String of Pearls: On the News Beat in New York and Paris - Hardcover

Buckley, Priscilla L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312272170 ISBN 13: 9780312272173

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2001

Synopsis

Priscilla Buckley is probably known for her long and admired tenure as managing editor of the conservative political journal National Review, founded in the 1950s by her brother William F. Buckley Jr. But in String of Pearls we meet a different Priscilla--young Pitts Buckley, just out of Smith, eager for the next step up from the college paper to "real" journalism. There she is, in her proper wool suit, her cashmere sweater, and in her string of pearls, notebook at the ready, United Press Radio News Department's fledgling employee.

The war in Europe was winding to its close. For Buckley, the atmosphere in UP's New York offices was a heady one; the journalists worked furiously but had time to play practical jokes, stage mock battles on the newsroom floor, and treasure the funny stories that haste and tension engender. Young Priscilla fit right in; she made friends, wrote copy for the reporters to read on the air ("Keep the sentences short!"), and joined in the fun and frequent hilarity. It was a demanding, sometimes heartbreaking, and always vibrant period.

The author was pleased a few years later to be offered a job at the Paris bureau of United Press. the young writer who has spent some of her girlhood years living in prewar France with her parents and her numerous siblings found a different Paris a war's end: scars of the prolonged occupation were everywhere. It was a poignant time, but for Priscilla and her friends there was laughter and comic misadventures as well, and she shares them, along with varied characters gathered at United Press at the time, with us.

Buckley's stay in Paris was cut short by a summons from brother Bill: Would she be interested in working with him on the new magazine he was starting? Thus ended her UP days, and this began a new and glowing journalistic career.

String of Pearls, which includes charming illustrations by the author's niece Lee Buckley, and an Afterword by her brother William F. Buckley Jr., is a knowing and delightful look at a turbulent time in a turbulent world.

About this title

About the Author

Priscilla Buckley was managing editor National Review for 27 years, and retired last year as senior editor. She lives in Sharon, Connecticut and continues to write.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

(((PART ONE)))NEW YORK1944-1948

I OPENED THE DOOR and walked into a scene of controlled chaos. The United Press newsroom on the twelfth floor of the Daily News Building in New York was at the time the largest newsroom in the world: several hundred men at hundreds of battered typewriters arranged in great Us—a U for each department—and dozens of teletype machines ringing and clattering day and night, erupting with news from all over the world. The editor sat at the outside of the U, the assistant editor faced him across the desk in what was called “the slot,” and the rewritemen and reporters manned typewriters along the long arms of the U. The floors were littered with paper, cigarette butts, and the desks with graying, cooling, stained containers of coffee, empty Coke bottles, paper, pipes, debris. A haze of smoke hung over the scene; cigarettes dangled from lips or perched perilously on the edge of tables. Paper spewed from the open mouths of huge wastebaskets. The floor was filthy, debris smashed flat underfoot.The shirtsleeved men kept their eyes on their machines as I walked down the long line of typewriters past the foreign desk where a tall skinny fellow with glasses looked up and almost nodded before turning back to the copy at hand. He was Harrison Salisbury, who would soon take over the job as foreign editor. Walter Cronkite had recently departed the scene to serve as a UP war correspondent in Europe. It was early January 1944.Near the end of the room, an alcove on the left housed UP’s Radio News Department. Here was another U-shaped cluster of long and short tables, half a dozen men at their typewriters too busy to look up, and in the corner of the room, by the window, a couple of proper desks. Leaning way back in a chair at one of them, his feet comfortably resting on the desktop, arms behind his head, a picture of relaxation in a scene of restrained turmoil: Phil Newsom, chief of the radio desk, the man with whom I had an appointment. Newsom was in his late thirties, good-looking, with a reddish complexion (martinis) and blue eyes that were enhanced by his startling white hair.I introduced myself. “Priscilla Buckley,” I said. “Are you Mr. Newsom?”He sat up and invited me to sit down and very kindly, very gently, interviewed me. Yes, I was a recent Smith College graduate. (He took my word for it. I had filled out no forms.) Yes, I had worked on the college newspaper. (Even I knew enough not to press that point.) I had heard about the job opening for a copy girl through a college friend who was herself a copy girl at Associated Press in Rockefeller Center. No, I had never held a job before. Mr. Newsom explained to me that working for a news organization was not like any other job, and that I should understand that it had many drawbacks. It had no regular hours. You could be asked to work any shift around the clock. And there were no proper weekends. They tried to give everyone two consecutive days off every week, but it would be a long time, and maybe never, before I could expect a Saturday and Sunday off. The pay, he commented, was not good, although he didn’t mention a figure. Finally he told me that the job I was asking for had been filled a day earlier, but he would take my name and address in case that didn’t work out. We shook hands and I retired back through that long, busy newsroom and out the door where the receptionist, the only woman I had seen in my brief foray, asked how the interview had gone, and I confessed that I had not gotten the job. She said she was sorry.We Were the Lucky OnesIt was years before I realized how lucky I was to be looking for a job just then, in January of 1944. Two years earlier, a third of the way through my junior year at Smith College, Japan had struck Pearl Harbor, and suddenly we were at war. Within weeks the campus scene had changed. Hundreds, thousands of young men dropped out of college and enlisted, and within months those who hadn’t were being signed up in all sorts of service programs as all branches of the military, with a world war on their hands, rushed to enlist college-level recruits for the officer corps needed to move from peacetime to wartime strength.At Smith, my senior year, over a hundred of my classmates had enlisted in the brand-new WAVES, the women’s corps of the U.S. Navy, and girls I used to share a Coke or a malted milk with at the Corner Drug now marched in their neat blue uniforms, lisle stockings, and sensible shoes from dorm to mess hall to class to drill field in formation, looking neither left nor right. There was a feeling of urgency on the campuses to get on with life’s work. Betty Goldstein (later Friedan), who had edited the Smith College newspaper the year I joined it, and who was a year ahead of me, was already in New York working for International Press. The rest of us wanted in, too. What none of us realized was that because at the height of the hostilities nearly eleven million young American men were in uniform, jobs in the civil economy that would have been closed to women two years earlier, and would be closed to them three years later when the veterans came home, were there for the plucking. Employers were desperate for help and we were the only help in sight, young women, girls really, in the graduating college classes of’42,’43,’44, and’45. We were the lucky ones.Book of KnowledgeThat afternoon I applied for another job that one of my helpful Smith friends had told me about. It was at The Book of Knowledge. My brothers and sisters, as many others in our generation, had grown up with The Book of Knowledge, a wonderful encyclopedia for children that was great to look things up in, but greater still to browse about in. The editors of the encyclopedia were in the process of bringing The Book of Knowledge up-to-date for a new edition and the job that I had heard about would be to rewrite the fairy tales and other stories in more modem and somewhat more understandable language. An extremely nice Mrs. Foster, I believe that was her name, interviewed me. This time I did fill out a simple form (family, educational background, date of birth, religion, and so on). She asked me to write a thousand-word piece on some thing or event that would be of interest to a young audience and to bring it in as soon as possible, the next day if I could manage it, since they were anxious to fill the job.I rushed home to the Phoebe Warren House, a woman’s boardinghouse where I was living with my sister Patricia, who was finishing off her senior year at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York. I took out the portable Royal typewriter father had given me freshman year at Smith, insuring that I would learn to touch-type by having its letter keys blacked out. The numbered keys had not been blacked out, and to this day I have to look down when I type a number or depress the shift key and reach for @ # % ? & * ( ) — +.,A month or so earlier some of my siblings and I had made the arduous journey from Mexico City to Morelia and thence by jeep and mule and foot to the site of the volcano of Paricutín, which had erupted several months earlier and was now a mountain several hundred feet high. It had been a fascinating excursion—and touching, too, when you rode past a row of small wooden crosses the campesinos had raised to divert the flow of lava from their adobe villages. I thought this might be a new and different kind of a story, and started to type.On Thursday I got a call from Mrs. Foster. She liked my piece and was offering me the job, starting the following Monday, at $35 a week. Friday morning, a telegram from Mr. Newsom. The copy girl had quit. Could I start Monday morning? The pay was $18.50 a week! In 1944, $18.50 bought more than it does today, but not that much more.What to do? There had been something terribly exciting about the glimpse of the UP newsroom. So, with gay abandon, I tossed aside The Book of Knowledge’s security and a living salary, and opted for UP, starvation wages, and a wonderful life. Rich I did not become from the labor of my brow, but neither have I ever been bored.New York, New York, It’s a Wonderful TownIn those days New York was the Mecca for the young and ambitious: it was where the action was. The very street names acted as magnetic poles. Want a career in business, in law, in finance? Head for Wall Street. In advertising? Madison Avenue. Publishing? Here were Time, Life, Fortune, The New Yorker, and a slew of the major book houses. (Boston still had a few.) Show biz? Broadway and Forty-second Street. Music? The Met, Carnegie Hall, Juilliard, and for the lower-browed, Fats Waller up in Harlem, Nick’s in the Village, and Jimmy Ryan on West Fifty-second Street. Art? The Metropolitan Museum, the Frick, and the Whitney, and the new and exciting Museum of Modern Art. Journalism? New York sported a dozen scrappy newspapers, among them the Sun, the News, the Mirror, the Journal-American, World-Telegram, and Trib, plus the staid New York Times. “New York, New York,” we all sang, “it’s a wonderful town.”New York was big, exciting, bustling, clean, and safe. There was little street crime, certainly in Manhattan where we youngsters congregated.It was a tidy kind of a city. The Italians lived in Little Italy and the Chinese in Chinatown. Writers, artists, poets, students, and kids settled in and around Greenwich Village where apartments were cheap and landlords permissive. The Germans were in Yorkville, in and around East Eighty-sixth Street. The blacks, who were called Negroes then, were mostly in Harlem and the Bronx. The homeless, who were called bums, hung out in the Bowery near the flophouses, soup kitchens, and municipal bathhouses. Jews ran all of the delis that the Germans didn’t, as well as the newspaper stands and stores. Italians were greengrocers, tailors, and cobblers. The Chinese did the laundry. The French ran cramped little restaurants—Le Bistro, Chez Jacques, La Grillade, Le Coin Normand—where you could get tasty three-course meals for a couple of dollars. We weren’t interested in who ran Wall Street and the banks because we knew little about the first and dealt sparingly with the second. The Irish owned, staffed, and patronized the corner bar, and patrolled the streets.New York was the Mecca fur the young and ambitious.There was little or no crime, aside from the front pages of the News or Mirror. It was known that jazz musicians—especially the drummers—got high on heroin and cocaine, but drugs played no part in most people’s lives. There was poverty—there is always poverty—but it was not much in evidence.New York was also a nickel-and-dime city, where youngsters making twenty, thirty, and forty bucks a week could have a whale of a good time. Subways were swift, clean, graffiti-free, and safe, and they cost a nickel, as did most buses and the clattering, clanking elevated trains that ran north and south up and down Third Avenue. (Rents along Third, given that all conversation had to be suspended every minute or two as a train roared by, were cheap. That’s where lots of us lived.) The Fifth Avenue buses were so grand they cost a dime, but in spring, summer, and fall you could ride on the open top deck of a double-decker bus all the way up Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive feasting your eyes on the river traffic along the Hudson and marveling in the twilight as the lights outlined the airy gracefulness of the George Washington Bridge. Fifty cents at the Automat, ten buffalo nickels, could buy you a chicken pot pie (five nickels), a lemon meringue pie (three nickels), a glass of milk, and a cup of coffee (a nickel each).We lived on what would now be called the poverty level, but didn’t know it. (We did know enough, however, not to permit our parents to visit our apartments lest they give us The Look.) New York was our town. It was the tops! and so (we thought in our secret hearts) were we by the very fact that it had taken us in. To make it in New York, even at the bottom of the ladder, was to be in the Big Time. Every Broadway show told us that.CollitchgirlsI arrived promptly Monday morning, shortly before nine A.M., inappropriately attired in a tailored suit, frilly white blouse, with hat and gloves and a navy blue purse that matched my high-heel shoes. Mr. Newsom was not yet in; he wouldn’t arrive for another couple of hours. As I stood around uncertainly one of the shirtsleeved men at a typewriter noticed me. (Dick Amper was the noticing type) “You the new copy girl?” he asked. I nodded. “Bobby,” he called, raising his voice. “Oh, Bobby, come here for a minute.” From the back of the room a tall girl in sloppy smeared white blouse, shirttail half out, loped over. “What’s your name?” Mr. Amper asked me. “Priscilla Buckley,” I said, “but most people call me Pitts.” “This is Bobby Ober,” he said. “She’ll tell you what to do,” and he turned back to his typewriter.Bobby was about eighteen, with a huge mouth and a broad smile that revealed uneven teeth. She shook hands and happily undertook my education, which meant that when anyone called for anything she sent me to do it, and went back to what must have been a most engrossing story in the Daily News, which had just been delivered by another copy boy. A copy girl was the equivalent of an office boy: you ran errands for the editors, went out to pick up drinks (soft) and sandwiches for the newsmen, changed the big rolls of teletype paper when they were in danger of running out, suffering verbal abuse if a word was lost in the transition from old to new roll. We sharpened pencils, ran out to the newstands to pick up the latest edition of every paper then printed in the city, and even, occasionally, emptied ashtrays that had disappeared beneath volcanic ash. (We were never instructed to do this; it was just that we couldn’t stand the sight and smell of it.) It wasn’t much fun.Most of the handful of remaining copy boys at United Press were overaged underachievers, content to stay put in a no-future situation because they didn’t aspire any higher. The copy girls, who were new to the enterprise, were something else again. For one thing they had aspirations: they wanted to be newspapermen. By most of the older newshands, we were, at least in those early days, contemptuously dismissed as collitchgirls , the syllables strung together in obloquy. “Collitchgirl,” sighed LeRoy Pope, who was riding the slot that first day when I went over to take his lunch order: “Another collitchgirl!”Weeks later when the World War II manpower pinch had become so bad that I had been moved to the sports desk (over the all-but-dead body of the sports editor), LeRoy, again in the slot on a hot Sunday afternoon, would have his deepest suspicions of the inadequacy of collitchgirls confirmed. After he had responded to a dozen angry bells—complaints from local bureaus that something was wrong in a baseball score—and corrected my error, he stood up in the slot, brought his ruler down with a resounding slap that brought every head sharply around, and put me straight on how things work in the news world. “Pitts Buckley,” he roared, “you can call Franklin Delano Roosevelt a goddamn sonovabitch, but you can’t make a mistake in a baseball score!” He was absolutely right.The Sports DeskIt was made clear to me when I was promoted to the sports des...

About this edition

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312272170
• ISBN 13: 9780312272173
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 183