The Rothman Scandal (27 page)

SHAVING-CREAM DROWNING
BAFFLES POLICE!

He was even able to get a follow-up story out of this event for the front page of his next week's issue:

MEDICAL EXPERTS DESCRIBE HORRORS
OF SHAVING-CREAM DROWNING!

Once again, the “medical experts” were none other than the youthful editor.

And, when no tale that seemed lurid enough for his front page presented itself, Ho Rothman was not above making something up. Thus he was able to use the headline he had imagined in his boardinghouse cell, about mad dogs disemboweling schoolchildren. By changing the venue of this fictitious event to a nonexistent hamlet in faraway California, “high in the wild ranges of the Sierra Madre,” and the dogs to coyotes, he was able to come up with:

CHILDREN DEVOURED BY
RABID COYOTE PACK!

But, to give him credit, he also gradually began adding elements to the
Explorer
's pages that were both innovative and helpful. He had begun to think of a newspaper that not only reported news events, but that also provided a “service” to its readers. Up to that point, American newspapers were considered a male medium. They were largely written by men, for male readers. The typical reader, American publishers assumed, was the man of the house who read his paper while his wife cooked and served his breakfast, and who then took the paper with him to read further on the train or streetcar that bore him to his place of business. Except for the inevitable advice-to-the-lovelorn column, or perhaps the church calendar, nothing in American newspapers of the day was designed to appeal to women readers. Women readers were expected to be served by the relatively small handful of ladies' magazines, including a venerable fashion magazine called
Mode
.

Ho Rothman had begun seeing, with some regularity, a pretty young lady of his own age named Sophie Litsky. Sophie was a far cry from the perfidious Rachel. A rabbi's daughter, Sophie Litsky had been gently bred and gently raised. Sophie's mother, Bella Litsky, had taken a liking to young Ho and, since he appeared to have no family, often invited him to the Litskys' table for dinner, a gesture that was much appreciated. Sophie's mother, he soon learned, had a well-deserved reputation in her neighborhood as a cook and Bella Litsky once boasted that she could go into anyone's icebox or larder and, with whatever ingredients she happened to find there, could come up with a tasty and hearty dish. To tease her, more than anything else, Ho dared her to do this. With the cooperation of an agreeable neighbor, Bella Litsky said she would take him up on the challenge. Bella marched into her neighbor's kitchen, where she found a couple of onions, a carrot, two tomatoes, a potato, a gill of sour cream, a bit of cheese, and half a roasted chicken, and proceeded to create—to Ho's taste, at least—a simply ambrosial casserole. Bella even gave it a clever name: Hopalong Casserole.

Ho decided to make use of Mrs. Litsky's cooking talents for the
Explorer
, and presently a recipe column called “From Mrs. L's Kitchen” became a regular weekly feature. Circulation jumped—from women readers who mailed in their subscription money. Quickly retitled “Exploring Mrs. L's Kitchen,” and expanded to include not only recipes but also housekeeping, shopping, and budgeting hints, and given a full page in the paper, the “Mrs. L Page,” seemed to be drawing more readers than any other. And Ho Rothman was hinting that he might make Bella Litsky his first paid outside contributor. But he was not quite ready to take such a drastic step, and for the time being Bella Litsky was satisfied with her photograph in the upper left-hand corner of the page, and a certain amount of local celebrity.

Today, of course, nearly every American newspaper has its so-called Women's Page. But Ho Rothman's paper was the very first to have one.

The only part of the paper to bear Ho Rothman's name was the editorial page, which appeared under the general banner:.

EXPLORING THE ISSUES!

by

H. O. Rothman

EDITOR & PUBLISHER

The general tone of the editorial page was one of indignation, though here Ho had to walk a thin and careful line. The people involved in the issues that the
Explorer
explored were actual, living human beings, and Ho was aware of American libel laws. He could, however, with reasonable impunity, question the propriety of a building contract for a new city hospital that was awarded to the mayor's brother-in-law. He could safely inveigh against the United States Congress for shortening the working day of all government employees to eight hours while, in private industry, most workers still labored ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week.

But he was most comfortable taking to task individuals and institutions that were far away, beyond the law's long reach. By the spring of 1912, Ho Rothman, who read the “real” newspapers regularly, was becoming increasingly annoyed by the boastful publicity coming out of England concerning a new luxury liner that Britain's White Star line was planning to launch in mid-April. Everything about the undertaking seemed to him to be grossly overblown. In addition to being the world's most luxurious, the passenger ship would be the world's largest and heaviest, 882 feet in length, and weighing 46,328 tons. With what struck Ho as outrageous
chutzpah
, the new liner was being billed as “unsinkable.” Even the new liner's name—the
Titanic
—struck Ho Rothman as preposterously grandiose.

In a series of
Explorer
editorials, Ho Rothman wrote scathingly of the White Star venture, which he called “the Rich Man's Liner,” and “White Star's Folly.” He noted that the British company had high-handedly provided only enough lifeboats to accommodate the ship's first class passengers. Should the unsinkable vessel ever sink, passengers in cabin class, tourist, and steerage would have to fend for themselves. The entire enterprise, he wrote, struck him as an act of arrogant defiance against God and Nature. From his own experience crossing the stormy North Atlantic, he doubted that any ship that ever sailed the seas could proclaim itself unsinkable. He wrote of how he personally had been aboard a mighty ship as it pitched and rolled, as forty-foot-high waves crashed across its decks, how its planks and beams shuddered and groaned as its hull seemed about to fly asunder beneath the impact of tons of water. He wrote of his own terror. He wrote of the threat of icebergs, whose giant, ghostly tips he had himself seen looming above the waves, and of his knowledge that, below these tips, huge and invisible hazards lurked that were impossible to estimate. He even noted that the
Titanic
's departure date—midnight, April 12—was an unlucky Friday, and that when the ship entered the Channel it would be an unlucky 13, a congruence of dates that struck him as a sign of ill omen.

He even, out of wishful thinking, perhaps, that his pessimism would prove justified, had a banner front-page headline set in type for the
Explorer
:

TITANIC SINKS!

Thousands Feared Lost

He set this rack of type aside for possible future use.

Meanwhile, Ho Rothman had needed to find another job in order to give himself some steady income until, with luck, his fledgling newspaper began to show a steady profit. He had taken a position at Bamberger's department store, as a general clerk and errand boy, for seven dollars a week, and his days were now spent scurrying back and forth between his paper and the store. If other Americans were then working ten to twelve hours a day for six days a week, Ho Rothman was working eighteen to twenty hours a day, seven days a week.

The principal items of overhead in running a newspaper were three: the cost of newsprint, the cost of electricity to run the presses, and the cost of water needed to mix the inks. In terms of the first item, Ho was in luck. He had inherited some two tons of newsprint from the late Mr. Meister. But paying for his electric and water supply was another matter. For a while, he had toyed with the idea of somehow connecting his electric supply line to a neighbor's meter. But that seemed risky and, besides, he knew too little about electricity to carry out such an operation. Then he had another idea. If banks made mistakes, couldn't utilities companies make mistakes as well? And, since he had bought his plant from the city, didn't that mean that the city had been its previous legal owner? He placed a call to the service manager of the Newark Light & Power Company.

“This is J. D. Sasser at City Hall,” Ho said in the best brusque American accent he could muster. “Why have not we received a bill for service at the three-oh-five Bergen Avenue property?”

“One moment, sir. I'll check.” When the manager came back on the line, he said, “We were notified, Mr. Sasser, that title to that property was assumed last month by a Mr. Rothman.”

“Not at all,” said Ho authoritatively. “Not at all. Now please see to it that the bill gets sent to the city right away.”

“Yes, sir!” said the manager.

“We have a city to run, you know, and a budget to balance, my good man.”

“Yes, sir!” said the manager.

“Give me your badge number, for our records.”

“Sir, we don't wear badges.”

“I just don't want you to get into any trouble over this, my good man.”

“No, sir!”

It might be months, Ho figured, before the respective bureaucracies of the city government and the power company discovered what was going on, and then someone else would be blamed.

The same tactic worked with the water company.

Meanwhile, his duties at Bamberger's turned out to be somewhat loosely defined. Some days he would be asked to sweep out the store's offices and empty the wastebaskets before the executives arrived for work. On others, he might be asked to help the window dressers set up their displays and dress their mannequins. One day he might be assigned to the store's sign shop, where the in-store signs and notices were printed, and the next day might find him running ad copy between the advertising department and the buyers' offices for the buyers' approval. As a result, he soon felt he knew as much about running a department store as he did about running a newspaper.

The buyers, he quickly realized, even though they worked out of tiny, cluttered, windowless cubbyholes, were the real kingpins of the store's operations. In theory, the buyers reported to a smaller number of higher-ups called merchandise managers. But, in actual practice—at least as long as the buyer's figures appeared in the Gains column of each day's sales sheet—the buyer was given carte blanche to do whatever he chose. The activities of the major buyers were rarely questioned, unless the figures from a buyer's department showed a trace of red ink. Then he would be summoned by his merchandise manager and asked to account for himself.

Young Ho also noticed that some buyers were definitely more important than others. At the top of the pecking order stood Mr. Gossage, the furniture buyer. When the great Eldridge J. Gossage strode through his department, underlings bowed and stepped out of his way, and otherwise tried to look busy. Next in rank came Mr. Rubin, the buyer for Major Appliances. The eminence of these two men was based on two factors: their merchandise was among the highest-priced in the store, and the square-footage their departments required comprised the store's two largest selling areas—Mr. Gossage's Furniture took up the entire seventh floor. The buyer for Furs, even though he dealt with expensive, luxury goods, ranked far below Furniture and Major Appliances on the status ladder. This was because his business was mostly seasonal, and furs were considered “impulse items.” But regardless of the time of year, customers still bought furniture and new kitchen stoves.

Ho Rothman also couldn't help noticing another oddity about the buyers. Physically, they called to mind the merchandise they dealt with. Mr. Gossage and Mr. Rubin were as massive and solidly put together as the overstuffed sofas and refrigerators that filled their respective departments. The fur buyer was a rabbity little man with a Persian lamb beard. The toy buyer was a jolly Santa Claus. The bespectacled book buyer looked like a librarian. The antiques buyer was an elderly bachelor. The women's shoe buyer was a dainty, effeminate little fellow whose slender back exhibited a curvature that almost exactly echoed the arched insole of a lady's pump. The fashion buyers were haughty, hatted, bejeweled women who carried themselves with the air of models about to pose for a cover of
Mode
. The faces of the cosmetics buyers were masked heavily with their products, while the faces of the buyers of the low-priced Basement Store wore a kind of prison pallor, as though they had never seen the light of day or been able to afford a decent meal. Even the window dressers were slender, willowy young men who, in conversation, often affected the exaggerated gestures and poses of the mannequins they dressed.

Miss Rabinowitz, the umbrella buyer, was important only on rainy days, when she was galvanized into action and seemed to commandeer the entire street floor as she repositioned her merchandise next to the store's entrances and exits. Only when it rained was Miss Rabinowitz ever seen to smile.

Ho observed other peculiarities about the way department stores were run. Once a year, for instance, in October, Bamberger's staged a storewide anniversary or birthday sale. But then so did every other department store in the New York metropolitan area. Did this mean that every department store in the Tristate region had come into being in the month of October? Or did it have more to do with the slow selling season that regularly occurred between back-to-school and Christmas?

As he carried sheets of advertising copy back and forth between the copywriters' and the buyers' offices, reading the copy as he went, he learned something about the advertising business that would stand him in good stead later on. He learned that much of the store's advertising was misleading, if not downright false. He would read: “This magnificent set of dining room chairs by Heritage will go on sale tomorrow—
for one day only
—for the amazingly low, low price of $129.95!” He was familiar with the chairs in question, having often passed them on his rounds. Their price tag had always been $129.95.