Free New York in the '50s by Dan Wakefield Page B

did my first boss at the Star , the talented Corky Lamm, who had tried to crash the gates of New York journalism fresh out of college but ended up with a dull job at an insurance company and retreated back home to Indiana. I tried Dorothy Peterson, the history teacher whom so many in my class had looked to for guidance beyond the classroom. Miss Peterson had a friend from her own college days at DePauw who, she said, was in the newspaper business in New York. She would call him and suggest that he see me, at least to give me advice, if not a job.
    For the first time, I got beyond a receptionist. In fact, I landed in the inner sanctum itself. The man behind the enormous desk was absorbed in reading my story of the multiplying rosebushes. The only sound in the plushly carpeted room was the muted stutter of a Dow Jones stock ticker, which looked like a small telegraph key inside an elegant bell jar with a gold base, set on a corner of the long desk. Miss Peterson’s friend had not only agreed to see me but was actually interested in reading the clippings in the now dog-eared manila envelope I clutched to my chest like a life preserver. The man was Barney Kilgore, publisher of the Wall Street Journal .
    Kilgore swiveled in his chair toward me, looked up from the clipping, and said, “Did you write this?”
    I said I had.
    â€œAnd the others too?”
    He held up the manila envelope.
    â€œYes, sir,” I said.
    Kilgore’s head jerked sideways in a twitching motion, a nervous tic that was one of the idiosyncrasies for which, I learned, he was famous. He was more justly famous as the brilliant journalist who became publisher of the Wall Street Journal at age thirty-nine and, with the acquisition of regional printing plants, was credited by Time with transforming a “dull financial sheet” into “one of the best U.S. newspapers.”
    I had heard that Kilgore was also renowned for making conscious use of his Hoosier background. He tried to pass himself off as a hick, wearing loud, hand-painted ties with unmatching shirts, and suit jackets that didn’t go with the pants. It was said that Kilgore believed this approach disarmed his sophisticated New York competitors and gave him an edge in whatever he was doing, which was usually successful.
    A friend on the Journal told me Kilgore once showed up in the city room without warning, and a new cub reporter handed him a story to take down to the printer, thinking Kilgore was a copy boy, one of those aging fellows in cast-off clothes who was lucky to get a job, roughly equivalent to a messenger. As well as dressing the part of a bumpkin, Kilgore spoke in a country-boy lingo, with a twang that made Will Rogers sound almost British by comparison.
    â€œYou’re from Indiana,” Kilgore said to me with approval. “You’ll do all right in New York.” His head yanked into a tic and he added, “Some of these New York fellas, they don’t do so good here.”
    Kilgore explained that as publisher of the Journal he no longer got to do any “real” newspaper work, and that was what he loved most of all—getting his hands smeared with printer’s ink and putting out a paper, in the old-time tradition of William Allen White and the great country editors. To remedy this, he had just bought his hometown weekly in Princeton, New Jersey, where he could do all the tinkering and puttering in the pressroom, or anyplace he wanted, without union restrictions. He offered me a job as reporter on the Princeton Packet , “New Jersey’s Oldest Weekly,” at the princely salary of $70 a week.
    I was thrilled at the offer—my first full-time job in the postcollegiate, real world. The drawback was I’d have to live in suburban Princeton, a college and commuting town, rather than the one place in the world I wanted to be, New York City. But at least I was less than an hour away by train, and I could come up every weekend