What's That Pig Outdoors? (23 page)

Both boys share something special and unique in their wider worlds: they are expert lipreaders, as good as or even better than their father. That won't surprise anyone in the field of deaf education; study after study has shown that at any age hearing people, being familiar with the rhythms and syntax of spoken language, tend to learn lipreading faster than do the deaf. For Colin and Conan, growing up with lipreading has been much like growing up in a bilingual home. The talent affords both boys a lot of amusement as they silently chat with each other across a crowded, noisy room, sometimes to the disgust of hearing friends who'd like to share in their secrets but can't.

The boys do favor their mother with their inner secrets a bit more than they do their father, just as I did with my own parents. There are probably two reasons. The more important, I think, is the earlier intimacy a child develops with the primary care giver of the ordinary American family unit, the mother. The lesser, subtler reason may be that it has always been easier for Colin and Conan to communicate with their hearing mother than with their deaf father. In the beginning, Debby could understand their first childish speech better than I could. Later, at night, in a darkened room, they could sleepily whisper their last confidences of the day into their mother's ear. If I was there instead of her, I'd have to turn on the light and dazzle their little eyes.

Psychologists ought to be careful about exaggerating this phenomenon, of building it into a nonexistent barrier between hearing child and deaf parent. They must keep in mind that of all the interlocking relationships children develop with their parents, one of the most important is an unspoken one, a kind of companionable silence. Just as my father demonstrated, with wordless example, how to ride a bicycle, how to catch a ball, how to swing a bat, how to wield a paintbrush, how to hammer a nail, and how to saw a board, so have I shown my sons. Some things can be learned only by showing, not by telling, and if we are lucky, our fathers will have a knack for that. Mine did. And as I watch Colin building a wooden cabinet in the basement or Conan rocketing a line drive into left field, I think I did, too.

Finally, there's the matter of their father's position in society. Until recently, most deaf breadwinners worked at menial jobs if they were unlucky and the blue-collar trades if they were lucky. They may have achieved considerable pride and dignity in their work, but early on, their children noticed the low value society placed on their parents' labor. From a very early age, however, Colin and Conan have been aware that their father occupies a position of some respect and consequence in the community. His name is in the paper frequently, his picture in it every weekend. He serves on committees and juries and often travels on business. Can it be lost on the boys that their father perhaps has enjoyed a larger share of good fortune than some others?

9

In the beginning Colin couldn't have cared less what his daddy did for a living. When I became book editor of the Chicago
Daily News
in March 1973, he was not yet four. Besides, the week I was appointed his little brother was born, and that was much more important.

The road from the copy desk to the book editorship wasn't without false turns and bumpy passages. I'd dreamed of the job since my days as a part-time critic in Wilmington, but such a goal had seemed almost unattainable. I had had little experience as a critic, and assumed that heavy-duty academic credentials were also necessary. All that was needed, it turned out, was a love of books and a willingness to pay a few dirtyfingernailed dues.

In 1970 one of my night desk mentors was elevated to the job of assistant managing editor in charge of features. He suggested I move with him to his new department to get a taste of another kind of journalism. The proposal at first seemed unattractive. Why give up local, national, and foreign news—matters of consequence—for the fluff of society columns, food and fashion stories, and comic strips? That was
women's
stuff. Features was where the lady writers hung out, while we hardened cigar chompers held sway in the city room, except for two “girl reporters” who covered “safe” beats such as the library and school boards. (One was Lois Wille, who later would win two Pulitzer Prizes, and the other was Georgie Anne Geyer, later the star of the
Daily News's
foreign service and a renowned globe-trotting syndicated columnist.)

But a new wind was beginning to sweep through American daily journalism. We didn't know it at the time, but events—prodded by the rise of feminism and the Vietnam War—had started to blur the line between journalism aimed at men and that intended for women, as well as the
roles of those who did the writing and reporting. A new sense of social responsibility was beginning to seep into the features columns. Coverage of high-society charity balls came to seem less important than stories about birth control and Montessori schools. Service journalism—food and fashion—was still timely, especially in attracting advertising, but was no longer the queen of the features department.

Working the features copy desk gave me experience in handling these broader kinds of stories, which we called, a bit contemptuously in the beginning, “soft” stories. “Hard” stories concerned murders, stock-market swings, and the latest body count in the Ia Drang Valley. I soon noticed that features writers seemed to take a different approach to their subjects. They tended to be more thoughtful, less dependent on formula, and not quite so driven by sensation as their hard-bitten confreres on “cityside.” I began to learn new respect for them.

All this is not to say that copyreading in the features department was an unalloyed adventure. There was also a great deal of routine drudgery that involved checking recipes, clipping canned sewing-column features, and dealing with reader-participation contests, and I hated and was bored by it.

But along with the enervating dog work came other opportunities. Sharing the features department with the “women's pages” was the arts and amusements department, which covered movies, theater, nightlife, art, classical and popular music—and books. The
Daily News's
book section was part of
Panorama
, one of the country's first and best weekend arts and entertainment supplements.

At its head was Richard Christiansen, who also doubled as secondstring theater critic behind the distinguished syndicated columnist Sydney J. Harris. Dick (who is now the entertainment editor and theater critic of the Chicago
Tribune
) is not only a first-rate and demanding “pencil editor” but also every bit as good a writer as any of his critics. A smile of approval from him was and is as rare and bright as a shiny new gold coin. I didn't think I could meet his exacting standards.

But Van Allen Bradley, the paper's veteran literary editor and a renowned rare-book specialist, presided over the book columns. Like so many older editors of those times, he loved to take young journalists under his wing and help them along in their careers. He had the time and
space to do so, for those were still relaxed days in newspapering, when staffs were much larger and less pressured than they are today.

As soon as I told him that I had written book reviews in Wilmington a few years earlier, he turned to his commodious cabinet of review copies and pulled down a clutch of first novels. Why not try an omnibus review of these? he asked. He liked the result, published it, and paid me the munificent sum of $20, the standard reviewer's fee of the time.

Van introduced me to the works of Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson, who were not lofty academic theorists but journalists, working critics who rolled up their sleeves and took a reader's-eye view of newly published books. Not for them the arcane mysteries of textual criticism in the classics but the simple questions: “Is this book worth reading? Why or why not?” Aimed at the intelligent, educated, but nonspecialist newspaper and magazine reader, their criticism was broad, even rough-and-ready, yet rooted in careful scholarship and delivered in graceful prose.

Wilson especially found pearls in places other critics would dismiss as trivial. He thought, for example, that the Sherlock Holmes stories were “literature on a humble not ignoble level. . . . The old stories are literature, not because of the conjuring tricks and the puzzles, not because of the lively melodrama . . . but by virtue of imagination and style.”

These were eye-opening words to a reader who had approached literature chiefly as an exercise in scholarly inquiry, and they made me read Conan Doyle in a new way, as well as Dickens and other authors once considered purveyors of popular trash. Literature, Wilson taught me, belonged to the people, not the professors. He showed how even lowly entertainments could be written with as much skill and insight as works of high culture, and some of them would last.

I soon began to contribute reviews regularly, and after a time also began to write
Panorama's
weekly column on paperbacks. By this time I had been “promoted” laterally to production editor for
Panorama.
The job entailed handling not only all the copy and headlines for the section but also page layout and especially composing-room work, directing printers in the makeup of the pages. But now, for the first time in my newspaper career, my deafness seemed to be a dragging anchor. The composing rooms of the old days were noisy places, filled with the clatter of Linotypes, the rattle of heavy-wheeled page trucks, the hammering of machinists, the whine of
conveyor belts whisking copy down from the editors on the floor above, and the shouts of “straw bosses,” or subforemen. I did not have an easy time making myself understood over the din.

At least in the beginning, the printers resented me, and some of their resentment was justified. I had had the misfortune to learn the basics of composing-room tasks from an impatient, high-strung editor who believed the only way to deal with printers was as an adversary who watched their every move critically. Not for a while did I discover that printers, perhaps the most intelligent and thoughtful workers in the skilled trades, responded best to treatment as equals. They had a stubborn pride and would not be pushed.

Not a few, I am convinced, also distrusted me because I was deaf, and for complex reasons. For a long time, the printing trade was a haven for deaf workers, because many of its skills don't require the ability to communicate easily. On a major metropolitan newspaper such as the
Daily News
, however, the deaf were limited largely to Linotype keyboarding and proofreading, both solitary pursuits. Foremen passed them the few orders they needed with paper and pencil or in crude sign language. The deaf didn't work the elite jobs “on the line” as page makeup specialists. And though a skilled worker's production was respected by his hearing union mates, his inability to communicate easily with them—and sometimes the cultural eccentricities of his deafness—ensured his second-class status. To some of the hearing printers, I was a “dummy” who was trying to rise above his station, and therefore was not to be taken seriously. Many didn't want to follow my requests. (Not orders; no editor who wants to get his product out on deadline ever gives orders to a printer.)

Also, the early 1970s were a time when everyone knew that cast-metal “hot type” was on the way out, soon to be replaced by phototypesetting and pasted-up page makeup. That new technology would eliminate more than 75 percent of the jobs in the composing room. A few printers regarded my intrusive presence as a deaf editor as part of the wave of the future.

I also received no sympathy from the deaf printers themselves. Why should they have given me any? Not being able to hear didn't make me one of them—not unless I used sign language. I couldn't communicate with them any better than could a “hearie” straw boss. I felt awkward among them and they with me.

For many months I truly felt like an outsider in the
Daily News's
composing room. The very depths came one Friday afternoon during my first year in the
Panorama
job. I was having a sweaty, frustrating time trying to communicate with a lone printer, a substitute for the vacationing regular makeup man. There was much to be done on the
Panorama
pages, just ninety minutes away from final “lockup,” and we were falling further and further behind. I tried to shout above the din of printers a few feet away, hammering together the last pages of the final-markets edition of the Friday paper before its own deadline. The printer, doubly frustrated by the unfamiliar job and the peculiar babble of the editor trying to direct him, turned and threw up his hands before his compatriots. “This
dummy
!” he shouted.