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8 2 I’m a Legman After graduating from high school in 1957, I went to Grinnell, a small liberal arts college in rural Iowa. The campus is an hour from Des Moines, five from Chicago. Grinnell was, and still is, highly regarded for its academics. But that’s not why I chose to go there. As good as the school was in teaching, it was bad in swimming, my sport. Thus: an opportunity for me to move up from second string in high school to first string in college. The promise of being the top guy in the hundred-yard backstroke (in a not-so-hot 1:05) was just too appealing. We packed up the ’55 white Buick. Mom and Dad took turns at the wheel. I was in the back with bags of shoes and clothes that I hoped would register me “cool” on campus. We drove, mostly in silence because of how apprehensive I was, through what seemed like thousands of miles of cornfields. I’m an urban boy, enraptured by subways, buses, and taxicabs, and the tighter, more jammed my neighborhood the better. Would I be bored in Grinnell, Iowa? And how would I cope with college requirements in math and science and, yuk, poetry? I wasn’t much up to “Beowulf” or “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I ended up doing fine in the pool, in class, and on the Scarlet and Black, the weekly newspaper. I covered sports, writing a column that was supposed to be about athletics, but was stretched to everything on which I had an opinion— grades, religion, ethics, professors playing favorites, boys in girls dorms (and vice versa), beer games on Friday night, potatoes for lunch. I learned early on the unique challenges, disciplines, responsibilities—and pleasures and rewards—of commentary. Reporting is writing about what you see and hear. Commentary is about what you think and feel. Reporting ought to be mixed into commentary; commentary ought not to be mixed into reporting. A reporter must earn a column. A reporter who gets it right may be rewarded with a column one day. Maybe even an editorship. I ’ M A L E G M A N 9 I thought my reporting and columns for the Scarlet and Black were good enough to qualify me for the editorship, but I lost out to a classmate. I was angry—so angry that I decided I should take a break from Grinnell. Go somewhere else, I told myself. Enroll for a semester at a big school, like the University of Illinois or Michigan. Or how about the Ivy League? Columbia was home to America’s most prestigious graduate school of journalism. I was an undergraduate. But, oh, it would be exciting to be part of the same university. And, of course, the school was in New York, the city where everything was, where everything happened: the United Nations, Tammany Hall, Wall Street, Broadway and Harlem, the Lower East Side, Fifth Avenue, and Greenwich Village. The Met, the Dodgers, Times Square. Mayor Robert Wagner and Governor Averell Harriman. The New York Times and Herald Tribune, the Post, the Daily News, and the Village Voice. Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, and Murray Kempton. Huntley and Brinkley . . . and Lynn Strauss, a young woman whom I had fallen for in Chicago. She was a student at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, a short train ride from Manhattan. Moved by love for Lynn and the romance of New York, I applied to Columbia. To my surprise and delight, I was accepted. Soon I’d be off to New York. Where the newspapers and television were jousting for supremacy, and where stories were played big: racial tensions bubbling up from a US Supreme Court decision to integrate public education in Little Rock, Arkansas; a downward spiral from the postwar boom; more unemployment , crime, and class conflict presaging riots and gang warfare. The city’s gilded class reaching for Higher Society, scrambling to get tickets for the first transatlantic jet passenger flight to Europe. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum splashing into the art world. I had to go. I also had to tell my parents. “Very funny, Walter,” my mother blurted (more like gasped) into the telephone , when I broke the news that I had applied, been accepted, and planned to leave Grinnell for New York in a month. “You are, of course, kidding.” “Mom, I’m not kidding. I . . .” “Sam” (definitely a gasp), “Sam, pick up the phone!” Less...

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