Mike Aronson asked him why he was talking to them and not to anyone from the School of Journalism, or was he planning to stop in there, too?
Because, McManus said, the experience gained from four years of work at the Spectator is more valuable than one year in a graduate program. The story you covered last spring was a big, complicated business, one of the biggest college stories in years, and every one of you sitting at this table did a good job, in some cases a remarkable job. You’ve been through the fire, you’ve all been tested, and I know what I’ll be getting if any of you chooses to join up.
Then Branch raised the far more important issue of the New York Times. What did McManus think of their reporting about Columbia last spring, and why would any of them ever want to work for the mainstream press when all they did was print lies?
They broke the rules, McManus said, and I’m just as angry about it as you are, Mr. Branch. What they did bordered on the monstrous, the unforgivable.
Much later, when Ferguson had a chance to reflect on what happened that afternoon, to think about why he did what he did and to ask himself what the consequences of not doing it would have been or not have been, he understood that everything turned on the word monstrous. A lesser, more prudent man would have said irresponsible, or shoddy, or disappointing, none of which would have had the smallest effect on Ferguson, only monstrous carried the full force of the indignation he had been walking around with for the past months, an indignation that was apparently shared by McManus, and if the two of them felt the same way about that one thing, then they must have felt the same way about other things as well, and if Ferguson still had any interest in working for a daily paper or in finding out whether journalism was the solution for him or not, then perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to brave the winds of the frozen north and accept the offer from McManus. It was only a job, after all. If it didn’t work out, he could always move on and try his hand at something else.
Count me in, Ferguson said. I think I’m willing to give it a shot.
There were no other takers. One by one Ferguson’s friends all bowed out, one by one they all shook McManus’s hand and said good-bye, and then it was just the two of them, Ferguson and his future boss, and because McManus’s plane wasn’t scheduled to leave until seven o’clock, Ferguson decided to cut his class on English Romantic poetry and suggested they walk across the street to the West End, where they could continue the conversation in more pleasant surroundings.
They found a spot in one of the front booths, ordered two bottles of Guinness, and after some brief words about Columbia then and Columbia now, McManus started to fill him in on the geography of the place where he would be going, talking with refreshing bluntness about the dying world of northwestern New York, the only part of the country where the population was going down, he said, nowhere more drastically than in Buffalo, which had lost nearly one hundred thousand people in the past decade, once glorious Buffalo, as he put it, not without a touch of mock blarney in his voice, the jewel of the old canal and shipping culture, now a half-empty wasteland of ruined and abandoned factories, derelict houses, boarded-up, caved-in structures, a bombed-out city never touched by bombs or war, and then, moving beyond dismal Buffalo, he took Ferguson on a short tour of some of the other cities in the region, choosing his epithets carefully as he touched on sad-sack Syracuse, anemic Elmira, ugly Utica, hapless Binghamton, and ragged Rome, which had never been the capital of any empire.
You make it sound so … so enticing, Ferguson said. But what about Rochester?
Rochester was a bit different, McManus said, a better brand of decline, a place that was falling more slowly than the others, and therefore still more or less solid, at least for now. A city of three hundred thousand in a metropolitan area of about one point two million, which accounted for the Times-Union’s circulation of two hundred and fifty thousand copies per day. A minor league town, of course, but not a two-bit minor league town, with the Triple-A Red Wings feeding the Baltimore Orioles a high-protein diet of Boog Powells, Jim Palmers, and Paul Blairs, home of Eastman Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, Xerox, and the indispensable French’s mustard, companion to every American hot dog since 1904, which made it a city where most people had jobs in businesses that weren’t about to head down south or go abroad. On the other hand, in spite of the sailboats and country clubs, the splendid film archive and decent philharmonic orchestra, the good university and even better music school, which was one of the best in the world, there were the gambling, prostitution, and extortion rackets controlled by Frank Valenti and the Mob as well as vast zones of poverty and crime, the rough black slums that housed fifteen to twenty percent of the population, many of those people struggling or out of work or doing drugs, and in case Ferguson had forgotten (Ferguson hadn’t forgotten), there had been the three days of rioting in the summer of 1964, one week after the riots in Harlem, three dead, two hundred stores looted and damaged, a thousand arrests, and then Rockefeller had called in the National Guard to put an end to it, the first time on record that the Guard had breached the walls of a northern city.
At that point, Ferguson mentioned Newark, Newark in the summer of 1967, and how it had felt to stand with his mother on Springfield Avenue during the night of the broken glass.
So you know what I’m talking about, McManus said.
I’m afraid so, Ferguson replied.
Chilly springs, McManus continued, lovely summers, tolerable autumns, brutal winters. You’ll see George Eastman’s name everywhere you turn, but remember that Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony lived in Rochester, too, and even Emma Goldman put in time there organizing sweatshop workers at the end of the last century. Also — and this is very important — whenever you’re in a down mood and feel you might want to kill yourself, go for a walk in Mount Hope. It’s one of the biggest and oldest public cemeteries anywhere in America and still the most beautiful spot in the city. I often go there myself, especially when I have an urge to think deep thoughts and smoke long, fat cigars. It never fails to clarify and sometimes even illuminate. The resting ground of three hundred thousand departed souls.
Three hundred thousand people above ground in Rochester, Ferguson said, and three hundred thousand below. What our good friend might have called fearful symmetry.
Or the marriage of heaven and hell.
So began the first conversation between Ferguson and Carl McManus, the warm-up to the two hours they spent together at the West End discussing the kinds of stories he would be writing for the paper, the initiation period of local reportage that would eventually lead to state and national events if he panned out, which McManus thankfully seemed to accept as a foregone conclusion, the salary he would be given to start with (low, but not to the point of dire struggle or heart-wrenching misery), detailed information about the staff and the running of the paper, and the more they talked the more pleased Ferguson became with the decision he had made, his instinctive count me in as an answer to the word monstrous, and now that he was getting to know McManus a little bit, he understood he would learn much by working for this man, that unlikely Rochester was in fact a good and plausible move, and as he held up his left hand and showed it to McManus (who was the first stranger who had ever asked him how he had lost his fingers), he said: I’m hoping this keeps the draft board off my back so I can take the job.