Front-Page McGuffin & The Greatest Story Never Told Read Free

the time, suddenly thumping his chest with a hand shaped like a fleshy meathook into which a tiny pencil had been incongruously placed.
    “Just ‘A’,” Front-Page responded.
    “Okay.” Hank wrote it down. “And the ‘D’?”
    “Just ‘D’,” said Front-Page.
    Hank Vendermeer shrugged and wrote the ‘D’ alongside the ‘A’ on the sheet on the desk in front of him, then made a few ticks here and there. And that was that. “Okay,” he said. “You start tomorrow.”
    Front-Page had a job.
    The ‘D’ in Front-Page’s initials actually stood for Donald. But this seemed even worse to Front-Page than Archibald. Hell, the only Donald he’d ever heard of was a grumpy cartoon duck. No Thank You, Ma’am.
    A. D. McGuffin worked hard and he learned fast and, pretty soon, he was making less coffee … though he was cussing more. At first, his daily routine pretty much consisted of schlepping copy around the various offices, doing a little typing, answering a few telephones, generally pinch-hitting around the floor. Then he got the chance to write up a piece on LaGuardia’s speech in Atlantic City, when the Mayor of New York agreed to head up the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, imploring Americans the country over not to overeat and not to waste. A. D. wrote a nice piece and made it onto page 4. His first solo flight in print. “One day,” he told Sonny Vocello, “I’m gonna be on the front page.”
    “Sure,” said Sonny, nodding his head. Hell, it was just a filler piece.
    “Well, I am,” said A. D.
    “Sure,” said Sonny Vocello. “We gonna have to call you Front-Page McGuffin.” And he laughed, calling it out to anyone near enough to respond.
    A. D. smiled and went along with the gag. But it made him even more determined to succeed.
    A. D. didn’t officially earn this sobriquet until December 1954 when he reported on the censure of the senator from Wisconsin for what the Senate called ‘four years of abuse of his colleagues’. A week later, albeit in smaller print and in a keylined box in the bottom right corner, A. D. got his second front page story when Papa Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for his sparingly written story of an old fisherman who just refused to give up.
    From then on, Front-Page McGuffin got a lot of lead stories and he just stuck with the name.
    He retired from the Times in 1991 at the not-so-tender age of 65. He was happy to be leaving it all behind, even though he still yearned for those years when newspaper reporting meant something more. But, he still had his wife, Betty, and he intended to write a book, a kind of memoir of the post-war years when everyone had a mental eye on the nuclear clock, watching its hands tick around to Armageddon.
    He had his friends, too.
    And his favourite watering hole, a two-flight walk-down that had just opened up a couple of years earlier on the corner of 23rd and Fifth, where he had met people who seemed real and where folks off the street just didn’t seem to come. He made some new friends there, too, at a time of life when a guy couldn’t really expect to make new friends but just to sit around and lose the ones he already had.
    That last part was true enough for Front-Page McGuffin.
    Cancers took a half-dozen of them in only half as many years, cut them down in their prime, wasting them to skin and bones and puckering up their mouths into thin-lipped sad little smiles. Bobby DuBarr, who could make a pool cue ball near on sit up and bark like a dog; Jimmy Frommer, who taught Front-Page all there was to know about subjunctive clauses; even Lester ‘Dawdle’ O’Rourke, Front-Page’s friend of friends, who was always late for everything, even the punchline of a joke…all of them went that way, eaten up from the inside like wormy apples, their skins yellow-white like old parchment and their ankles blown up over the sides of their house shoes because of all the steroids they were taking.
    Heart attacks