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17 3 The City News Bureau, Queen Elizabeth, and Me Mabley enjoyed mentoring, felt good about teaching me some of the rules of his road, and was pleased with my work. In fact, he said he’d come to depend on my help, and that he’d have a hard time replacing me. He knew how much I didn’t want to be replaced, how much I loved being in the city room of the DailyNews.Whycouldn’tIstayandcontinuetohelpuntilIwasreadytomoveon? “Don’t even think about it,” he said, peering down at me over his patrician nose and reading glasses. “Remember when you finished high school and asked if you could come to work for me? Do you remember that I told you to go to college and come back? That worked out pretty well, didn’t it?” “Yes it did, but—” “Now I’m telling you to finish college and come back.” “But you’ll find someone to take my place.” “I’ll be here,” he said. And he was. When I finished my senior year, he recommended me for a job at his alma mater, the Chicago City News Bureau, which for more than one hundred years had been hiring aspiring young reporters to cover the courts, governments, and police and fire departments. The information gathered and the stories written by City News were delivered to Chicago newspapers and radio and television stations by way of an elaborate system of pneumatic tubes. A day in my life at the bureau in the late 1950s: I’m assigned to cover combat in city hall, where Chicago alderman Leon Despres of the Hyde Park neighborhood, surrounding the University of Chicago, conscience of the city council, is railing at Boss Daley about the political patronage system. I take notes, dash to a telephone in the press room outside the council chambers, or, if the newspaper big shots don’t want me in their way, to a public phone. I call “the desk” at City News, and ask for “rewrite.” “I’m ready with the Daley/Despres story,” I chirp, self-satisfied at not only gathering information quickly and precisely, but at capturing a mood. 18 T H E C I T Y N E W S B U R E A U “Okay, okay. GO, will ya. Move it, kid. Dictate, goddamn it. You’re fucking late. The papers’ll have the thing on fucking page 1 before you get halfway through telling me what the fuck happened. C’mon. Talk, will ya, please. Shit!” (And that was the decent part of what he said.) “Mayor Richard J. Daley, comma—” “Everybody knows he’s Richard J. We don’t need the fucking initial.” “. . . sailing along in his third year in office, comma—” “What?” “. . . has run into a reef.” “Stop already with the sailing and the reef. And you don’t have to tell me where the fuck to put the commas, okay?” “Sorry. I’m trying to add color.” “Cut the color, please. Jus’ tell me what the fuck happened,” which I do, and he hangs up. The dictation is yanked from a rewriter’s typewriter, rolled and stuffed into a metal can, shoved into one of the pneumatic tubes, and zipped to city desks and radio and TV production meetings throughout the metropolitan area. Not until 1961 were those tubes replaced by teletype. Founded in the 1890s and funded by Chicago’s major newspapers, the City News Bureau did more than supply news. It was like a farm system in Major League Baseball. Most of the bureau reporters were like me—young, ambitious, fresh out of college, and green. The newspapers that many of us would eventually join expected us to learn things at the bureau from the veteran editors who kept us in line. We did. Many were the times I was told by the editors, a wise and demanding bunch, to return to the scene of a crime or fire in an abandoned warehouse to get more information (as in the old story of the City News reporter who was sent back five miles to find out the color of the eyes of a just-murdered toddler). Other times, I was grilled on the accuracy of my reporting. The mantra of City News was: “If your mother tells you she loves you, make sure you double-check it.” Double-check it! First doubt it, check it, then check it again. I learned to test my accuracy by thinking about what might...

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