All The News... Part III

Where was I... Oh yeah... something completely different... Well before I get into that, I remember a few things that happened while I was at the Times...

New Years Eve, 1969... Now one of the chores of the job was to go out each night around 11:30 and get the Daily News (which was publishing across town) as well as coffee and stuff for all the shift reporters and copy editors. Either a News Assistant (which I was) or a Copy Boy (which I started as) would go out and do this. The idea was that the editors wanted to see what was in the competition before the late edition was 'put to bed'.

So on this particular night, the Copy Boys and News Assistants decided to celebrate by taking some bright orange pills (some ersatz chemist named Owsley had created an LSD pill that replaced the original sugar cubes).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owsley_Stanley

Now anybody who has ever turned on the television on New Years Eve knows what madness there is in New York’s Time Square. It isn’t unusual for a million people to turn out and watch the ball drop at midnight. The Copy Boy who was sent out to get the Daily News and the Coffee was Kenny Kessler, who was a really bright overweight guy who always dressed sloppily. This chore normally took about 45 minutes and in the hallowed world of the Times, nothing… absolutely nothing… should ever interfere with or come in the way of the daily production schedule. I think mentioned that the clerical staff was on acid that night. So off goes Kenny and the rest of us are walking around in our own little dazed states.

This particular New Years, the paper was expanding into another building, The Paramount Building, which had a lot of frontage on the Square. The building was under renovation and there was nothing to keep me from wandering into it and checking out the madness of the moment outside on the street. The newsroom was on the third floor and the office I found myself overlooked Times Square on 3 sides. So I looked out, saw the throngs, and totally spaced myself out. Next thing I knew, I had opened the windows to the fullest on all 3 sides and was standing there listening and watching the million crazy people. And then I began to hallucinate that I was the Pope and they were all there to see me! The sound of the mass of people was an electric undercurrent as the clock approached midnight. And at about five minutes till, I began to pray for them all and give my blessings. When the ball fell, they were all cheering for me and I had an acid-induced epiphany. I didn’t have to be a part of something to experience it. And the experience was whatever I chose to make it. At that moment, I realized that I was the one who could make things happen and not be the one who things happened to.

Anyway, about a half hour later, I closed the windows and managed to find my way through all the construction and get back to the newsroom. All the Copy Editors were clamoring for their coffee and cakes and stuff but Kenny was nowhere to be found. The Editors were freaking out that there might be an important story in the Daily News and the Times could be scooped. And the entire cadre of Copy Boys and News Assistants were all totally and irrevocably smashed on acid, smiling at everything and everybody. 1:30 rolls around and in staggers Kenny grasping a shredded copy of the Daily News and a now-empty ripped, wet, brown paper bag that must have had the coffee and stuff in it before Kenny tried to negotiate his way through a hundred thousand drunken revelers. His shirt was open, his pants were ripped, his face was flushed and he was completely wild-eyed. He had what I can only describe as a classic 'bad trip.'

All The News That's Fit To Print, Part II

It was both a sad and a glorious time. On one hand, countless friends were being drafted into the Vietnam War and more than a few came home in coffins. One of my jobs at the Times was to edit the casualty lists for the nightly paper and several times I found people I knew and would never see again. I was ‘on the inside’ of the establishment journalism and got to see firsthand how slick the censorship was engineered. I also got to send the daily cables off to each foreign reporter to tell them how their stories were handled, where they appeared in the paper, and what the competition (like the Washington Post, Newsday, and other papers were running with. At 5PM each day, the editors held a meeting where they decided on the placement of each story in the paper and how much space would be given to each of the news divisions. The main groups were Metro, National and Foreign News and they always competed for the best spots and most column inches in the day’s paper. My job was to write a summary of each reporter’s story in their own writing style and send them to the Foreign Editor who would bring them to the meeting to support the request for placement and size. This was actually not an easy job since many of the reporters were given their jobs based more on their ability to get the news than on their ability to write about it. We had a reporter in the Middle East named Dana Adams Schmidt who couldn’t write a complete sentence if his life depended on it. Whenever he filed, the word went out… “…another load of Schmidt…”

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9503E1DD1039F935A1575BC0A962958260

There were street protests happening all the time about all kinds of things. Anti-War, Civil Rights, Free Speech, etc. You name it and there were 30 million passionate young people out there screaming for justice. And the amazing thing was that even though the society was polarized, even those trying to maintain the status quo knew right from wrong. The last straw for me came when there was a protest about a park, People’s Park in Berkeley, California. There was a dispute going on over who and what was permissible in the park and the California National Guard was called in to restore order. This happened a year before the Ohio National Guard killed several students during a famous anti-war protest at Kent State University. Anyway, the soldiers were ordered to use force to restore order and John Kifner (NYT Reporter) led off his story with the fact that this was the first time in US History that a large unit of guard soldiers had refused to obey an order. I watched as the story was filed, sent to the editing desk and ultimately looked nothing like what he had sent in. It was clearly the most important story of the day and deserved to be placed on the front page. His filing went to a copy editor who rewrote his lead paragraph to simply relate the protest and put the Guard’s refusal to obey down into the 4^th or 5^th paragraphs. Then, when the story was placed on the front page, those paragraphs were too far down to be there but were to be included in the continuation of the story inside the paper. Now… remember that the news divisions are allotted a specific amount of space in the paper each day. They always sent more than they were allotted and what wasn’t used was regarded as ‘overset’ and discarded. Guess what wound up as ‘overset’ and never even made it into the paper?

Although I loved the job for its excitement and meaningfulness, in the end, I left. I’m not sure if I left cause I was too high, too moral, too young, or just too full of myself but I spent a lot of time thinking about the casualty lists, the life I was seeing every night in Manhattan, and the opportunity to do something ‘completely’ different.

More on that later…