Into My Own The Remarkable People and Events That Shaped a Life

Chapter One The Coach Reality brightens my dream, to become a writer. I It may seem curious, at least it does to me, that an old Herald Tribune hand tapping a keyboard would so soon cite a primal dictum of The New York Times, as quoted by Arthur Gelb in the 662-page memoir he called City Room. Early in the book, along about page 136, Gelb quotes Adolph Ochs, paterfamilias of the family that runs the Times, as saying, "The most useful man on a newspaper is one who can edit. . . . Writers are galore." Quoting Ochs around the Times may not be precisely like spouting Luke in a Southern Baptist church, but it comes close. The old man burst out of Chattanooga and took control of The New York Times in 1896, a publisher of ferocious ambition, an astounding work ethic, and a brilliant head for business. Even in the twenty-first century, six decades after his death, he remains the principal architect of what is probably the most successful newspaper on earth. There is a nice ring to his surprising phrase "writers are galore," but in this instance, as in a few others, Baron Ochs was wrong. The greatest newspaperman I have known was R. (for Rufus) Stanley Woodward, a huge, myopic former Amherst lineman whose glory days came when he was sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune. During that stretch, from the 1930s into the 1960s, "Coach" Woodward pitched batting practice for the Yankees in a uniform borrowed from Lou Gehrig, discovered Red Smith, saved the baseball career of Jackie Robinson, and invented the modern sports page. He also took time out to cover World War II and, in 1944, armed with a Boy Scout knife and a sheaf of pencils, landed behind Nazi lines in a glider, the better to observe the horrific Battle of Arnhem. He did all these high deeds, and, on another level, he managed to convince me in my youth that if I worked hard, double-spaced my copy, read Paradise Lost, and learned to remain vertical after drinking four martinis, there was no reason, no reason at all, why I could not become a writer. Woodward was the man Ernest Hemingway wanted to be. Woodward's credo, which he learned as a cub reporter at the Worcester Evening Gazette from an editor named Nicholas J. Skerrett, went like this: "The American newspaper is the greatest institution in the world." I think all of us who have worked for American newspapers feel that way, at least some of the time, which is why we get so upset when we see the art and craft of newspapering abused. Within Woodward's mighty framesix feet two, 230 poundsbeat the sensitive and vulnerable heart of an idealist. He was a classicist, a humanist, and a liberal, who loved farming and played the violin. But above all he was an idealist. Ogden Mills Reid, who had inherited great wealth, ran the Trib for four decades, until his death in 1947. In a staunch Republican way, old Ogden was an idealist, even as Woodward, and he championed the sometimes combative Coach. But Reid's will left the paper in the hands of his widow, Helen Rogers Reid, who had started her career as an impecunious social secretary. Helen was slight, strong-willed, jut-jawed, and tightfisted. She appointed herself publisher and designated her son "Whitie" editor in chief. Both these people were kind to me. Each took a personal interest in my work. But neither had old Ogden's overall tolerance for nonconformists, rebels, or, for that matter, martinis. After some clashes, which I'll get to presently, Helen and Whitie fired the best sports editor in the country and replaced him with a onetime college hockey star named Bob Cooke, formerly Whitie's Old Blue classmate at Yale. Jolted, his adrenaline pumping wildly, WoodwKahn, Roger is the author of 'Into My Own The Remarkable People and Events That Shaped a Life', published 2007 under ISBN 9780312371289 and ISBN 0312371284.