MAY HIS TRIBE DECREASE
Mayer, Milton
May His Tribe Decrease by MILTON MAYER Kind of choking and welling, I read the words of William Randolph Hearst Jr. on the front page of his unraveling string of newspapers: "It is fifteen...
...The story ended, "A headline in yesterday's Examiner about Dr...
...I had interviewed the General at lunch, and when the General reached for the check I said, "No, sir—you can't buy me with the blue-plate special...
...It was fifteen years ago this date that Pop left us...
...He left us Young Bill...
...May His Tribe Decrease by MILTON MAYER Kind of choking and welling, I read the words of William Randolph Hearst Jr...
...Young Bill and I have never met, but I know Ed Montgomery like the back of my own hand...
...But we were all getting rich, from the Chief at the top to me at the bottom, and that was all any of us cared about...
...You are hard put today to think of a newspaper as bad as Hearst's were...
...You couldn't even believe the weather report...
...FOR Moscow, with a three-line subhead: Stephen Smale, Supporter of VDC-FSM...
...The store replevined the electric toaster I was buying on the installment plan...
...But under Young Bill, now Old Bill, you sometimes catch a clumsy glimpse of the days of unblessed memory...
...and I. We never actually met, because his beat was the Hearst Castle at San Simeon and mine was the Wabash Avenue police station in Chicago...
...on the front page of his unraveling string of newspapers: "It is fifteen years ago this date that Pop left us, and even now I can not think about him very long or talk reminiscently about him without kind of choking up and hot tears welling up in my eyes...
...One of a number of subpenaed Berkeley anti-war activists, Dr...
...The store moved in on him, and the Hearst empire wound up a baker's half dozen of rags...
...The Chief had been buying up continents...
...Still and all, I was once a Hearst man, and I think I may say that all that I am today I owe to William Randolph Hearst Sr...
...Smale had gone to Moscow to receive the Field Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians, and that his UC leave had been granted last January...
...The Hearst papers were the stuff that nightmares were made on...
...While Young Bill, now Old Bill, choked and welled the other day, his San Francisco Examiner ran a four-column thirty-six point headline: UC PROF DODGES SUBPENA, SKIPS U.S...
...In leaving the country, he has dodged a subpoena directing him to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in Washington...
...But he didn't leave us empty-handed...
...Stephen Smale, University of California professor and backer of the Vietnam Day Committee and the old Free Speech Movement, is either on his way or is in Moscow, the Examiner learned today...
...The next day, under a twocolumn, eighteen-point headline, MOSCOW-BOUND UC PROF NOT AVOIDING SUBPENA, without a byline, the Examiner reported that Dr...
...He had received a complaint about me from General Charles Gates Dawes, Calvin Coolidge's Vice President...
...Then the bottom, with me on it, dropped out...
...The only contact we ever had was a teletype message from San Simeon to Chicago beginning, as usual, "Chief says," and signed, as usual, "Willicombe," Willicombe being the Chief's panjandrum...
...In three one-sentence paragraphs, Ed Montgomery, Examiner Staff Writer, told the story: "Dr...
...And Ed Montgomery, Examiner Staff Writer...
...Smale took a leave of absence from UC and leased his home there before his trip abroad...
...I hadn't said a word about the time the General and Blond Billy Lorimer shuttled the assets between their banks to fox the inspectors, but the General took umbrage anyway...
...What the Chief said, on that occasion, was that I was to be fired from the Chicago Evening American...
...Yea, knowing the back of my own hand, I know him...
...We were colleagues and co-workers, William Randolph Hearst Sr...
...But the mere passing of the Chief, fifteen years ago this date, raised the level of American journalism...
...Smale and the House Un-American Activities Committee was open to an incorrect inference that he had gone to Moscow to avoid the subpena issued by the Committee...
...Me, or mine, too...
Vol. 30 • October 1966 • No. 10
