Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [19]
Just as the Times became a little proud of the army paper it housed, so the army paper was proud of the Times. The staff learned the Times folklore complete through constant contact with the Thunderer’s staff in the building—this was after Times editors decided we’d been there long enough for them to stop bowing stiffly from the waist when we passed in the corridors—and in the Printing House Square pub, Alf Storey’s Lamb and Lark. There was a great store of Times stories, and probably the one the S&S liked best was that of the man with the little black bag.
When a new managing director was appointed by the Times board of directors, he started a thorough check through the books and offices of every branch of the organization. The new manager noticed an obscure little man in an oversized overcoat and carrying a little black satchel entering the building one Friday and made a mental note to find out who he was. The following Friday he saw the little man again and this time started asking who he was. The old-timers admitted they had seen the little man for years, but no one knew exactly who he was or what he did. He came Friday nights, carrying his black satchel, and left Monday mornings.
Over the weekend, the manager was checking some ledgers and came upon a small but inexplicable item. He asked one of the bookkeepers about it and was told the money went for meals brought in Saturday and Sunday from a small restaurant around the corner; the meals went to the little man who appeared each Friday night at the office.
On the third weekend, the manager searched through the dozens of little offices off the rabbit warren of corridors. Beyond one door he found the little man, with a little lunch spread out before him, his little black satchel at his side.
The little man was from the Bank of England. In the little black satchel he had five thousand pounds in cash.
Back at the turn of the century, along about the time of the Boer War, the Times wanted to send a man off to cover a big story on the Continent in a rush assignment. He had to leave on a Saturday afternoon, but there were no boats to the Continent that day because of a storm. Charter a boat, ordered the editor. The business office ruefully replied that there wasn’t enough money in the place, it had been sent to the bank in the morning.
To prevent that ever happening again, the Times had asked that a representative of the Bank of England be on hand Friday evenings and stay until Monday mornings with five thousand pounds in cash.
Long afterward, when the Times had its own boats and had fullymanned bureaus on the Continent, no one had bothered to countermand the order, and the little man was still coming every Friday evening.
Stately Times, whose subscribers will doubt the world’s end until they read it in your pages, institution of British dignity with morals like the collars of your directors, you were very kind; and if you were an old gaffer, the people who came to your house to work were brats, and you were very indulgent. You nodded and smiled when the people in Fleet Street got to calling your musty, cobblestoned old courtyard “Stars and Stripes Square,” instead of the Printing House name it had borne so long. You even asked one of the brashest of the Americans to write book reviews for that book review section which is the doubledistilled synthesis of Times conservatism and backed him up when he lampooned stuffed shirts. You gathered up the pieces when they were broken and you set the precedent for all the rest to come. As it was in the beginning, so always was The Stars and Stripes, and so the