Into My Own: The Remarkable People and Events That Shaped a Life - Softcover

Roger Kahn is the author of nineteen books and hundreds of articles in national magazines such as Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Time, and The Saturday Evening Post. He has taught writing at various colleges and lectured at Yale, Princeton, and Columbia. Mr. Kahn held the distinguished position of Ottaway Professor of Journalism at SUNY New Paltz in the spring of 2004. He lives in Stone Ridge, New York, with his wife, the psychotherapist Katharine Johnson.

Roger Kahn is the author of nineteen books and hundreds of articles in national magazines such as Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Time, and The Saturday Evening Post. He has taught writing at various colleges and lectured at Yale, Princeton, and Columbia. Mr. Kahn held the distinguished position of Ottaway Professor of Journalism at SUNY New Paltz in the spring of 2004. He lives in Stone Ridge, New York, with his wife, the psychotherapist Katharine Johnson.

Chapter One

 
The Coach
 
Reality brightens my dream, to become a writer.
 
I
 
It may seem curious, at least it does to me, that an old Herald Tribune hand tapping a keyboard would so soon cite a primal dictum of The New York Times, as quoted by Arthur Gelb in the 662-page memoir he called City Room. Early in the book, along about page 136, Gelb quotes Adolph Ochs, paterfamilias of the family that runs the Times, as saying, "The most useful man on a newspaper is one who can edit. . . . Writers are galore."
 
Quoting Ochs around the Times may not be precisely like spouting Luke in a Southern Baptist church, but it comes close. The old man burst out of Chattanooga and took control of The New York Times in 1896, a publisher of ferocious ambition, an astounding work ethic, and a brilliant head for business. Even in the twenty-first century, six decades after his death, he remains the principal architect of what is probably the most successful newspaper on earth. There is a nice ring to his surprising phrase "writers are galore," but in this instance, as in a few others, Baron Ochs was wrong.
 
The greatest newspaperman I have known was R. (for Rufus) Stanley Woodward, a huge, myopic former Amherst lineman whose glory days came when he was sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune. During that stretch, from the 1930s into the 1960s, "Coach" Woodward pitched batting practice for the Yankees in a uniform borrowed from Lou Gehrig, discovered Red Smith, saved the baseball career of Jackie Robinson, and invented the modern sports page. He also took time out to cover World War II and, in 1944, armed with a Boy Scout knife and a sheaf of pencils, landed behind Nazi lines in a glider, the better to observe the horrific Battle of Arnhem. He did all these high deeds, and, on another level, he managed to convince me in my youth that if I worked hard, double-spaced my copy, read Paradise Lost, and learned to remain vertical after drinking four martinis, there was no reason, no reason at all, why I could not become a writer. Woodward was the man Ernest Hemingway wanted to be.
 
Woodward's credo, which he learned as a cub reporter at the Worcester Evening Gazette from an editor named Nicholas J. Skerrett, went like this: "The American newspaper is the greatest institution in the world." I think all of us who have worked for American newspapers feel that way, at least some of the time, which is why we get so upset when we see the art and craft of newspapering abused. Within Woodward's mighty frame--six feet two, 230 pounds--beat the sensitive and vulnerable heart of an idealist. He was a classicist, a humanist, and a liberal, who loved farming and played the violin. But above all he was an idealist.
 
Ogden Mills Reid, who had inherited great wealth, ran the Trib for four decades, until his death in 1947. In a staunch Republican way, old Ogden was an idealist, even as Woodward, and he championed the sometimes combative Coach. But Reid's will left the paper in the hands of his widow, Helen Rogers Reid, who had started her career as an impecunious social secretary. Helen was slight, strong-willed, jut-jawed, and tightfisted. She appointed herself publisher and designated her son "Whitie" editor in chief. Both these people were kind to me. Each took a personal interest in my work. But neither had old Ogden's overall tolerance for nonconformists, rebels, or, for that matter, martinis. After some clashes, which I'll get to presently, Helen and Whitie fired the best sports editor in the country and replaced him with a onetime college hockey star named Bob Cooke, formerly Whitie's Old Blue classmate at Yale.
 
Jolted, his adrenaline pumping wildly, Woodward immediately dictated, not wrote but dictated, a remarkable, forgotten book called Sports Page, which could be used as a primer today by every publication covering sports, although, Woodward being Woodward, it is livelier and better written than standard texts. In Sports Page, Woodward warned of "the unholy jargon, the tendency to call things by names other than their own." Typically that would be describing a shortstop's error as a "miscue." The shortstop, of course, does not carry a cue stick. Woodward ruled that "horrendous clashes of fearsome Tigers and snarling Wolverines, usually concluded in purple sunsets, are taboo." Copyreaders, whom he called "the comma police," sometimes may cut a good writer to dullness, "but they are essential if the vehicle [sports section] is not to be smeared with wild and indiscriminate pigments." Good copy editors were rare and valuable, but the lifeblood of a great sports section and a great newspaper flowed from its writers, or at least it should. "The giants of our craft," Woodward asserted, "Grantland Rice, W. O. McGeehan, and Westbrook Pegler, each gave something to today's school of writing. Rice contributed rhythm and euphony; Pegler a grumpy and grudging curiosity for fact; and McGeehan a certain twist, in the likeness of Anatole France, which could make an ordinary sentence interesting."
 
Rice is best remembered for creating the most remarkable lead ever written on a football game. Covering Army-Notre Dame in November 1924--Notre Dame, 13; Army, 7--Rice began:
 
Outlined against a blue-gray sky, The Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreyer, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on a bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.
 
A cyclone can't be snared. It may be surrounded but somewhere it breaks through to keep on going. When the cyclone starts from South Bend, where the candle lights still gleam through the Indiana sycamores, those in the way must take to their storm cellars at top speed . . .
 
Over drinks Red Smith liked to ask archly, "From what angle was Granny watching the game if he saw the Notre Dame backfield outlined against a blue-gray sky?" Further, there was no precipice below the Polo Grounds; the old ball park actually sat under the precipice called Coogan's Bluff. But such specifics are piffle. Rice's lead itself was a cyclone that swept away all before it. Or so I believe. (So did Woodward, and so did Red Smith when he wasn't being arch.)
 
William O'Connell "Bill" McGeehan, called Sheriff, had his golden years in the 1920s, which used to be called the Golden Age of Sport. When Luis Angel Firpo, nicknamed the Wild Bull of the Pampas, fought Jack Dempsey, the Manassa Mauler, for the heavyweight championship in 1923, Firpo knocked Dempsey through the ropes in round one. Sportswriters shoved Dempsey back into the ring and, although dazed, he continued to fight fiercely. Dempsey won by a knockout in round two, the ninth knockdown in about four minutes of championship boxing. Ring Lardner commented that Dempsey had turned big Luis Firpo into "the Tame Cow of the Pampas." More seriously Sheriff McGeehan wrote in the New York Tribune: "A pair of wolves battling in the pines of the Northern Woods, a pair of cougars in the wastes of the Southwest, might have staged a faster and more savage bout, but no two human beings."
 
Pegler is remembered, if at all today, for his venomous old age, when he moved into the western desert and wrote column after column attacking Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. But the earlier Pegler had been a superb and salty journalist who wrote that only two varieties of sportswriter existed on earth, "the ones who go 'gee whiz' and the one who say, 'aw nuts.'"
 
Why is it that none of these worthies worked for Ochs's New York Times, or...