Assignment to Hell Read Free Page A

Teutonic culture.
    What Liebling loved most about his old man was that he was street savvy, a guy who talked pure “Noo Yawk,” knew his way around a con game, and palled around with the shady characters Joe loved to call “boskos,” or “gozzlers,” or, most memorably, “Telephone Booth Indians.” Liebling reveled in telling effete friends about how his father, with a well-timed contribution, had snookered Reverend Charles Parkhurst, an antivice crusader, into ridding a certain Manhattan neighborhood of prostitutes. Unbeknownst to the good preacher, as soon as the streetwalkers were ejected, a syndicate headed by Liebling senior swooped in to make a killing on the suddenly “clean” real estate. 15
    A T ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME , Homer William Bigart’s father, Homer S., wasn’t providing blood money to ministers or taking his clan on summer jaunts to Switzerland. Bigart senior, in fact, was barely getting by in Hawley, Pennsylvania, a factory and coal-mining hamlet perched in the Poconos between Scranton and the Delaware Water Gap. Old man Bigartmade sweaters for a living, running a shop in which his bookworm son and two daughters toiled after school.
    Young Homer, tall and pasty with stringy dark hair, was exceptionally bright but had a debilitating stutter. Homer senior and his wife, Anna Schardt Bigart, were devout parishioners at First Presbyterian, a few steps from their home on Church Street. His Calvinist upbringing, his harsh surroundings, and his social awkwardness all contributed to young Homer’s combative personality, future colleagues surmised. Bigart’s prickliness served him well in the newspaper business. Even his smiles bore traces of “wry exasperation,” recalled Betsy Wade, who worked with Bigart at both the
Herald Tribune
and the
Times
and collected a book of Homer’s best war correspondence. 16
    Not many sons of Hawley earned scholarships to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon) in the ’20s, but Bigart did. He showed up in Pittsburgh with the intent of studying architecture. But within a few days it was apparent that Bigart couldn’t draw; he not only withdrew from the architecture program but also dropped out of school.
    In 1927, at age twenty, he rented a $3-a-week room in Brooklyn, took occasional English and journalism classes at New York University, and landed a job as a nighttime copyboy at the
New York Herald Tribune
. 17 The
Herald Tribune
may have had a distinguished history as Horace Greeley’s abolitionist organ but Bigart was starting in its cellar. He earned the princely sum of $12 a week fetching coffee and cigarettes for the hard-bitten scribes on the
Trib
’s overnight city desk.
    Year after year, Bigart performed menial tasks, hoping it would lead to a full-time reporting job. He even started a newsletter for entry-level cohorts,
Copy Boy’s Call
. 18 In 1933, his perseverance was rewarded, sort of: At age twenty-six, he was made head copyboy—quite possibly the oldest copyboy in the
Trib
’s history. “On the job, [Bigart’s] charges saw him as something of a tyrant; off it, they thought him almost a recluse,” Richard Kluger wrote in
The Paper
. 19 Not only did Bigart’s speech impediment make it difficult for him to communicate with newsroom staffers, he often wore a sarcastic smirk that did not endear him to superiors. Instead of hanging around Bleeck’s, the
Trib
’s ground-floor saloon, Bigart liked to go homeand devour books. Later, his eclectic knowledge and grasp of literature astounded Ivy-educated friends. In 1935, in fact, the
Trib
sent its Renaissance man to interview Thomas Wolfe when the
Look Homeward, Angel
novelist visited New York. 20
    Reading was one thing; reporting quite another. On those rare occasions when Bigart was given a chance to write an obituary or cover a church service or handle some other pedestrian assignment, his copy was full of cross-outs; it took him forever to compose even the simplest stories.