Every career needs a hand. Nobody earns a paycheck over a long stretch of time without help from friends, but also from strangers showing the right way to do something, acting in kindness or common sense, by example or encouragement.
Fifty years ago this week, a career in the newspaper business got started with ambitions to change the world and earn $100 a week someday as a reporter.
"So you want a break?" the voice and face of Neil Toomey remains distinct across a half-century. A retired cop, it was Toomey who hired copyboys at the New York Daily News, at $34 a week. The News was one of seven papers in Manhattan then (not to mention the Brooklyn Eagle) and none was hiring "cub" reporters off the street. It was copyboy or nothing.
The first 20 minutes live in memory as the most difficult in the whole 50 years. Editors or rewrite men would yell, "Boy!" and sheets of paper had to be carried from here to there, but where⢠No instruction. Sink or swim, trial and error, and people yelling at you. The "boy" from Pittsburgh (age 21) came close to giving it up right there.
The job of copyboy, like linotypist, is no more. "Copy" flies by computer. And no one would think of sending an entry-level professional out for a sandwich and coffee. It's a shame, really. Half of everything anyone needs to succeed in the world of work is learned in the trials, human relations and opportunities of the bottom rung.
Didn't a hustling colleague named Tom Donnelly advise that a copyboy could earn a few extra bucks by coming up with Sunday features, like one about a Greenwich Village lady who ran an "orphanage" for kittens⢠Harry Nichols, the city editor, would pay $15 under the table for 12 inches of such "filler" by signing a blank expense voucher. Lowell Limpus, head of the News' United Nations bureau, picked a copyboy as an extra hand for the 1952-53 General Assembly where the python Andrei Vishinsky was Stalin's debater. Dwight Eisenhower's election as president was celebrated in the newsroom (of a very Republican paper) with sandwich fixin's and Cokes for all.
A year later, the boy's Sunday clippings (bylines from the Big Town!) won a reporter's job from Sig Hagen, city editor of the Philadelphia Daily News. Sixty-five dollars a week. And the chance to cover Richardson Dilworth's "reform" administration at City Hall (which didn't last) and all kinds of news with George Zacharias, Saul Shraga, Mitch Swartz and Dave Racher.
A Pittsburgh friend, Ed Jensen, put in a word at the Post-Gazette, where Managing Editor Joe Shuman needed a business editor to succeed the veteran Arthur Friedman and nobody on staff wanted the dull, back-of-the-paper job. But it paid $200 a week and proved a life-changing assignment. Also a transferable one, when Dick Scaife sought a business editor for his up-and-coming Tribune-Review.
Only regret: nothing in anybody's typewriter could stop Pittsburgh's slide from industrial greatness.
But it took a lot more people than those mentioned here to sustain one lucky journeyman in work for 50 years. Some others at the right place and time were John Donovan, Tom Cooney, John Golightly, Al Rosensweet, George Beidler, John Paulus, Bill Block, Larry Werner, Walter Toerge, Will Schoyer, Bert Delano, Nels Nelson, Si Pickering, Steve Czetli and John Oravecz.
But you'll develop your own honor roll if you're starting a career this year, a career in anything. Just get past that first 20 minutes. And maybe it'll last till 2052!
