History of My Reading: Friends and Other Strangers 1973-4

 In 1973 I was the Managing Editor for the Boston Phoenix arts and entertainment section, roughly half the newspaper each week.  In addition I was still its Books Editor and I was expected to keep writing regularly.

 One of my first unfamiliar tasks as managing editor was authorizing that week’s payments for our section’s freelance writers. A number of writers wrote for us regularly but were paid as freelancers (as I had been with my Book Reports column) but I discovered that the amount of those payments varied wildly.  Pretty much without anyone’s authorization, I increased the fees for those getting much less than others.  I got away with it.

I made a number of changes to the section, discontinuing some regular features and adding others, setting up rotations for the coverage other than the major areas of movies and pop music, and so on.  These and other changes were also meant to give the section an identity.

 The Arts Editors for music (Ben Gerson) and movies (Janet Maslin) continued to write lead pieces and to assign other pieces in their area.  I dealt directly with regular contributors and freelancers in other areas, as well as books. I didn’t hire staff on my own but I assigned to new freelancers. I had the final edit on all copy for the Second Section.  In several cases I was pleased to do for others what had been done for me: give that first assignment to writers who went on to writing careers. Most of the time I advocated for writers when there were problems, but there were also situations in which they were disappointed and there was nothing I could do.  Listening to people's problems--and bearing their secrets-- was part of my job, and also part of my social life.  

 I attended the weekly staff meeting but the business there mostly involved the news section.  Ideas for our stories got generated through conversations with the Arts Editors, staff members, freelancers and others, and (pretty often) out of my own head. I fielded some calls and a lot of mail from organizations and venues looking for coverage.

 That was the first thing to greet me when I arrived at the office—our receptionist Martha handed me a pile of pink slips with my accumulated messages, along with bigger piles of mail (including books.) She handled all calls first.  We must have had some kind of intercom system or perhaps she just rang my phone with the line number of my incoming call.  Working the phone was occasionally pleasant, mostly a chore, and sometimes maddening.

 The first part of my week generally involved working with writers on possibilities for future issues.  I might tinker with the lineup of stories scheduled for the next issue, if necessary.   When copy came in for that week, I worked with that.  I recall meeting with our regular contributor on art, Kenneth Baker, often down in the small lunch counter tucked into our building at street level.  I would peruse his usually immaculate copy while maneuvering a sandwich and coffee.  I didn’t understand much of what he was writing about, but if he could interest me in it as a reader for the time it took to read the piece, then it could appeal to other readers as ignorant as me as well as to contemporary art aficionados.  Baker went on to be the long-time art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

 In general text editing was something of a challenge—deciding whether first impressions and sense of the piece were right, versus second or third reading. Copy- editing was a pleasure if I was relaxed enough—I was good at it.  I became aware of the temptation to change things just to show I’d worked on it, and fought it off as best I could. 

 Once I had enough copy in hand, and I factored in the photographs our staff photographer (Michael Dobo) had either taken or would take, and the advertising staff told us how many pages we could run, I met with the layout editor to solve the jigsaw puzzle of every page—where the copy, the ads and the photos would go.  There was often a little leeway, and decisions to be made later, not infrequently at the last minute. Often the layout had to be completed before I had all the copy.  An event near (or sometimes past) deadline was being covered, or essential copy that simply came in late.  Space was saved for those.   

Janet Maslin

Janet Maslin had moved to New York, so theoretically she saw movies sooner than their Boston run, but in practical terms, there was often some suspense as to when her review copy would arrive. (Janet had married Jon Landau, who had switched from editing record reviews to writing movie reviews for Rolling Stone, while he still wrote on music for The Real Paper. At a certain point Janet was also writing on music for a new national magazine based in New York, called New Times—which is unrelated to any current publication of that name.  I had been invited to their wedding, and had even picked out their wedding present: since they were both reviewing movies, at the Harvard Coop I found matching pens with a little light near the tip, so they could write in the dark.  But I came down with a sudden illness and didn’t make the trip to New York—not the first time this happened within view of a wedding.)

In any case, their New York experiment didn't last very long.  Within months they were back in Boston.  Once I happened to pass the Italian restaurant in Inman Square and saw them sitting at the window table where Carol and I used to eat, when that restaurant was smaller and unknown.

 Ben Gerson’s music pieces were always meticulously written, but also invariably late. They were so late at times that he took his piece directly to the composing room at the last possible moment to fill the space waiting for it, thereby coincidentally also avoiding any editor messing with his copy.

 There would be one day in the week that could last well into the night when the paper had to be put to bed, and I was wrestling with late copy as well as making adjustments when stories came in too long or too short, photos were missing or didn’t work, or ads that got dropped or added. I wrote headlines and captions, copy-read the printed copy on what I believe we still called the flats, then approved each page before it could go to the printer.

 The next day there would be “blue pages”—the paper as printed, except on a different kind of paper with blue print.  A few corrections were still possible at this stage.  When they were made, the issue was done.  And it was time to start work on the next.    

 I still wrote for the paper—among what survives in my files is an impressionistic rant on Muzak, an appreciation of One Hundred Years of Solitude on the occasion of Garcia Marquez’s birthday, a few Talk of the Town type pieces for the inside-cover column I started, and a Second Section cover piece on Picasso when he died.  There were times that a section cover story fell through, and I had to quickly write one.  I recall one forced ramble on the big awards in the arts and the various entertainment award shows.

 I started out working in the office next to the Editor’s office that used to belong to Kate Herriges.  Kate had been my strongest supporter when I started out in 1971, but she’d moved on.  Eventually the paper took over a large room on the building’s third floor, and I set up my headquarters there.  At one point, I shared that office with staff writers R.D. Rosen (eventually to be the author of the book and therefore part of the language: Psychobabble) and Jim Lardner, also a subsequent author, whose grandfather was Ring Lardner (and Ring, Jr. was his father.)  

 It was in that room that we entertained Ted Solataroff, editor of the New American Review (recast as American Review), one of the great publications of the era.  What I recall most about the afternoon he visited was basking in the sunshine coming through the high window, and speaking in euphoric and awestruck tones about the magnificence of One Hundred Years of Solitude.  That book, especially at that time, was the most magical literary work I’d ever encountered.  For years, whenever anyone asked me to recommend a book, I gave them a copy of this one, and it never failed, from Cambridge sophisticates to a western Pennsylvania waitress.

 Another interview I recall from that year was with writer Anthony Burgess.  He was in Boston for the premiere of the new musical based on Cyrano, for which he’d written the book and lyrics.  We were supposed to have lunch in his hotel suite but we never got past the drinks stage before his next interview was scheduled.  It was an exhilarating conversation as well as interview.  As I left he shook my hand and said with apparent feeling, “a very great pleasure.” 

 The Burgess interview came out when I was filling in for our regular theatre critic Carolyn Clay.  I was also writing about music and movies, which at that point constituted mini-vacations from managing, editing and books.  In February 1973 I wrote about a Neil Young concert.  His current album was Harvest, his biggest seller and the top album of 1972. He did three concerts in Boston that week, two of them at the huge Boston Gardens and one at the smaller Music Hall. His surprise opening act was Linda Ronstadt, who sang on his biggest single, “Heart of Gold.”

 In Young’s last appearance in Boston, he’d been nursing a bad back and did an all-acoustic tour, mostly seated and playing guitar and harmonica, and piano. This time he was playing a mixed set with the Stray Gators, the session musicians on Harvest, but his back wasn’t completely healed, so he again sat in a chair for part of the gig.  My piece began like this:

 “The band’s instruments were in place and tuned, and after suitable pause, a roadie finally brought out the final prop and placed it carefully at center stage.  The Chair: one part papal, one part electric, an all-organic, down-home chair, obviously not one of your backstage fold-ups, but something special that traveled with the tour. Then the house lights went out, part of the stage was darkened, then all of it—each change brought gradually louder swells of oohs and ahs.  As eyes adjusted to the dimness, a single shadow emerged from the back of the stage.  Tumultuous applause greeted a still longhaired, baggy-jeaned Neil Young, wearing what appeared to be the same flannel shirt he wore for his last Boston appearance more than two years ago, its condition suggesting that he’d been wearing it ever since.  He sat down.  The crowd went wild.”

 I then quoted Linda Ronstadt’s comments from the stage on the Boston Garden show the night before.  “Usually at these big concerts the kids come in and then get messed up, until they’re ready to be taken out in stretchers at the end.  Last night it was like they came in on stretchers.”  It was the beginning of the Quaalude era in pop music audiences.

  The concert itself included songs from Young’s entire career, already extraordinary, and was taped for possible inclusion on a live album.  At that point in my life, he was the songwriter and rock musician I most identified with. 

At some point in 1973 I met Harry Nilsson at a press affair.  I've forgotten this entirely but found a letter I wrote to him later with some information he wanted, which I also don't recall.  Apparently we had an actual conversation.

Then in April I reviewed the reggae-filled film The Harder They Come starring Jimmy Cliff, and predicted it would play in Cambridge forever—which it more or less did, running at the Orson Welles Cinema for over a year.

 Meanwhile the Phoenix was undergoing a couple of  major changes.  A managing editor for the entire paper was hired—a genial Englishman who was startingly older than the rest of us, though probably not by much.  But it was the new Editor that became consequential.

 The search for a new editor came down to a few remaining candidates (several top choices had dropped out of contention.)  I thought we’d found a pretty solid one, but then another candidate showed up, and exuded a cheerful charm.  I can’t say I was entirely immune to it—he quoted the likes of Wordsworth and Yeats, and offered bold ideas, like reviving the Dickensian tradition of serializing novels—this time in the Phoenix.  But I was also suspicious—I’d seen the damage so-called charismatic figures could do, not to mention con artists.  In Dickens tradition therefore, let's just call him Wily Brass.

Others also had misgiving but in the end, an editorial meeting vote was taken and Wily Brass was selected. He was the third of the three finalists; the top two had turned down the job. Steve Mindich took the recommendation and hired him.  At first Brass and I got along very well—after a pleasant dinner conversation, we walked around Boston until he found what he wanted to show me—an historical marker commemorating a reading of his work given by Charles Dickens on one of his two American tours (probably at the site of the old Tremont Theatre.) 

 But things quickly devolved between us, and between him and everybody else. His bold plans, like the serialized novel, went nowhere.  He was perceived to be arbitrary and unresponsive, petty and abusive, and borderline incompetent.  We had a number of staff and freelance defections, often to the Real Paper.  At one point I discovered that he was intercepting packages of books meant for review, including those addressed to me personally (once he purloined a personal gift), and keeping those he liked for his personal use.

 Over those months, Brass chipped away at my innovations and authority. I told at least one staff confidant that I was sure he intended to take control of the arts section, even if it meant driving me out.

 At the same time there was a movement to unionize the paper, including editorial staff, and become affiliated with the United Electrical Workers. It had begun the year before but was getting more intense in early 1973.  I thought the affiliation was a bit absurd but I supported the efforts to organize. There was a lot of discontent, and a lot of reasons for it.  It didn’t occur to me at first (or seemingly anyone else) that I was actually management now, so I attended some meetings.  After one, I was called into the publisher’s office where the paper’s lawyer grilled me on what I knew.  I simply refused to talk to him, and only Steven’s intervention kept it from becoming a shouting match or worse.

In addition to all this, I edited a Book supplement that spring.  I wrote the cover piece on Kurt Vonnegut’s new novel, Breakfast of Champions (which soon became the NYT top best-seller), a review of DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, reviews of poetry collections by James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates, and a number of short notices of forthcoming books. I solicited a piece on the new collection of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories from my Knox professor and ongoing friend, Doug Wilson.  Much to my embarrassment there was not enough room for it, but it was later published in a literary journal.

 

The supplement also included reviews of two avowedly ambitious novels: Philip Roth's The Great American Novel and American Mischief, a 500 page novel by Alan Lelchuck, who taught at Boston's Brandeis University--both pretty much forgotten.  Earlier that year we reviewed another massive work, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. This is the one that has lasted.  Its length and complexity were daunting,  though clearly it was a work of genius. In college I'd read maybe 100 pages of Pynchon's first mega-novel, V, (I remember in 1973, the New York Times Book Review relishing the pun of calling the new book V2, since that Nazi rocket was a main character in it.) I loved Pynchon's dynamic style but I couldn't follow the story.  Although I'd had no such problem with Pynchon's shorter 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49, it recurred with this book. 

 My experience was similar to my periodic confrontations with Joyce's Ulysses.  I would read and rapturously re-read the first Stephen Dedalus section, but I could only dip into fragments until the Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end.  Similarly I so loved the opening section of Gravity's Rainbow that I couldn't get past my confusion about the story to go much beyond it, for years.  It would in fact be at least a decade before I read it through--still mostly for the writing and its rhythms--and another several decades before I read it through again, with the help of a plot guide, and actually knew what was happening.  But in 1973, the style was exciting and inspiring enough, though I was pleased to find another dynamic voice in novels I could follow, by Don DeLillo.

The supplement went over well.  I got a letter from Joyce Carol Oates praising it: "What a marvelous issue! My husband and I are really impressed by the depth and background of reviewers.  Nothing seems treated flippantly or casually..." She passed along individual compliments, and mentioned she was sending a copy to her friend, Margaret Drabble, also reviewed in the supplement.  

 It was shortly after the books supplement came out in May that I took several weeks off.  I flew to Minnesota where I was hosted in St. Paul by Barbara Azer, sister of my Knox classmate, Mary.  I’d never been to the Twin Cities before, and Barbara and her roommates were excellent guides.  We picnicked on a bluff overlooking the place where the Mississippi began, and drove up past the immense devastated landscape in the iron range near Duluth to a little cabin on Lake Superior (where now there are expensive condos.)

 We even did some literary touring, visiting fields where Robert Bly lived (I got out of the car to imitate him reading poems about them), and a hotel bar once frequented by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I asked the bartender reputed to have served Fitzgerald what he was like, and he gave the perfect answer: “He was a good tipper.”  Whether or not he actually had been there that long, it was a ready, pointed and potentially lucrative response.  

At that time in the early 1970s, what most of America knew about Minneapolis was that was the home of Mary Richards of the Mary Tyler Moore Show.  On my first visit to downtown Minneapolis (to meet up with one of Barbara’s housemates at the department store where she worked), we saw people lined up along the sidewalk watching some other people walking right down the middle of the street.  One of them was Mary Tyler Moore, on possibly her first visit to the city (though probably her second), filming a new introduction to the show.

 So on my first visit to downtown Minneapolis, the first person I saw was Mary Tyler Moore. This was the second such coincidence of that spring, and it wouldn’t be the last.  The first was while making my way to the Twin Cities.  Just before I left, I’d put the Phoenix second section to bed, leaving space in the music section for a review by Peter Herbst of the Paul Simon concert occurring the next night. It was in fact Paul Simon’s first concert as a solo performer—that is, without Garfunkel, for he had lots of musicians and singers as part of his show. 

 I went to that show, and the next morning to the Boston airport, where I picked up a copy of the Phoenix and read Peter’s review on the plane.  He hadn’t liked the concert as much as I did (or as Jon Landau did, writing in The Real Paper.)

 I was to change planes for Minneapolis at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, as many people did—it was the busiest in the country, and a hub before there were hubs.  As I walked to my new gate, carrying my guitar case and copy of the Phoenix, I had a stray thought of—wouldn’t it be something to run into Paul Simon?  After all, he was starting a tour, he might go through O’Hare.  Then I turned a corner and saw…Paul Simon.

 He was standing near a ticket counter chatting with a young woman wearing the uniform of an airline.  I realized I had a copy of the Phoenix in my hand, and took it over to him.  “Here,” I said, “you can read about yourself.”  As he opened the paper, I suddenly realized it was not my review in there but Peter’s more mixed one.  I quickly tried to cover: “I was at the concert, too, and I loved it.”  At which point the young woman looked puzzled, and I realized she didn’t know who he was, just some guy chatting her up.  For him perhaps a rare normal moment, charming someone who didn’t know he was a celebrity rock star.  “Don’t say anything else,” Paul Simon warned me.  I backed away, saying only, “I’ve got to a plane to catch.  Nice seeing you… Fred.”

 After the Twin Cities I flew back to Pittsburgh and spent the rest of my time off visiting my parents and other family and friends in and around Greensburg.  My mother had suffered through treatments for breast cancer over the past several years.  My recollections of what happened when are hazy, partly because in those years no one talked about these things (especially cancer, as if you could spread it by saying the word)—certainly not my family, and specifically not my father.  I was home for part of the time and I kept in touch when I wasn’t, but mostly these treatments and her health were distant backdrops to everything else. At this point the cancer was in remission. She was getting close to the five year survival point, which at the time was believed to signal something like a cure.

 She was still a bit fragile and tentative, but mostly herself.  I helped her plant flowers in pots and flowerboxes, and we watched the movie “Stormy Weather,” just about the only program on this new cable TV, just starting up.  She and my father had put a down payment on some land in Florida, and she showed me the plan for the condo where they eventually would live.  Before that, she said, she hoped to see Hawaii. 

 But I had a hard time sitting still.  Even in Minnesota, surrounded by even younger energies than mine, I had trouble gearing down from the relentless demands of my job, the frenetic hours of phone calls and conferences, quick evaluations and instant decisions, generating story ideas for the endless appetite of the Second Section, keeping track of rock concerts and promo events, while juggling a hundred things in my head that had to be done.  I was often tired and I experienced things at a distance, as if I wasn't really there.

 So in Greensburg I went out with old friends, hung out with my sisters and their crowd.  Eventually my mother said she was disappointed I didn’t spend more time at home.  As was typical in our family, she said this when it was too late for me to do anything about it.  I was due back in Boston.      

 I returned to the Phoenix to find an editorial staff in turmoil.  An ongoing conflict (I no longer recall what it was about) had come to a head.  The staff was united against Editor Brass, and conspired to steal the copy for an entire issue to force him to confront the issue.  I joined them.  When Brass realized what was going on, his dismissive arrogance turned to beet-red fear.  He gave in, temporarily settling things down.  Though I wasn’t particularly a leader in this action, it didn’t escape his notice that it happened once I was back.

 Meanwhile the unionizing efforts were stalling, and there were secret conclaves to discuss the possibility that there was an agent provocateur among the staff. 

In early June, another eerie coincidence.  I was walking near the Ritz when I had one of those wouldn’t it be strange if I ran into thoughts…this time it was Kurt Vonnegut.  But no, he wasn’t around the next corner.  However…That evening I attended a performance by a new band called Stories.  I’d been following them, gathering material for a piece ever since Ben Gerson and I had been flown down to Nashville by their record company to see them perform there.  (We stayed in the King of the Road motel, where the Bee Gees were also staying, but I didn’t catch a glimpse.)

 That night I went out with the band to a large all-night restaurant.  I was sitting in a booth with bassist Kenny Aaronson, listening to him comically complain about the absence of all these groupies he’d heard about, when I glanced across the room and into the somewhat hostile stare of Kurt Vonnegut.  He was there with a group of people apparently after a university speaking engagement. 

 The last was perhaps less of a coincidence than a portent.  One night in late June, probably after I’d put the Second Section to bed that week, I was walking home from the subway station at Central Square, when I cut through an alley from Mass Ave.  Ahead of me I saw a car’s headlights coming towards me, and a kitten facing me.  The car ran over the kitten.  I was more than upset—I felt immediately that it was a portent, and that night I called a woman at the Phoenix for whom I had, let us say, romantic feelings, of which she was well aware.  She reassured me and calmed me.

 After some problems with missing mail at my Columbia Street apartment, I had added a post office box at the main Post Office on Mass Ave. in Central Square. The next day I picked up mail there and got on the bus to work, down Mass Ave. to Bolyston Street in Boston and the Boston Phoenix offices, to wrap up the week and start on the next. There might have been an early birthday card in the mix, but there was a business-sized envelope with the orange Boston Phoenix return address but no name.

 Inside was a very short note written by the woman I’d been pining for, the one I’d spoken to the night before, telling me that in my time away from Boston she and one of my closer friends had begun an affair.  At the time it seemed grudging and cold, though perhaps it was trying to be gentle and even affectionate.  But both of them were on the Phoenix staff and I worked with them every day.  It felt like a betrayal, as well as a humiliating, impossible situation.  

 And suddenly there I was, approaching the Boylston Street offices.  I walked up the long stairs, then up another flight to my third floor office, unusually empty.  Perhaps I examined the blue pages one last time. I wrote a brief letter of resignation, gathered what personal belongings I wanted to take, left the letter in the reception area, and walked down the dark stairs to the bright street. 

 I’d been on the edge of quitting once before this. The incessant demands, the tawdry office, and the constant onslaught of emotional and auditory noise, had me shattered by my day's end.  Steven assured me then that over time I’d get used to the pace and intensity of the job. But since I’d been back I’d struggled to gear up again, after my vacation had been marred by my anxious inability to slow down. I felt oversaturated and isolated, especially with added layers of shifting conflict.  All the egos and agendas, the moods and misunderstandings, the hormones, the noise, everything out of proportion.  Surrounded constantly by so many people, I was often exhausted and lonely.  This final sudden situation was almost a metaphor for it all, as well as the paradigmatic last straw.

 Meanwhile, Editor Wily Brass was so eager to prevent any second thoughts or attempts by others to persuade me to return, that he accepted my resignation that same afternoon—by telegram.  I don’t think I’d ever received a telegram before, or since. (As I learned later there were such attempts to get me back, but Brass was intransigent.)  Within a few days, I was later informed, Brass mumbled aloud his plans to take over the Second Section himself, fulfilling my prophecy.

 I had a Saturday ritual of doing the week’s food shopping (including cat food) at the Purity Supreme supermarket in Central Square, and eating a tuna sandwich in their adjacent lunch counter while reading the Boston Globe, in particular the weekly “Lit’ry Life” column by George Fraiser, which dealt in Boston literary and media tidbits.  The Saturday following my resignation, this column noted a decline in quality at the Boston Phoenix, which “a number of Phoenix people” informed him was due to the incompetence of Editor Wily Brass.  Only a fierce loyalty to the paper, he wrote, kept old hands like Ben Gerson and Janet Maslin from resigning. 

 My name, as usual, wasn’t mentioned—I don’t think Fraiser ever mentioned me—probably a networking error on my part.  And this time I didn’t read the column at Purity Supreme.  It was hand-delivered to my mailbox by Phoenix poetry editor and friend Celia Gilbert, along with a note and birthday greetings.  That particular Saturday I had turned 27.  

I eventually heard from a few other editorial staff and writers (or just ran into them) but as was to be a pattern in my departures, the most open regrets came from support staff.  

I kept very much to myself the rest of that summer, with strange long days awake—sometimes 24 hours straight-- followed by almost as much sleep. For awhile I entertained the fantasy of sailing on a transatlantic liner to Europe to visit Carol (though by then only the Queen Elizabeth II was left) but I couldn’t even focus the energy to visit a friend in Gloucester up the coast as promised, which ended that friendship. I couldn’t be around anyone for very long. 

My one public responsibility was teaching a course in the Boston Adult Education program, which I’d been persuaded to do some months before.  It was called Best of the New Books, so basically a reading and discussion course, meeting one early evening a week (Mondays at 6:50) for eight weeks. I had a class of 13, seated easily around a long table. There was a nice age range, and though there were a couple of college students with an academic approach, I especially appreciated the openness and direct responses of the post-college age adults, including an older married couple.  In the midst of a melancholy haze, I enjoyed it as much as was possible.  

  Since I opted for paperbacks to limit the costs to students,  most of the books were months old, despite the course title.  So instead of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (very new in hardcover), I chose  Slaughterhouse Five.  For the third class we read two fairly short novels: Don DeLillo’s End Zone and Margaret Drabble’s  Thank You All Very Much. The books in subsequent weeks were Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates, You Might As Well Live (biography of Dorothy Parker), Norman Mailer's collection of pieces titled Existential Errands, Anne Sexton's poems based on fairy tales, The Book of Folly, and finally,  the one I knew would be a winner, One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Although I didn't choose it, I would think I considered Kosinski's Being There. It’s interesting to reflect that in 1973 Marquez, DeLillo, Kosinski and Drabble were all relatively early in their careers, at least in America.

 I spent much of my time trying to write myself into coping with and even understanding what I’d been through, mostly in the forms of fiction and poetry. (But also the inevitable Shakespearian parody, with Wily Brass as Richard III.)  I was in revolt against concentrating exclusively on what was new—forthcoming books, new records. As I explained in a letter to Lester Bangs at Creem, most of the record companies had dropped me from their mailing lists when I became an editor, and now I was listening to music the way I used to—one or two albums at a time, repeated many times.  My records that summer were John Cale’s Paris 1919 and Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses.  Her "Judgment of the Moon and Stars" in particular.

 I did something similar with books, turning my reading to non-new writers in old paperbacks.  I had a definite Hemingway phase, which unfortunately showed up in my writing.  I recall reading several novels by Balzac and Stendhal for some reason. I applied for unemployment when I became eligible, and stood in the long lines at the unemployment office (there was a recession on) reading The Red and the Black. 

 I emerged somewhat in September, when I wrote a cover story for The Real Paper on Marlon Brando.  I wasn’t sure I was ready for a staff job yet, but I wasn’t offered one there anyway. Its editor confided that if I were a black woman he could hire me immediately.  I pass this on now with the amusement I felt then.  This was the social justice I’d supported, in action.  That it might have personal consequences for me was a fitting irony—even if I believed him, which I’m not sure I did. 

I still occasionally got invitations to music events. I always got music critic treatment at Passim, the Cambridge club down below the street, where the fabled folk Club 47 that had opened in 1958 with the debut of Joan Baez.  One evening that fall I sat with Janet Maslin and some others at the table near enough to singer Maria Muldaur to pick up the cable connector to her microphone that dropped to the floor.  This was her pop moment with “Midnight at the Oasis” on the radio, and she was radiantly beautiful.  When she clicked the cable back into the mike and thanked me, it was the closest I’d gotten to sex in some time. 

At some point that fall I found myself in the apartment of an attractive woman.  There’d been a bit of a vibe when we met one Saturday night through mutual friends from the Harvard Bookstore, and I went to see her Sunday afternoon to explore the possibilities.  It didn’t take long for me to realize I wasn’t really interested, and I don’t think she was either.  But I saw a paperback book in her living room of Larry McMurtry’s novel, All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers.  I’d seen it before—it was fairly fashionable—but I’d resisted it because the title made me angry: it was too close to my title for an admittedly still unwritten fiction to be called “Friends and Other Strangers,” after the Dylan line.  I hadn’t read any other McMurtry.

 Still, something should come of this wasted trip, so I took the T back to Harvard Square and bought a copy. I read it straight through, and then I read it again.  Its protagonist, Danny Deck, was soon my current tortured alter-ego.  McMurtry also was in the early phase of his long writing career.  These writers of 1973--Vonnegut, Garcia-Marquez, DeLillo, Pynchon and McMurtry--would be mainstays of my personal literary arcana for decades to come.

Probably in October I spent a week on assignment for a magazine--fascinating in its way but basically disastrous.  Carol returned on a visit from Europe for a week or so.  She'd had a scare in Switzerland that her Hodgkins had returned, but her doctors at Mass General confirmed it had not.  I went with her on the train to New York and she flew back from there.  We continued to correspond regularly for about another year, but this was the last time I saw her.

According to contemporaneous notes and letters, I spent some of November back in Greensburg, which must have included Thanksgiving.  My mother's health was of concern, though reports were typically vague.  I returned to Greensburg from Cambridge for Christmas.  It is also a blank in my memory, but I chanced upon a page torn out of a notebook that recorded my impressions of Christmas in Greensburg that year: the traditional dinner at my Severini grandmother’s, the annual visit to my Kowinski grandfather and his daughter’s family in United.  I noted that my elders seemed noticeably older, and that my mother was experiencing pains again, and that her hair had started to thin.  “Gone with the wind,” she said. 

 Then it was late January 1974 and I’d been back in Cambridge for awhile when I got a call one night from my father, who said my mother was in the hospital again, and I should come home as soon as I could.  I had one housemate left at the time, and I quickly arranged for her to again take care of my cats, and booked the next flight to Pittsburgh I could manage.

History of My Reading: Phoenix in Flight/ Boston 1972

 

For young writers in the 1920s it was Paris.  In the 30s it was  the WPA Federal Writers Project and various literary and theatrical communities in New York. In the 40s it was radio and Hollywood.  In the 50s it was television. In the 60s, improbably, it was theatre—in London, New York and even Eastern Europe. (Unless you were at least equally a musician, and then it was rock music. For a few, there was also the Andy Warhol scene in New York.)

  In the 1970s it was the alternative press, including the new rock music publications, and the New Journalism of New York-based magazines. 

 These were the entry points, the new and exciting places hungry for talent and maybe even community. They were where it was happening, but also, crucially, they were the prime opportunities of their day. 

   This was the opportunity I stumbled into, when I began writing humble book reviews for the alternative weekly, Boston After Dark in 1971.  It was one of the new weeklies sometimes described as “sea-level,” because they were midway between the underground press and the established daily newspapers.  They were also called “countercultural,” and they certainly were aimed at a young readership, with emphasis on rock and other entertainment and arts, as well as more or less radical politics.  With all of its colleges and universities, the Boston area had a huge potential readership. 

I had a book review assignment for early November but I first delivered an unsolicited but timely piece on poet Pablo Neruda winning the Nobel Prize. That was the first to be published, followed a couple of weeks later by a review of Sylvia Plath’s now classic novel The Bell-Jar.  I’m not sure if this was assigned, but the book was newly published in America in 1971.  The first review that definitely was assigned was Paul Dixon’s Think Tanks, a nonfiction appraisal on those little known but influential institutions, published in early December.

 I delivered my pieces in person, sometimes hanging around for feedback from Jake Kugel, the literary editor, and hopefully to get another assignment and some more books. Once that December he told me that the staff Christmas party was taking place at a restaurant and bar nearby, and that I should go over. I did, but there was almost no one there yet.  I was sitting alone at a small table with my free drink when an amazingly beautiful young woman walked in, looked around and left.  She turned out to be Janet Maslin, one of the Arts Editors at Boston After Dark.  John Koch, the senior movie reviewer, and Ben Gerson, the music editor and chief writer, were the others.

 On another visit to Jake, he sent me back up the corridor to Ben Gerson’s office, who was pretty open to new writers for record reviews.  Ben pointed to a pile of records stacked against a wall, told me to pick out a couple, and write 150 words or so on them.  I’d earn $5 for each review published, plus I got to keep the record. 

By then I had already started writing for Creem magazine, which published my movie reviews and even a short piece of fiction, as well as record reviews (the first national review for Bonnie Raitt) and music features (my first was on James Taylor.) With a few pieces for Creem as well as B.A.D., Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs told me how to write to record companies and request to be put on their lists for new albums. They sent me a list of contacts. Some responded, some didn’t, but pretty soon I was getting free records through the mail.  Warners was particularly generous, I recall.  I also wrote reviews occasionally for other publications, such as Time Out. That’s how I got to be one of the first generation of rock critics, at a time that rock artists were big business.

 There were concerts and club dates galore as well as records, and I covered some, mostly in Boston but also on trips to New York City.  My first one-on-one interview was with Bill Withers in his trailer before a summer concert on Boston Common. He probably sensed I was nervous so we sat together on a step to the trailer and chatted.  I asked him about the theme running through his new album; he said he didn’t think anyone would notice that there was one.  

Harrison with Pete Ham of Badfinger

My first big concert assignment was Badfinger, and I dressed up in a three-piece corduroy suit.  Before the concert I got up from my seat and walked up the aisle to the outer area, and heard this titter in the crowd. I then realized that they might have thought for a second I was George Harrison, who’d produced Badfiner’s latest album.  I had the long hair and beard as well as the cord suit.

 The life of a rock critic also included attendance at various promotional events, which always featured free food and drink.  A few times a limo actually picked me up at the B.A.D. office.  My friend Mike Shain, writing for Broadcasting Magazine then, said there were freelancers in New York who pretty much lived on the food at these events.

 Rock music as a serious cultural force was so new that there were few books on it then.  Mostly we read magazines and music tabloids, especially Rolling Stone, but also others that have come and gone.  And of course we read each other.  The coverage in established newspapers and magazines was sparse and generally laughable.

 I reviewed albums by David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Harry Nilsson, the Bee Gees, Little Feat, Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Ravi Shankar and the Incredible String Band as well as the now mostly forgotten (but remembered and revered by some) Jackie Lomax, Family, Kenny Rankin, the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils and Jim Carroll, and the completely obscure Audience and Formerly Fat Harry. Some reviews are embarrassing now (I didn’t understand Steely Dan’s first album) but I was maybe ahead of my time on others (I was much in the minority in proclaiming John Cale’s “Paris 1919” a masterpiece, which it is now acknowledged to be.)  I was hardly a music scholar, even about the roots of rock music before the 1950s, but the power of that music in those years was emotional.

 Besides Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs in the Midwest, the titans of rock criticism were Robert Christgau at the Village Voice, and Jon Landau, the record review editor of Rolling Stone in San Francisco, who actually lived near Cambridge, and wrote for its weekly, the Phoenix.  I met Christgau a few times, through Mike Shain, and later was friends with his younger sister Georgia.  I knew Jon Landau a little better, especially after he and Janet Maslin became an item.

Boston After Dark had its offices then at 1108 Bolyston Street in what likely was an old industrial building, close to the Bolyston Street subway station. (It looks like the building is now part of the Berklee School of Music.)  The paper was composed on the first floor, and the editorial and business offices were up a long flight of stairs on the second floor.  The door opened onto to the central reception area. Back to the right was the entry to the advertising and business offices.  Ahead were the editorial offices.  There weren’t many of them.

 Walking down that corridor, past the room sometimes occupied by a staff photographer and/or cartoonist, the first office on the left was Ben Gerson’s.  John Koch and Janet Maslin were in the next office on the left, opposite Jake Kugel’s on the right.  These consisted of a desk or two surrounded by plasterboard walls and a door.

 At the end of the corridor was a room occupied by assistant editor Kate Herriges and her intern, Mike Baron.  But a sharp right immediately before this area led to a large room that was basically the office of the Editor (by early 1972, Teddy Gross) but was also the entire news department. True to its name, Boston After Dark had begun as an entertainment paper, with gradually expanding news. For awhile it especially was home to veteran journalists of “the movement,” such as Carl Ogelsby, Alexander Cockburn, Derek Shearer, Frank Browning and others.   

Soon I was also writing a few movie reviews but mainly I did books—all kinds of books: fiction (short story collections by John Updike and Doris Lessing, novels by Vonnegut, Margaret Drabble and Don DeLillo, and posthumous novels by Hemingway and Camus), poetry (including Ann Sexton, James Wright, D.H. Lawrence, James Tate, Jonathan Williams) and poetry anthologies; literary criticism, psychology, anthropology (including Elaine Morgan’s The Descent of Woman), linguistics, politics, education and memoir (Run-Through, John Houseman’s nearly 500 page evocation of working with Orson Welles in the 1930s Federal Theatre project and the Mercury Theatre, which I’ve recently re-read with great pleasure.) 

 A number of my reviews were of books of countercultural interest, like a novel by Raymond Mungo (author of the classic hippie memoirs Famous Long Ago and Total Loss Farm), Michael Weller’s play Moonchildren, and Digger guru Emmett Grogan’s bitter memoir, as well as the latest pop psychology, including astrology and the occult.  I was enchanted by the novel Hide Fox, And All After by 17 year old Rafael Yglesias, who went on to a writing career in books, movies and television.

 I also got (or created) some reviewing opportunities related to old enthusiasms.  I wrote about Richard Ellmann’s Ulysses On the Liffey, a fairly short book based on a series of lectures about the structure of Joyce’s novel.  In college and afterwards I idolized Joyce as well as Ellmann’s hefty biography.  I also contrived to review a couple of books by Thoreau, including one we’d used in Doug Wilson’s Emerson and Thoreau course at Knox College, along with a newer enthusiasm, Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life.

 In fact, to this day my shelves include books I reviewed or at least mentioned then, that I was unlikely to acquire otherwise: Penelope Gilliatt’s wonderful stories in Nobody’s Business, Lewis Mumford’s Interpretations and Forecasts, The Unknown Lewis Carroll, Evan S. Connell’s Points of a Compass Rose, Reynold Price’’s Things Themselves, Suzi Gablik’s Magritte (the first in depth treatment of that artist), poet Paul Eluard’s Capital of Pain and poet Michael Benedikt’s Mole Notes. Reviewing William Irwin Thompson’s first book (Imagination of an Insurrection) led to looking out for his subsequent books over ensuing decades.  The same was true for several other authors. 

One of the books I no longer have, however, is Dow Mossman’s novel Stones of Summer. A very long first novel that quickly disappeared, it has since become legendary, especially due to a documentary film made about it and its iconic status, as well as its reclusive author who never published again.  It turns out that my review was just about the only one it received, perhaps 250 mostly admiring words.  The documentary director heard of its existence after he’d made his movie, so although two people I know (and who do not know each other) are interviewed in his film, I am not.  Plus I had by then sold this apparently rare first edition along with others to a Pittsburgh bookstore in 1996, to lighten the load of the Ryder truck I drove here to California.  It’s worth a lot more now than I was paid for it. 

Joyce Carol Oates in 1972

Book reviews didn’t pay much—the book itself was the treasure. Still, you can’t eat them, so I aimed for some sort of weekly stipend.  I lobbied for a book review column, which would include a main review and short notices of other books received, to encourage publishers to send us more.  By spring of 1972 my “Book Report” column was appearing.  And we were getting loads of new books from presses large and small. I was getting letters from writers I reviewed or mentioned.  A note from Joyce Carol Oates, probably responding to my laudatory review of her nonfiction book on tragedy in fiction, resulted in a correspondence of a half-dozen or so letters.

 I also got letters from readers, some appreciative but others disputing or correcting me, and even a few threats. Other staff members and people I knew or just ran into often commented on my reviews and other pieces.  This helped make me conscious of reading eyes, so I was even more carefully about checking facts and spelling, and avoiding other mistakes.  If it wasn’t before, this instilled a consciousness and habits of care that has been part of my writing process the rest of my life. 

As for how I learned to write book reviews at all, the answer is simple: by reading book reviews. Those magazines I subscribed to in high school ostensibly for speech club all contained book reviews—from the newsweeklies to The New Republic, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and a magazine I recall reading the first year or so of college, the Saturday Review.  I also happened to begin reading the New York Times Sunday Book Review regularly just as its most glorious era began with the editorship of John Leonard, the best reviewer and editor I ever encountered as a reader, before or since.

 I absorbed the rules of the form (including the journalistic part of conveying information about the author and the book, etc.) and a sense of their style and their possibilities. And I learned from my peers. It was the same basic process by which I learned to write all other journalistic forms.

  Apart from the journalism basics I learned in high school social studies, I didn’t have a single journalism course.  I learned by reading and by writing.  My college education as a liberal arts English literature and composition major helped of course, in general and various specific ways.  But that education led up a path of graduate school (or a writers workshop) and the combination of college teaching and literary writing.  I had wandered off that path, never to return.  

 Eventually that year, when Jake Kugel left, I became responsible for managing this surfeit of incoming books as Books Editor (Celia Gilbert became the Literary Editor, responsible among other things for the poems the paper published.) In terms of sheer volume at least, I’d come a long way from borrowing two books for two weeks from the Greensburg Public Library. 

In late summer of 1972, we returned from a weekend to learn that our publisher, Steven Mindich, had bought out his Cambridge rival, the Phoenix. We were now the Boston Phoenix.  A few Cambridge Phoenix writers elected to come over, but most stayed and reconstituted themselves as a staff-owned weekly called The Real Paper.  There was a stir—one of the former Phoenix writers (Andrew Kopkind) referred to Mindich in our pages as a “hip capitalist.” Steve and I had our differences, but I admired the moment he came to an editorial meeting. “I am not a hip capitalist,” he announced.  “I am a capitalist.” Still, for most of us, nothing much changed, at least not immediately.

 Also that summer, while racial tensions over busing in Boston were erupting in sporadic riots, the Rolling Stones played the Boston Garden.  I was there with a half-dozen others from the Phoenix.  We were high up and far away from the stage as we watched a tiny Stevie Wonder perform, and when he ran out of tunes, we waited for the Stones to appear.  

An hour or so went by before Boston Mayor Kevin White appeared at the microphone instead of Mick Jagger.  He told us that Jagger and Keith Richards had been arrested for an altercation with a photographer after getting off their plane in Rhode Island, but that he’d gotten them released and they were on their way. After the cheering stopped, his voice dropped dramatically. “Another part of my city is burning,” he said.  He was pulling police from the Garden area to help with the emergency. He asked the crowd to act responsibly.

 We had about another hour to wait, but the mood turned giddy, and frisbies and beachballs began to appear, being tossed from level to level, with notable catches roundly cheered.  Finally the Stones appeared, but I was too exhausted by then to appreciate much.  I don’t think there was much energy left in the rest of the crowd, either.  

 I probably reviewed more books than I remember, but as far as I know, no B.A.D./ Boston Phoenix archives exist anymore for 1971 and most of 1972--at least, not online.  My bookshelves remind me of some, but I have clips of most of those I mentioned.  As book review editor, cutting out clips of reviews was part of my job as I conceived it.  I kept some of my own but mostly I clipped everybody's, to send to publishers of the books reviewed. This was especially important if I'd written or called to request review copies. This gave us credibility as a publication that regularly wrote about books and authors.  If nothing else, it probably encouraged publishers to send us more books. But it got their attention in another way, as I was to discover.

 I described the basic physical layout of the B.A.D., now Boston Phoenix offices, with the business side separated from the editorial side by the reception area.  This was more than a physical separation.  There was (in those days) something called The Wall between business (specifically advertising) and editorial. It meant that editorial did not take advertisers into account when deciding what to cover or print.  This protected editorial integrity, while giving the ad reps cover when advertisers were unhappy about something that appeared.  

But this didn’t stop certain efforts at persuasion, gentle or otherwise, from Barry M., the head of advertising sales.  Barry came to me with various ideas for things I should write about, basically because they were good for advertising. (Or things he was afraid we were going to write about that might be bad for advertising.) I listened to him, and though I got angry a few times, he was a genial guy and I basically saw it as a game we played, because I never accepted a single idea he offered.

 In addition to the regular weekly paper, which by mid- 1972 sometimes came in two sections (news and arts), we published occasional supplements on particular subjects.  The largest as I recall was the Music Supplement.  I wrote several pieces for those, including the article I had the most fun researching, on the iconic countercultural comedy group, Firesign Theatre. Their hilarious recorded narratives were filled with puns and countercultural references and themes.  This was at a time that shaggy strangers who were lined up to get into rock concerts might while away the time by combining to reproduce a Firesign Theatre scene from memory. At one point I had all four of its members on the phone for an interview, which was as funny and surreal as their albums. 

 Then I proposed a Book Supplement, which was approved.  But not by Barry.  He came to moan to me about how he couldn’t see how to sell ads for it.  There were two major publishers in town: Little, Brown, and Houghton-Mifflin, and lots of bookstores.  But how was he going to fill all those pages?  I didn’t know, I said, and I didn’t care.

 I edited our first books supplement in fall 1972 (November 28 issue.) Unfortunately I haven't yet found a complete copy if I have one somewhere. I did locate a couple of pages from it, with my essay on Philip Roth, about his complaint that American reality was more bizarre than anything a fiction writer could imagine, along with a review of his latest novel, The Breast. The piece was headlined "The Gripes of Roth," suggesting I'd learned something from John Leonard's amazing headlines in the Times Sunday Book Review.  The pages also have the beginning of Victor Burg's piece on the latest works of several Southern writers, including Flannery O'Connor's collected stories, Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter and essays by Reynolds Price.  I met Victor at his day job of presiding over the Harvard Bookstore.  I believe there was another piece on Southern writers, by a  young woman who grew up in New Orleans and never written for publication before.

 A word about Walker Percy, who seems to be forgotten but was then a respected and in some ways seminal writer, and still deserves to be read.  Re-reading Love In the Ruins today, it first of all reminds me of two things: where I first heard of Early Times bourbon, and how apocalyptic those years were, the late 60s through the mid-70s, which he had projected into an alternative near future tale.  Walker portrays the extreme division in American life and  politics in terms that look very familiar today.  The breadth of those divisions was perhaps obscured by the most obvious cause: the still-ongoing war in southeast Asia. 

Speaking of which, this book supplement may also have been the occasion for a review of David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, which suggested that hubris in high places was a chief cause for getting into Vietnam and staying there. There may well have been an interview with the author included. 

In any case this did appear, even if not in the book supplement.  I was part of the Halberstam interview, held in his room in the Ritz hotel, where major New York publishers liked to house their top authors when they visited Boston.  Halberstam’s speaking voice, even in conversation, was at once authoritative and intimate, almost conspiratorial. He had an easy yet urgent way of describing his books as if he was letting listeners in on amazing things he’d just discovered. His interviews were tremendous assets, evident in this one, for his first of many books. Any criticism of the Vietnam war was still controversial, but this book was an immediate success. By early 1973 it was the #1 Best Seller on the New York Times list.

I was also part of an interview at the Ritz with Jerzy Kosinski, who published probably his best novel, Being There in 1971, and The Devil Tree in 1973.  I’m guessing it was the occasion of a paperback edition of Being There in 1972.  He turned out to be an dazzling raconteur who had us mesmerized with bizarre but convincing tales, mostly about his own life in Poland, Europe and America.  This is something else that might have appeared in the supplement.

Some surviving notes indicate I prepared a number of short reviews and lists: Fred Barron wrote short reviews of books on film, Mike Baron on books on Tarzan, Wayne Biddle on fiction, Adrienne Rich and Liz Fenton on books by and about women.  

 In any case, while I was getting the final editorial copy ready for this first book supplement, Barry bolted through the Wall from advertising, showed up at my desk very excited.  The ads for the supplement were rolling in, including the first national ads he’d ever sold for books.  He wanted to know when we could do another one.

As I recall we also got good response from readers, including a letter on McGovern for President stationery from a professor of English at Northeastern who took out a subscription, not because of our (mostly my) positive coverage of the McGovern campaign (read on), but because of the writing in our book supplement. 

 I wrote on other subjects as well in 1972.  I did music concert features on T-Rex and Neil Young, stories on music artists who appeared at the summer series on Boston Common (including Arlo Guthrie, the aforementioned Bill Withers and the last concert appearance anywhere by Smokey Robinson with the Miracles) as well as at least one news story on the music biz. 

 But I also did arts section cover stories, including one on Buckminster Fuller and another on Dick Cavett.  The week that latter story was in the current issue, I got a disorienting jolt one night. I was watching Cavett and about to turn it off, when I saw the next guest was comedian Mort Sahl.  He entered carrying a copy of my Cavett story (“Does the Emmy Spell Cancellation for Cavett?” Spoiler alert: it did.)  Sahl then read a few lines from the story, and the camera focused on the newspaper, with my byline. So my name appeared on Dick Cavett, though without my person. (It turned out Sahl had a week’s engagement at a club in western Massachusetts, where he saw the paper.)

 I ended the year with a series of stories that appeared in the front section of the Boston Phoenix, all concerning the 1972 election campaign between incumbent Richard Nixon and Democratic nominee George McGovern.  For reasons lost to history, I was assigned—or perhaps just permitted—to cover McGovern’s day-long, early October campaign stop in Boston. 

It was a bleak moment in a baffling campaign year. The country was riven by the Vietnam War, and McGovern had a clear plan to end it immediately. Never very popular, Nixon was embroiled in scandal, especially with the first reporting on what came to be called Watergate.  But there was still considerable hostility towards the anti-war movement, and my generation in particular.   The polls—just beginning to be a force in American politics—showed Nixon overwhelmingly ahead. Yet McGovern was getting increasingly large and enthusiastic crowds at his rallies, and after the contentious convention the Democratic party seemed to be uniting behind him.  So I focused my story on how the McGovern campaign and the press covering it evaluated the candidate’s chances.

  Before I started, I spoke with Tim Crouse, who lived in Cambridge and whose pieces on the media covering this campaign that eventually became his classic book, The Boys on the Bus, had begun appearing in Rolling Stone. He suggested people to talk to for my story.

 With my press credentials, I got to the noon rally early and stole a quick interview with Senator Eugene McCarthy, one of the antiwar candidates in 1968.  I witnessed him meeting long-time Massachusett’s congressman and former Speaker of the House John McCormack.  I characterized this as the meeting of the Saint and the Pol.  “Should I genuflect?” I heard McCormack say, probably the best line in my story.  I talked with other campaign operatives, and eventually with campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz (an interview on the campaign bus to the airport) but I also spoke with various members of the press covering the campaign, in an enormous room full of tobacco smoke and typewriters at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel.

 At first I was just dazzled-- all these reporters from wire services and large newspapers across the country, pretty much all friendly and accessible.  When the most eminent of reporters entered—the New York Times columnist James “Scotty” Reston-- the waves parted before him.  He gave me a courtly nod, a kind of welcome to a newcomer, and maybe a blessing. 

As I reported in my piece, the traveling press saw a campaign that by traditional measures (crowd size and enthusiasm, party support and organization) looked like a winner.  I spoke with Connie Chung, then a young CBS News reporter attached to the campaign (smart, playful and more vibrantly beautiful than TV cameras ever captured), who also summed it up that way, and added: “Then I go back to Washington and they tell me he’s blowing it, look at the polls.” 

 I was also present when McGovern spoke to a small group of young people working for his campaign outside the hotel, and asked him a question or two as we shook hands there. 

My resulting piece was the front page lead.  When it was decided that it would be, I was summoned by editor Teddy Gross for a close edit session.  I learned more in that session than in years, before or after.  I had the same feeling a few other times over the decades, in particular with copy editors, but it was rare.  Reading now the five pieces I wrote over the next few weeks, this is clearly the best.

 It also happened to be published in Teddy Gross’ last issue as Editor.  Kerry Gruson, an associate editor for news, became the interim editor while a not very urgent search for a permanent replacement began.  Very early she said she would not take the job herself, a decision she came to regret.

 In the October 17 issue I had two pieces in the news section.  One was another piece on the McGovern campaign, when it came back to Boston for an evening fundraiser, a Gala which featured Hollywood stars (Tommy Smothers, Warren Beatty, Shirley McLaine) and political stars (Senator Ted Kennedy, the teenage Caroline Kennedy.)  Other politicians spoke as well-- they told jokes (as I noted in my piece) while the Hollywood stars made political speeches. 

Cassie Mackin

Again, I was an accepted citizen in the huge but this time mostly empty press room (where I ambushed Warren Beatty, evidently looking for NBC News reporter Cassie Mackin.  His answers to my questions were short, embarrassed and as useless as he meant them to be.) Later, during McGovern's speech, I stood in the press area near the front taking notes and looked over at the only other reporter who seemed to be doing the same--the aforementioned Cassie Mackin.  Tall, blond and outspoken, she was later targeted by the Nixon people and pretty much driven off the air.  She looked back at me and flashed a quick, incandescent smile. 

 Members of McGovern’s family were also at the gala, including his teenage daughter, Mary, who at some point ran past me in the company of a laughing Caroline Kennedy.  I ended my piece by re-stating the stakes of this election through these two teenage girls. Referring to McGovern’s dedication to transforming the political life of the country, I wrote: “One could not see Caroline Kennedy and not remember what that dedication means, and hope that the boy she was smiling at from the stage would at least be spared the killing and the dying, that Mary McGovern at least could be spared the further twisting of conscience, the frustration and the terrible absorption of energy that the war has brought to being young in America.”

 My second piece in that issue was a long exposition on the Nixon administration’s attempts to intimidate and control the press—efforts that would become even more obvious and effective in coming years.

 Along with the influence of polls, another new wrinkle in American politics was the role of television network projections of outcomes based on computer analyses. Computers had been used to predict vote totals as early as the 1952 presidential election, but even in 1960 they were treated as a novelty, a sideshow.  In 1972 they threatened to become a major factor. 

 I got a tip from someone—probably Mike Shain in New York, who couldn’t use the information himself—that NBC was planning for the possibility of announcing the presidential winner before the polls were closed in all the states. This had never happened. So I reported this in October 31 issue, along with reactions I solicited, from the ACLU for instance.  The response was divided.  Some saw it as a free speech issue, others as essentially disenfranchising western voters, and possibly affecting the election because the projections became self-fulfilling prophesy.

 This possibility was related to the overall danger that potential voters—especially potential McGovern voters-- would see all the coverage of the polls and then the projections, and become too discouraged to vote. They would simply give up hope.

 My pieces seemed to respond to the feeling I was picking up, even among the antiwar young, that either McGovern was insufficiently radical, or that no candidate who promised to immediately end the Vietnam war could win.  The McGovern campaign itself seemed to sense this, for in Boston and elsewhere they had the candidate stand under banners or behind a podium that said simply, “President McGovern.” Conceiving of the possibility seemed half the fight. (Erstwhile Yippies Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman co-authored a paperback titled Vote! in which they tried to persuade their readership that McGovern was one of them, sort of.)

 On the front page of our last issue before Election Day, we confronted the doubts about voting for McGovern with two stories.  A short book had been published outlining how McGovern could surprise everyone and win, mostly because of a huge youth vote. It was excerpted, under a picture of the famous photograph of Harry Truman in 1948 holding up a newspaper proclaiming his defeat, the morning after he’d won.

   Under that began my story about the many reasons to vote against Nixon, including the corruption that had already been at least partially exposed by Woodward and Bernstein in Washington.  (McGovern himself had proclaimed the Nixon administration “the most corrupt in American history,” but no one listened to that, either.) 

 I spent election night as a reporter at McGovern headquarters. It was filled with anxious but noisy supporters and campaign workers early in the evening, as a few young staffers stared at numbers coming into their computer terminals, eventually rendered speechless. Indeed at least one network did project McGovern’s defeat well before California polls closed, and the room emptied out as if by magic.  Local politicians in particular disappeared.  Someone eventually came down to the lonely podium to thank the few shell-shocked campaign workers who were still around.  But the silence in that room was like nothing I’d experienced, despite the fact that McGovern had won Massachusetts.  Unfortunately, it was the only state he did win. 

J. Anthony Lukas

Some weeks later, when New York Times reporter Anthony Lukas came to town to report on why Massachusetts was the exception, he had dinner with Kerry Gruson and she brought me along (he knew Kerry through her father Sydney Gruson, a Times executive.)  Kerry gallantly suggested one factor in the Massachusetts vote might be my series of stories in the Boston Phoenix.

(This was the winter that men were wearing fur hats, and Lukas was particularly proud of his, because he got it in Russia. )

 In months to come, as the war in southeast Asia got even worse, and the Watergate hearings and later the Impeachment hearings gripped the nation, I had a locally popular bumper stickers slapped on my guitar case, which I took on all my plane trips.  It said: “Don’t Blame Me/I’m From Massachusetts.”

 In 1972, the Boston Phoenix editorial staff was largely comprised of people in their twenties, most of them graduates of local colleges: principally Harvard (and Radcliffe), Brandeis and Boston University (BU). That was true of regular freelancers as well.  A slim majority were male, and I don’t recall a single person of color.

 I was friends with many of the people I worked with, including support staff.  We were part of each other’s social lives—we were swimming in the culture we were reporting, so I would often attend music events with Ben Gerson and others covering music, for example. We all went to movies together in various combinations.  Janet Maslin sometimes enlisted me to accompany her to movies she was reviewing, especially at theatres in a dodgy part of town. 

 I socialized most with those on the arts and entertainment side, but I did become friends with Kerry Gruson, before and after she became interim editor.  We had an odd moment that seemed significant when we both unexpectedly came back to the office after a weekend with dramatically shorter hair.    

 For reasons I don’t recall if I ever knew, Kerry invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at the house in Essex that she shared with her boyfriend at the time.  Her father was also coming, and in fact, they picked me up at my East Cambridge apartment for the hour or so drive to Essex.  They had a typical father-daughter moment on the way, when Sydney remarked on my Polish name and suggested his family might be Polish.  “We are not Polish,” Kerry said emphatically, in that “Oh, Dad” tone. 

 By the time we sat down to dinner at a long table, I was surprised to see that I was the only Phoenix staffer there.  As mentioned, Sydney Gruson was a New York Times executive.  He had been a reporter and distinguished foreign editor.  (His wife and Kerry’s mother, Florence Lewis, was also been a Times reporter in Europe.  What I don’t think I knew at the time was that 1972 was the year of their divorce.)  

Gloria Emerson

Because of Sydney’s presence, there were several Times reporters there, including Pulitzer Prize winners Gloria Emerson (who won hers for Vietnam reporting) and Anthony Lukas.  I mostly watched and listened. After dinner, I was packed into a car going back to Boston.  I was in the back seat, squeezed between Anthony Lukas and Gloria Emerson: the filling of a Pulitzer sandwich.  Lukas was so tight against me that when we turned to each other to converse, we were practically kissing.  On my other side Gloria soon fell asleep, with her head on my shoulder.

 But that somewhat out of body experience wasn’t the end of my day—I had another Thanksgiving dinner to attend that evening.  This one was hosted by Martha, the Phoenix receptionist.  She lived in my general neighborhood of East Cambridge with several housemates, and I’d been to their house several times.  I found myself again at a long table, this time with a few others from the Phoenix plus a number of others I knew and didn’t know.  This was a more relaxed and raucous group—at least I was more relaxed.  I found myself seated between two women I’d had at least flirtations with, and at one point was holding hands under the table with both at the same time.  A group of us ended up trooping off to a nearby blues club, after which I had just a short walk home.

My biggest problems with the Phoenix was in getting paid.  We had some real conflicts over both rates of payment and promptness.  But though I was the regular book columnist, and even filled in as music editor while Ben Gerson was away, I was essentially still a freelancers, and freelance writers were often treated poorly, and not just by this publication. 

 But then I got the chance for an actual weekly salary. I believe it was towards the end of the year that Steve Mindich offered me a job that had not previously existed.  The Phoenix was about to launch a redesign, and it would now regularly appear in two sections.  He offered me the new position of Managing Editor/Arts, with the Second Section as my responsibility.  The salary (which would cover my writing and continued tenure as Books Editor) was substantial: not only more than I had ever made (that would be easy) but more than my parents were making (though I didn't know it at the time.) 

 By the time I went back to Greensburg for a Christmas visit, I had accepted.  I would begin my new work in the new year—a year that turned out to hold more than one major change.