This column first appeared on Dec. 24, 1995
To perceive what it was prefer to toil on a Hearst newspaper, you actually needed to be there. As one among my veteran colleagues right here as soon as noticed, “Working for Hearst is like living in a public-housing project.”
Mission Hill, possibly. Or Orchard Park.
I obtained to eager about the outdated Hearst empire this week when phrase got here of the loss of life of Harold Banks, the 80-year-old retired columnist and rewriteman, first for the Boston American (d. 1961), then the Record-American (d. 1972) and eventually the Herald American (d. 1982).
Ring Lardner labored briefly for the American, however don’t go getting the thought it was some sort of high-hat sheet. By the time Harold obtained there, in 1945, the editor was a man named Walter Howey, who was the prototype for Walter Burns, the fictional editor of the oft-remade film, “The Front Page.”
By the time he obtained again to Boston, although, the extra acceptable film about Howey would have been “The Lost Weekend.” The in a single day police reporter for the American (it was a day rag) had one necessary process each night. After midnight, he needed to drive to Walter Howey’s townhouse on Comm. Ave. and ship the provisions that this legend wanted to get him by means of the night time.
Two packs of Spud cigarettes and two bottles of elderberry wine.
One night time within the late ’40s, proper on deadline, Howey fired everybody within the newsroom apart from one copy boy who generally performed whist with him. Screaming, completely loaded, Howey ordered all people however the copy boy out of the constructing. They all shrugged and headed down the road to Barsanti’s.
The teen-age copy boy – now promoted by Howey to managing editor of the Record, the American and the Sunday Advertiser – needed to wait till Howey staggered again into his workplace for an influence nap earlier than working all the way down to Barsanti’s to rehire all people.
I discovered this lore enjoying playing cards with the boys within the metropolis room on Saturday nights shut to twenty years in the past. In these days you had much more institutional reminiscence within the room than you do now. We even had a couple of bleary-eyed survivors of the Evening Transcript (d. 1941) and the outdated Boston Post (d. 1956) padding zombie-like by means of the newsroom.
Poor Harold Banks – this was a man who’d gone to Boston Latin, Harvard College and the Columbia Journalism School. This, at a newspaper the place, in case you had one semester at Boston State below your belt, the legmen referred to as you a “college f-g.”
Sometimes, between Marlboros, Harold would point out, a bit wistfully, his schoolboy days with Teddy White – Theodore White, who wrote the “Making of the President” sequence.
Teddy White, making tens of millions and hobnobbing with JFK and LBJ whereas Harold, the consummate professional, was doing rewrite on the paper finest recognized for working the pool quantity.
George Frazier, the late Boston columnist, had an ideal description for this outpost of the Hearst empire: “When I went to work for the Record I was aware that many of the readers moved their lips when they read, but I didn’t know that most of the editors did too.”
Somehow, although, in any case, Harold Banks and some different rewritemen and a handful of gifted photographers put out that paper (no matter its identify was that yr). They did it day after day, yr after yr.
I keep in mind one Saturday night time, as a boy rewriteman, taking some dictation from a toothless tiger down on the Cape. Usually this man’s thought of legwork was to name accumulate from a taproom with a couple of telephone numbers for me to name. This time, although, he had some quotes (in all probability from that day’s Cape Cod Times).
My job was to take the notes and vogue them right into a function story a few shepherd, so a quick bodily description of the shepherd appeared acceptable.
I requested the legman, what precisely did this shepherd seem like? It should have been a really powerful query, judging from the silence on the different finish of the road.
“What did he look like?” he lastly repeated. “He looked like … a bleeping shepherd.”
It was at this level I started to suppose: What precisely is so dangerous about going into tv?
Pretty quickly I used to be gone from what Frazier referred to as the “Hearst hybrid beyond belief.”
Harold hung in there to the bitter finish and obtained – effectively, I don’t know what he obtained, however I doubt it was what Walter Howey did, which was a pocket watch inscribed by “the Chief.” But then once more, in contrast to Walter Howey, Harold had by no means named one among his kids “William Randolph.”
Ah, recollections. But that’s what this present day is for. Harold Banks, you had been the perfect. Everybody else, Merry Christmas.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”