My Ears Are Bent Read Free Page B

the addenda that goes with being Mayor of the city. Therefore when I come here to this great forum and see before me flowers and buds, ladies, girls and widows, emotion is just running riot with me.” Another time he got to his feet and said, “Mr. President, and may I say, brothers? When I get in a room with chairs I get the fraternal spirit.” Once he addressed the Ohio Society and he read a poem, sighed and said, “I yearn now and then for the dear old river or for some Bohemia where you can get away from the stress of it all.” I have seen a puzzled audience staring at him, wondering what he was getting at. One night I listened to him tell about the time he almost slid off the tailboard of a furniture van and I was so fascinated by the words tumbling out of his mouth that I forgot to take notes. After his speech I went up to a stenographer he had brought there himself and got him to read me off a hunk of the oration. We printed the story next day and two of his campaign managers came around and said I made the whole thing up and threatened to sue for $150,000.
    No reporter can work on interviews constantly without becoming a little batty; sooner or later he will begin hearing the birdies sing. When it gets through with more important matters I think that rotation of jobs should be one of the points takenup by the American Newspaper Guild, the union of newspapermen, of which I am a member and in whose program I believe. When a city editor catches you looking cross-eyed at your notes and wishing black plagues on the head of the inarticulate lulu you have just interviewed he is sometimes nice enough to put you on the street for a while, or on rewrite, or maybe a big story breaks and saves your sanity. Just when you are about to collapse with one of the occupational diseases of the reporter—indigestion, alcoholism, cynicism and Nicholas Murray Butler are a few of them—a big story, a blood-hunt that takes you out of the office, usually breaks.
    I was once saved by the Hauptmann trial. In rapid succession I had interviewed a crooner making a come-back, an injured trapeze performer, the proprietor of a lonely hearts bureau, a student of earthquakes, a woman undertaker, a man who manufactures the fans used by fan dancers, a champion blood donor and Samuel Goldwyn, and had begun to whimper when I got near a typewriter. Then I was sent to Flemington, New Jersey, to write courtroom features during Hauptmann’s trial. The trial was a nightmare to most of the reporters who covered it and before it was over I had begun to talk in the unknown tongue, but at first it was soothing not to have to ask questions but to sit still and listen to those asked by the Attorney General of the State of New Jersey.Compared with most newspaper work a trial is easy to cover—that is, a murder trial; a thing like the Bank of United States trial is another matter. A financial trial is slow torture. At a murder trial you simply sit still and write down what happens. After a reporter has covered features for a while there is nothing like a fast murder trial to get the lead out of his pants. It discourages him from trying to make literature out of every little two-by-four news story; a newspaper can have no bigger nuisance than a reporter who is always trying to write literature.
    My office had at least ten reporters in Flemington through all the addled weeks of the Hauptmann trial—compared with our competitors we were under-staffed—and we covered it better than any other afternoon newspaper. We were able to do so because each night when court adjourned we left the fevered atmosphere of Flemington, where reporters were as enforcedly gregarious as fishing-worms in a can, and did not return until court opened next morning.
    Throughout the trial we lived in Stockton, New Jersey, ten miles or so from Flemington, in a small hotel, the Stockton, which was established in 1832 and which is celebrated for its hearty American grub, things like breasts of