by John Darnton
Soon I hit upon a foolproof arrangement. A German photographer for Time magazine agreed to help smuggle out my copy. The Polish authorities had insisted that all news photographs be developed inside the country and submitted to the censors. But Time had recently switched to color photographs, and, as there were no chemicals on hand to process the film, the authorities permitted this one photographer to ship his film out undeveloped, presumably keeping a close eye on him while he was shooting. Each time he was to make a shipment, he contacted me. I’d trot over to his hotel, spread my story on his bathroom floor (turning on the tap to foil the bug in the room), and he’d photograph it page by page. At the top of the first page was that same old number for The New York Times. And presto—off it went to Time magazine’s photo department, which then sent it on to West Forty-third Street. The scheme came just in time, because the flood of departing Westerners had turned into a trickle.
After a week, Nina managed to talk herself aboard the first LOT flight from London and turned up on our doorstep at midnight, lugging a suitcase filled with meat from Harrods. She said that as the plane was about to touch down, the stewardess thanked the passengers, all Poles returning home, for flying with the airline, saying she hoped they would “fly LOT in the future.” Her remark set off peals of bitter laughter. They knew they wouldn’t be flying for quite a while.
In Poland, resistance continued, but in muted form. There were sporadic reports of strikes and other protests. Local phone service came back, but each call was preceded by a recorded warning that it was being “monitored.” Underground leaflets and laboriously typed bulletins—samizdat—popped up like mushrooms after a rain. My Volvo suddenly began acquiring a lot of flat tires, often just before curfew, so that I’d have to sneak home, dodging patrols on the deserted streets. “Ah,” said one tire repairman, holding a sharp screw that had been carefully placed between the treads, “I haven’t seen one of these for … oh, more than a decade.”
Eventually, as far as the outside world was concerned, the Polish story began to fade—down to the bottom of page one, then inside the paper, then to one or two appearances a week. Over time, things settled into an eerie kind of stasis. Men in uniforms read the nightly news. Some six thousand Solidarity activists were held in prison. Newspapers, their staffs vetted for political reliability, resumed publishing and toed the official line. Christmas was dreary. We put a wreath on our front door and a handyman attached a Solidarity button to it. Kyra, then seven, feared the repercussions and removed it. The man upbraided her: “Just because Solidarity is not allowed, you don’t like it anymore.” She cried.
For those friends of ours still at liberty, Nina and I scheduled a New Year’s Eve party to try to raise their spirits. We managed to wrangle some hors d’oeuvres from diplomats who had access to the embassy commissary and we laid in plenty of alcohol and put up some streamers. But by 9:00 p.m., no one had turned up. By ten o’clock, we opened a bottle and resigned ourselves to drinking alone. Perhaps we had been foolish to believe they would run the risk. Then we heard a caravan of cars pull up. Dozens of our friends poured out. We later learned that they had been debating whether or not to come for two hours. The party turned out to be one for the books. Singing and shouting, they fantasized about leaving Poland. At midnight, they toasted one another with cries of “Happy New York!”
In the second week of January, I scored an important exclusive. The highest-ranking Solidarity leader still at large was Zbigniew Bujak, the twenty-seven-year-old head of the Warsaw chapter. Moving from house to house like the Scarlet Pimpernel, he had become a symbol of the resistance. Through contacts, I asked for an interview. On the day it was to materialize, I was given instructions to change cars and taxis, and I finally met up with activists, who blindfolded me and took me to a large house in Praga, on the east bank of the Vistula. But the long-anticipated encounter was called off at the last minute. It was too risky, I was told. Instead, I wrote up a list of ten questions for Bujak and days later was told to appear at 8:00 p.m. on the third-floor landing of a certain apartment complex close to the river. That evening, it snowed heavily. I parked my car blocks away from the rendezvous and doubled back twice, looking at my trail of footprints in the snow to make sure I hadn’t been followed. I climbed the stairs and waited on the dim landing. Minutes passed. By 8:20, I began to despair. Then I heard the front door downstairs open and close. Up the staircase came a young woman wrapped in a thick fur coat. She looked at me and smiled, then unbuttoned her coat and reached into her skirt. She pulled out a sheaf of papers, handed them to me, and left without a word. The next day, I filed the story, in which Bujak spoke of his underground activities and called for the peaceful overthrow of the military “dictatorship.” It landed on page one. (The story has a footnote: Fifteen years later, back in Poland, I was interviewing a woman who was a top editor at Gazeta Wyborcza, the major post-Communist daily. She fixed me with a stare and said, “You don’t recognize me, do you?” In that moment, I did. “My God, it’s you!” I exclaimed. She gave me a smile, which hadn’t changed over the years.)
During this time, the Polish authorities tried a carrot and stick approach. The head of Interpress, a suave man who was persona non grata in the West, dangled the prospect of an exclusive interview with General Jaruzelski. Perhaps it would come more easily, he suggested, if my stories would only show some appreciation for those in power. I did the opposite. Acting on a tip from a source in the Catholic Church, I heard that guards had severely beaten Solidarity activists in a prison up north, and I wrote the story. The government denied it and suspended my credentials for a week. Later the primate, Józef Glemp, confirmed the beatings in his address during the annual pilgrimage to the shrine of the Black Madonna at Czestochowa.
I was informed I had won the Pulitzer by Abe Rosenthal, who called me in Warsaw. I was on deadline—the remnants of Solidarity had inaugurated an underground radio broadcast and asked people to respond by flashing their apartment lights, which thousands did. I spoke to three or four editors—they passed the phone around—and I could hear champagne corks popping in the background. What really pleased me was that the Times article about the awards noted that I was the son of Byron Darnton. For the first time, I felt worthy of my patrimony.
By the time I left Poland five months later, demonstrations had broken out once again in Gdańsk. They were put down brutally by the police. I took a plane to Warsaw, my clothes still smelling of tear gas, and from Warsaw I went to join my family in New York. As the plane lifted off, I stared down at the meadows and forests—those subtle pastel shades of brown and green—and I thought of the friends we had made and the Poles we had met and I was convinced the underground resistance would grow.
I didn’t think of my father every day or even every week while I was abroad. But in looking back, I believe that his presence—or something like it—was close. Whenever there was a hint of danger or an obstacle to overcome, an answer came to me from somewhere—from stories I had heard or values I had assimilated or a spirit I had unknowingly acquired.
Sometimes my experiences paralleled his so closely that it was downright eerie. For one story, I signed on in Djibouti to accompany an American crew smuggling coffee out of Uganda. On the way back from Entebbe, flying above a missile range in the restricted airspace of Ethiopia, the pilot, who was something of a cowboy, ushered me into his seat and disappeared. He stretched his legs, enjoying my discomfort as I sat there, my hands frozen on the controls. Three decades later, I read in the diary of one Capt. Alexander Evanoff, commanding officer of the 13th Squadron of the 3rd Bomb Group, that on June 17, 1942, his plane carried Barney Darnton from New Guinea to Charters Towers in Australia. Apparently, a bit of a cowboy himself, he handed over the controls. “I enjoy letting Darnton fly,” he wrote cheerily, “but I believe that he is leery of trying anything.”
When I returned to the Times to work as an editor after a decade overseas, the plaque to my father was missing. During a tasteless redecoration, it had
been removed, along with the beautiful green-veined marble facing that had lined the lobby. It took months to locate the plaque—it had been stashed in a storeroom somewhere—and years to get it displayed again. Seymour Topping, the managing editor, took up the cause and eventually persuaded the publisher to hang it on a wall next to the foreign desk in the newsroom. In June 2007, the paper moved to a spanking new skyscraper on Eighth Avenue, but the plaque did not make it into the new quarters. Instead, the paper named a conference room on the fifteenth floor after Barney.
*In April 2010 she was among ninety Poles who perished when a plane en route to a memorial ceremony at Katyn crashed at Smolensk, Russia.
CHAPTER 19
In the summer of 2006, shortly after I retired, Nina and I drove out to Michigan so that I could visit my father’s relatives and learn some things about him. I had gone there at the age of thirteen, when I left Washington and fell into the embrace of a large midwestern family I had not known before—or since. Over the years my only contact had been through greeting cards sent by one uncle, Tom. They arrived like clockwork one week before Christmas and one week before my birthday. In precise block letters he would write a short note, usually about the weather, and include a five-dollar check. I rarely answered him. I sometimes wondered, Why does this man, whom I wouldn’t recognize from Adam, keep up this one-sided correspondence? Is it love for his long-dead brother? A sense of obligation to the family left behind? Then I learned something about Tom that put it in perspective. He had been a banker; during the Great Depression, he had lost a good deal of money and ended owing thousands upon thousands of dollars. It took him something like three decades, but he paid back every cent. Simply put, he was a man who believed in doing the right thing.
Tom had died years ago, along with my four other uncles and my aunt. In fact, even some of my first cousins had passed away. I was not hopeful that I would come away with a stock of stories about my father. But it seemed to me that if I was to write a book about him, this was the kind of journey I should make. As we crossed the Michigan state line, I thought about the people I was soon to meet. I believed that my father had been different, that he’d been the only one with the gumption (a word they would probably use) to leave the roost. I was convinced he had had a special quality, a restless gene, which made him go off to war and bounce around the country looking for better jobs while they stayed close to the homestead. Of course, I was mistaken.
But our first stop seemed to fit my preconception. It was a pleasant but sterile retirement community in Marysville, called Snug Harbor. It was the home of Louis Dunn, the son of my aunt Clare, and his second wife, Marian. Louie, ninety years old that week, was a gentle, soft-spoken man with an oval-shaped face, a large furrowed brow, and a few wisps of white hair. He had worked for forty-two years as a reporter, city editor, executive news editor, and editorial-page editor for the Port Huron Times Herald—the same paper where my father had started. Over coffee, he explained it had been no coincidence. He had idolized my father and resolved to follow in his footsteps. Barney had gotten him the job.
Louie disappeared into another room for a moment and returned with a carbon copy of a letter Barney had written the editor, asking him to hire his nephew. I recognized my father’s casual style. (“He’s dead set for newspapering and I think he’ll make the grade.”) Louie reminisced a bit. He recalled that in his sophomore year at Notre Dame, he and a friend had gone down to New York to meet Barney and my mother, who took them out to a nightclub and got them roaring drunk. “I was a country hick. What did I know? I got sick in the hotel.” The next morning they stopped off to say good-bye and Barney poured him another drink. “He fixed me up—what is it, the tail that bit the dog?” Barney, he said, was his idol. “I mean, it was one of those darn things, I don’t know. He was very debonair. He wasn’t flamboyant about it. He smoked and drank, had a little mustache, a good-looking guy and kind of big city, big stuff. He had covered the Al Smith campaign. He was kind of your ideal of the really debonair city guy.”
Louie’s father, president of a mutual savings bank, had wanted him to go into banking. “I kind of broke his heart, I think.” He fished out another letter from Barney, this one written to congratulate him for getting assigned to cover the Sandusky bureau. It was filled with avuncular advice. “There is no place like a small town to learn what the newspaper business is about, even though it may not seem that way when you are undergoing the process.” Something in the letter caught my eye: Barney began with an apology for not writing sooner, explaining that he’d been busy—“getting married and settled in the country.” Getting married. So Barney had wanted his family to believe that he and Tootie had wed. I didn’t ask Louie if he knew that this was untrue. If Barney had wanted his family to believe it, then who was I to disillusion them?
Nor did I ask Louie why he had turned his back on his dream of working for a big-city newspaper. The answer emerged when he started talking about his first marriage. One day, he said, his wife, Ardiel, came down with what she thought was the flu. It quickly worsened. She had trouble breathing, was rushed to the hospital, and then into an iron lung. She had contracted polio. For the next twenty-four years, until her death, she was an invalid. Louie looked out the window at a distant view of a lake. “In the newspaper business, you know, you have to move around. You don’t stay put.”
We talked about all kinds of things, our grandfather, who was so distinguished and looked like Woodrow Wilson, the Catholic Church, the war, and how much newspapers had changed. He spoke slowly and chose his words carefully to be precise and to avoid exaggeration. I thought he was someone who exuded common sense and integrity and that he must have been one hell of a fine editorial writer.
That afternoon we drove five hours to Charlevoix, a resort town on the northern shore, where various branches of the Darnton family had summer cottages. Charlevoix is located on an isthmus between Lake Charlevoix and Lake Michigan. The town is centered around a quaint main street, with a bridge across a canal on one end and a town green on the other. The grass slopes gently toward the water; plunked in the middle is a white bandstand, where the locals put on evening concerts. The next morning we drove to meet the relatives and were quickly engulfed in hugs from various cousins, whose names and relationships came at me so fast, I had trouble keeping them straight. Over the next three days we swam in a social soup. We were fussed over and given “Grandma D’s” recipes for scones and chocolate cake. We poured over family trees and documents tracing the Darnton lineage back to the thirteenth century to the town of Darlington, near England’s North Yorkshire border. We followed them through the centuries as they married and propagated and crossed the ocean. Robert, my great-grandfather, came to this country and moved to Adrian as a machinist for the railroad. A tubercular young man, he was married to one Mary Lanchester. I learned that my grandfather, also named Robert, had been a printer and foreman at the Adrian Times and Expositor, then a clerk and sales manager for a wire-manufacturing company. A Republican and an Elk and a member of the order of the Knights of the Maccabees, he became a respected town father. He moved into a solid three-story Queen Anne house on a corner lot on Comstock Street. He was president of the school board, captain of the Adrian National Guard, head of the Liberty Loan drive for World War I, and, finally, after getting the top score on a civil service exam, postmaster, a position equivalent in prominence to mayor.
The Darnton facility for mathematics and engineering showed itself in my father’s siblings. A number of my uncles and cousins occupied important positions at General Motors. When I heard this, I thought of my mother’s prediction that I would become an engineer.
One afternoon we were taken sailing on Lake Charlevoix by Darntons in their forties. One of them, a handsome man, who kept one hand on the tiller, said that his father’s generation had set a negative example. They had worked too hard and spent too many hours at the auto plants. The implication was that they had missed out on life’s pleasures. “We never saw them
in the evenings. They had no family life and no social life. That’s one mistake we all made sure we’re not going to make.”
We got quick capsule biographies of relatives who previously had been only names to me. Even though I was a stranger, because I was close in blood I was offered remarkable intimacies and confessions. My father, I learned, was not the only one to have been struck by wanderlust. His older brother, Clifford, had disappeared for years on end. He rode the rails, crisscrossing the country, picking up odd jobs in fields and factories. He spent so many hours close to the pounding pistons and wheels that he very nearly went deaf. Once, while picking apples in Washington State, he decided to visit his brother Robert, who was working as a machinist in a steel mill in Monessen, Pennsylvania. “He came across country in a boxcar full of apples,” recounted one of Robert’s sons. “For three or four days, the only food he had was apples. He got there dressed in nothing more than a jacket and summer clothes. The landlord called up the stairway, ‘There’s a man here who wants to see you. He says he’s your brother.’ Cliff stood there, cold and shivering. He said he’d like to go to work. Dad told him it was possible they could put on another machinist in the mill. He’d talk to the foreman the next morning. He left Cliff in bed. It was all arranged—he was to turn up at the employment office at eight or nine o’clock. Cliff never showed up. He left a note that he had taken Dad’s only overcoat. He couldn’t take the cold and hoped to send the coat back by parcel post. He never did.”