by Henry Kisor
The January issue of the magazine was to contain a pictorial catalogue of more than five hundred racing sailboats, from eight-foot dinghies to the stately America’s Cup twelve-meter yachts. Having “messed about in boats” at Camp Echo, I knew a little about the subject. It wasn’t difficult to translate manufacturer’s brochures into short paragraphs describing the length, beam, sail area, and other characteristics of each boat, with a sentence or two about the things that set it apart from other sailboats. In a few hours I had the task down to a formula, batting out a new paragraph every five minutes or so.
Wilson was delighted. When that job was completed a couple of weeks later, instead of giving me a check and a goodbye handshake, he thought I might continue to be useful if I could come in for a few hours a couple of times a week. He’d show me how to lay out and paste up page dummies of the catalogue from galley proofs of the paragraphs I had written, and how to read the page proofs when they arrived from the printer. This was hardly an unfamiliar task. It was the kind of thing I’d done as managing editor at Evanston High, and I took to it as swiftly as a swallow to the wind. Before long Johnny had me editing copy and writing headlines and helping plan the contents of the entire magazine.
“You’ve got talent, kid,” he’d say after a day of hard work, and I’d beam with pleasure. I was on my way.
Partly to earn money for school and partly to gain the experience, I delayed my return to Medill for two quarters while working full-time for One-Design Yachtsman. Most of my tasks were purely editorial, but on two occasions Johnny sent me on the road to write articles about regattas. I’ll never know for certain, but I think Johnny had two motives for doing so—first, to get more material for the magazine, and second, to see what my limitations as a reporter might be.
So long as I could talk to people face to face, I could get the information I needed for a story. These brief field trips, however, didn’t involve telephone newsgathering, as does most professional reporting. If they were inconclusive in demonstrating my journalistic limitations, they did show me that I was happiest at an editor’s desk. On the road, I often had to ask people to repeat what they’d said. As an editor I rarely had to do that, and my growing skills, at any rate, seemed most valuable at the desk.
Halfway through this period Johnny, sick unto death of Chicago winters, resigned to return to Florida. He had been a superb teacher, and had carved enough raw skill out of me so that for the next three months I could do most of the editorial and production work of the magazine almost alone under the sharp eye of Knowles Pittman, the publisher, as supportive in his quiet, intellectual way as Johnny had been in his craggy manner. I had needed a break, and Johnny and Knowles gave it to me in spades.
When I returned to Medill in the fall of 1963, I had an advantage over most of my classmates: the kind of experience and responsibility a young journalist doesn’t ordinarily get until long after graduation. It stood me in particularly good stead in the Editorial Operations graduate course, in which the class of sixteen students was divided into two news desk staffs, each responsible for producing a mock newspaper during a three-hour lab. We’d rip copy from the Associated Press and United Press International teletypewriters, lay out pages, edit stories to fit their holes, and write headlines for them.
Johnny and Knowles had taught it all, the raw-copy-to-finished-product approach, and my performance impressed the course’s instructor, Dan Sullivan, who was then cable editor of the Chicago Daily News—another major-league newspaperman moonlighting as a professor. “Sully,” bespectacled, balding, and brush-cut, looked like a middle-aged nerd, complete with plastic pocket protector. He was an old-fashioned newspaperman’s newspaperman, with an intense, inquiring, and retentive mind that knew no boundaries. And he was a patient, compassionate teacher, the kind who took a personal interest in his students. Near the end of the quarter he drew me aside and said quietly, “In a couple of years, come look me up.”
This time, going through the job-interview mill was different. I knew that I had value as a journalist and—thanks to my experience at One-Design Yachtsman—knew exactly what it was. So long as I did not have to use the telephone, I could edit. I was good at taking a piece of raw, unruly copy and blue-penciling it to its essence, making sure of the facts as I went along, and searching out its heart for the headline. Sullivan said he thought I was a natural newspaper copyreader and, even if I still wanted to work on magazines someday, a few years of newspaper experience would stand me in good stead.
The interviews were hugely different from those at Trinity. My voice was no longer a nervous squeak, but strong, confident, and poised. I was proud of my resume, which included straight A’s at Medill and a sheaf of bylined clippings from One-Design Yachtsman.
And the employment market was wide open. Not for a few years would journalism—still as low-paying as elementary school teaching—surge in popularity as a career after college. Like Johnny Wilson, newspaper recruiters were looking for warm bodies. Whatever unease my deafness raised in them apparently was overwhelmed by my thick resume, which included recommendations from the part-time instructors—professional newsmen, not just teachers—attesting to my ability to do the copyreader’s task as well as any hearing person.
Before graduation half a dozen offers came my way. The two most attractive were at the Denver Post and at the Evening Journal of Wilmington, Delaware. The latter (circulation 90,000) was small enough so that a new editor on its five-person news copy desk could quickly gain experience editing all kinds of articles, from local squibs to major breaking national and international news. And so, a week after receiving my MS in journalism degree with distinction as well as a couple of top-student awards, I piled my belongings into my Volkswagen and drove east. I was to be paid $87.50 a week—a munificent sum considering I had been making $75 a week at One-Design Yachtsman.
The day I arrived in Wilmington to look for an apartment, the temperature was in the humid nineties. After studying the classified ads, I went to the city’s largest real estate agency, thoroughly sweat-sodden in wrinkled, wilted shirt sleeves. When I told the receptionist that I was answering an ad for an apartment, she looked me up and down and turned to a manager at a desk nearby. I did not see what she said, but he looked me over and said, “I’m sorry, all our apartments have been rented.”
Such was my naĩveté that not for a long time did I realize I had gotten the brush-off. It could have been because I was deaf, therefore presumably unemployable and a poor risk for the rent. My scruffy appearance that sweltering day, however, probably would have scared away even the most enlightened apartment manager. I’ll never know the truth.
That night I stayed in a motel. The next morning, dressed in coat and tie, I tried again, this time at the offices of a downtown dentist, who was advertising a $55-a-month walk-up efficiency apartment above a women’s dress shop downtown, just three blocks from the Evening Journal plant. “I’ve just been hired as an editor at the paper,” I said to introduce myself, and the apartment—which had been vacant for many weeks—was mine. It was tiny and bare and, I am sure, quite depressing. The only furniture it ever held, aside from a bed and a bookcase, was an aluminum lawn chair. But it was my apartment. I was on my own—free, independent, and gainfully employed.
Professionally, the ten months I spent in Wilmington were highly valuable. At first the other members of the copy desk seemed wary, but after a few days they warmed up to me. Like any other young recruit, I was in the beginning given “shorts”—one-paragraph squibs—to edit. Then, as the “slot man”—as we called the copy chief, who sat in a niche at the center of a large semi-circular desk feeding raw copy to the editors on the “rim”—grew more confident in my talents, I was given more important work to do. In a few weeks I was handling my share of breaking news. At no time did the veterans patronize me as a deaf person, although I did come in for the usual gentle hazing every greenhorn had to suffer.
The only exasperation they ever displayed came during our lunch
-hour bridge games. Despite their best efforts, I never could learn more than the rudiments of bridge, for I have absolutely no card sense. They shrugged indulgently. “You can be dummy,” they would say, and if the irony of that phrase ever occurred to them, they never acknowledged it.
Like young journalists everywhere, I wanted to do everything, to write as well as edit. A fellow editor, knowing my wide reading interests, suggested I do as he did—write book reviews for the Evening Journal’s sister paper, the Morning News. There was no critic’s fee—just the free copy of the book under review—but I loved reading novels and felt honored to render a printed judgment upon them. So enthusiastic was I that I suggested to the feature editor that perhaps I could review subtitled foreign films as well.
I was young enough and brash enough to think I could get away with it. As I had done in school, I prepared for the task by researching the film, reading criticisms of the director’s previous films as well as magazine reviews of the one under notice. Wilmington was far enough off the first-run path so that national magazines and newspapers would carry their notices weeks before the movie arrived in town.
Half a dozen times this system worked well. But one night I got my comeuppance when an Italian movie featuring Sophia Loren arrived in town. It was the wrong print, with dubbed English instead of subtitles. I had little idea what was happening on the screen—it was a drama with a great deal of dialogue and little action—and when I wrote the review at the office that evening, I had to fake it. The resultant review was skewed enough from reality so that the sharp-eyed feature editor (who himself had seen the movie the same night) immediately spotted my little exercise in fraud. He suggested gently that it might be better for my moonlighting career if I stuck to book reviewing, and I had to agree.
Back to books it was, and by the spring of 1965 I had persuaded the editor of the Evening Journal to let me write a weekly literary column for the paper, focusing on local books and authors. I should have been content—my career was growing, and I was gaining respect as an up-and-coming young journalist around town. I was, however, beginning to chafe.
Wilmington may have been a fine place to work, but socially it was a wasteland. It was and is a company town; in the 1960s, if you did not work for Du Pont, you were nobody in white-collar society. The News and the Journal were owned by Du Pont, but their employees—especially the young ones—did not have the social cachet of those in the corporate mainstream. And if you weren’t a member of the Wilmington Country Club, which was practically a Du Pont subsidiary, there wasn’t much social life for you.
Hence I spent many of my weekends visiting friends in New York City and in Washington. There was an old girlfriend in Manhattan, but I was especially interested in a Northwestern classmate who had joined the faculty at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Sharon was a Kentuckian, a cute little slip of a thing barely five feet tall from Louisville who had graduated from the University of Kentucky. A former cheerleader, she was perky and bright though not an intellectual. Like Rachel, however, she was warm, open, and curious about everything. And, like Rachel, she was a product of her pre-feminist times, perhaps more alert for marriage prospects than career opportunities.
From the first we got along like puppies. Sharon’s casual Kentucky drawl was easy to lipread, and she understood my speech readily. As a Southerner, I think, she had learned to tolerate a wider range of human vagaries, including speech patterns, than most Northerners had. Southerners, in my experience, are more easygoing and patient with people whose behaviors differ from the norm. Why, I don’t know. It may have to do with the slower, perhaps less judgmental pace of life below the Mason-Dixon Line.
It was clear from the beginning, however, that Sharon was much more interested in large social groups than I was. She had been the belle of many balls in Kentucky and loved to dress up and go to gatherings that attracted lots of other dressed-up people. Dutifully, I let Sharon drag me to them, though given my druthers I’d have gone someplace else.
At this time, I was starting to learn, perhaps unconsciously, that I functioned best in small groups, not at large parties. The problem didn’t lie so much in lipreading; people in large gatherings tend to congregate in small conversational knots that are easy enough for a lipreader to cope with. The difficulty was in making myself understood. Though it is intelligible in a quiet room, my low, nasal, breathy deaf speech easily gets lost in a forest of competing voices. My most troublesome sounds—the fricatives “th,” “f,” and “s” and the long vowels “a” and “e”—are often too diffuse to be discerned against a noisy background. And when I raise the volume of my voice, the sounds tend to grow even more distorted. The noisier the party, the harder it is to understand my speech.
And so I’d stand silently at Sharon’s elbow, smiling and nodding as she chattered on. That was all right with me. She talked enough for both of us.
Before this problem could come to a head, however, we had graduated and scattered to our new jobs. Sharon was four hours from Wilmington by car, and in the beginning I’d drive down almost every weekend to visit her in either Washington or Charlottesville. But time and distance inevitably take a toll on every relationship, and one day I received a letter from Sharon telling me, gently but clearly, that there was someone else in her life.
It was just as well. As a Southerner, Sharon was a churchgoing, Biblereading evangelical Christian with a decent respect for virginity, and I a Northern agnostic with small sympathy for either organized religion or traditional sexual codes. That, I am certain, contributed more to the breakup of our relationship than my deafness.
My heart was again broken, although I had been slowly growing aware that our differences spelled doom for our affair. It is always better to be dumper than dumpee, and this was the second time I had been handed my walking papers. There was a difference, however: I had not been rejected because I was deaf. There followed a decent period of mourning, then a return to circulation.
Without an out-of-town girlfriend to go visit, I had to fend for myself in Wilmington. There was a popular bar near my apartment that attracted young downtowners after work—you might call it a rudimentary singles bar, but it was a quiet place, not a noisy circus like modern “meat markets.” There I met two young secretaries and dated them casually for several months. It was then that a special problem of the young deaf adult who lived alone began to emerge: the inability to use a telephone.
For a long time, when I was in high school, I had to ask my friends or Mother or Dad (Buck was off at college) to call my girlfriends to set up dates. This is no way to conduct a love life, having your mother ask if so-and-so would like to go to the movies, or maybe to Wimpy’s for a shake, or whatever. Mine was very good about it, because there was nothing else to be done. She and I both had to grit our teeth and be brave. I am sure she was as relieved as I when Debbie grew large enough to hold a telephone handset. There is something wonderfully conspiratorial between a big brother and a little sister in matters of the heart. During the two years I lived at home while attending Medill, Debbie served as a very efficient social secretary, not only calling dates but reminding me when it was time to go out on them.
But I was in Wilmington and she in Evanston. So long as I weekended out of town, I could write letters to set up dates. But without somebody— parent, sibling, friend, roommate—to serve as my telephone mouthpiece, carrying on an ordinary social life in Wilmington was cumbersome. Making dates there required quick footwork at the mailbox. Letters would have to be mailed by Tuesday if a reply was to come by Thursday or Friday, too late to recoup the weekend if my proposal was turned down. Before long I refined the method. I’d be my own mailman, delivering the messages around Wilmington myself, dropping them off in the morning on the way to work and picking up the replies sometimes that evening, sometimes the following morning. The young women I dated in this way were perfectly understanding, if a bit amused by my one-man Pony Express.
They were not entertained, however,
when I tried to save a few hours by ringing their doorbells to negotiate the time for a date face to face. Several times a prospective date greeted me in curlers, face cream, and dismay, and I’m certain that on at least one occasion I interrupted something passionate. Urban Americans do not drop in unannounced at each other’s homes.
Local dates thus became a sometime thing, and as my out-of-town relationships waned, I began to spend a lot of lonely evenings in Wilmington. Like so many young adults in a strange city, I began to think about home. A host of friends remained in Chicago; would I be happier in my old hometown?
I wrote to Dan Sullivan, who, as good fortune had it, was now copy desk chief of the Chicago Daily News. Were there any openings? Yes, there were, and the fellow who did the hiring immediately telegraphed me with a job offer. He was Creed Black, the managing editor, who coincidentally had resigned as editor of the Wilmington papers just before my arrival, in a dispute with the owners over how news affecting Du Pont should be played in its newspapers.
Sullivan sent me a copy of the memo of recommendation he had given Black. “Henry is one of the five or six best students I’ve had over the years,” he had said. “At Medill he held his own in the daily copy-desk repartee,” he added, referring to the mostly genial, sometimes sharp-edged abuse copyreaders liked to heap upon each other during slow moments. This was the sole reference in that memo he made to my deafness, and it was an oblique one. Even after a quarter of a century in journalistic harness, I’ve received few encomiums I’m as proud of as that one.
I was now in the big time as a staff member of a major metropolitan newspaper, and a distinguished one at that. The Daily News, more than a century old, had fielded the world’s first foreign service and was still known as a writer’s newspaper, favoring good prose as well as distinctive reporting. Its veteran correspondents were nationally famous, thanks to the joint news service the Daily News put out with its sister morning newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times.