Robert Whitcomb: Reporting in pre-glitz Boston

Soon after I had graduated from college, in June 1970,  a friend suggested that I try to get a job at the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP), an old Yankee establishment newspaper that also had a lucrative TV and radio station.  I applied, but first, the city editor, the always unflappable and wry Bob Kierstead, said that I should report and write a research project  -- a little book -- for the paper to prove I could report. The book, on Boston politics, history and demographics, was meant to help the paper’s reporters cover the next mayoral and other local elections.

Mr. Kierstead found  the little book useful enough to hire me a reporter. I wish that I could find what I wrote and compare the reporting in it with the very different (much glitzier and more Manhattanish) Boston of today. Back then, Boston had a down-at-the-heels quality that evoked the Thirties, or even Dickens’s London.

Then began a crazy year of covering all kinds of stuff – from train derailments,  murders, industrial-strength arson, potheads lost in the White Mountains, race and student riots,  the start of Boston’s busing/desegregation crisis and the opening of Walt Disney World. It was one of my most vivid periods and showed me what I could do on deadline and often in considerable chaos on the road.

I thought that it would be just an occupational side trip, whence I would return to school to perhaps get a doctorate in history or start a small business. But I found I had a talent for quickly if roughly understanding people, places and situations and concisely writing down fast what I had so quickly learned. What’s more, back then, I liked to travel (much more than now). Journalism spoke to these things. A college history major, I looked on my work as writing current history. Or, as the late editor of The Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, put it, “history on the run.’’

But I knew I couldn’t stay at the Herald Traveler because it was likely soon to lose its FCC license for its very profitable TV station, which, with its sister radio station, had been subsidizing the newspaper. The case went up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the owners lost for good; the paper's assets were sold shortly thereafter to Hearst, for whose  sensationalist Boston tabloid, the Record American, I had worked in a summer job as an editorial assistant/gofer.

So I applied to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, was admitted, got an economics fellowship and off I went, at the end of the summer of 1971, to New York. This was just after the Pentagon Papers were printed and Nixon took America off the gold standard. The latter led me to interview  for the Herald Traveler a covey of famous economists, most notably Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith, shortly before I left for Manhattan.

It was fun  to have such access to celebrities.

And it was a relief to leave the stuffy walkup apartment I was renting on the Cambridge-Somerville line from the brother of a former girlfriend.

Robert Whitcomb is editor of New England Diary.

Sweet, sweaty summers in the city

I've always liked cities in mid-summer. They have a sweet, slow gritty melancholy. The vegetation, turning grayish green, wilts in the heat, but it's a good and pleasant time for rumination. I have considerable nostalgia for  walking slowly around Boston at lunch breaks in summer jobs and then as a reporter for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). My boss, the city editor, was more relaxed about deadline assignments in July and August and I could wander around and look for feature stories every few days.

The sulphur smell of the  then highly toxic Fort Point Channel in those pre-EPA days remains to this day a powerful memory, as  the smell of diesel reminds me of Paris.

Even stronger are my memories of strolling down to Battery Park at the tip of Lower Manhattan on Sundays in August as an editor for The Wall Street Journal (we worked Sundays-Thursdays; there was no weekend edition then) to get a hot dog and feel the humid, polluted southwest breeze coming up over New York Harbor. Or walking down Riverside Park between 88th Street, where I lived for a while, and Columbia.

Then there were the slow, sweaty strolls around mid-summer Washington, interrupted by a little work  in the National Press Building and trips to the restaurant-cafe on top of the  Hotel Washingtonian, where the capacious beverages served made one forget the Congo-like heat.

Later there was the openness of Paris in August, when so many residents went off  on vacation,  emptying the parks away from the main tourist strips.  We lived in an middle-class neighborhood (in the 15th Arrondissement). A lot of local stores closed for much of August as residents were in Normandy, Brittany or on the Riviera, but most of the street markets were open and everyone  was quite laid back.

And the densely treed East Side of Providence has its mid-summer charms too -- quiet and parklike. But the college kids come back to  school much earlier than when I was in college. So the summer now effectively ends about Aug. 20 in our neighborhood -- not the week of Labor Day.

--- Robert Whitcomb