Chapter One

A Boy Named Chinky
 

I hate mirrors, thought the boy. Especially this one. The full-length looking glass in the bank lobby was unforgiving. It revealed all. And, sadly, there was little about his appearance that this little boy liked.1
Those skinny bowed legs. Ugh. Later in life, having become intensely competitive, he would force those skinny legs to run the half-mile on his college track team. His time would be respectable, but he would nonetheless give up in disgust when he realized half the team ran faster. Even at age eight, Myron Wallace wanted to be the best—which brings us to the face that stared back at him in that mirror. What to do with that face? Complexions that surrounded him in Brookline, Massachusetts, were snow white and freckled. This was Kennedy country.
“One of my claims to fame is the fact that Jack Kennedy was born five doors away from me, about a year before me,” says Mike. “We went to grammar school together for a very short time.”2
Mike’s coloring was darker than the other kids in the neighborhood. His skin was olive, like a gypsy’s. And those eyes, squinty and slanted. That’s why the other kids called him “Chinky.” Everyone had a nickname in those days, and little Myron Wallace was as close to Oriental as the Irish neighborhood lads had seen. He didn’t particularly mind the moniker. It had an edge.
“Vanity!” teased his father, Frank, cuffing him gently on the neck, as he retrieved “Chinky” from the lobby of the bank, where he remained gazing at his own reflection.3 The doorman opened the door for them with a friendly nod. Everyone loved Mr. Wallace. A man of his word. A man of integrity.
As Mike puts it: “My dad was the gentlest, sweetest, really most honorable fellow that a son can imagine.”4
The elder Wallace succeeded in America from the most humble of circumstances. As a fifteen-year-old immigrant from Kiev at the end of the nineteenth century, Friedan Wallick (whose name was changed at Ellis Island) began selling groceries from a pushcart on the streets of Boston. With a keen mind and a strong will, he soon landed a job at the Standard Grocery Company, where he met his future wife, Zina Scharfman, a bookkeeper, also from Kiev. Zina was tiny, no taller than 4'5", but powerful—a force to be reckoned with. She came from a family of ten, one of numerous middle children who needed to establish a high-relief personality in order to stand out.
Gentle Frank was impressed by the sheer strength that came in such a small package. They wed and had four children in quick succession—two girls and two boys. Mike (born Myron) was the youngest and by far the most temperamental.
He came into the world on May 9, 1918, near the close of World War I. Frank had established his own wholesale grocery company at this point, Frank Wallace & Sons—though neither of his two boys would follow in his footsteps, despite the fact that the business was booming. Frank was one of the pioneers in establishing grocery stores in a unified chain. With several million soldiers still deployed in Europe, the demand for transatlantic food supplies had become staggering. Sensing opportunity, Frank teamed with several partners and invested in a boatload of Jamaican ginger bound for Europe, but the ship never made it. A sudden storm swallowed the vessel whole, sinking it without a trace. The cargo was uninsured—and Frank lost everything.
He left the grocery business in dejection, and in a nod to his own recklessness, became an insurance salesman. Too proud and too principled to declare bankruptcy, Frank Wallace ended up rebuilding himself and paying off every penny he owed. That’s why at the bank and elsewhere Frank Wallace was considered an honorable man.
Throughout his career, Mike would pride himself on the kind of integrity he learned from his father. Despite the gun-slinging bravado of his 60 Minutes persona, he held himself to a high standard when it came to the rules of journalism—so much so, that when this value came under fire later in life in a series of very public and humiliating lawsuits, it nearly destroyed him.
Mike uses few words to describe his mother, Zina: “upwardly mobile” … “moody” … “humorless.” She was the family disciplinarian. Where Frank’s nature was sweet and forgiving, Zina came off as strict and uncompromising. Her demand for obedience was at odds with Mike’s antiauthoritarian nature and the two locked horns with regularity. Says his co-biographer Gary Paul Gates: “He was absolutely the mischievous one. Basically he had the kind of personality as a kid that he did as an adult.
“One of the things about understanding Wallace is that he is an expert and compulsive and unrelenting needler and ragger … I mean, this is his whole persona. If you can’t take his needling, then you’re not going to have a relationship with him. And I think he was that way as a kid.”5
Older brother Irving had wisely chosen the path of conflict avoidance, becoming the “good boy” of the family, a stance mimicked by his sisters, Helen and Ruth, as well. That left Mike with only one option: hell-raiser, a role he took on with gusto. The willful boy was particularly hard to discipline.
“My father would start to give him hell and Mike would have him laughing,” says Irving. “My father was never able to punish Mike. My mother could, though. My mother was a tough dame.”6
She needed to be tough with a son like Mike, who was stormy, willful and above all curious, always looking to do something exciting, out of the ordinary and often dangerous. So rambunctious was he that his exasperated mother actually summoned the police to their home to threaten her own son with arrest, hoping to terrify him into submission. It happened more than once.
On the first such occasion Mike was eight. Sitting on the stoop one day with a friend and armed with his keen powers of observation, Mike noticed the mailman delivering an identical piece of mail to every mailbox on the block. Further investigation revealed that the item in question happened to be free samples of chewing gum. Seizing the moment, the boys proceeded to help themselves to armfuls of free gum, until a neighbor spotted Mike’s hand in her mailbox. She blew the whistle on the boys, summoning Mike’s mother, Zina, who read her son the riot act but soon realized her maternal dictums would only go so far, given Mike’s rebellious nature. It was not the first time that he had been caught stealing.
“I was picked up for shoplifting at the five and ten cent store only a half a dozen times,” grins Mike.7
But Zina had had quite enough of it. So, to Mike’s shock, she flagged down the local cop. “Stealing is a crime,” deadpanned Zina. “You’re going to jail.”
Mike blanched in a sudden panic as the brawny beat cop entered the Wallace home and looked him in the eye. A long lecture ensued about the perils of embarking on a life of crime and the demeaning nature of jail time. Zina let Mike sweat it out for nearly ten minutes before dismissing the policeman, having extracted a firm promise from her wayward son never to steal again.
To both their credits, Mike remained true to his word....