“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
― Thomas Jefferson
Here Now the News
(Back from medical leave)
My earliest memory of reading a newspaper is sitting on the living room floor of our Chicago apartment (circa 1946) with my mother and a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune (morning) or Chicago Daily News (evening) splayed open on the rug. We took both papers. Both papers featured an entire page of news photos on the back page. I remember such all-photo sections being called a rotogravure, as in the lyrics from In YourEaster Bonnet, a Bing Crosby song that was popular at the time. (A photographer will snap us, and you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure.)
I’m sure this was a daily routine, but I remember only one day. The entire top half of the rotogravure section was filled with a picture of an aircraft carrier. “Your father is on that ship,” is my memory of what my mother told me. “He’s coming home.” My dad was a less famous PT boat crewman than JFK. He was based on an island off New Guinea. (He called it Wendy Island. I can’t find it anywhere on Google Earth or anywhere else. If anyone has any insights, please comment.)
I always looked at the rotogravure section first. After all, I could not yet read, but I could understand pictures. Later and older, I moved on to the comics and sports pages. Newspapers and the radio were our only sources of news until we got a television set in 1952 when I was eight. My father finally broke down and bought a TV set because he wanted to watch the College All-Star Game that year.
The annual game in August in Soldier Field, Chicago, kicked off the NFL preseason and pitted the previous year’s NFL champion against a team of college stars who had been drafted by NFL teams. With great anticipation, we hooked up the antenna, plugged in the set and turned it on. To our consternation, smoke began pouring out of the vents on the side of the cabinet of the twelve-incher (picutre tube size). I still recall the awful electrical fire smell. Fortunately, the fire went out when we unplugged the set, but the smell lingered. In addition to the brand new Westinghouse, my hopes of watching the football game went up in smoke.
We missed an especially great game with stars aplenty. Bob Waterfield was the quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams. Waterfield was perhaps more famous for being married to movie star, Jane Russel, with whom all red-blooded American boys were in love. Dick Night Train Lane, Elroy Crazy Legs Hirsch, Deacon Dan Towler and Paul “Tank” Younger, the first player from a traditional African-American school (Grambling) to make it to the NFL, were all on that Rams team.
Both Towler and Younger were Negroes in the vernacular of the time. That was unusual then when the situation in the NFL was the reverse of today. Black players were a distinct minority. Now Blacks make up the overwhelming majority of players. As kids just starting to play tackle football (without protective gear), Tank Younger was our idea of the quintessential big, bruising fullback. Trying to tackle him was as punishing as trying to tackle…well…a tank.
The College All-Stars that year also had some big names that would go on to stardom in the NFL. Vito Babe Parilli was the quarterback. Frank Gifford and Bill Wade were also all-stars that year. Ollie Matson, Hugh McElhenny and Gino Marchetti were all on that team. In a competitive game, the Rams won 10-7 before 88,316. Rain held down attendance. Soldier Field’s capacity was slightly more than 101,000, and in the 30s and 40s, capacity crowds often watched the games that were still competitive then. The 1937 Chicago Prep Bowl, an annual contest between Chicago’s Public League champions and the Catholic League champions, drew a record crowd estimated at 120,000.
First Television Newscasts
The first television newscasts that I recall were five minute broadcasts on the hour or half-hour with Clifton Utley. Another newscaster of that era I remember was a woman, Nancy Dickerson. I had trouble remembering her name at first. When I finally recalled it, I found out through researching her that she had a son, John Dickerson, who is a journalist with CBS News, currently hosting CBS News Prime Time with John Dickerson on the CBS streaming network.
He has written a book about his mother On Her Trail: My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, TV News’ First Woman Star. Reading about her and reading the first few chapters of the book, I learned that Ms. Dickerson was a much more complicated and socially prominent woman than I had imagined from my youthful impression of her based on a five-minute newscast. She went on to much bigger and better things, including marrying into lots of money. From the Dickerson book blurb on Amazon:
Before Barbara Walters, before Katie Couric, there was Nancy Dickerson. The first female member of the Washington TV news corps, Nancy was the only woman covering many of the most iconic events of the sixties. She was the first reporter to speak to President Kennedy after his inauguration and she was on the Mall with Martin Luther King Jr. during the march on Washington; she had dinner with LBJ the night after Kennedy was assassinated and got late-night calls from President Nixon. Ambitious, beautiful and smart, she dated senators and congressmen and got advice and accolades from Edward R. Murrow. She was one of President Johnson's favorite reporters, and he often greeted her on-camera with a familiar "Hello, Nancy." In the '60s Nancy and her husband Wyatt Dickerson were Washington's golden couple, and the capital's power brokers coveted invitations to swank dinners at their estate on the Potomac.
Her son writes candidly of his relationship with his mother. They became estranged. From his book:
By the time I was thirteen, I wasn’t confused anymore. I was angry. I hated her: I thought she was a phony and a liar. Everyone still thought she was a big deal, but I thought she distinguished herself at home by being petty, rigid and clumsy. My parents divorced that year and I took my electric clock and brown comforter and I escaped. I moved in with my father. Mom stayed at Merrywood, the mansion where she and my father had raised five children, entertained presidents and smiled on cue for nearly twenty years of celebrity photographers. I would never live with her under the same roof again.
Little did he know then that twenty years later he would be following in her footsteps. He and his mother reconciled shortly before her death in 1997. He had moved to Washington and was “covering her old beat.”
Having graduated from college in 1932 and entering the workforce in the midst of the Great Depression, my father’s formative experience was the economic hard times of the thirties and the need to do without. He, therefore, watched his pennies carefully. We did not subscribe to many magazines. The exceptions were U.S. News and World Report, and The Kiplinger Letter, both of which had no appeal for me.
Time and Life Magazine were two of the most popular publications in my youth but not in our house for some reason. Virtually all of my friends’ families subscribed to them, however, so I read them regularly, along with Reader’s Digest. I loved the humor in the latter. Life, however, was my favorite. LIfe was how we learned about the overseas world through great photography. It was also where we found pictures of the beautiful Hollywood stars we fantasized about—Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren and of course, Brigitte Bardot.
A great uncle who was a sportsman, meaning in those days that he hunted and fished, gave me his National Geographic and Florida Wildlife copies after he had read them. The only thing I remember about Florida Wildlife is accounts of encounters with eastern diamondback rattlers and cottonmouth moccasins. That only exacerbated my fear of snakes that has lasted to this day.
Sputnik and Little Rock
Eighth grade was a memorable year for me. My favorite teacher, Mr. Rubidoux, was a stern taskmaster but had a sense of humor. We were drilled in grammar, keeping an English notebook into which we transcribed the grammatical point of the day. That year I learned all the grammar I ever needed to know.
We also read newspapers in class and followed current events closely. It was the year of Sputnik. The Soviet Union’s surprise launch of a satellite had shaken the world, particularly the military world in the United States.
Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program. It sent a radio signal back to Earth for three weeks before its three silver-zinc batteries ran out.
Even before the launch, Soviet advancements in millitary technology in particular shook up government bureaucracies, including the education bureaucracy. It was decided that we were behind the USSR in producing scientists. Our students were also, it was believed, lacking in knowledge of foreign countries and foreign affairs. We needed to put more emphasis on studying world events and learning foreign languages.
Thus, in our 8th grade year at Arlington Heights (IL) Junior High School, we were suddenly offered electives in advanced science, foreign languages (French, Spanish and German) and advanced art. I am not sure the reason for the addition of the art elective—perhaps in order to become potential assets for the CIA, forging documents and doing sketches from descriptions of alleged Soviet agents. For the record, I opted for advanced science.
The Little Rock school integration crisis happened just as we were beginning our 8th grade year. From Wikipedia:
The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
We followed the situation closely in LASS, (Language, Arts and Social Studies—education had its acronyms, even then.). Of course, we took the side of the Negro students. We could not imagine how anyone could be so bigoted as were those in Little Rock who fought the admission of Blacks to public schools for which they were paying taxes. We never stopped to think that there were no Black students in our school or in our town. One had to travel the roughly 20 miles to the Chicago city limits in order to encounter an integrated school.
We learned that the South was an example of de jure segregation (by law), and the North’s segregation was de facto (Segregation in fact, but not mandated by law.). Of course, the press, save for newspapers in the segregated South, supported integration.
Nightly News
I do not recall watching a national newscast until high school. Then The Huntley–Brinkley Report came across my radar screen. Watching the nightly news became a ritual. Still, local news broadcasts dominated. The NBC and CBS newscasts were only fifteen minutes long. There was the Today Show with Dave Garroway, but local news had broadcasts throughtout the day and evening. Local news broadcasts also covered some national and international news.
My introduction to active journalism came my senior year in high school when I took the journalism elective and also wrote for the school paper. I learned the Five Ws and H, but forgot to double check one of the Ws when I wrote my biggest story. We were defending Illinois State Champions in gymnastics. I wrote the preview story for the upcoming state meet. It was the lead story on the front page with my byline. One problem—I got the when W wrong. Tonight, I began, the Arlington State Champion Gymnastics team, begins its defense…etc. The problem was the meet was tomorrow night, Saturday not Friday.
I was initially pleased as the proverbial punch when Mr. Martin, our student paper adviser, complimented me on my story. Then, the real punch arrived when he told me that, unfortunately, I had the date wrong. Lesson learned: Measure ten times. Cut once.