out, grab the slip, and take off 10 percent.
Seely lived until nearly one hundred, running his store to the end. Every time I visited Champaign-Urbana, he would turn up to greet me, telling everyone in listening distance, “I gave him his start.” Then he’d hold his hand under my chin. The first time I saw this gesture I was autographing my first book in Robeson’s Book Department. I looked at him blankly. “Come on, young man!” he said sternly. “You know what I want!” I didn’t. He shook his hand. “Right here in my hand!” The readers waiting in line regarded this. “What in your hand, Mr. Johnston?” I said. “Your chewing gum! You’re at work now!”
Seely was paying me seventy-five cents an hour. The News-Gazette job represented a fifteen-cent hourly raise. To be hired as a real writer at a real newspaper was such good fortune that I could scarcely sleep. To be sure, the job paid poorly, but everything was cheaper in those days and I was already driving my own car, a 1954 Ford. I stayed past midnights on game nights, driving home after curfew on a pass from the police department.
My colleague late at night, a year or two older, was Bill Lyon, who covered Champaign High School sports and became a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Tall, with a crew cut, he smoked cigars while pounding out his copy. We’d be the only two in the newsroom at midnight on Fridays, writing our coverage of the football games.
Bill and I would labor deep into the night on Fridays, composing our portraits of the games. I was a subscriber to the Great Lead Theory, which teaches that a story must have an opening paragraph so powerful as to leave few readers still standing. Grantland Rice’s “Four Horsemen” lead was my ideal. Lyon watched as I ripped one sheet of copy paper after another out of my typewriter and finally gave me the most useful advice I have ever received as a writer: “One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?” These rules saved me half a career’s worth of time and gained me a reputation as the fastest writer in town. I’m not faster. I spend less time not writing.
Before each game I wrote a pregame story and walked across the street late at night to slip it through Harold Holmes’s mail slot. I hardly seemed to sleep in those days, and it might be two or three a.m., sometimes with a new snow falling. One night there’d been an ice storm, and every tree branch sparkled in the light of the full moon. No lights in the windows, no traffic on Washington Street, and me with my next byline in my pocket.
Urbana that season had a great football team under the “tutelage” (a dependable sportswriting word) of Coach Warren Smith, a proponent of the single-wing offense. He even wrote a book on it. The Tigers were an underdog in the Big 12 (Champaign, Bloomington, Decatur, Springfield, Mattoon, and so on) but were undefeated with two games to go. The season closer, of course, would be with Champaign, a night fraught with Shakespearean drama, during which crosstown romances were destroyed, fenders bent, friendships ended, families divided. Perhaps the team was distracted by the Champaign game coming up in a week’s time, but they were unexpectedly defeated and their hopes of a perfect season destroyed.
This was clearly the occasion for a Great Lead. I wrote: “The glass slipper was shattered and broken, the royal coach turned into a pumpkin, and the Cinderella Urbana Tigers stumbled and fumbled and fell.” Saturday morning, I turned up at work, assembling area high school scores, and the news editor, Ed Borman, loomed over my desk and rumbled, “Young man, that’s as good a piece of writing as we’ve had on high school sports in quite a while.” I turned back to the sports section and read my Great Lead again, and as you can see I memorized it.
My euphoria was shattered at school on Monday, when Coach Smith slammed his door on me after thundering, “From this day forward, you are banned from all Urbana sports under my jurisdiction. You can buy a ticket to the games.” He left me devastated. It was up to Stanley Hynes, our grizzled World War II veteran English teacher and advisor of the high school paper, to negotiate a truce. I admired him enormously because he addressed his students as “Mister” and “Miss” just as if we were in college, and he smoked in the classroom. “There has been a literary misunderstanding,” he told me. “Coach Smith thinks you called him a pumpkin.”
Borman entered my story in the Illinois Associated Press writing competition, and it won first place in the sportswriting category. That happened in summer of the next year. Daddy had been diagnosed with lung cancer the previous spring and was now in the last weeks of his life. I took the framed certificate to him in the hospital, and he was proud of me. I would never again win anything that meant more.
Coach Smith was the speaker at one of our class reunions. He recalled that long-ago season, and said, “You boys were the best team I ever coached. And remember that you were covered in the Gazette by Roger here, who would go on to work in Chicago.” And who called him a pumpkin.
I worked full-time at the News-Gazette on Saturdays, when in season there was no story in town more important than the Illinois football game. Bill Schrader, the sports editor, commanded our field army. He would write the game story and the Illinois locker room story. Dick Stephens would handle the opposing coach, unless it was Woody Hayes, and then he and Schrader would switch. Curt Beamer, who at one time or another had possibly photographed a third of the local population, had a sidelines pass and his photos would be blown up big on the front page and in the sports section. It went without saying that the story would get the front page headline, eight columns in Railroad Gothic, a typeface we referred to as “World Ends.”
In September 1958 I was assigned to Beamer as his caption writer. This was a lowly but crucial job. I knelt next to him on the sidelines, the perfect view, and wrote down the players in every frame of film. He briefed me: “You’re not here to enjoy the game. Your number one duty is to grab my belt and yank me out of the way if I’m about to get creamed by a player I can’t see through the viewfinder. Number two, make a list starting with “Roll one, Shot one” and write down the players in every shot I take, because when they get muddy they all look the same.” When the ball was snapped, I hooked my fingers through Beamer’s belt, ready to yank him hard if a play ran into our sidelines. Looking through his telephoto lens, he sometimes couldn’t see them coming. “Pull me too soon and you spoil a great picture,” he instructed me. “Wait too late, and we get creamed.”
Beamer’s photos from the first three quarters were rushed back to the office by a speed demon on a motorcycle. After the game we rushed back ourselves. His photos would supply the wire services. In the photo lab, Hal Holmes would be developing them as fast as he could, hanging them by clothespins to dry. I stood by with my caption notes. Bill Schmelzle, the city editor, would come back to the lab to get a look at what we had. Beamer would pick the best ones and Holmesy would lay them on rotating cylinders to go over the telephone to the AP.
By now it was maybe seven o’clock. In the newsroom, all attention focused on Schrader, pounding on his Smith-Corona in a cloud of cigar smoke. The rest of us went across to Vriner’s Confectionery for dinner. Tyke Vriner was a local celebrity: He’d led the Champaign Maroons to an undefeated season around 1940, but when it turned out he was overage the team had to forfeit every game. Vriner’s was a period piece even then: A marble counter with stools and a soda fountain, glass cases for the fudge and taffy he made in the rear room, and high-backed wooden booths. It was said that the mayor of Champaign and other notables joined in after-hours poker games back there. Hal and I would order cheeseburgers or maybe even a T-bone steak, which Tyke would fry right on the hamburger grill. All he had was a grill for meat and deep fat for fries, chicken, and shrimp.
After dinner, we went back up to the newsroom, where Ed Borman would have taken over the city slot from Schmelzle. He supervised T. O. White, the retired sports editor who was entrusted with writing headlines and reading copy. A few other local stories might come in: Crashes, fires. I would go over to Champaign Police to look at the blotter for newsworthy cases. Borman would be back with the Linotypes, leaning over the turtles that held the type and photo engravings, reading it upside down. The paper would be locked up, the press would roll, the building would shake, we’d all gather around the city desk, and Borman would produce six-packs of Old Style from a refrigerator in the publisher’s office. That autumn he pushed a can over the desk to me, my first beer. The pressroom foreman came up with the paper, and we read it. As my mother prophesied, I was a newspaperman, underpaid and drinking.
In the summer of 1959 I was given a full-time job on the state desk, writing up obituaries, fires, traffic accidents, and county fair prizes in the paper’s circulation area, always referred to as “East Central Illinois.” My partner on the beat was Betsy Hendrick, also young and ambitious, who later went on to run the family business, Hendrick House. Our mentor in those days was Jari Jackson, a passionate young woman who took every story with dead seriousness and drilled me on the UPI style book. Her copy pencil would slash through my stories; she was not as forgiving as the sports desk, which granted itself infinite leeway in style. The high point of Jari’s day would be a “fatal,” a car accident with fatalities. She would growl down the line to the state police for more details, chain-smoking and growing impatient as the deadline approached. I learned from her that a newspaperman never misses a deadline, and I never have.
The city room in those days was filled with characters, and each desk was like an island of influence. All work flowed into and out from Schmelzle, a benign man who had round shoulders from years of bending over copy. He sat at the crossbar of the H-shaped city desk. Across from him sat a chief copy editor, often T. O. White, the former sports editor. To his left, Borman. To his right, Gracie Underwood, the former society editor. Gracie’s best pal was Helen Stevick, mother of Marajen Stevick Chinigo, the paper’s owner. Helen would appear in the news room around lunchtime with her poodles on a leash. She and Gracie would go out to lunch together, and after returning Gracie would put her head down on her arms and sleep soundly for an hour.
The state desk was next to the city desk. Across from us was the society desk, run by Bill Schmelzle’s wife, Annabel. Sports was at the other end of the room. Across from them was a long desk for general assignment reporters, including Joe Black, who always smelled faintly of bourbon and wrote beatnik poetry. Right in the middle of the room, between the reporters and sports, was the desk of Fran Myers, the university editor, a formidable matron who embodied a Wodehousian aunt. Every single one of these people, with the exception of Fran Myers, was a smoker, and a grey cloud hung low over the room.
In a room off the newsroom were the desks of Willard Hansen, the editor, and Harold Holmes. They shared space with the morgue, in which countless clippings rested in file envelopes. Willard was a diffident, polite man whose editorials advised our readers to vote Republican in every possible circumstance. So Republican was the paper that in 2008, long after Marajen had died at an advanced age and even the Chicago Tribune broke with more than a century of tradition to endorse Obama, it faithfully endorsed Senator John McCain. Behind Harold and Willard was the conference room, lined with photographs of D. W. Stevick, founder of the paper, and his legendary daughter and countess, who had married Count Michael Chinigo, the International News Service bureau chief in Rome. Marajen, a great beauty in her youth, looked dashing as an early aviatrix and companion of senators, tycoons, and movie stars. She commuted between a mansion in Palm Springs, a villa in Ravello, Italy (where she lived on a hillside next to Gore Vidal), and her big childhood home in Champaign, which had the first private indoor pool in town. Regularly the News-Gazette railed against the “out of town ownership” of the Champaign-Urbana Courier, a member of the Lindsay-Schaub chain out of Decatur, forty miles away. Bob Sink, the crusty editor of the Courier, eventually wrote an editorial saying the paper was “weary of these complaints from the banks of the Tiber.”
In those days the paper, then at 52 Main, was not air-conditioned. Huge windows opened to the summer heat, and every desk was covered with grime from the nearby Illinois Central tracks. Fran Myers’s first task every morning was to scrub her domain with Windex. In August, millions of tiny black bugs from the cornfields would be attracted by the paper’s big neon sign, and our desks would be covered in the morning by their corpses. We scraped them onto the floor with folded copy paper. The heat down the hall in the composing room, filled with Linotype machines, was unbearable when I raced with breaking stories on deadline to Bill Schmelzle, leaning over the type, reading it upside down, cutting stories while they were in lead, his sweat dripping on the headlines.
My first day of full time, Schmelzle pulled the oldest trick in the newsroom on me. “Ebert, take a day off,” he called from his desk. Everyone looked up. “Look behind you,” said Ruth Weinard, the sweet assistant society editor. I was standing in front of the wall calendar. The day began slowly. We received our “assignment sheets,” individually prepared for every reporter by Schmelzle from his tickler file, which contained advance notes on everything of possible interest to East Central Illinois. “Check cause of Philo fatal,” he might write to me. Or “new highway work at Hoopeston.” I was not discriminated against because of age and sometimes drew plum assignments, like “Rantoul Rotary,” “Holiday Inn opening,” or “Paxton grain elevator fire.”
As the morning progressed, the most important state desk stories defined themselves. There might be a farm machinery accident near Mahomet. Or Jari Jackson might have a fatal with three or even four deaths and would evacuate from her desk and commandeer a command post at city desk, racing back and forth puffing furiously. From her example I absorbed the frightening urgency of deadlines. By 11:30 a.m. every typewriter on the floor was being pounded with the velocity and rhythm of self-taught typists at incomprehensible speed. Deadline was 12:15. The city room would empty, with most reporters heading directly across the street to Vriner’s for lunch. By then Schmelzle would be permanently in the composing room, putting the edition to bed. We had two editions, the state (two pages filled with news and photos from our small-town correspondents) and the city (those pages swapped out for more local news and last-minute updates).
The News-Gazette was a few blocks from city hall, which housed the fire and police departments. Through the tall open windows we could hear the fire sirens as the trucks pulled out. One day, just after deadline, the sirens wailed and Schmelzle told me, “Wait five minutes, call the fire department, and see what it is.” Champaign firemen told me it was “a still at Morris Brown’s junkyard.” I pounded out one paragraph on deadline: “A still caught on fire just after noon Tuesday at Morris Brown’s junkyard. Champaign firemen said it was out on arrival.” I rushed back to the composing room with my sheet of copy paper, which Schmelzle handed to the foreman without reading. It was “railroaded” into type, not copyread, slammed onto the bottom of page three, and the paper went to press.
At four that afternoon I was summoned to the desk of Harold Holmes.
“Roger,” said Mr. Holmes, “I would like you to meet Morris Brown.”
Morris Brown did not look like a happy man. He was a well-known bondsman who had once, I knew, stood bail for a circus elephant. I told him I was sorry to hear about his fire.
“There’s more to be sorry about than that,” Holmes said. “Do you know what a still is?”
“It’s a machine used for… distilling? Something?” I said.
“True enough, but at the fire department, you see, it’s also short for ‘stillborn.’ That’s a fire that’s already out when they get there.”
Schmelzle, who had silently come up behind me, broke into laughter. Mr. Brown handed me his card, which read: “Can’t make bail? You don’t need the wings of an angel if you know Morris Brown.”