Wonderful Room Read Free Page B

Henever told me he liked them. Raynor‧s behind-his-back nickname in the newsroom was “the gray ghost.”
    Engledow led me down the hallway to the photo studio and introduced me to the only
Times
photographer, Jorge Bate. He was a small, nervous bantam type who wore cowboy boots and huge green aviator sunglasses and a brown cloth cap like the one Hemingway wore fishing.
    “You‧ll be Jorge‧s assistant,” Mr. Engledow said. “He‧ll teach you to develop film and print pictures. He‧ll teach you how to use a camera. You‧ll work four hours a day. You‧ll be paid a buck an hour.” (The minimum wage.) “If something better comes up, we‧ll see about it.”
    He departed, leaving me in Bate‧s charge. Bate whined at length about how overworked he was. It was about time he got some help, he said. He showed me around his darkroom, then invited me home with him for dinner.
    Bate and his wife lived in a tiny apartment in the basement of an old brick building not far from the newspaper. We had a beer while Mrs. Bate prepared a meal of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits and iced tea. She was a young, attractive Mexican woman. She spoke not a word of English. Bate spoke no Spanish. Neither did I, beyond “por favor” and “gracias.”
    It was an odd evening.
    Bate taught me how to develop his film and use the enlarger to make prints from the negatives.That‧s what I did from 2 to 6 p.m. every day. In the mornings I took summer classes in English and history at Texas Western College. When my workday ended, I studied at the public library until it closed, then rode a bus from San Jacinto Plaza to the little house beyond Mt. Franklin, near Fort Bliss, where my mother‧s cousin, her husband and two children lived. I paid $10 a week for their spare bedroom and breakfast. The late-night buses out Dyer Street were full of drunk, puking GIs getting back to base.
    The day Mr. Latham returned to work, I was the first thing he saw. I was wearing my rubber darkroom apron and laying some photographs in the wire basket on the city desk. While he took of his hat and coat and donned his green eyeshade and sleeve garters, his face got redder and redder. He said not a word to me.
    One afternoon in mid-July Chuck Whitlock, the sports editor, came to the darkroom. “Hey, Woolley,” he said. “We could use some night help on the desk. Taking calls from stringers, writing shorts about ladies golf tournaments and softball games and the like, writing heads. You interested?”
    The job was 20 hours a week, 7 to 11 p.m., at a dollar an hour. For the remainder of the summer and most of the fall, I worked in Bate‧s darkroom in the afternoon and on Whitlock‧s sports desk at night.
    Then I got fired.

SECTION   C
MY CAREER IN PERIL
     
    Q uitting and getting fired were common events in newsrooms in those days. Many reporters and copy editors were itinerant laborers who wandered the country, working in one town and then another, their wanderings often depending on the weather. They went north in the summer and south in the winter.
    Newspapermen also tended toward volatile tempers, which were sometimes fueled by alcohol, and they favored spur-of-the-moment ultimatums. If a reporter got furious with an editor, he quit. If it was the editor who blew up, he fired the reporter. The departing scribe was supposed to give or get two weeks notice, but often decamped before the deadline.
    Jimmie Cotten, a police reporter, once got so furious that he batted out a long, sulfurous resignation letter. Damn the two weeks notice, it stated; Cotten‧s departure would be immediate. He thrust his letter into Mr. Latham‧s hand just as Latham was distributing our Christmas bonus checks. Latham declared that since Cotton was no longer an employee, he would get no bonus. And he didn‧t.
    Some bilious newspapermen would return to El Paso and get hired again after six months or a year in Albuquerque or Tucson or San Antonio. Cotten did that. Others