by Roger Ebert
For years I served early Mass one morning a week, riding my bike to church and then onward to St. Mary’s for the start of the school day. On First Fridays, the Altar and Rosary Society supplied coffee, hot chocolate, and sweet rolls in the basement of the rectory. When you served at a wedding, the best man was expected to tip you fifty cents. When you served at a funeral you kept a very straight face. During Lent there were the stations of the cross, the priest and servers moving around the church to pause in front of artworks depicting Christ’s progress toward Calvary. Walking from one station to the next, we intoned the verses of a dirge.
At the cross, her station keeping,
Stood the mournful mother weeping,
Close to Jesus to the last.
I enjoyed the procession around the walls of the church, the sweet smell of the incense smoking in the censer as I swung it. Out of the corners of my eyes I could survey everyone in the church and exchange furtive grins with my pals, although I was supposed to be attending our symbolic progress through Christ’s sufferings.
I was never abused in any way by any priest or nun. One incident remains vivid to this day. When I was perhaps eight years old and new to serving Mass, my mind emptied one morning and I made a mess of it. When we returned to the sacristy, I burst into tears. “I’m sorry, Father!” I sobbed, and Father McGinn sat down and took me on his lap and comforted me, telling me that God understood and so did he. Today, tragically, the idea of an altar boy on a priest’s lap has only alarming connotations. On that day Father McGinn was only being kind, and I felt forgiven.
My mother continued with her assumption that I would become a priest. There were times when I wondered if she had only given me birth for the high purpose of “giving me to the Church.” When I was thirteen, I was sent for a three- or four-day retreat at a seminary run by the Diocese of Peoria. We boys were to be given a glimpse of the training ahead of us. I remember two things in particular: A fiery version of a sermon I believe was then known to all Catholic boys, with a lurid description of the unimaginable torments of infinite duration awaiting any boy who committed the sin of impurity. And then an interlude after lunch where we sat on the grass and chatted with actual seminarians, who were older and casually smoked as they discussed vocations, ours and theirs.
I was already a little smartass, and asked my seminarian: “If hell is the way they describe it, how can the punishment for impurity be worse than the punishment for anything else?” The seminarian smiled condescendingly. “The notion of levels of hell comes from Dante,” he said. “He was a great poet but an amateur theologian. See, that’s the sort of thing we study.” I remember the sermon, the conversation with the seminarian, and only one more detail from my life as a seminarian: I came down with some insignificant complaint, maybe a fever, and spent a night in the infirmary listening to my portable radio and hearing Patti Page sing “Tennessee Waltz.” It must have been June. The light lasted long, the windows stood open, a lazy breeze drifted in, I was in the only occupied bed, I was in early adolescence, and the song summoned confused feelings of regret for experiences I stood on the brink of having. Patti Page sang of a song that took her sweetheart from her. I was that sweetheart.
I was a voracious reader in grade school and early on began to question the logic of the faith. To be informed it was necessary for me to just simply believe was not satisfactory. Some things just didn’t make any sense. If God was perfect, I reasoned, how could he create anything that contradicted his creation? This conclusion, reached in grade school, was later to lead me like an arrow to the wonderful theory of evolution. We were not taught creationism in grade school, and I learned that the Church was quite content to get along with Darwin. The questions that plagued me didn’t have to do with science but with fairness. If you committed a mortal sin, it might depend on sheer chance whether you would get the opportunity to confess it before you died. Why had God, who was all-powerful, devised this merciless moral mechanism for his creatures? He created paradise and in no time at all his very first humans, Adam and Eve, did something that made perfect sense to me. I would have eaten the apple myself. Now humankind was condemned forever to the prospect of hell. Did hell even exist before there were people to occupy it? If only the fallen angels lived there, why didn’t God in his infinite mercy choose to keep us someplace handy where he could encourage our rehabilitation? And who dreamed up the system of indulgences, even plenary indulgences, which reminded me uneasily of Get Out of Jail Free cards? The Church began to resemble a house of cards; remove only one and the walls fell.
At some point soon after my discovery of Playboy magazine I began to live in a state of sin, because I simply could not bring myself to confess certain transgressions to a priest who knew me and could see me perfectly well through the grid of the confessional. Logically I was choosing eternal torment over a minute’s embarrassment. This choice was easy for me. When I saw Harvey Keitel placing his hand in the flame in Mean Streets, I identified with him. The difference between us was that long before I reached the age of Charlie in the film, I had lost my faith. It didn’t make sense to me any longer. There was no crisis of conscience. It simply all fell away. I remained a cultural Catholic, which I interpret as believing in the Social Contract and the Corporal Works of Mercy. I didn’t believe then, and don’t believe now, that it is easy to subscribe to the teachings of the Church and not consider yourself a liberal.
I got my driving license and my first car at sixteen. By then I was working for the News-Gazette and came home at two a.m. after helping put the Sunday paper to bed and stopping off with Hal Holmes and Bill Lyon at Mel Root’s restaurant across from the courthouse in Urbana. This was my excuse to sleep late and go to a later Mass than my mother. What I did instead was buy the Chicago papers and read them while parked in my car in Crystal Lake Park.
In high school, I was taking Latin at my mother’s insistence. She said I would need it when I eventually got my vocation. Mrs. Link, our Latin teacher, was a cutie who wore smart tailored suits and high heels, and her classes were elegant performances. In diction and wit, she was like a crisp movie star, and we regarded her with wonder. I never told my mother I wouldn’t become a priest, but she got the idea. Even after starting work in Chicago, I never found the nerve, when we were visiting, to not attend Sunday Mass with her. She knew well enough those were the only times I went to church. What I was doing, I suppose, was going through the motions to respect a tradition that was more important to her than to me. She believed in the faith until the hour of her death. She was buried from St. Patrick Church, and I tipped the altar boys.
11 NEWSPAPER DAYS
DICK STEPHENS, WHO must have been all of twenty at the time, chain-smoked Camels, drove a fast Mercury, and covered Urbana High School sports for the News-Gazette. The sports editor in those days was Bill Schrader, who called everybody “coach.” He promoted Stephens and grandly ordered him to “hire your own successor.” After talking to Hal’s dad, Harold Holmes, the managing editor, Stephens hired me.
In that September of 1958, just turned sixteen, I was working part-time for Seely Johnston at his sports shop, where I functioned by listening to everything said by Mate Cuppernell, a weathered salesman, and repeating it. If a customer was shopping for fishing lures, I’d say, “The cats are taking that Heddon spinner out at Kaufman’s Clear Lake.” I had never been fishing. Mate taught me how to spin-cast using a thumb-action reel and a plug at the end of the line. One day when I was demonstrating to a customer in front of the store, the plug flew through the air and snagged the back of a garbage truck. The line snapped. I was humiliated and quietly put the rod back on the rack. Later that day Herb Neff, the store manager, was out front doing a demonstration. He used the snap of the fiberglass pole that should have been good for fifty feet, and the plug flew five feet and stopped. He lost the sale and blamed me. He complained to Seely, who drove him crazy because every time he had a sale all written up, Seely would hurry out, grab the slip, and take off 10 percent.
Seely lived until nearly one hundred, running his store to the end. Every time I visited Champaign-Urbana, he would turn up to greet me, telling everyone in listening distance, “I gave him his start.” Then he’d hold his hand under my chin. The first time I saw this gesture I was autographing my first book in Robeson’s Book Department. I looked at him blankly. “Come on, young man!” he said sternly. “You know what I want!” I didn’t. He shook his hand. “Right here in my hand!” The readers waiting in line regarded this. “What in your hand, Mr. Johnston?” I said. “Your chewing gum! You’re at work now!”
Seely was paying me seventy-five cents an hour. The News-Gazette job represented a fifteen-cent hourly raise. To be hired as a real writer at a real newspaper was such good fortune that I could scarcely sleep. To be sure, the job paid poorly, but everything was cheaper in those days and I was already driving my own car, a 1954 Ford. I stayed past midnights on game nights, driving home after curfew on a pass from the police department.
My colleague late at night, a year or two older, was Bill Lyon, who covered Champaign High School sports and became a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Tall, with a crew cut, he smoked cigars while pounding out his copy. We’d be the only two in the newsroom at midnight on Fridays, writing our coverage of the football games.
Bill and I would labor deep into the night on Fridays, composing our portraits of the games. I was a subscriber to the Great Lead Theory, which teaches that a story must have an opening paragraph so powerful as to leave few readers still standing. Grantland Rice’s “Four Horsemen” lead was my ideal. Lyon watched as I ripped one sheet of copy paper after another out of my typewriter and finally gave me the most useful advice I have ever received as a writer: “One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?” These rules saved me half a career’s worth of time and gained me a reputation as the fastest writer in town. I’m not faster. I spend less time not writing.
Before each game I wrote a pregame story and walked across the street late at night to slip it through Harold Holmes’s mail slot. I hardly seemed to sleep in those days, and it might be two or three a.m., sometimes with a new snow falling. One night there’d been an ice storm, and every tree branch sparkled in the light of the full moon. No lights in the windows, no traffic on Washington Street, and me with my next byline in my pocket.
Urbana that season had a great football team under the “tutelage” (a dependable sportswriting word) of Coach Warren Smith, a proponent of the single-wing offense. He even wrote a book on it. The Tigers were an underdog in the Big 12 (Champaign, Bloomington, Decatur, Springfield, Mattoon, and so on) but were undefeated with two games to go. The season closer, of course, would be with Champaign, a night fraught with Shakespearean drama, during which crosstown romances were destroyed, fenders bent, friendships ended, families divided. Perhaps the team was distracted by the Champaign game coming up in a week’s time, but they were unexpectedly defeated and their hopes of a perfect season destroyed.
This was clearly the occasion for a Great Lead. I wrote: “The glass slipper was shattered and broken, the royal coach turned into a pumpkin, and the Cinderella Urbana Tigers stumbled and fumbled and fell.” Saturday morning, I turned up at work, assembling area high school scores, and the news editor, Ed Borman, loomed over my desk and rumbled, “Young man, that’s as good a piece of writing as we’ve had on high school sports in quite a while.” I turned back to the sports section and read my Great Lead again, and as you can see I memorized it.
My euphoria was shattered at school on Monday, when Coach Smith slammed his door on me after thundering, “From this day forward, you are banned from all Urbana sports under my jurisdiction. You can buy a ticket to the games.” He left me devastated. It was up to Stanley Hynes, our grizzled World War II veteran English teacher and advisor of the high school paper, to negotiate a truce. I admired him enormously because he addressed his students as “Mister” and “Miss” just as if we were in college, and he smoked in the classroom. “There has been a literary misunderstanding,” he told me. “Coach Smith thinks you called him a pumpkin.”
Borman entered my story in the Illinois Associated Press writing competition, and it won first place in the sportswriting category. That happened in summer of the next year. Daddy had been diagnosed with lung cancer the previous spring and was now in the last weeks of his life. I took the framed certificate to him in the hospital, and he was proud of me. I would never again win anything that meant more.
Coach Smith was the speaker at one of our class reunions. He recalled that long-ago season, and said, “You boys were the best team I ever coached. And remember that you were covered in the Gazette by Roger here, who would go on to work in Chicago.” And who called him a pumpkin.
I worked full-time at the News-Gazette on Saturdays, when in season there was no story in town more important than the Illinois football game. Bill Schrader, the sports editor, commanded our field army. He would write the game story and the Illinois locker room story. Dick Stephens would handle the opposing coach, unless it was Woody Hayes, and then he and Schrader would switch. Curt Beamer, who at one time or another had possibly photographed a third of the local population, had a sidelines pass and his photos would be blown up big on the front page and in the sports section. It went without saying that the story would get the front page headline, eight columns in Railroad Gothic, a typeface we referred to as “World Ends.”
In September 1958 I was assigned to Beamer as his caption writer. This was a lowly but crucial job. I knelt next to him on the sidelines, the perfect view, and wrote down the players in every frame of film. He briefed me: “You’re not here to enjoy the game. Your number one duty is to grab my belt and yank me out of the way if I’m about to get creamed by a player I can’t see through the viewfinder. Number two, make a list starting with “Roll one, Shot one” and write down the players in every shot I take, because when they get muddy they all look the same.” When the ball was snapped, I hooked my fingers through Beamer’s belt, ready to yank him hard if a play ran into our sidelines. Looking through his telephoto lens, he sometimes couldn’t see them coming. “Pull me too soon and you spoil a great picture,” he instructed me. “Wait too late, and we get creamed.”
Beamer’s photos from the first three quarters were rushed back to the office by a speed demon on a motorcycle. After the game we rushed back ourselves. His photos would supply the wire services. In the photo lab, Hal Holmes would be developing them as fast as he could, hanging them by clothespins to dry. I stood by with my caption notes. Bill Schmelzle, the city editor, would come back to the lab to get a look at what we had. Beamer would pick the best ones and Holmesy would lay them on rotating cylinders to go over the telephone to the AP.
By now it was maybe seven o’clock. In the newsroom, all attention focused on Schrader, pounding on his Smith-Corona in a cloud of cigar smoke. The rest of us went across to Vriner’s Confectionery for dinner. Tyke Vriner was a local celebrity: He’d led the Champaign Maroons to an undefeated season around 1940, but when it turned out he was overage the team had to forfeit every game. Vriner’s was a period piece even then: A marble counter with stools and a soda fountain, glass cases for the fudge and taffy he made in the rear room, and high-backed wooden booths. It was said that the mayor of Champaign and other notables joined in after-hours poker games back there. Hal and I would order cheeseburgers or maybe even a T-bone steak, which Tyke would fry right on the hamburger grill. All he had was a grill for meat and deep fat for fries, chicken, and shrimp.
After dinner, we went back up to the newsroom, where Ed Borman would have taken over the city slot from Schmelzle. He supervised T. O. White, the retired sports editor who was entrusted with writing headlines and reading copy. A few other local stories might come in: Crashes, fires. I would go over to Champaign Police to look at the blotter for newsworthy cases. B
orman would be back with the Linotypes, leaning over the turtles that held the type and photo engravings, reading it upside down. The paper would be locked up, the press would roll, the building would shake, we’d all gather around the city desk, and Borman would produce six-packs of Old Style from a refrigerator in the publisher’s office. That autumn he pushed a can over the desk to me, my first beer. The pressroom foreman came up with the paper, and we read it. As my mother prophesied, I was a newspaperman, underpaid and drinking.
In the summer of 1959 I was given a full-time job on the state desk, writing up obituaries, fires, traffic accidents, and county fair prizes in the paper’s circulation area, always referred to as “East Central Illinois.” My partner on the beat was Betsy Hendrick, also young and ambitious, who later went on to run the family business, Hendrick House. Our mentor in those days was Jari Jackson, a passionate young woman who took every story with dead seriousness and drilled me on the UPI style book. Her copy pencil would slash through my stories; she was not as forgiving as the sports desk, which granted itself infinite leeway in style. The high point of Jari’s day would be a “fatal,” a car accident with fatalities. She would growl down the line to the state police for more details, chain-smoking and growing impatient as the deadline approached. I learned from her that a newspaperman never misses a deadline, and I never have.