Читать книгу Variety Show: Twenty Years of Watching the News Parade - Frederick Griffin - Страница 6
ОглавлениеBEGINNER’S ACT
FOR a full two minutes I hesitated .... then knocked on the door lightly lest too much sound disturb the dead, half hoping that no one would come. No one came.
Maybe there isn’t anyone in, I thought, my mind jumping at the idea of escape, and an impulse to go seized me. Should I? It would be easy to report that I had tried the house and there had been no answer. No, a dozen times no. Duty called for at least one more attempt to get in. I knocked again, a little more firmly.
That brought response. The door opened solemnly and a woman in black said “Yes?” .... The widow. No backing out now. This was the moment for which I had been steeling myself since I had received a curt, casual order to call.
“Y-your h-husband—I was s-sent—I’m f-from The Star.”
Ah! At last it was out, and for the first time in my life I had proclaimed myself a newspaperman.
“Won’t you come inside?” and she stood back to let me enter. Stealthily lest I make a sound, I followed her into the darkened living-room.
She was not crying, I noticed, and was grateful, since I had thought that widows always cried; she seemed cheerful about a reporter calling as if it was something to be thankful for. Little did she know that this timid novice had had to flog himself to this intrusion on her, that he was fighting an almost irresistible impulse to take to his heels.
Yet it was just an obituary, an affair of obtaining a routine paragraph.
An elderly railroad man had died, and I had been sent to whet ’prentice pen on the task of writing his simple life story. This involved a street car journey to the suburbs, a lengthy walk on a below-zero morning and this call on his widow.
The ice once broken, she told me when and where he was born, of his faithful service for the old Grand Trunk, his many years at the throttle, of his retirement some time previously, of his illness and death. If this is reporting, I thought, it is not so hard; buoyancy succeeded my backwardness, and I became so enthusiastic in my interest, as if I were a friend of the family and had known the dead man, that she showed me a chair which some brotherhood had presented as a mark of esteem.
“Sit in it,” she said, “and see how comfortable it is. He loved it. He always sat in it.” I sat in it, wondering now that I had obtained the material for an obit how to end the visit and get out.
She urged me to regard a clock on the wall, given him by fellow workers when he retired. Not knowing how to refuse further interest and guessing it was part of my business of reporter, I got up to look at it. Drawn curtains had shut out the light and I had to lean over closely to see: it seemed imperative that I should prove my sympathy.
As I bent over I became conscious of a queerness. The hair began to creep on my head. With an effort I looked down.
There, within half a foot of my own, lay the face of the departed, grey, cold, ghostly. My Irish youth had been fearful with spectral tales, and this was the first dead face I had ever seen. Choking back a yell, I backed up, shaking; said an abrupt good-bye and hurried to the office downtown with my little harvest of collected fact.
The copy I wrote may or may not have been printed. I forget.
Such was my first newspaper assignment.
This was in February, 1916.
It was in Toronto, capital of the Province of Ontario and the principal English-speaking city of Canada.
It was before radio was born to link wilderness, farm and city home in a unison of broadcasts and before the moving picture had to any marked degree penetrated its towns and villages. It was before the general ownership of automobiles and the spread of paved highways.
Canada was then in the midst of the Great War.
Men, not in khaki, wore buttoned boots, invisible suspenders, visible belts, watch fobs and fancy garters to halter their shirt sleeves. Women wore high boots and barrel skirts. Only a rare woman played golf and only an odd adventuress smoked a cigarette in private. Bridge had not yet arrived.
Simple it may all seem now, looking back at those simpler days of twenty years ago, but to this tremulous reporter on The Toronto Star it was complex indeed. Three years of an apprenticeship in the morgue or library of the newspaper as filing assistant had been little enough to give a primer sense of Canadian values.
Toronto, still to a degree a big overgrown village, was to me, new to city life, a bewildering place. I was an immigrant from Ireland. Until my arrival in Canada in July, 1912, I had never used a telephone; I had never seen a typewriter; I had never ridden in an automobile; I had never clicked an electric light switch—oh yes, I had, on the boat coming over. This was a strange and a vast world in which I found myself. The newspaper, the affair of news-getting, was a very great enterprise in which I became an uncertain cog. With hesitant steps, therefore, I sallied forth to see and hear and ask questions. I had the dread that sometimes it might be necessary to ask unpleasant questions, and people might not like them.
At first I wrote obituaries, and was dreadfully upset at the sight of a man in a coffin, though I was to grow to look casually at many dead as simply fragments of a story.
I covered suburban meetings, trudged around unpaved shack districts on the city’s outskirts, hustled to secure items about war casualties, recorded recruiting rallies, called up the hospitals to discover accident cases and the fire halls to uncover conflagrations which never fortunately arose, filled in on the police beat, reported the police courts and the law courts, and sometimes rose to the height of substituting for a regular man at the City Hall, calling on those exalted dignitaries, the Commissioners of Parks and Street Cleaning.
Gradually the pattern of it began to take shape as a species of news drudgery and of exactitude in small things, such as a man’s initials and the spelling of his name, and of the avoidance of a vague reptilian monster called Libel. It seemed that this reporting had little more meaning than bookkeeping, no more excitement than department store clerking—or junior schoolmastering, which I had tried in Ireland.
In December, just before 1916 ended, I was to learn that it had moments, hours, that were heady indeed.
