The copy boys at the Los Angeles Times at Christmas in 1962 were a multifarious lot, most of them in their early 20s, all of them, like me, eager to learn the news business.
My closest friend among them was Lance Brisson. Lance's mother was the movie star Rosalind Russell, famous particularly as Auntie Mame. His father, Freddie Brisson, was a producer of Hollywood movies and Broadway plays.
The most popular copy boy at the Times was much older. His name was Frederick "Chick" Galloway. He was 60, about 5-feet-4, rotund, with curly brown hair. He looked like a Russian stacking doll.
Before becoming a Times copy boy, Chick had spent most of his adult life in Folsom prison for murder, including time waiting to be hanged. Chick was 23 and playing the ukulele in a traveling vaudeville act when he killed another vaudevillian in a drunken fight in Venice, Calif.
After two years on death row, locked alone in a small cell with no window, no toilet and no running water, an appeals judge changed Chick's sentence to life in prison.
On Christmas Eve 1959, 32 years later, a guard handed Chick an unexpected note from the warden. It said: "You are paroled. Be ready to leave in one hour."
The owner and publisher of the Times, Norman Chandler, had agreed to take Chick on as a copy boy as part of the parole.
Copy boys were paid $65 a week. It was enough to live on but not enough for a plane ticket to get to my home in New England. I was resigned to spending Christmas alone in Los Angeles.
There was a Chinese restaurant open all night a block from the Times. My plan was to go there with a book and read over a dinner of lo mein .
A few days before Christmas, Lance Brisson's parents learned that I would be alone. They invited me to come to their house for dinner and spend the night.
I worked with the skeleton staff in the newsroom on Christmas Eve. About 7 p.m., the night city editor told me and Chick Galloway to go home.
It occurred to me that Chick had nowhere to go for dinner. As we stepped onto the sidewalk, he said, "If you're not doing anything tonight, why don't we have supper⢠Clark's Cafeteria's got a full turkey dinner for 99 cents."
Wait, I said, and ran back into the Times' lobby. I borrowed the phone from the guard and called Lance. Could Chick Galloway join us for dinner?
Hold on, he said. He came back and said, my mother says yes, Chick is invited. But, he said, you might ask him not to say that he lived on death row.
I picked Chick up at his boarding house in 20 minutes.
He was wearing a too-tight blue suit, a red velvet vest, his double-soled prison shoes and a knit watch cap pulled over his ears.
The streets were deserted. Chick perched solidly on the back of my 1956 BSA street bike. We took Sunset Boulevard straight from downtown, through Hollywood into Beverly Hills, right to North Beverly Drive and the Brissons' house, set behind a high hedge and gates. It was a cold, starry night and the Beverly Hills Hotel, two blocks away, sparkled in Christmas lights.
The Brissons had famous friends and many of them were there for buffet dinner, milling in the bar and living room: Jimmy and Gloria Stewart; Bennet Cerf, the witty publisher, and his wife, Phyllis; director Josh Logan and his producing partner Leland Hayward and his wife, Pam Digby Churchill (later Pamela Harriman); Cary Grant and his new girlfriend, Dyan Cannon; Dinah Shore; actresses like Greer Garson and Claudette Colbert; Frank Sinatra and his ex-wife, Nancy. Frank Sinatra was one of the closest of the Brissons' friends.
Soon, Mr. Sinatra was leading the singing of Christmas carols in the living room while Mr. Brisson's elderly Aunt Tilda pounded away enthusiastically on the piano as glasses of Aquavit were passed.
I watched Chick, his hair flattened by the watch cap, sharing a song sheet with Dinah Shore and Frank Sinatra. He looked happy.
Why wouldn't he be⢠He was once due to be hanged and now he was eating creamed sweetbreads with spinach and singing Christmas carols with Frank Sinatra and movie stars.
Later, Mrs. Brisson had the cook take Chick home in her green Bentley. Chick rode up front.
Richard W. Carlson, a former U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles, is vice chairman of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
