Katharine S. White, E.B.’s wife, was around Liebling for decades. She was astonished that, unlike the other temperamental writers in her orbit, Liebling never seemed to suffer from writer’s block.7 Liebling’s colleagues, most of whom agonized over every word, would shake their heads as they walked past Joe’s office with its clattering typewriter. Within minutes he’d be prowling the hallways, eager to show off his immaculate copy.
“I can write better than anyone who can write faster,” Liebling once boasted. “And I can write faster than anyone who can write better.”8
IT’S NOT THAT THE FAST-BUT-STILL-GOOD Liebling couldn’t have been a successful newspaperman. It’s that he chose not to. Of his two years studying at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Liebling wrote that it “had all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A & P.”9
As a cub reporter at the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin and later a night deskman at the New York Times, he exhibited the same cheeky indifference that had gotten him thrown out of Dartmouth College as an undergrad in the early ’20s. In Hanover he was dismissed for repeatedly cutting compulsory chapel service. At the Journal, he decided that covering civic meetings and petty crime in a provincial town was beneath him. But the clincher came at the Times, where Liebling was unceremoniously dumped for messing around on the overnight sports desk. Liebling somehow thought it would be clever to list the referees for high school basketball games as Ignoto, Italian for “unknown.”10 Once his recurring gag was uncovered, the Times bade him arrivederci.
He went on to work at the New York World (later the World-Telegram) in the early ’30s, where, at least on occasion, he flashed lush writing and reportorial skills. But the daily grind of journalism bored him; in ’35, when the World-Telly stiffed him on a raise, he quit.
Liebling’s cockiness was rooted in a pampered childhood of nannies, private schools, and summering at Lake Como. His father, Joseph, although conspicuously nonobservant, achieved the dream of every Jewish immigrant. While still a young man, the Austrian émigré became balabos far sich (Yiddish for “one’s own boss”11), striking it rich in the furrier trade and real estate. In a few short years, Joseph went from living hand to mouth in Manhattan’s Bowery to basking on the Upper West Side. He married a socially prominent San Franciscan named Anna Slone, whose Judaism was almost as indifferent as his own.
Their first child, Abbott Joseph, born in the fall of 1904, would be raised only nominally Jewish. Abbott, as his parents insisted on calling him, harbored ambivalent feelings about his ancestry, never quite embracing it, but never quite repudiating it, either. “Even Hitler didn’t make [Liebling] an intensely self-conscious Jew,” his third wife, the writer Jean Stafford, remarked.12
Liebling was a pudgy kid who never backed down if a playground tough taunted him about his weight, or his girly name, or his thick glasses. Young Abbott was forever losing his specs when he took them off to mix it up in upper Manhattan or later in Far Rockaway on the Queens/western Long Island border, where the family moved in 1913.
For the rest of his life, Liebling remained an unrepentant New Yorker. Among his first books was a collection of pieces on his passion for life in the Big Apple. The charm of America’s heartland eluded Liebling. “Friends often tell me of their excitement when the train on which they are riding passes from Indiana into Illinois, or back again,” Liebling wrote in Back Where I Came From. “I am ashamed to admit that when the Jerome Avenue express rolls into Eighty-sixth Street Station I have absolutely no reaction.”13
He almost never got the chance to extol New York’s virtues. As an eleven-year-old, Liebling contracted typhoid fever. For six months he was confined to bed, a condition that left him delirious for a time but fueled a voracious reading habit. The infirm Liebling devoured what he later called the “literature of fact,” developing a lifelong infatuation for the writing of “Stendhal,” Marie-Henri Beyle, the nineteenth-century Frenchman considered the father of literary realism. Liebling’s French was so advanced that, as a teenager, he could appreciate Stendhal in the writer’s native tongue. In his youth Liebling read a lot of fiction, mainly Charles Dickens, but never cared as much for make-believe. Years later, Liebling’s efforts at crafting straight fiction proved frustrating, although he loved the detective stories of Frenchman Guy de Maupassant. Joe proudly became “my own Sherlock Holmes,” he said.14
Young Liebling also followed the horrors of the Great War—the sinking of the Lusitania, the siege at Gallipoli, the early trench maneuvering at the Somme. By the time the French commander at Verdun issued his gallant vow “Ils ne passeront pas!” (“They shall not pass!”), Liebling had become a Francophile. He developed a scorn toward everything Germanic. Since his parents had hired a series of fräuleins, spiteful German nannies, to watch over Liebling and his younger sister, it didn’t take much to persuade young Abbott that there was something inherently defective in Teutonic culture.
What Liebling loved most about his old man was that he was street savvy, a guy who talked pure “Noo Yawk,” knew his way around a con game, and palled around with the shady characters Joe loved to call “boskos,” or “gozzlers,” or, most memorably, “Telephone Booth Indians.” Liebling reveled in telling effete friends about how his father, with a well-timed contribution, had snookered Reverend Charles Parkhurst, an antivice crusader, into ridding a certain Manhattan neighborhood of prostitutes. Unbeknownst to the good preacher, as soon as the streetwalkers were ejected, a syndicate headed by Liebling senior swooped in to make a killing on the suddenly “clean” real estate.15
AT ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME, Homer William Bigart’s father, Homer S., wasn’t providing blood money to ministers or taking his clan on summer jaunts to Switzerland. Bigart senior, in fact, was barely getting by in Hawley, Pennsylvania, a factory and coal-mining hamlet perched in the Poconos between Scranton and the Delaware Water Gap. Old man Bigart made sweaters for a living, running a shop in which his bookworm son and two daughters toiled after school.
Young Homer, tall and pasty with stringy dark hair, was exceptionally bright but had a debilitating stutter. Homer senior and his wife, Anna Schardt Bigart, were devout parishioners at First Presbyterian, a few steps from their home on Church Street. His Calvinist upbringing, his harsh surroundings, and his social awkwardness all contributed to young Homer’s combative personality, future colleagues surmised. Bigart’s prickliness served him well in the newspaper business. Even his smiles bore traces of “wry exasperation,” recalled Betsy Wade, who worked with Bigart at both the Herald Tribune and the Times and collected a book of Homer’s best war correspondence.16
Not many sons of Hawley earned scholarships to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon) in the ’20s, but Bigart did. He showed up in Pittsburgh with the intent of studying architecture. But within a few days it was apparent that Bigart couldn’t draw; he not only withdrew from the architecture program but also dropped out of school.
In 1927, at age twenty, he rented a $3-a-week room in Brooklyn, took occasional English and journalism classes at New York University, and landed a job as a nighttime copyboy at the New York Herald Tribune.17 The Herald Tribune may have had a distinguished history as Horace Greeley’s abolitionist organ but Bigart was starting in its cellar. He earned the princely sum of $12 a week fetching coffee and cigarettes for the hard-bitten scribes on the Trib’s overnight city desk.
Year after year, Bigart performed menial tasks, hoping it would lead to a full-time reporting job. He even started a newsletter for entry-level cohorts, Copy Boy’s Call.18 In 1933, his perseverance was rewarded, sort of: At age twenty-six, he was made head copyboy—quite possibly the oldest copyboy in the Trib’s history. “On the job, [Bigart’s] charges saw him as something of a tyrant; off it, they thought him almost a recluse,” Richard Kluger wrote in The Paper.19 Not only did Bigart’s speech impediment make it difficult for him to communicate with newsroom staffers, he often wore a sarcastic smirk that
did not endear him to superiors. Instead of hanging around Bleeck’s, the Trib’s ground-floor saloon, Bigart liked to go home and devour books. Later, his eclectic knowledge and grasp of literature astounded Ivy-educated friends. In 1935, in fact, the Trib sent its Renaissance man to interview Thomas Wolfe when the Look Homeward, Angel novelist visited New York.20
Reading was one thing; reporting quite another. On those rare occasions when Bigart was given a chance to write an obituary or cover a church service or handle some other pedestrian assignment, his copy was full of cross-outs; it took him forever to compose even the simplest stories. Nevertheless, the Trib tried him out as a spot reporter at $25 a week.
Early on, he managed to screw up the unscrew-up-able when he was sent to Penn Station to cover the inauguration of a new New York–to-Miami line. He somehow ended up at the wrong track; worse, his article singled out the wrong outfit, angering a large advertiser. Bigart’s gaffe earned a personal knuckle rapping from Helen Rogers Reid, the domineering wife of the Trib’s publisher.
But Bigart survived and, slowly but surely, began showing a gift for what Kluger called “sardonic observation.” In March 1940, Bigart’s front-page take on the city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade included this sparkling passage: “The snow lay an inch deep in the folds of the Mayor’s large black felt hat by the time the County Kerry boys went by singing, ‘The hat me dear old father wore.’”21
Moreover, by his early thirties, he’d figured out how to “use” his stutter. He perfected what became universally known as “Homer’s All-American Dummy Act.” Recognizing that people misconstrued his impediment as ignorance, Bigart would put on a theatrical stammer and ask the same basic questions over and over again. “And then w-w-what happened?” was a typical Bigart query, usually delivered from behind a Lucky Strike spilling ashes.
It drove colleagues and competitors to distraction, but interviewees tended to take pity on Bigart, often sharing information they had no business sharing because they felt sorry for him. In truth, Bigart was always two steps ahead of the competition because he’d done his homework.
“Homer didn’t know anything—like a fox,” his acolyte Andy Rooney chuckled a half century later.22
UNLIKE HIS MENTORS LIEBLING AND Bigart, Rooney never came up through the ranks of workaday journalism. He didn’t have the chance: the pug-nosed kid, all of five-foot-eight with bushy brown hair and bushier brown eyebrows, was still a junior at Colgate University when he was conscripted into service.
Like a lot of college students in the ’30s, Rooney, appalled by the Great War’s hypocrisy, flirted with pacifism and conscientious objection. An iconoclastic economics professor, a Quaker, preached something that Rooney and his Colgate friends took to heart: “Any peace is better than any war.”23 It was a maxim Rooney would come to regret in April 1945 when he walked through the gates of Buchenwald.
But Rooney the undergrad paid a lot more attention to Colgate’s nationally prominent football squad than he did to the spread of European Fascism. He was an undersized and scrappy mule who—in a prelude to the rest of his life—wasn’t afraid to stick his nose into bigger guys.
He’d grown up in a comfortable upper-middle-class home, the son of a Williams College graduate who abhorred FDR. His dad was a successful enough salesman with the Albany Felt Company to send his son to private school and afford a vacation cabin on nearby Lake George.
Young Rooney showed some promise as a writer at the academy, crafting funny essays that caught an English teacher’s fancy.24 But his only brush with journalism was a brief apprenticeship as an intern/copyboy at the Knickerbocker News and a couple of letters—one advocating pacifism—published in upstate New York papers.25
Rooney always pooh-poohed his academic performance at Colgate, but he was more than a jock: He became a protégé of noted English professor Porter Perrin, a contributing editor of the student magazine, a member of the debate team, a faithful reader of E. B. White and the New Yorker, and a good enough after-dinner speaker to win an undergraduate competition two years running.
“Andy was a word man,” his roommate Bob Ruthman remembered. “He enjoyed reading, writing, speaking, and conversing. His subjects were whatever he thought worth talking about. He never used profanities, slang, or told off-color jokes.”26
Belying his later image of Everyman, Rooney could also be something of a snoot. Ruthman met Rooney at the “R” mailbox freshman year. “Andy asked where I lived and my prep school. ‘I’m from Evanston, Illinois, and I went to Evanston High School,’ I said. Andy seemed surprised. ‘A high school—an elevated structure? And no prep school?’”
Ruthman remembered his “Room” (as they called one another) as fun to be around and an athlete who got the most out of his limited abilities. But Rooney could be stubborn to a fault.
Part of the hazing ritual at Sigma Chi, the fraternity they pledged together, was to tromp through the snow-covered hills of Madison County. Ruthman, an experienced wintertime hiker, owned a pair of sturdy, Iroquois-style snowshoes and urged Rooney to buy a similar pair. But Andy went cheap, getting snowshoes that constantly slipped off his feet.
“I had to pull his ass out of the snow the entire way,” Ruthman laughed seven decades later.27 But the two of them avoided frostbite and got into Sigma Chi.
The young Rooney sometimes rubbed people the wrong way, Ruthman allowed, coming across as “brash” and “impolitic”—the very qualities that in the years to come Rooney turned into his own cottage industry.
When his draft number was called in the spring of ’41, Rooney mulled it over and concluded he wasn’t introspective enough to be a conscientious objector. So off he went that July to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he developed an instant—and lifelong—disdain toward martinets in uniform. He also learned that if you popped off to a noncommissioned officer, reprisals would come fast.
Rooney was in one of the few places he could abide on a military base—the mess hall—on December 7, 1941, when news came over the radio that the United States was now at war.28 Post–Pearl Harbor, his outfit, now known as the Seventeenth Field Artillery Brigade, put him to work cobbling together a weekly newsletter. One of the brigade’s colonels came away from a conversation with Rooney convinced that the youngster was a Communist—or at least a serious subversive.
HAL BOYLE, ROONEY’S FUTURE FIRST Army jeep companion, was rebellious in his own way, too. His middle name, Vercingetorix, conveyed defiance: It came from a Gaul chieftain who gave the Roman Empire everything it could handle in 45 BC. Boyle eventually shortened the moniker to “Vincent.” Even while covering a world war Boyle exhibited “Boston tea party tendencies,” his great AP friend and editor Wes Gallagher wrote in 1944.29
But Boyle had reporting in his blood; as a student at Central High School in Kansas City, Missouri, he finagled a job as a copyboy at the local Associated Press office. More than four decades later he was still working for the same wire service. But instead of sharpening pencils he was penning a nationally acclaimed column—and had been for thirty years. His first real reporting assignment in Kansas City came in 1928 when AP sent him to cover a triple hanging.30
Boyle’s old man was an Irish immigrant, one of seventeen kids from a hardscrabble coal-mining family. “Every Irish family is a staircase to heaven,” Boyle was fond of writing.31 In the case of the Kansas City Boyles of the 1920s and ’30s, the stairwell was cluttered. His hard-drinking pop disliked imposing discipline over Boyle and his three male siblings. “He thought boys had to get a few bumps in the process of learning to pit their strength against life,” Boyle wrote, “and he didn’t think it paid to interfere or protect them too much.”32
Hal’s father was an ardent Democrat, a proud foot soldier for “Boss Tom” Pendergast, Kansas City’s notorious political strongman.33 Hal inherited much from his old man, including feistiness and a fondness for drink.
Boyle’s mother was off the boat from County Mayo, a tart-tongued farm girl who provided her son w
ith fodder for dozens of columns. She never got Mayo out of her blood; although they lived in the heart of Kansas City, all manner of farm animals wandered around the Boyles’ backyard.
His dad ran a butcher shop where Hal and his brothers worked before and after school. Young Hal didn’t care for the stench out back but loved the old-timers who stopped in to exchange wisecracks and talk politics and sports. His AP colleague and fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Don Whitehead once wrote of Boyle: “He gazes at the world through the eyes of a boy looking across the meat counter and finding the procession of customers interesting and exciting.”34
In the summertime the Boyles liked to host big neighborhood gatherings, with tons of fried chicken, ham, watermelon, and cold beer.35 But times weren’t always rosy; at the height of the Depression, the Boyles were forced to shutter the meat shop at Twenty-third and Vine.36
As a kid Boyle became infatuated with Richard Harding Davis, the dashing Harper’s Weekly correspondent who helped create the legend of Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War. When just twelve, Boyle told his mother he wanted to be a famous war reporter like Davis.
At Central High, he won various essay contests and was introduced to the joys of Emily Dickinson and other great poets. He was so taken with Dickinson that he named a collection of his columns after one of her classic verses: “A day! Help! Help! Another day!” He also mastered enough philosophy to one day be christened “The Pavement Plato” and the “Poor Man’s Philosopher.”
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