by Roger Ebert
The city room in those days was filled with characters, and each desk was like an island of influence. All work flowed into and out from Schmelzle, a benign man who had round shoulders from years of bending over copy. He sat at the crossbar of the H-shaped city desk. Across from him sat a chief copy editor, often T. O. White, the former sports editor. To his left, Borman. To his right, Gracie Underwood, the former society editor. Gracie’s best pal was Helen Stevick, mother of Marajen Stevick Chinigo, the paper’s owner. Helen would appear in the news room around lunchtime with her poodles on a leash. She and Gracie would go out to lunch together, and after returning Gracie would put her head down on her arms and sleep soundly for an hour.
The state desk was next to the city desk. Across from us was the society desk, run by Bill Schmelzle’s wife, Annabel. Sports was at the other end of the room. Across from them was a long desk for general assignment reporters, including Joe Black, who always smelled faintly of bourbon and wrote beatnik poetry. Right in the middle of the room, between the reporters and sports, was the desk of Fran Myers, the university editor, a formidable matron who embodied a Wodehousian aunt. Every single one of these people, with the exception of Fran Myers, was a smoker, and a grey cloud hung low over the room.
In a room off the newsroom were the desks of Willard Hansen, the editor, and Harold Holmes. They shared space with the morgue, in which countless clippings rested in file envelopes. Willard was a diffident, polite man whose editorials advised our readers to vote Republican in every possible circumstance. So Republican was the paper that in 2008, long after Marajen had died at an advanced age and even the Chicago Tribune broke with more than a century of tradition to endorse Obama, it faithfully endorsed Senator John McCain. Behind Harold and Willard was the conference room, lined with photographs of D. W. Stevick, founder of the paper, and his legendary daughter and countess, who had married Count Michael Chinigo, the International News Service bureau chief in Rome. Marajen, a great beauty in her youth, looked dashing as an early aviatrix and companion of senators, tycoons, and movie stars. She commuted between a mansion in Palm Springs, a villa in Ravello, Italy (where she lived on a hillside next to Gore Vidal), and her big childhood home in Champaign, which had the first private indoor pool in town. Regularly the News-Gazette railed against the “out of town ownership” of the Champaign-Urbana Courier, a member of the Lindsay-Schaub chain out of Decatur, forty miles away. Bob Sink, the crusty editor of the Courier, eventually wrote an editorial saying the paper was “weary of these complaints from the banks of the Tiber.”
In those days the paper, then at 52 Main, was not air-conditioned. Huge windows opened to the summer heat, and every desk was covered with grime from the nearby Illinois Central tracks. Fran Myers’s first task every morning was to scrub her domain with Windex. In August, millions of tiny black bugs from the cornfields would be attracted by the paper’s big neon sign, and our desks would be covered in the morning by their corpses. We scraped them onto the floor with folded copy paper. The heat down the hall in the composing room, filled with Linotype machines, was unbearable when I raced with breaking stories on deadline to Bill Schmelzle, leaning over the type, reading it upside down, cutting stories while they were in lead, his sweat dripping on the headlines.
My first day of full time, Schmelzle pulled the oldest trick in the newsroom on me. “Ebert, take a day off,” he called from his desk. Everyone looked up. “Look behind you,” said Ruth Weinard, the sweet assistant society editor. I was standing in front of the wall calendar. The day began slowly. We received our “assignment sheets,” individually prepared for every reporter by Schmelzle from his tickler file, which contained advance notes on everything of possible interest to East Central Illinois. “Check cause of Philo fatal,” he might write to me. Or “new highway work at Hoopeston.” I was not discriminated against because of age and sometimes drew plum assignments, like “Rantoul Rotary,” “Holiday Inn opening,” or “Paxton grain elevator fire.”
As the morning progressed, the most important state desk stories defined themselves. There might be a farm machinery accident near Mahomet. Or Jari Jackson might have a fatal with three or even four deaths and would evacuate from her desk and commandeer a command post at city desk, racing back and forth puffing furiously. From her example I absorbed the frightening urgency of deadlines. By 11:30 a.m. every typewriter on the floor was being pounded with the velocity and rhythm of self-taught typists at incomprehensible speed. Deadline was 12:15. The city room would empty, with most reporters heading directly across the street to Vriner’s for lunch. By then Schmelzle would be permanently in the composing room, putting the edition to bed. We had two editions, the state (two pages filled with news and photos from our small-town correspondents) and the city (those pages swapped out for more local news and last-minute updates).
The News-Gazette was a few blocks from city hall, which housed the fire and police departments. Through the tall open windows we could hear the fire sirens as the trucks pulled out. One day, just after deadline, the sirens wailed and Schmelzle told me, “Wait five minutes, call the fire department, and see what it is.” Champaign firemen told me it was “a still at Morris Brown’s junkyard.” I pounded out one paragraph on deadline: “A still caught on fire just after noon Tuesday at Morris Brown’s junkyard. Champaign firemen said it was out on arrival.” I rushed back to the composing room with my sheet of copy paper, which Schmelzle handed to the foreman without reading. It was “railroaded” into type, not copyread, slammed onto the bottom of page three, and the paper went to press.
At four that afternoon I was summoned to the desk of Harold Holmes.
“Roger,” said Mr. Holmes, “I would like you to meet Morris Brown.”
Morris Brown did not look like a happy man. He was a well-known bondsman who had once, I knew, stood bail for a circus elephant. I told him I was sorry to hear about his fire.
“There’s more to be sorry about than that,” Holmes said. “Do you know what a still is?”
“It’s a machine used for… distilling? Something?” I said.
“True enough, but at the fire department, you see, it’s also short for ‘stillborn.’ That’s a fire that’s already out when they get there.”
Schmelzle, who had silently come up behind me, broke into laughter. Mr. Brown handed me his card, which read: “Can’t make bail? You don’t need the wings of an angel if you know Morris Brown.”
12 HIGH SCHOOL
I WENT TO Urbana High School between 1956 and 1960, walking the four blocks to school. We were the first generation after Elvis, and one of the last generations of innocence. We were inventing the myth of the American teenager. Our decade would imprint an iconography on American society. We knew nothing of violence and drugs. We looked forward to the future. We were taught well. We had no idea how lucky we were.
I realize now what good teachers I had. At the time I took them for granted. Because the university had a nepotism rule, some of them were spouses fully qualified to teach at the college level. I suspect high school teaching was bearable, even enjoyable, for them because the school was run smoothly under firm discipline and as far as I’m aware didn’t have a single incompetent faculty member. Teachers controlled their classrooms. Hallways weren’t fight zones. Boys wore slacks, girls wore dresses. It was like a cliché from the movies. We even had the Elbow Room, a malt shop on the corner, to hang out in, with a jukebox.
When I think of those days, they often come down to a Friday night in autumn, and a football game. I successfully auditioned for the job of game announcer, and watched the games from a third-floor window of the school building, where I first met Dick Stephens, who covered the Tigers for the News-Gazette. I grandly announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise to join in the singing of our national anthem.” I read announcements about homecoming dances and charity car washes and chanted “Touchdown, Urbana!” with enthusiasm, or “Touchdown, Champaign” with dejection.
After the game, I went to the Tigers’ Den. This was a br
ick storefront a block from Main Street in Urbana. Customized cars cruised slowly past, thought to contain sexual predators from alien high schools on the hunt for our Urbana girls. Inside, there was only one chaperone, Oscar Adams, possibly the best-known and most popular man in town. Oscar’s chaperoning duties consisted largely of sitting in the lounge watching Gunsmoke on TV.
There was a small dance hall with a stage at one end and a soft drinks bar at the other, chairs around the walls, and the sexes eyeing each other uneasily, for nothing is easier for a teenager to imagine than rejection. The boys dressed in chinos or corduroys, and plaid shirts from Penney’s. Our hair was fixed in place by Brylcreem. The girls wore skirts that swirled when they danced.
If you knew what to look for, you’d catch guys cupping their hands in front of their mouths and sniffing to test themselves for halitosis. The cautious among us worked through packs of spearmint, or if we were really insecure, Dentyne. Halitosis was far worse than dandruff. The only thing more to be feared was an untimely erection on the dance floor, especially if you’d been slow dancing; at the end of the dance your buddies were watching you like hawks, ready to point and go, Yuk! Yuk!
One of the girls I had yearnings for might be there when I arrived at the Tigers’ Den, studiously not noticing me. You could spend half an hour deliberately not making eye contact. It was a form of predance foreplay. The evening began with rock and roll, the girls dancing with one another, and then a guy would sidle up to the deejay and ask for a “slow song.” And now it was crunch time. With all of your courage you approached the girl of your dreams.
It might be that you were too slow, and another guy would get there first. Was that the faintest shadow of a hint of a sidelong teasing look of regret that Marty-Judi-Sally-Carol-Jeanne sent your way? Or had she forgotten you even existed? Halfway across the floor toward her, you saw her taken into the arms of a rival and made a studious course correction as if you’d only been walking across the room to get to the other side.
The legendary teacher of our time was Mrs. Marian Seward, whose senior rhetoric class we heard about as freshmen. She was exacting and unforgiving, and cultivated a studied eccentricity. Once she stood looking dreamily out the window, her arms crossed, and said, “Oh, students, this morning I walked into my farmyard and listened to the worms making love.” She issued lists of Rhet Words—words we had to try to find in our reading. They counted heavily toward our grades. She had an eagle eye for cheating. Thomas Wolfe was a gold mine of Rhet Words. When I found a word, I’d copy it in pencil on the flyleaf. From my copy of Look Homeward, Angel: Scrofulous. Immanent. She was hard, but she was good. She intimidated us with her standards. When I walked into her class, I thought I knew it all. I was a professional newspaper reporter. She returned my first paper marked with a D, and I appealed to her. “Mr. Ebert,” she said, “when, oh, when, will you learn that the paragraph is a matter of style, and not of punctuation?” Mrs. Carolyn Leseur, another English teacher, confided at our fiftieth reunion that when the faculty was voting on the members of a senior honor society, I was blackballed by one teacher for being a “smartass.” And who was that teacher? “Mrs. Seward.” True to her standards. This long-delayed information filled me with great happiness. We may have feared Mrs. Seward, but she demanded our best and I think we respected that.
Stanley Hynes was another English teacher, and for him I held great affection. He took us into Shakespeare so well that I never got out again. From other teachers, we heard bits of his story. While still too young to serve, he volunteered for the First World War, was gassed at the front, and his facial skin was darkened and pockmarked as a result. For World War II he might have been too old, but he volunteered again.
Hynes was a bachelor. It is conceivable he was gay. He treated his students as adults, and we responded. Our discussions of poetry in his classroom became serious and introspective, and students had a way of thinking deeper to impress him. He was the sponsor for the student paper, a volunteer for all school projects, yet existing above the daily flow with a gravity and intelligence that set him apart.
Some years after graduating, I came across him one night in the basement cafeteria of the Illini Union on campus, which functioned as a coffee shop and gathering place for those outside the mainstream—foreign students, nerds, geeks, writers, musicians, chess players, programmers with their shoe boxes of punch cards, students of the New York Times crossword puzzle. He was by himself, smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee, his finger keeping his place in his book. I had the impression he’d seen me before I’d seen him. “Good evening, Mr. Ebert.” Just as always. I was happy to see him but caught a little off guard. I could have had a post–high school conversation with him, and I don’t remember why I didn’t. That might have been my opportunity to know him better. When I meet my classmates from those years, they remember him with warmth and we share our curiosity: What was his life like? What did he go through in two wars? Was he lonely? Was he always like… Mr. Hynes? If there were answers, we didn’t have them, except perhaps in his passion for the literature he taught.
In those years I read endlessly, often in class, always late at night. There was no pattern; one book led randomly to another. The great influence was Thomas Wolfe, who burned with the need to be a great novelist, and I burned in sympathy. I felt that if I could write like him, I would have nothing more to learn. I began to ride my bike over to campus and steal quietly into the bookstores, drawn to the sections of books by New Directions and the Grove Press. I bought poems by Thomas Merton, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and in The New American Poets I found the Beats, whose values and references seemed alien and yet attractive to me.
Starting in grade school I consumed a great deal of science fiction, including four or five monthly magazines, but that tapered off in college as I began to choose “real” literature. Some of the sci-fi authors were better than I realized at the time. But even as I drifted from the genre itself, I found myself involved in Fandom, an underground culture of the fans of science fiction, fantasy, the weird in general, and the satire and irony of the time: Bob and Ray, Harvey Kurtzman, MAD magazine, Stan Freberg.
Fanzines were mimeographed magazines circulated by mail among science fiction fans in the days before the Internet. I first learned about them in a 1950s issue of Amazing Stories and eagerly sent away ten or twenty cents to Buck and Juanita Coulson in Indiana, whose Yandro was one of the best and longest running of them all. Overnight, I was a fan, although not yet a BNF (big name fan). It was a thrill for me to have a LOC (letter of comment) published on such issues as the demise of BEMs (bug-eyed monsters), and soon I was publishing my own fanzine, named Stymie.
I have always been convinced that the culture of fanzines contributed crucially to the formative culture of the early Web and generated models for websites and blogs. The very tone of the discourse is similar, and like fanzines, the Web took new word coinages, turned them into acronyms, and ran with them. Science fiction fans in the decades before the Internet were already interested in computers—first in the supercomputers of science fiction myth, and then in the earliest home-built models. Fans tended to be youngish, male, geeky, obsessed with popular culture, and compelled to circulate their ideas. In the reviews and criticism they ran, they slanted heavily toward expertise in narrow pop fields. The Star Trek phenomenon was predicted by their fascination years earlier with analysis of Captain Video, Superman, X Minus One, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and there were detailed discussions about how Tarzan taught himself to read.
The Urbana High School Science Fiction Club went as a group to hear our hero, Arthur C. Clarke, speak on campus. Years later, tingles ran down my spine when I heard the voice of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey announce that it had been born in the computer lab at the University of Illinois in Urbana. (Was there a connection? I interviewed Clarke on a cybercast from Sri Lanka, and he said he didn’t recall having been to Urbana.)
I was demented in my zeal for school activities. I
joined the swimming team, appeared in plays, founded the Science Fiction Club, co-edited the newspaper, co-hosted the school’s Saturday morning radio broadcast, won the state speech contest (radio speaking division), and was elected senior class president, all the time covering high school sports for the News-Gazette. It was not in my nature to attend classes and go home. Two nights most weeks I worked for the paper until well past midnight.
It was the duty of the class president to produce the senior talent show every spring, and I threw myself into this project. Larry McGehe and John Kratz, two of my friends, constructed a plywood time machine pierced by dozens of lightbulbs and stood behind it, furiously rotating a copper strip past contact points so the lights spun in a pinwheel effect. We synched a tape recorder to broadcast a satire of the school’s morning loudspeaker announcements. We built the set, held rehearsals, worked with the UHS Jazz Band, stayed up all night.
I was the emcee. The show was a success. Afterward we had coffee and cake backstage and then I walked out and sat in my car and collapsed in sobs. I had spent four years in a frenzy of overachievement, and I was wrung out. I had come to the end of something. I had no good reason for sadness, but I’ve never forgotten that night. I drove for a while through the moonlit streets, torch songs playing on the radio, seeing myself, and the town, through eyes instructed by Thomas Wolfe.
13 UNIVERSITY
URBANA-CHAMPAIGN WAS GATHERED at the feet of the University of Illinois like a medieval town outside the walls of a great castle. It employed us, it fascinated us, it was our fame. Its professors were knights who deigned to live among us. I had a professor from Hungary on my Courier route, and my father told me to always walk the route clockwise “so the old professor will get his paper sooner.”
Told that my father worked at the University of Illinois as an electrician in “the physical plant,” I imagined it as a form of vegetation. On Saturdays he would sit close to the radio, following the Illinois game, reacting to the play-by-play by Marc Howard and later Larry Stewart. I watched him and laughed and frowned in sympathy. When the Illini scored, he always said, “Boy, howdy!” In the first postwar years our family would often go for dinner at a cafeteria on campus in a Quonset hut that had a wheelchair ramp. Here were budget-priced meals for faculty, staff, and war veterans in wheelchairs. “They like it here because they don’t have to wheel those chairs up and down hills.” One man was blind. My father whispered, “Watch him feel to make sure his apple pie is pointed at him.” On pleasant days, we would stroll after dinner onto the Quadrangle, lined with trees and the biggest buildings I’d ever seen. “This is the greatest university in the world,” my father told me. “Someday you’ll go here.”