Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [15]
Maybe the Times is best summed up: its readers open their paper first to the editorials.
When The Stars and Stripes became a daily on November 2, 1942, it was at the Times, the first in a long line of journalistic step-parents to the daily paper of the army.
When The Stars and Stripes staff first clattered through their building, the sober editors of the Times looked up disapprovingly from under their green eyeshades. Times reporters, busy writing out their reports in longhand, lay down their pencils and pens as the unconscious Americans hit the floor, where only toes previously had tread, with heavy GI heels, making more noise than the building or any of its occupants had heard since the last nail (or wooden peg) was hammered in place hundreds of years before. There was a lot of walking to do to get where you were going at the Times.
The course from the street, near Blackfriars Bridge, to the S&S office in the Times led through hundreds of feet of narrow, winding corridors, up and down flights of wooden steps and around little corners.
Strangers groping their way to the office often felt like dropping small bits of paper, Boy Scouts of America–like, so they would be able to find their way out. The second night of the occupation of the Times, Bob Moora and Russ Jones started out to find a shortcut from the editorial offices to the pressroom, some four floors below, and eventually wound up in a black maze, literally unable to retrace their steps. They stood there and hollered for help until a small, gray Times employee came along and, completely unperturbed, led them back to the city room.
The labyrinth, which would have driven any intelligent American laboratory guinea pig insane, was some protection, though, from the thousands of screwballs who tried to get up to the office. Some of the Belgian bicyclists who wanted to insert ads in the paper, the refugee Poles who wanted to find their cousins from Scranton and the soldier with the selfheating bedroll for tired and cold soldiers got to know their ways to the editorial rooms, but thousands more must have given up, discouraged. We never found any parched skeletons, though, on the way out.
The Times got The Stars and Stripes daily printing job by underbidding all the other London papers for the job. It was on a reverse LendLease basis, but they were doing it cheaply. It was almost a gesture of goodwill to their American allies. “Sure we’ll print your little journal for American soldiers,” they said in effect. What they definitely did not understand was that within a year and a half The Stars and Stripes would dwarf the Times’ own circulation and would be published by a highpowered staff from whom “The Thunderer’s” own editors frequently borrowed stories.
It probably was a merciful thing that the Times didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late to stop it. From its venerable presses was coming an American tabloid newspaper, comic strips, pin-up photos of semidressed femininity, black headlines on page one; six days a week, four pages a day except Monday when there were eight and every one of them blatant by Times standards.
That first month of November, 1942, full of bold news for bold American headlines, such as the invasion of North Africa, gave the Times an idea of what it was going to be like. Before December, every newspaper in Fleet Street was sending a messenger boy to wait at the Times’ pressroom, not for a copy of the Thunderer, but for The Stars and Stripes. So, too, the American news agencies. The British press picked up leads on stories, and frequently stories intact, albeit injecting into them the unique style of London journalism.
The Stars and Stripes was particularly proud of its roundup on the day’s bombing