MY JOURNALISM JOURNEY

Mind the Gap

NEW YORK POST

After two years abroad, my family was happy to have me back. So was the Selective Service, which summoned me to the Fort Hamilton Military Entrance Processing Station in Brooklyn.

It was my lucky day: A top-to-bottom physical found that I had a skin condition—pilonidal cyst—that could flare up at any time and cause severe pain. The army didn’t want me in a foxhole.

I was classified 1–Y—registrant qualified for service only in time of national emergency.

They were prophetic. During a visit to San Francisco the next summer, I would sleep on a hardwood floor and awaken to unbearable tailbone pain.

Free of the draft, there was no more stalling. I needed to find work.

The newspaper landscape in 1969 had changed. New York City was left with just three citywide dailies—the Times, Daily News and Post. I applied to two of them.

I went for the brass ring—the Times—but came up empty-handed. I was too green.

The other paper was the Post, a scrappy, left-leaning tabloid with an emphasis on local news. I let it fly. I sent a puckish letter to introduce myself and show off my street smarts:

“The place is New York. Bell bottoms are in, bras out. It takes a minute to go a block and 10 minutes to find a cab. When it’s 78 degrees on the weather sign at Nathan’s Famous on 43rd St., it is 85 degrees on the sign at the Deli Plaza on 42nd St. Between the blocks, news of crime and war and inflation rings the Allied Chemical Tower and purse-snatchers, pick-pockets and pimps ring pedestrians. The ticket lines outside “Applause!” are long. The lines for “Joe” are longer. There are no lines for “Hair.” (There are, also, no tickets.) New York has strip joints, stripped cars, Columbus Circle, a park across the street from Columbus Circle, and a rapist in the park across the street from Columbus Circle....”

The paragraph ran an entire page. It ended with:

“I want to work for the New York Post. If you’re overstaffed, I’ll go underpaid. If you understaffed, I’ll go overworked.”

The City Editor, John Bott, wrote back:

“Come see me.”

I was hired as a general assignment reporter. Breaking news. Follow-ups. Full-page features. Week-long series. Obits. Rewrite. They threw the kitchen sink at me.

I was young. I was fueled by enthusiasm. I had a car. I knew the city.

Underpaid? Yes, but I didn’t expect to get rich on a reporter’s salary.

Overworked? At times, but I collected overtime. The New York Newspaper Guild had a say in that.

A plum assignment my first year was the Kent State massacre in which four unarmed students were killed and nine others wounded by the Ohio National Guard. But the Post needn’t have flown me to Ohio. New York in the Seventies was exploding with crime.

My clips read like a police blotter:

And The Bronx was burning:

In between the mayhem and infernos, however, the Post indulged my penchant for storytelling.

Here’s from an article on Cabbies with Long Hair: A New Breed:

It’s the same old battered Dodge traveling over the same old bumpy roads with the same reckless abandon. The car is no cleaner. The fare is no cheaper. And the trip’s no faster.

But something about your ride this day is different. That difference, you realize, is somebody. Yours is a Kid Cabbie.

He’s 19 years old and he’s in competition with Crabby Cabbie, age 55. “Kid” is a few inches lower in the seat, but he gains the height with a head full of hair. There’s the same stoic cabbie expression on his face, but youthful verve has been added. Attuned to the driving, he’s also tuned to a 15-transistor portable on the dashboard. You rock and rattle to your destination.

And this, from a five-part series on New York at Night:

When the A&P had occupied the building, a round, well-lit red sign with curling white A&P logotype hung outside. When the property changed hands, the name of the new occupant, Dilbert’s Big Ben, was spelled out in blocks of flashing neon letters mounted across the fronting. Yet another successor, Royal Farms, remodeled the outside, dressed it up in purple and gold metal sheeting, and flooded the signpost with fluorescent lights.

There were several remodels. There was an enlargement. There were floods of advertising fliers. There were lengthened store hours.

Nothing seemed to work to make the location, at Mott Ave in the center of Far Rockaway, a viable business venture.

Then, four years ago, the property was rented for “charitable” purposes. The store was cleared of the food counters, a curtain was drawn around the windows, plywood boards hammered in front of several cracked panes, and a small yellow Pepsi sign slapped on the front.

The sign spelled out B-I-N-G-O.

It spelled success.

The quirkier, the better. Like Crazy Clocks Keep Commuters Guessing:

The 5:04 Penn Station to Babylon was on time yesterday. It left at 5:05.

Amidst the clamor about late-running trains, another fickle element in the everyday transportation picture has gone unassailed: off-schedule clocks.

There are probably more errant timepieces in terminals and stations—fast and slow clocks and electronic figure devices—than there are tardy trains and buses....

And in the spirit of “see something, say something,” I reported Who Gets Ticket-Proof Parking at City Hall:

Two streets bordering City Hall have been turned into parking lots for city, state, and police officials.

Fourteen cars bearing government or police insignia or identifications were illegally parked during rush hour yesterday on Broadway and Chambers St. Both streets are designated as snow emergency thoroughfares where parking, and even standing, are banned.

In addition, three cars with the letters “PBA” in their license plates—signifying Patrolmen’s Benevolent Assn. and issued to its top officials—were parked in the official City Hall parking lot in front of Mayor Lindsay’s wing. Only one of the vehicles has been authorized by the Mayor’s office to be there.

The vehicles parked along the City Hall side of Broadway and the south side of Chambers St., both of which were choked with homebound traffic, bore varying insignia and identification cards or plates on front and rear windows, on dashboards, on visas, or affixed to door panels, bumpers, or license plates.

The story did not endear the Post to the officials who issue NYP license plates that enabled reporters and photographers to park their vehicles in special New York Press parking zones.

If you care to read more, the Articles section has samplings of my Front Page, Spot News, Investigative, Features, and Second Takes writings.

Fast forward to 1976. The Post underwent a generational change. The paper’s long-time publisher, Dorothy Schiff, a New Deal Democrat, sold the Post to media magnate Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch moved the paper in a different direction.

A year later, so did I.

Westward ho!