Escape Velocity

by Charles Portis

  PORTIS: Yes, he and Jonathan were both good editors. Good writers, too, but they no longer bother with it. Richard came to his senses and went to medical school. I never worked on a copy desk. There was a rule at The Commercial Appeal that new reporters had to put in a few months on that duty, to get the feel of things. But the rule was waived—a shortage of reporters or something—when I went there.

  REED: What do you remember about Harry Ashmore?

  PORTIS: Well, you think of the editor of a newspaper as being some remote figure in a back office, going home at four in the afternoon. But Ashmore was out and about in the city room, checking on things, at all hours. He would sit on the corner of your desk and have you fill him in on just what Governor Faubus said, and how he said it, and who was there. He would grill you and make suggestions. More like a managing editor. A very open and genial boss to deal with.

  REED: Did you ever go out drinking with him?

  PORTIS: No. Or once or twice in a group. We weren’t pals.

  REED: He was much more than just the editor of the editorial page?

  PORTIS: Yes, indeed. He was interested in everything. He would look over the photographs and make selections.

  REED: What about Douglas? What do you remember about Bob Douglas?

  PORTIS: Bob, yes. I don’t remember exactly what he was then—copy editor, news editor—but I know he had more authority than the title suggested. He didn’t need the rank. He had a natural authority that everyone recognized. Even his bosses deferred to him.

  REED: He seems never to have forgotten a detail of his history.

  PORTIS: No, and that was part of it. He knew things.

  REED: Wasn’t he also the guy you once referred to in your column as the funniest man in Arkansas?

  PORTIS: Yes, that was from a story he told me once about a funeral in a country church, up around Kensett. It was an ordinary church with the two aisles—pews on the left and right and in the middle. The service had already started. The coffin was on a platform, a bier, beneath the pulpit. An old man came in late, making his way down the left aisle, when he caught his foot on a sprung board or something. He went into a stumbling trot, trying to regain his balance, and appeared to be making for the coffin—making a headlong assault on the coffin. Everyone froze. But at the last moment he managed to veer off to the right, short of the coffin, and continue his run down the right-hand aisle. I can’t remember now whether his momentum carried him on out the door, or whether he just plumped down into a pew at the rear.

  REED: You remember Joe Wirges?

  PORTIS: Oh yes, Joe broke me in on the night police beat there. He was the day man, the police reporter. He had been doing it for so long, you know, that he was almost one of the cops himself. That’s one way of doing it, and he did it very well. I tried to keep a little more distance—not so much stuff off the record—but that way you get frozen out of things. You can make a case for either approach. There was no police information officer then. You had to get the stuff, as best you could, from individual cops and detectives.

  REED: He was kind of a legendary figure.

  PORTIS: Yes, indeed, maybe senior to everyone except Mr. Heiskell. Joe had seen it all—lynchings, electrocutions, shootouts. There was a radio show in the 1940s and 1950s, “The Pall Mall Big Story” or “Front Page,” something like that. Dramatized stories about crime reporters. One of Joe’s adventures was on that show. He told me he got $500 for it.

  REED: It seems to me that he died on the same day Mr. Heiskell died.

  PORTIS: I don’t remember that.

  REED: What do you remember about Mr. Heiskell? J. N. Heiskell?

  PORTIS: Well, you know, he was in his nineties then, but still fairly active. He would come through the newsroom now and then, usually with a galley proof in his hand, and some questions. I remember doing a story about the river. The Corps of Engineers had told me that the Arkansas River would soon run blue through Little Rock, when all these new locks and dams were in place. Mr. Heiskell came by to ask me about that. The muddy, reddish old Arkansas out there flowing blue? Was I quite sure of that? “Blue, Mr. Portis?” I said I was sure the claim had been made. He went away shaking his head, over the absurd claim or my gullibility, or both. But the engineers were right, you know. The river is blue at times. Jerry Neil told me that Mr. Heiskell stopped him once in the hall and said, “Mr. Neil, have you ever stopped to consider just how different things might be if General Lee had had just one scouting airplane at the Battle of Gettysburg?” Jerry said he hadn’t. But, yes, Mr. Heiskell was there every day. He knew what was going on.

  REED: Did you ever write any of those stories—those ideas of Mr. Heiskell that got passed along?

  PORTIS: Yes, a “Mr. Heiskell must,” something like that. I don’t remember any offhand but certainly did some. But, remember, we couldn’t use the word “story.” It smacked of fiction. Mr. Heiskell said the proper word for a news account was “article.” And we couldn’t use “evacuate” as of a building or a city being evacuated. He thought it might remind readers of a bodily function. I don’t know what softer word we used. There can’t be many synonyms for “evacuate.” And no photographs of snakes or other vermin, with those same sensitive readers in mind. And we spelled “Tokyo” with an “i” instead of a “y.” But I sort of liked those quirks.

  REED: JNH.

  PORTIS: Yes, that was it. That was the note for those must-do things.

  REED: I had a box full of JNH’s when I left. Gave them back to Bill Shelton, and he was not amused.

  PORTIS: Bill was hard to amuse. I ignored notes, too—just kept putting things off till they were forgotten or dead. But maybe not the JNH ones. I think I did act on those.

  REED: You had worked at the Arkansas Traveler at the University. Was that your only other newspaper experience?

  PORTIS: Well, no, I worked at the Northwest Arkansas Times, too. The last year or so I was in Fayetteville. I did the courthouse beat, the sheriff’s office, the jail, Judge Ptak’s municipal court. A weird judge, to say the least. Justice was swift there. And I edited the country correspondence from these lady stringers in Goshen and Elkins, those places. I had to type it up. They wrote with hard-lead pencils on tablet paper or notebook paper, but their handwriting was good and clear. Much better than mine. Their writing, too, for that matter. From those who weren’t self-conscious about it. Those who hadn’t taken some writing course. My job was to edit out all the life and charm from these homely reports. Some fine old country expression, or a nice turn of phrase—out they went. We probably thought we were doing the readers a favor. Ted Wylie was the editor.

  REED: You worked there a year?

  PORTIS: Or a little more, yes.

  REED: While you were a student?

  PORTIS: I was a student, yes. It was very early in the morning [when] I’d go down to the Times office. In my 1950 Chevrolet convertible, with the vertical radio in the dash and the leaking top. The Chevrolets of that period had a gearshift linkage that was always locking up, usually in second gear. I would have to stop at least once on the way to work—raise the hood and pop it loose by hand.

  REED: That was when the Fulbrights still owned the paper?

  PORTIS: Yes. The publisher was—Gearhart?

  REED: Sam Gearhart—does that sound right?

  PORTIS: Yes, and there was another executive—I can’t recall the name.

  REED: Was Mrs. Fulbright still there? Roberta Fulbright?

  PORTIS: She was still alive, but I don’t recall seeing her there in the office. Maybe she came by later in the day.

  REED: Did the Senator himself ever show up?

  PORTIS: I don’t remember seeing him there, either.

  REED: But you did a whole range of work at the paper?

  PORTIS: Within a limited range, yes.

  REED: How did you happen to go to work there?

  PORTIS: I think I just went down and asked for a job. I was in journalism at the university, and Mr. Thalheimer may have p
ut in a word for me. One of my teachers there. But I don’t remember the details. I was just suddenly working there.

  REED: What did you do at the Traveler?

  PORTIS: I’m not sure I ever worked for the Traveler, in any formal way. I wrote a few columns, sort of comic pieces, but I don’t believe I was on the staff. Ronnie Farrar was the editor at that time. Then Sammy Smith and Kenny Danforth. Or maybe the other way around.

  REED: You wrote a particular piece that was reprinted in the Gazette. It had to do with—it was during the Central High crisis. You remember that?

  PORTIS: Vaguely. Something about…

  REED: About Time magazine?

  PORTIS: Time magazine, yes, yes. I remember that. But not much about the thing itself.

  REED: How’d you come to do that?

  PORTIS: I don’t know. You get an idea, and you start fooling around on a typewriter.

  REED: They had Faubus on the cover, as I remember, and then it had this cover story about him, which was pretty denigrating of not only Faubus but the state of Arkansas.

  PORTIS: Yes, I think that was probably the provocative thing. The smartass stuff about Arkansas.

  REED: You remember how that piece ended up?

  PORTIS: No.

  REED: I happened to see it not long ago. A suggestion that they ought to plow up Manhattan and plant it in turnip greens.

  PORTIS: So, my smartass response. But I don’t remember that part.

  REED: What got you interested in journalism to start with?

  PORTIS: Oh, I don’t know. I got to be something of a reader in the service. Paperback books, whatever came to hand. I got out of the Marines in May of 1955 and went back to Hamburg. A friend of mine there, Billy Rodgers, had just gotten out of the Air Force, and he had a car. So we drove up to Fayetteville and enrolled for the summer semester at the university. An all-day drive, then. I think Hamburg is actually closer to LSU and Ole Miss than Fayetteville. Anyway, we registered, and you could do that then, just show up with a high school diploma and $50, or whatever the tuition fee was, and you were in. You had to choose a major, so I put down journalism. I must have thought it would be fun and not very hard, something like barber college. Not to offend the barbers. They probably provide a more useful service. But, remember, Footsie Britt had been in Hill Hall, too, and we could claim him. Surely the only journalism major ever to win a Medal of Honor. Maybe the only one named Maurice. But the degree was in liberal arts, and the journalism courses were only a small part of that, thirty hours or so.

  REED: Were you always good at English?

  PORTIS: Well, adequate, I suppose. I didn’t have much trouble with it in school. Diagramming sentences, that kind of thing. If you mean the mechanics of it. Although Bill Whitworth, for—what, thirty-odd years now—has been trying to drum into my head the difference between “which” and “that.” I go pretty much by feel. People who know more about grammar than we know, well, aren’t they pedants?

  REED: When I was twelve or thirteen, I had begun to read pretty much, and I liked fiction and decided to write novels, and somebody came along and said, “Well, first you have to make a living and one way to do that is to work for newspapers.”

  PORTIS: Yes, it was probably something along those lines. It was a writing job. They would pay you to write things.

  REED: But I never got back to novels, and you did. Were both your parents in education?

  PORTIS: No, only my father. He was from Alabama, a graduate of Birmingham Southern College. His brother, my Uncle Cecil, was a lawyer, and he came over to south Arkansas during the oil boom of the 1920s, trading in leases and options. He got my father a teaching job in Norphlet.

  REED: Little oil town.

  PORTIS: Yes, between El Dorado and Smackover. And my father got to be the school superintendent there in short order. The job paid well—the school district had all that oil money. He was a very young man. I have the idea he made more real money there than he was ever to make again. He later got a master’s degree at Fayetteville. But, no, my mother didn’t go to college. She liked writing and had a gift for it, but never the time to work at it much. Fits and starts. A good poet with a good ear. But neither of them were wide readers. Again, maybe, because they didn’t have the time. And, anyway, the Portises were talkers rather than readers or writers. A lot of cigar smoke and laughing when my father and his brothers got together. Long anecdotes. The spoken word. But he was something of a Bible scholar. And he read The Congressional Record, of all things. He had a taste for politics, local, national, all the ins and outs of the game. I didn’t get that gene. I’ve often thought how much he would have enjoyed all this political stuff on cable television, the debates and hearings, all that.

  REED: What was his name?

  PORTIS: Samuel Palmer Portis.

  REED: And your mother’s name?

  PORTIS: Alice Waddell. He met her in Norphlet. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister there. One of eleven children. None of them left now.

  REED: There are three of you boys and one girl, right?

  PORTIS: Yes, my sister was the oldest. I was two years younger. She died in 1958.

  REED: What was her name?

  PORTIS: Alice Kate, which she didn’t like. She preferred “Aleece,” spelled A-L-I-E-C-E. But I think that was partly to prevent confusion with my mother, who was also Alice.

  REED: She died of what?

  PORTIS: A cerebral hemorrhage. She was just twenty-eight. Married and with two small sons.

  REED: I had a sister who died at 29. It’s…

  PORTIS: Yes, and my father never really got over it. She was his favorite. She had a very quick intelligence.

  REED: I had a call the other day from your sister’s son’s wife.

  PORTIS: Sam Sawyer or Paul Sawyer?

  REED: Sawyer, yes. Nathania.

  PORTIS: Nathania, yes, Paul’s wife. She’s writing a thesis on Harry Ashmore. She called me about that.

  REED: I felt like she was right on top of it.

  PORTIS: Oh, yes, she would be. Diligent and well organized. She’ll get it done.

  REED: Well, Buddy, you have now worked for two newspapers that are no longer alive. Is there something about those papers that—did they have things in common?

  PORTIS: Well, the Gazette and the Herald Tribune, they were both good places to work.

  REED: You mean, good people to be around?

  PORTIS: Yes, that’s it, good company, and a pleasant atmosphere. I’ve been in other newsrooms where you could feel the gloom and fear hanging about. People who hated their work and their bosses.

  REED: Who were some of your favorite people at the Trib?

  PORTIS: Well, my favorite boss was my immediate boss, Buddy Weiss, the city editor. Murray Weiss, that is. Demanding, but always very good to me. He later went to Paris as editor of the European edition of the paper. His wife was from Snyder, Arkansas—he met her when he was in the Air Force, I think. He didn’t believe me when I told him I knew Snyder well. He had never found anyone, even from Arkansas, who had ever heard of Snyder. But it’s not far from Hamburg, in Ashley County. There was a succession of managing editors—Fendall Yerxa, Jim Bellows, Dick Wald—and they all treated me well, too. Better than I deserved.

  REED: Who hired you?

  PORTIS: Dick West, a Yankee gentleman. He was the city editor before Buddy Weiss. I had sent him some clippings from the Gazette and asked about a job. He wrote back to say come by and see him when I was in New York. Not a firm offer. But I gave notice at the Gazette and went to New York, and he hired me. A little later he took a job at Grolier Encyclopedia. I remember those first few days at work. I would go over and ask Bob Poteete, the assistant city editor, for permission to call Chicago, Miami, wherever, having to do with some story I was working on. Bob had worked for the Gazette, too. He was from Perryville. Finally, he said, “Why do you keep asking me this?” I said, “Well, at the Gazette you had to get permission to make long-distance calls.” He laughed,
at my bush-league ways, and said, “Hell, call whoever you please.”

  REED: Maybe that’s why they went out of business. Yes, at the Gazette we not only had to get permission to make a long-distance call, we didn’t even have our own phones. Remember, you and I shared a phone for a long time.

  PORTIS: Yes, I do remember. But Bob and I weren’t the only Gazette hands on the paper. There was Inky Blackmon on the re-write bank. The legendary Herald Tribune re-write bank. But its glory days had faded by then. And later there was Bill Whitworth and Pat Crow. We had quite a few Southerners there. Fulbright?

  REED: Newton Fulbright?

  PORTIS: Newt Fulbright, yes, from Texas. And Phil Carter, Hodding Carter’s son, from Greenville, Mississippi. I remember once there was a call from Mayor Wagner’s office. One of his aides had some statement to give us. Bob Poteete took the call, and he relayed it to Newt, who relayed it to Phil, who said he was tied up, too—a likely story—and he passed it on to me. The City Hall guy was mad over being pushed around like this, and by all these alien voices, and he said, “This is The New York Herald Tribune, isn’t it?” I said it sure was. He mimicked my accent and said, “I thought maybe I had the bleeping Birmingham Herald Tribune.”

  REED: Well, it was pretty much the same with The New York Times in those days. The Times was a better paper for it, I always suspected.

  PORTIS: Yes, probably so. Still, you know, we like to think we were hired and promoted strictly on merit, but I’ve since wondered if there wasn’t a certain amount of affirmative action going on then, favoring Southern boys. Hiring guys like us. I hope it wasn’t because we worked cheap. I remember this copy desk fellow one night in Bleeck’s bar, in the rear of the Tribune building. Across from the old Metropolitan Opera. He was usually a very reserved fellow, but on this night he was drunk and raging. He had been passed over for promotion to, I think, assistant copy editor, and he said, “Well, I’ve learned one damned thing for sure. You’re not going anywhere on this paper unless you went to Yale or you’re from below the bleeping Mason-Dixon Line.”

  REED: Wonder who that was?

  PORTIS: I can’t—I can see him now, but I can’t call the name. It’ll come to me.