by Roger Ebert
That fall was unusually long, and the autumn leaves unusually bright. As I drove around town, I thought, I am saying good-bye to all this. Whatever comes next, it will not happen in Urbana.
14 THE DAILY ILLINI
I SPENT MORE time working on the Daily Illini than I did studying. After selling the Spectator, I walked in cold and began writing a weekly column. I became the news editor, and then was appointed editor in my senior year. I can’t say it was the best job I ever had, but… well, yes I can. It was the best job I ever had. The Daily Illini had been from the earliest days a commercial enterprise and not a “student activity.” It was owned by the Illini Publishing Company, which also owned the yearbook and a campus low-power radio station. That was a great convenience in shielding the university from lawsuits and scandals involving the undergraduate editors.
The paper occupied the basement of Illini Hall at Wright and John. It was in every sense a real newspaper, published five days a week on an ancient Goss rotary press that made the building tremble. Something was forever lost from newspapers when their buildings stopped trembling. We had three union employees, two printers and Phil Roach the pressman, and we knew they were union men because there was a shop grievance approximately weekly. These usually involved disagreements between editors and printers about what could and would be set into type, and how. There were some tense moments during the Cuban Missile Crisis when Dave Harvey, a member of the Young People’s Socialist League, wrote a column questioning the facts we had been presented. Harvey later became a famous sociologist. I don’t remember if the column was printed. What I remember is Orville Moore, the shop foreman, astonishing us with his vocabulary in denouncing it.
Our words were set into hot lead on Linotype machines. Pages were composed on heavy metal tables called turtles. Orville and the student night editor leaned over them facing each other, both reading backward, one reading upside down. Each page had to be justified to fit perfectly within the form, and this usually meant words had to be trimmed. This Orville did with a steel tool that cut them from the lead. All cuts had to come from the ends of paragraphs, which could lead to puzzling lapses. Resetting a shorter version of a story was forbidden under Orville’s interpretation of the union rules.
I never saw Orville Moore without a cigar clamped into his teeth. He taught us as much about journalism as many of our professors, and it was all practical. He helped us understand that a newspaper, apart from being a stanchion of democracy, was a mass-produced product for sale at retail. It had to be produced on time and on budget, and the meaning of “deadline” took on terror when Orville would announce he would simply fill up remaining holes with something from the “overset,” stories set in type that had never run. This never happened. We were convinced Orville would choose the most embarrassing overset at hand, for example heat wave coverage in the middle of January.
The paper ran twelve to twenty pages most days, tabloid. The press printed one color, black, on huge rolls of white newsprint, but for an ad, a Christmas shopping issue or homecoming, Phil Roach would add red, green, or the school colors, orange and blue. This he did with an intimate understanding of the linear path the paper traveled through the print rollers. He would map his strategy to assign a red roller or a green roller, say, and then suspend himself above the presses in an aluminum lawn chair and paint the colored inks on those rollers with a brush. Wade Freeman, the editor before me, told Phil that if he ever fell into the press we could also hope for shit brown, which was what his daring scheme was full of.
We had an old-fashioned semicircular copy editors’ desk in the newsroom, a strange assortment of desks and typewriters, and an office up front ruled by Paul McMichael, the long-suffering publisher hired by the publishing company. He kept the books, handled the billing, settled disputes, and was the adult in the room. I have no idea how many speeches he had to listen to about freedom of the press, yet he tended to be permissive.
As editor I was a case study. I was tactless, egotistical, merciless, and a showboat. Against those character flaws I balanced the gift of writing well, a good sense for page layout, and ability as a talent scout. I took special satisfaction out of finding gifted writers and giving them a column. I found the young Liz Krohne, who was ahead of the curve on radicalism. I made a math student named Ron Szoke our film critic and learned as much from him as from anyone since. I recruited another mathematician, Paul Tyner, to write columns, and he was as funny as S. J. Perelman. He wrote a column based on his experiences as a waiter at the campus Spudnut Shop. Noticing a sign saying “No Reading,” he asked the owner if that was appropriate for university students. “Somebody could start reading some book and never stop,” the owner said. “My motto is, get ’em in, give ’em their Spuddies, and get ’em out again.” This inspired a celebrated Tyner column titled “The University is a Spudnut Shop.”
Tyner fascinated me. He wore his hair like the Beatles before they did. He was handsome in the Jean-Paul Belmondo manner. He largely supported himself, he said, by hustling pool in the Union’s billiards room. On every men’s room wall on campus he wrote: Autofellatio is its own reward. While getting a Ph.D. in math he sold a short story to the New Yorker and later expanded it into a novel, Shoot It, published by Atlantic Monthly Press/Little, Brown. He was a romantic, the lover of spectacular women. He often joined one of the communal tables at the Capitol Bar on Green.
Before dawn one morning in Chicago some years later, he hammered on my door and entered drunk, carrying a bottle of vodka. “I need a place to drink this,” he said. I let him in and went back to bed. In the morning I left him unconscious on my sofa. At some later period—months? years?—he reappeared in my life on a Saturday afternoon when I was sitting at O’Rourke’s, my favorite Chicago bar, dazed with drink.
“Roger,” he said, “look at you. You’re drunk in the afternoon. That’s not good. It means you’re an alcoholic.” He told me he was an alcoholic and now was sober through Alcoholics Anonymous. He must have given me the kind of information any AA member would have shared, but I was in no condition to listen. I later learned that Tyner, still sober, had married and was working in San Francisco. The time frame for all this is hazy. At some later point I learned he was dead. On a flight from London to San Francisco, Paul had inexplicably started drinking again. He continued for a week and then shot himself in the head. I still have his novel on my shelf.
Another columnist I recruited was a philosophy student named Robert Jung. He was a good-looking, quietly funny guy whose column was somber and poetic about the big picture, which for him zoomed out to Existence itself. My sports editor was Bill Nack, the future Sports Illustrated star, who was no less poetic, and they spent hours huddled in the corner discussing deep matters. Jung’s weekly column showed a mastery of the personal essay; he led you inexorably to a conclusion you didn’t see coming. One of the professors who passed him on his Ph.D. oral exam was Frederick Will, a student of Wittgenstein and the father of George Will. Fred was as far to the right as Robert was to the left.
Nack followed me as editor. I stayed as a graduate student for the rest of 1964 and often saw Bill and Robert drinking coffee and explaining the universe to each other. Jung got his Ph.D., married, and found a job in the Philosophy Department at Southern Methodist. He stayed in contact; he was doing seminars around Dallas on existentialism. One day I got a call from Bill. Jung had checked into a hotel near Dallas to explore the border between life and death. As Bill understood it, he tried bleeding himself slowly. He was calling 911 when he passed out and died.
The DI was a real paper. We were a member of the Associated Press. We ran Walter Lippmann once a week and the comic strip Pogo every day. We had an ad department. We paid salaries; a night editor made three dollars, which would buy you a good dinner. Norman Thomas, the perennial presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, spoke on campus, and I interviewed him and asked if the DI could syndicate the column he wrote for the party newspaper, New America. This cost
us two dollars a week. I got the impression he was not widely syndicated; once a week I received a letter from Thomas with a carbon copy of his new column. I ran conservative columns by Dave Young, later the transportation editor of the Chicago Tribune, and Bob Auler, who stayed in Urbana, opened a law office, and became famous for suing the university on behalf of athletes. For a time he owned the Champaign-Urbana minor league baseball team. We’re still good friends. He calls me the Mad Bomber and I call him a Fascist Baby Eater.
As editor I loved to cover campus characters, and one was well known to us, because he had found a bedroom for himself in the small room where lead was remelted into bars for the Linotypes. This was an earnest young man named Richard McMullen, who helped circulate the paper and explained he could sustain life on almost no money by eating gelatin dissolved in water and an occasional apple. He walked the campus with a billboard proclaiming “Good News for Jews” and was arrested by the campus police for handing out the Bible in front of the University Library. The Daily Illini found this an outrage against freedom of speech, and I addressed a rally on the steps of the auditorium, using a battery-operated bullhorn. Effortlessly changing from activist to journalist, I pitched the story to the Chicago Sun-Times and had my first byline in the paper, on page one.
I bought the paper on November 22, 1963, and read my front-page story again and again while sitting in the Reading Room of the Illini Union. The sound of a radio broke the silence, where not even music had been heard, with the news from Dallas. I ran to our basement office. Everyone was there. On the radio, WILL, the university radio station, was playing Beethoven’s Fifth.
In a dramatic gesture, I swept everything off the top of my desk into a large wastebasket and made it a command post. I deployed Dave Reed, the executive editor, to write a story of the mood of the campus, which he could have written by simply looking around. The news editor John Keefe went to interview Norman Graebner, the famous history professor, who had just been scheduled to address the campus that night from the auditorium stage. He was considered a Great Man. I telephoned Revilo P. Oliver, the classics professor notorious for writing an article in the John Birch Society magazine calling Kennedy a communist. There was no answer.
John Schacht, the journalism professor who was chairman of the Illini Publishing Company board, made his only visit in history to our offices and handed me a headline that would be a perfect fit in two lines of Railroad Gothic: NATION MOURNS SLAIN LEADER. Unable to improve on it, although I resented his trespass, I took it back to Orville Moore, who regarded it from under his green eyeshade and asked himself, “Where the hell is our Second Coming of Christ font?”
Kennedy had campaigned from the auditorium steps in autumn 1960, and I had run breathless beside his open convertible. An assassination was unthinkable then. In a second in 1963 America was turned upside down. Dave Reed sat in the copy desk slot. Our lead story would be from the AP. I went to the Capitol and ate dinner with Bob Jung, Bill Nack, Paul Tyner, Bob Auler, and others. It was as if someone had called a meeting. The bar was jammed, but hushed. At three a.m. I was back at the paper to watch Phil Roach push a button and start the press. The nation mourned its slain leader.
15 MY TRIP TO HOLLYWOOD
IN 1963 THE Illinois team won a trip to the Rose Bowl. I assigned myself and Dave Reed to cover the story. The U of I Foundation paid for our train tickets. My sports editor was Bill Nack, later to become one of the greatest of all American sportswriters, but I don’t recall him on the train. He probably hitchhiked.
I’d watched the great 1963 team from the sidelines as Curt Beamer’s caption writer, seeing Dick Butkus and Jim Grabowski close enough to get mud kicked in my face. I wanted to see Illinois in the Rose Bowl; that was an excuse. Much more urgently I wanted to see California. I’d been as far west as Peoria. Since reading On the Road I had subscribed to the whole California mystique, and already I used “Hollywood” as a weary adjective for a world I knew nothing about.
We took the Illinois Central to Chicago and boarded the Santa Fe for Los Angeles. We slept sitting up. There were two cars chartered by the Student Senate, and the bar car became like Saturday night in Campus-town. I became friendly with a voluptuous young woman and under a grey woolen railroad blanket in the middle of the night, rocking through the midlands, we made free with each other. I recall her warmth and enthusiasm; I wish I could recall her name. Many undergraduate women acted as if they were making a gift of something, but in her dexterity she seemed to be gifting herself, and I found it so exciting that it was a hungover dawn before we finally fell asleep.
Across the deserts and the plains we rocketed in a Thomas Wolfean journey, dismounting at lonely stations like Durango to toss footballs in the night air. Union Station was an art deco set. We moved into the Biltmore Hotel on Pershing Square, and in the ancient gilded bar with its two-story ceiling we ate peanuts and threw the shells on the floor. Six to a room, we slept on cots. I read the Los Angeles Times a page at a time, and Jim Murray’s columns twice. I walked outside in shirtsleeves in winter. Nearby we bought Mexican street food and lingered uncertainly outside bars with women smiling at us through the windows.
This was all brand new. Dave and I stuck together like strangers in a new land. Hicks from the sticks. He played the mandolin, and we sat on a ledge in Pershing Square and together sang songs we knew from the Campus Folksong Club: “Amazing Grace,” “May the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Tennessee Waltz,” “This Land Is Your Land.” We put a cup on the sidewalk and made a few quarters, we two fresh-faced, tousled-haired, pink-cheeked lads from the cornfields, and never thought it odd that our fans were middle-aged men who avoided eye contact with one another.
I will spare you any mention of the Rose Bowl Parade and the game itself. What remains is one night. Dave and I found ourselves on Hollywood Boulevard, reading the stars on the Walk of Fame and examining the handprints at Grauman’s Chinese. Half a block off the boulevard we found a club named Disco a Go-Go. We sat at a railing and watched the lights of a disco ball revolve upon the small and shabby dance floor, and the dancing couples seemed to be glamorous and cool. One girl in a black sweater and pleated skirt danced with a Troy Donahue type, his blond hair in a pompadour because the Beatles were only just happening. She had the largest breasts I had ever seen on a young and slim woman. She and her date pressed eagerly against each other. I was hypnotized. I remembered the girl with the white parasol that Mr. Bernstein would never forget in Citizen Kane. This was California. This was Hollywood. This was life. It was all ahead for me. Yes.
How we found ourselves later that night in front of the Mormon temple on Santa Monica Boulevard I cannot remember. We must have taken a taxi, although why we went to that address I can’t say. Neither of us had any idea what it was. I remember standing with Dave, gazing up at the golden angel on the spire, and then noticing how late it was. I said we had better take a taxi to the Biltmore. Dave, who had matched me beer for beer, said he would walk. He wanted to see more of Los Angeles. Getting into a taxi, I asked him if he even knew the way. He asked me how many Biltmore Hotels I thought there were in Los Angeles.
The next morning all my roommates had already left when I awoke very late to a pounding on the door. It was Dave. He limped into the room and pulled off his penny loafers. The heels of his socks were soaked with blood. He limped for the rest of the trip. Now that I know Los Angeles I think it’s impossible that he walked all the way back. I stay in touch with Dave, who became a journalism professor at Eastern Illinois University, but he’s never told me what happened. The bastard probably met up with the girl in the pleated skirt.
Illinois won the Rose Bowl, there was much celebration, and we boarded the train for the journey home. I found my makeout partner, but I had a painful earache and slipped the porter twenty dollars to put me in a Pullman sleeping compartment. So great was the pain I didn’t even invite my friend to join me. I took three aspirins and a double scotch and far into the night read the Modern Library edition of
Fifty Stories by John O’Hara.
16 CAPE TOWN
OUR NEIGHBOR HAROLD Holmes suggested me as a nominee for a Rotary fellowship, which paid for a year of postgraduate study overseas. It was the only scholarship I was likely to win, because it wasn’t based entirely on grades but took student activities into account. My editorship of the Daily Illini may have helped. Asked to name the five schools I desired, I wrote down Cambridge, Trinity in Dublin, Calcutta, Melbourne, and the University of Cape Town. The only one of these I’d seen was Cape Town, on the slopes of Table Mountain, when I was with the wheelchair team from Illinois during their 1962 tour. Cape Town was the one I was offered.
I took the Panama Limited to Chicago. I was free. I was out of Urbana and out of America for a year. My host Rotary district said I was welcome to speak to as many clubs as I wished, and I assured them I would speak to as many as possible. This provided me with the hospitality of locals throughout the Cape, as far north as Bloemfontein, and all over South-West Africa, now Namibia, where from Windhoek I was flown in a Rotarian’s small plane down to the Diamond Coast and visited the towns of Oudtshoorn and Swakopmund, places out of time, the imposing civic buildings of German colonialism towering incongruously over the humble structures of what South Africans called a dorp town.