Assignment to Hell (8 page)

Not many sons of Hawley earned scholarships to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon) in the ’20s, but Bigart did. He showed up in Pittsburgh with the intent of studying architecture. But within a few days it was apparent that Bigart couldn’t draw; he not only withdrew from the architecture program but also dropped out of school.

In 1927, at age twenty, he rented a $3-a-week room in Brooklyn, took occasional English and journalism classes at New York University, and landed a job as a nighttime copyboy at the
New York Herald Tribune
.
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The
Herald Tribune
may have had a distinguished history as Horace Greeley’s abolitionist organ but Bigart was starting in its cellar. He earned the princely sum of $12 a week fetching coffee and cigarettes for the hard-bitten scribes on the
Trib
’s overnight city desk.

Year after year, Bigart performed menial tasks, hoping it would lead to a full-time reporting job. He even started a newsletter for entry-level cohorts,
Copy Boy’s Call
.
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In 1933, his perseverance was rewarded, sort of: At age twenty-six, he was made head copyboy—quite possibly the oldest copyboy in the
Trib
’s history. “On the job, [Bigart’s] charges saw him as something of a tyrant; off it, they thought him almost a recluse,” Richard Kluger wrote in
The Paper
.
¹⁹
Not only did Bigart’s speech impediment make it difficult for him to communicate with newsroom staffers, he often wore a sarcastic smirk that did not endear him to superiors. Instead of hanging around Bleeck’s, the
Trib
’s ground-floor saloon, Bigart liked to go home
and devour books. Later, his eclectic knowledge and grasp of literature astounded Ivy-educated friends. In 1935, in fact, the
Trib
sent its Renaissance man to interview Thomas Wolfe when the
Look Homeward, Angel
novelist visited New York.
²⁰

Reading was one thing; reporting quite another. On those rare occasions when Bigart was given a chance to write an obituary or cover a church service or handle some other pedestrian assignment, his copy was full of cross-outs; it took him forever to compose even the simplest stories. Nevertheless, the
Trib
tried him out as a spot reporter at $25 a week.

Early on, he managed to screw up the unscrew-up-able when he was sent to Penn Station to cover the inauguration of a new New York–to-Miami line. He somehow ended up at the wrong track; worse, his article singled out the wrong outfit, angering a large advertiser. Bigart’s gaffe earned a personal knuckle rapping from Helen Rogers Reid, the domineering wife of the
Trib
’s publisher.

But Bigart survived and, slowly but surely, began showing a gift for what Kluger called “sardonic observation.” In March 1940, Bigart’s front-page take on the city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade included this sparkling passage: “The snow lay an inch deep in the folds of the Mayor’s large black felt hat by the time the County Kerry boys went by singing, ‘The hat me dear old father wore.’”
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Moreover, by his early thirties, he’d figured out how to “use” his stutter. He perfected what became universally known as “Homer’s All-American Dummy Act.” Recognizing that people misconstrued his impediment as ignorance, Bigart would put on a theatrical stammer and ask the same basic questions over and over again. “And then w-w-what happened?” was a typical Bigart query, usually delivered from behind a Lucky Strike spilling ashes.

It drove colleagues and competitors to distraction, but interviewees tended to take pity on Bigart, often sharing information they had no business sharing because they felt sorry for him. In truth, Bigart was always two steps ahead of the competition because he’d done his homework.

“Homer didn’t know anything—like a fox,” his acolyte Andy Rooney chuckled a half century later.
²²

U
NLIKE HIS MENTORS
L
IEBLING AND
Bigart, Rooney never came up through the ranks of workaday journalism. He didn’t have the chance: the pug-nosed kid, all of five-foot-eight with bushy brown hair and bushier brown eyebrows, was still a junior at Colgate University when he was conscripted into service.

Like a lot of college students in the ’30s, Rooney, appalled by the Great War’s hypocrisy, flirted with pacifism and conscientious objection. An iconoclastic economics professor, a Quaker, preached something that Rooney and his Colgate friends took to heart: “Any peace is better than any war.”
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It was a maxim Rooney would come to regret in April 1945 when he walked through the gates of Buchenwald.

But Rooney the undergrad paid a lot more attention to Colgate’s nationally prominent football squad than he did to the spread of European Fascism. He was an undersized and scrappy mule who—in a prelude to the rest of his life—wasn’t afraid to stick his nose into bigger guys.

He’d grown up in a comfortable upper-middle-class home, the son of a Williams College graduate who abhorred FDR. His dad was a successful enough salesman with the Albany Felt Company to send his son to private school and afford a vacation cabin on nearby Lake George.

Young Rooney showed some promise as a writer at the academy, crafting funny essays that caught an English teacher’s fancy.
²⁴
But his only brush with journalism was a brief apprenticeship as an intern/copyboy at the
Knickerbocker News
and a couple of letters—one advocating pacifism—published in upstate New York papers.
²⁵

Rooney always pooh-poohed his academic performance at Colgate, but he was more than a jock: He became a protégé of noted English professor Porter Perrin, a contributing editor of the student magazine, a member of the debate team, a faithful reader of E. B. White and the
New Yorker
, and a good enough after-dinner speaker to win an undergraduate competition two years running.

“Andy was a word man,” his roommate Bob Ruthman remembered. “He enjoyed reading, writing, speaking, and conversing. His subjects were
whatever he thought worth talking about. He never used profanities, slang, or told off-color jokes.”
²⁶

Belying his later image of Everyman, Rooney could also be something of a snoot. Ruthman met Rooney at the “R” mailbox freshman year. “Andy asked where I lived and my prep school. ‘I’m from Evanston, Illinois, and I went to Evanston High School,’ I said. Andy seemed surprised. ‘A high school—an elevated structure? And no prep school?’”

Ruthman remembered his “Room” (as they called one another) as fun to be around and an athlete who got the most out of his limited abilities. But Rooney could be stubborn to a fault.

Part of the hazing ritual at Sigma Chi, the fraternity they pledged together, was to tromp through the snow-covered hills of Madison County. Ruthman, an experienced wintertime hiker, owned a pair of sturdy, Iroquois-style snowshoes and urged Rooney to buy a similar pair. But Andy went cheap, getting snowshoes that constantly slipped off his feet.

“I had to pull his ass out of the snow the entire way,” Ruthman laughed seven decades later.
²⁷
But the two of them avoided frostbite and got into Sigma Chi.

The young Rooney sometimes rubbed people the wrong way, Ruthman allowed, coming across as “brash” and “impolitic”—the very qualities that in the years to come Rooney turned into his own cottage industry.

When his draft number was called in the spring of ’41, Rooney mulled it over and concluded he wasn’t introspective enough to be a conscientious objector. So off he went that July to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he developed an instant—and lifelong—disdain toward martinets in uniform. He also learned that if you popped off to a noncommissioned officer, reprisals would come fast.

Rooney was in one of the few places he could abide on a military base—the mess hall—on December 7, 1941, when news came over the radio that the United States was now at war.
²⁸
Post–Pearl Harbor, his outfit, now known as the Seventeenth Field Artillery Brigade, put him to work cobbling together a weekly newsletter. One of the brigade’s colonels came away from a conversation with Rooney convinced that the youngster was a Communist—or at least a serious subversive.

H
AL
B
OYLE
, R
OONEY’S FUTURE
F
IRST
Army jeep companion, was rebellious in his own way, too. His middle name, Vercingetorix, conveyed defiance: It came from a Gaul chieftain who gave the Roman Empire everything it could handle in 45 BC. Boyle eventually shortened the moniker to “Vincent.” Even while covering a world war Boyle exhibited “Boston tea party tendencies,” his great AP friend and editor Wes Gallagher wrote in 1944.
²⁹

But Boyle had reporting in his blood; as a student at Central High School in Kansas City, Missouri, he finagled a job as a copyboy at the local Associated Press office. More than four decades later he was still working for the same wire service. But instead of sharpening pencils he was penning a nationally acclaimed column—and had been for thirty years. His first real reporting assignment in Kansas City came in 1928 when AP sent him to cover a triple hanging.
³⁰

Boyle’s old man was an Irish immigrant, one of seventeen kids from a hardscrabble coal-mining family. “Every Irish family is a staircase to heaven,” Boyle was fond of writing.
³¹
In the case of the Kansas City Boyles of the 1920s and ’30s, the stairwell was cluttered. His hard-drinking pop disliked imposing discipline over Boyle and his three male siblings. “He thought boys had to get a few bumps in the process of learning to pit their strength against life,” Boyle wrote, “and he didn’t think it paid to interfere or protect them too much.”
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Hal’s father was an ardent Democrat, a proud foot soldier for “Boss Tom” Pendergast, Kansas City’s notorious political strongman.
³³
Hal inherited much from his old man, including feistiness and a fondness for drink.

Boyle’s mother was off the boat from County Mayo, a tart-tongued farm girl who provided her son with fodder for dozens of columns. She never got Mayo out of her blood; although they lived in the heart of Kansas City, all manner of farm animals wandered around the Boyles’ backyard.

His dad ran a butcher shop where Hal and his brothers worked before and after school. Young Hal didn’t care for the stench out back but loved the old-timers who stopped in to exchange wisecracks and talk politics and
sports. His AP colleague and fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Don Whitehead once wrote of Boyle: “He gazes at the world through the eyes of a boy looking across the meat counter and finding the procession of customers interesting and exciting.”
³⁴

In the summertime the Boyles liked to host big neighborhood gatherings, with tons of fried chicken, ham, watermelon, and cold beer.
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But times weren’t always rosy; at the height of the Depression, the Boyles were forced to shutter the meat shop at Twenty-third and Vine.
³⁶

As a kid Boyle became infatuated with Richard Harding Davis, the dashing
Harper’s Weekly
correspondent who helped create the legend of Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War. When just twelve, Boyle told his mother he wanted to be a famous war reporter like Davis.

At Central High, he won various essay contests and was introduced to the joys of Emily Dickinson and other great poets. He was so taken with Dickinson that he named a collection of his columns after one of her classic verses: “A day! Help! Help! Another day!” He also mastered enough philosophy to one day be christened “The Pavement Plato” and the “Poor Man’s Philosopher.”

He spent a year at a local junior college before enrolling at the University of Missouri in Columbia. His Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity brothers were floored by his off-the-wall political views and often flattened by him in late-night wrestling matches. “No Sig Ep,” the
Kansas City Star
once wrote, “ever felt himself safe from the clutches of Boyle’s steel-like arms.” No matter the hour, Boyle celebrated his wrestling triumphs by shrieking like Tarzan.
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