The Mama of Us All

...Paul Sann is the executive editor...

...The New York Post is an institution which has Kempton, Wechsler, Herb lock, Bill Shannon, Ted Poston, who, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse could hold their own in any league...

...The New York Post is an institution which lost its probably widest-read columnist (Jimmy Cannon) through underpayment...

...Still another huge and beckoning source of readership is Harlem...

...The old girl's still looking pretty good...

...The Post is the only big paper in town that is even remotely concerned in any true sense did they but know it—for far more of them gulp up the daily vitriol of the News, Mirror, and Journal-Americanwith what happens to New York's millions of Negroes and Puerto Ricans...

...And I also know that I have more than once sent off a fervent mash note to some writer or another on the Post—notably, I should guess, to Murray Kempton, who has a talent unique unto himself for touching on, and touching up, the general ignobility of our times...

...Because we too, we oldest familiars, still need some place to turn...

...we stopped seeing one another altogether...

...All her vibrations, her wave lengths, would have to be Jewish...

...There is the counter-balancing impulse to model oneself after one's parents and follow their standards...

...In the first day back at school as we entered the ninth grade, I walked into Miss Stewart's Social Studies classroom in long pants instead of knickers...

...Definitely, she is a woman...

...I should say did not, for as the Negro's purchasing power rises—perhaps, some day, even the Puerto Rican's—his acceptance as a customer likewise rises...

...And who among us would have it otherwise...

...Our epitaph is actually going to read: They copulated with their newspapers...

...The most ironic and aggravating thing about it is that all this garbage-combing is done with the left—or rather the right—hand...

...It was a lot better written, he said...

...certainly this is reflected throughout its classified columns where 75 per cent of its Help Wanteds and 98 per cent of its available Real Estate (apartments, stores, houses for sale) are in the Bronx...

...I do not know anyone of my several hundred New York friends who does not read the Post every afternoon or evening of his (her) life, and who does not perpetually sneer at it, or on occasion snarl...

...That week Miss Stewart sent Grete Schuyler and myself, unaccompanied, over to the Ford plant at Edgewater, New Jersey, to find out what an assembly line and a picket line were all about and report on our findings to the others...

...Papa keeps us rich, mama keeps us honest...

...Why...

...Well, I had struck it right with the Post...

...She is the good indignant mama of New York City as the New York Times is its good gray papa...

...Especially in our early, formative years is the whole thing like a huge ritual of teen-age courtship: between ourselves and a great waiting field of newspapers there are first dates, blind dates, arranged blind dates, pick-up dates, late dates, secret dates, steady dates, broken dates...

...I was a middling intellectual middle-class midManhattanite in mid-puberty, awakening in one great huge rush to the fact that I was also part of everything in the world...

...Wechsler and Kempton are up in the clouds, Paul Sann has two feet firmly planted in the ground...

...If I close my eyes and squeeze them, I can see her with a good deal of precision, this clean slim beautiful girl, probably a vivid brunette, for whom I was searching...

...And the two of them who will explain it in full effusion and palship in their respective verbal domains for days on end...

...With the angry pride of a young Odets hero I would flaunt the latest hell-raising edition on the Amsterdam Avenue bus, the IRT subway...

...She remained, a little heavier in the jowls, a little plumper in the bosom, a little more emphatic in the walk, a little more authoritative in local and national life—she remained and she is with us today and she is all we have of that part of our heritage: all...

...Well, there are certain therapies available to some of the staff...

...I tried it, found he was right, and stayed with the Trib for about ten years, when a modernization which included green newsprint on certain pages—they soon abandoned it—drove me back into the arms of the Times...

...he's a ski enthusiast and on occasion contributes a column of ski notes to the sports section...

...In this city, whose very pulse is fed by what Fortune, in all its majesty, last year pronunciamentoed as "the Jewish elan," only that would have made complete sense...

...my friend said to me, we shall build a world without them...

...but those ten years are now a hundred years dead, and Jackie Robinson the columnist would have been hard put to it to awake even Allen Klein or Martin Wolfson, the two faithful balls of liberal fire in the Post's letters - to - the - editor section...

...The Post had a new columnist named Samuel Grafton and an exciting new rival named PM...

...I lived with the Times all through high school and college and, whenever I saw it, through the war...

...they print her picture in the Bacheldor cartoon, to prove it, almost once each week...

...I have myself written a theater review in the form of a parody of Rose Franzblau's psychiatric agony column, and there are others who have had similar sport with this incredible lady...

...All of which is also a part of our times, and it is too bad it can't somehow be isolated away from the information that the world is going to blow up and Mississippi take over the leavings at 3 o'clock tomorrow morning...

...Now that Alexander Hamilton, who founded it, has passed along, the first, most fundamental fact about the New York Post is the throbbing fact of its Jewishness...

...Certainly not the man from whom there issued, with such seeming disdain, the words above...

...in a number of ways the Post has ever since had to serve as house organ for that volatile borough...

...Hell, there'd be rats crawling through every multiple-dwelling from here to Sacramento...

...The other thing my wife turns to that way is Franzblau, where she reads the questions only, not the answers...

...K. was a midget...

...We are married to our newspapers, we fall in love with them, we fall out of love with them, we commit adultery with them and against them, we ditch them, we divorce them, we remarry...

...Off with the old affair, on with the new...

...He's given a chitchat column every Tuesday in which to spread his cheer on them...

...Who among us would prefer not to have tapped into the bloodstream of life through our intimate couplings with whichever newspapers we were living with, bedding down with, at one particular era or another...

...all in all, it was in fact quite tragic...

...And like wife, like mama, she is indispensable...

...Less than five years later it was no longer a question of building a new world but of saving the old one...

...This involves a double irony: it has not won them over —not yet, at any rate—and it has cost the paper an incalculable income in advertising withheld by the "quality" department stores who do not want to attract "the Post's sort of readers...

...They are the paper's inner nerve fiber, its ethic, whether for cour age (Poston), individuality of style and viewpoint (Kempton), dogged simplicity of style and viewpoint (Wechsler, Herblock, or the still more dogged decencies and quiet furies of Shannon's tireless legwork in Wash ington and elsewhere on the national scene...

...The interloper had a vitality sufficient to push even the Post into the category of dowager...

...The New York Post is an institution which will tell you all about nothing about the private life of everybody you never wanted to hear about from Rise Stevens to Herman Wouk...

...It was a bit more than one had bargained for...

...Tim New York Post is schizophrenic because, like most newspapers, but more than most, it doesn't know who its audience is...

...Theater critic Richard Watts likes detec tive stories, Ireland, China without Chiang Kai-shek, and any pretty girl who ever breathed...

...Let them turn black, I said to my friend...

...entered the White House and I entered junior high school...

...THERE Is ONE sure-fire way to determine how necessary the Post is for all of us: imagine New York City, and the United States, without it...

...Then everything began to change...

...He didn't go far enough, that writer...

...It is more than concerned...

...We are "brought up on" certain newspapers—another well-worn phrase...

...As it is the green which makes a leaf a leaf, the gray which makes a battleship, it is that which makes the Post the Post...

...Bennett Schiff of the rewrite desk doubles with an art column in the week-end edition...

...Archer Winsten, on the other hand—a film critic whose iconoclasms would not be uninteresting if his peculiar syntax didn't muffle them like oatmeal—goes to equally great pains to prove he's a reg'lar feller underneath it all...

...If you want to know, I have remained one of her regular callers to this day...

...Dolly Schiff likes Israel (for the Israelis) and anyone of importance who treats her as of equal importance...

...It is less than one time in four that I am successful in discouraging her from reading them out loud...

...That's what I was recklessly asked to write about...

...Our own styles were to a large extent unconsciously shaped, I am afraid, by those in PM...

...What in God's name would ever become of this city if mama were taken away from us, I do not know...

...The New York Post is an institution in which the victim is always right, especially if someone else has died as a result of his victimization...

...There's the week-end page of book reviews where you can sometimes knock out a few words to demonstrate your appreciation of the better things in life...

...On the tombstone of our race, a famous writer has told us, there will some day be carved the single chilling remembrance: They copulated and read the newspapers...

...now K. was the only boy among us still in knickers...

...Papa goes down to the firm and makes the money while mama keeps things hopping in the Daughters of the Negev Anti-Poll-Tax and Sane Nuclear Society...

...The Post, in short, is forced to play it to all fields at all times...

...Tell you and tell you and tell you, in endless nine-part articles researched and written by thirteen various members of the staff...

...I had been down to the Garden to stand on the seat of a folding chair and, with 18,000 others, shriek out my joyous salute to F.D.R...

...For the New York Post is, among other things, an institution with a publisher whose political stances are in large part determined by whether she is buddy-buddied or cut dead by the high-society friends of the candidates— or, of course, by the candidates themselves...

...The New York Post is an institution which aches with schizophrenia, selferosion, and ambivalence—Jewish ambivalence— from stem to stern...

...a seduction was in progress which was to continue through the war and — speaking for myself — until, on Okinawa, in the weeks just after the end of the war, a reading of Koestler's The Yogi and the Commissar made me begin to rethink every ill-shaped political idea I had held ever since getting out of those knickers...

...Which has another columnist named Max Lerner on whom so many wolves are closing in that I shall not...

...BUT the New York Post is also an institution which buries these writers in a sea of pseudo-folksy tabloid journalism which exiles the "hard news" to about six sticks of type woven in and out among the columns, the boilerplate, the auto notes, the comics, the sob stories, the subway failures and other pet peeves, the rapes, the slaughters, and fully as much bedroom scandal as has ever reeked through the pages of the Daily News (but the News has more nastily gifted writers and headline-writers...

...In the evening field I stayed with the Sun until its demise, if only for the baseball pages...

...There remained the Post...

...as he assured us: "We have only just begun to fight...

...No one in the business, not even the Jimmy Reston of 1952 and 1956, manifested more sheer contempt for Eisenhower the obfuscator-ignoramus and moral coward...

...That it was an absurd, arch-reactionary anachronism on every other page was something that didn't impinge on me—and wouldn't have bothered me either way—until around the time that F.D.R...

...She's our mama, that's what counts...

...Which for a period had another named Jackie Robinson who once played the game of baseball in such a way as to awake and recharge my heart, even though I was a lifelong Giant fan, for the next ten years to come...

...A number of the most sophisticated girls I've ever known, my wife certainly among them, seize on this cartoon strip daily with all the gleeful intensity of the religious fanatic...

...A statistical survey thought up by me as I stare out the window reveals that these profiles may be broken down as follows: Jews, 94 per cent Negroes, 8 per cent Catholics, I per cent Others, 2 per cent Showbiz, 85 per cent Intellectuals, 5 per cent Do-gooders, pioneers, etc., 7 per cent Enemies, 3 per cent "Beatniks," etc., 5 per cent The New York Post is an institution which is quite capable of turning in a dry season to the horrifying midcentury news that New York City plays host to a million-dollar Numbers Racket...

...An inheritance of higher passions and fewer qualms stems from the Post's absorption, a decade ago, of the Bronx Home News...

...The New York Post is an institution which will provide you with all the kicks you require six days out of every week (and in four colors on Saturdays) just with the muckings-into-other-people's-lives of dear little grey-haired Mary Worth, the gentile Dorothy Schiff...

...the miracle is not that it is such an unholy mishigas of a newspaper — and a liberal newspaper yet!—but that it whatsoever survives as a newspaper, and even continues to bind its oldest familiars to its heart...

...he fancies himself a character out of The Front Page, and it is he who every day makes sure that the rapists are right up in there with, and above, the eggheads...

...I was fresh from service when a literate older friend of mine—I mean about two years older—said he thought I should start taking up with the Tribune...

...Which has another named Earl's Pearls whose greatest gift is in knowing how to cast them delicately before swine...

...next thing I knew, the girl was dead...

...A publisher who will blithely pull the rug out from under her own editor a couple of hours before the final pre-election edition goes to press...

...Certainly its basic inheritance (from the '30's, from PM) is the Dissident Intellectual who in the current era has many dialectical schizophrenias of his own...

...it directly panders to them...

...Because we need, and deeply need, the highstrung and tireless mama that is the New York Post...

...There are the various thrilling, verboten differences of class and background ("I'm sorry, dear, but we just don't allow that newspaper in this house"—which as a minor cliche of American drama and fiction must go back at least to the administration of James K. Polk...

...I could see every Fascist on the opposite seats, every withered-up, crow-clawed Roosevelthater, every Bundist delivery boy, every braying Ku Kluxer, turn black with venom...

...definitely, a Jewish woman, a wife, a mama—the affair having long ago atrophied into marriage—a macher, a yenta, a kvetch, a nag, an irremovable conscience, a presence...

...The writing of barbed parodies of some of its regular features, the penning of supercilious private or public notes to its editors or columnists, has almost become an official profession...

...Less fortunate was his more recent and no less stubborn determination to flush the Cuban mud from the flintlocks of the New Frontiersmen...

...I know that more than once I have written not-for-publication diatribes, on matters which I can now barely remember, to Post editor James Wechsler...

...Nothing was dearer to him than newspapers to the day he died, and on that day it was the arteries of our own death into which we tapped, for he was Camus...

...and finally, of course, there is the new ghetto society of half a million Puerto Ricans...

...On the other hand, the New York Post is an institution in the absence of which, in any season, the builders and shakers and crumbs and con-men and free-booting marauders of Title I and the like would certainly long since have reduced this giant city to their own personal fiefdom...

...ABOUT THE TIME that I started reading it, the paper experienced a change of ownership and format: its headlines, in the snappiest sans-serif in town, were soon to start jumping out at you from fifty paces everywhere...

...And an editor who will take it, though he would not submit to Joe McCarthy...

...If I squeeze my eyes still harder, I can today see something else about the girl of my dreams that I didn't know then, and wouldn't have admitted to myself if I had known: in my city, in my time, she would have had to be a Jew...

...it is also characteristic that it was Shannon who was first on the Post, and in newspapers generally, to head south to do a firsthand report-in-depth on the nonviolent Negro movement which was recognizable in its first few days in 1959 as the most important and exciting national story of the year, the decade, or maybe of the century...

...By a "higher" level I, of course, mean a self-reflecting level, someone who would talk my own language, reflect my many newfound passionate interests...

...But I think I will live a long time before I see a full page for Lord & Taylor opposite the full page for Abraham & Straus or Alexander's...

...He is probably right: I choose to think that what anchors me to the paper is the KemptonShannon syndrome, but what I and my friends lap up no less avidly is the daily bilge about who's going with whom, who's quitting whom, who's seeing the doctor, who's getting hit over the head in hallways, how the B-girls are doing, what it was like the night Carlos didn't come home, the night Carmelita didn't come home, and what secrets Fern Marja or Gael Green have unearthed for us this week behind the sealed doors of the model agencies and reducing salons...

...Leonard Lyons of the cafe beat goes to great pains, week after week, to keep making like he's on the inside track, not merely with Jackie Gleason, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Bill Saroyan, but Picasso ("the painter"), Corbusier ("the French architect"), and Albert Schweitzer...

...I was in college now, running a hotly interventionist college newspaper of my own...

...Shortly after being restored to civilian life, I began to put an end to the romance with PM...

...The New York Post as an institution...

...Now I began to look around for someone to have an affair with on a somewhat higher level...

...It was Miss Stewart who later introduced me to the New York Post, and all of us to the proper way in which to read and understand a newspaper...

...My colleagues and I read Sam Grafton's flaming calls to arms and almost nothing else in the Post—from time to time we would get permission to reprint one of Grafton's columns— but we would read every inch of PM except the sports pages, which from the beginning we took to be not much more than a vague pretense...

...I already had one secret trampy mistress, the Daily News...

...Naive to the last, he ended up thinking that Nixon might be the new Lincoln, and was never heard from again...

...The whole class stood up and cheered...

...it's as if everyone on the paper "knows better" but doesn't know what to do about it...

...It is the kind of newspaper you love to hate and hate to love: but to hate to love is, first, to love, and that is the one-to-one relationship of some 300,000 of us today with the New York Post...

...I was brought up on The New York Times and the now defunct New York Sun, an evening paper carrying the Wall Street results and business columns that my father would pore over, and the sports results and philately columns that we both would pore over, often side by side, passing the sections back and forth, under the same 1930's baroque wrought-iron livingroom standing lamp...