As a boy I had taught myself to type because I wanted to grow up to be a newspaperman, preferably on the New York Herald Tribune , the paper I idolized for its humanity and humor. The colonel had an elevated sense of personal glory, and I was a captive sergeant. He put me to work writing company histories and other reports that would exalt his feats of leadership. Once, near the Algerian town of Blida, just under the Atlas Mountains, a sirocco from the Sahara swirled through the tent where I was typing, pelting me with hot particles of sand that I sometimes think are still lodged in my scalp.
The next winter, near the Italian town of Brindisi, the particles swirling through my tent were cold and felt very much like snow. Those wartime stints at a typewriter prepared me for a lifetime of writing in odd or exotic places, starting in , when I came home and got a job on the Herald Tribune βmy boyhood dream come true.
The Trib building, at West 41st Street, extended through the block to 40th Street; the city room, which housed most of the editors, reporters, rewrite men, sportswriters, and columnists, occupied almost the entire fifth floor. Decades of use by people not known for fastidious habits had given the room a patina of grime. The desks, scarred with cigarette burns and mottled with coffee stains, were shoved together, and the air was thick with smoke. In summer it was circulated but not noticeably cooled by ancient fans with black electrical cables that dangled to the floor.
There was no air conditioning, but we would have scorned it anyway. We were newspapermen , conditioned to discomfort, reared on movies like The Front Page , in which gruff men wearing fedoras barked at each other in sentences that moved as fast as bullets. I thought it was the most beautiful place in the world. Not everyone was as charmed by the environment. A copyreader named Mike Misselonghites, who sat along the rim of the horseshoe-shaped copy desk, arrived at his post a half hour early every day.
Then he brought them back to the copy desk and scrubbed his area of the desk. Then he scrubbed his telephone and its cord. Then he lifted his chair onto the desk and scrubbed its seat and back and legs, not resting until his workplace was free enough of dirt and bacteria for him to safely go to work. Perkins, who often smoked his pipe upside down, started a paper fire in his wastebasket.
