Are you okay, Archie?
I sometimes wonder what I’m doing there, Ferguson said, but I think I’m all right, still feeling my way for now, more or less okay, more or less happy with the job, but one thing is clear, one thing you can be absolutely certain about: I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in Rochester, New York.
THREE-ALARM FIRES. THE twentieth anniversary of an unsolved murder case. Anti-war activity at the local colleges and universities. The breakup of a ring of dog snatchers. A fatal traffic accident on Park Avenue. The establishment of a new tenant association in the black neighborhoods on the west side of town. For five months Ferguson toiled as a lowly cub reporter under the suspicious gaze of Joe Dunlap, and then McManus pulled him off the city beat and handed him something big. Apparently, Ferguson had passed the test. Not that he had ever known the precise nature of the test or by what standards McManus had been judging him, but however it had happened, one could only conclude that the boss now felt he had graduated to the next level.
On the morning after Christmas, McManus summoned Ferguson to his office and told him about a thought that had been turning around in his mind lately. The sixties were just about done, he said, there was less than a week to go before the big ball dropped, and what did Ferguson think about writing a series of articles on the past ten years and how they had affected American life? Not a chronological approach, not a time-line summary of major events, but something more substantial than that, a sequence of twenty-five-hundred-word stories on various pertinent subjects, the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the growth of the counterculture, developments in art, music, literature, and film, the space program, the contrasting tonalities among the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, the nightmare assassinations of prominent public figures, racial conflict and the burning ghettos of American cities, sports, fashion, television, the rise and fall of the New Left, the fall and rise of right-wing Republicanism and hard-hat anger, the evolution of the Black Power movement and the revolution of the Pill, everything from politics to rock and roll to changes in the American vernacular, the portrait of a decade so dense with tumult that it had given the country both Malcolm X and George Wallace, The Sound of Music and Jimi Hendrix, the Berrigan brothers and Ronald Reagan. No, it wouldn’t be the usual kind of reportage, McManus continued, it would be a look back, a way of reminding Times-Union readers where they had been ten years ago and where they were now. That was one of the advantages of working for an afternoon paper. More leeway, more time to dig around and investigate, more opportunities to run feature-length stories. But it couldn’t be just a dry rehash. He wasn’t looking for an academic history but articles with some bite to them, and for every book and back-issue magazine Ferguson read for his research, McManus wanted him to talk to five people. If he couldn’t get hold of Muhammad Ali, then he should track down his trainer and cornerman, Angelo Dundee, and if he couldn’t get through to Andy Warhol, then he should call Roy Lichtenstein or Leo Castelli. Primary sources. The ones who did the doing or were close by when something happened. Was he making himself clear?
Yes, he was making himself clear.
And what did Ferguson think?
I’m all for it, Ferguson said. But how many pieces do you want, and how long do I have to write them?
About eight or ten, I would imagine. And roughly two weeks to write each one, give or take. Is that enough?
If I give up sleeping for a while, I suppose it will be. Do I hand them in to Mr. Dunlap?
No, you’re finished with Dunlap. You’ll be working directly with me on this.
And where and how do I begin?
Go back to your desk and come up with fifteen or twenty ideas. Subjects, titles, musings, whatever seems most urgent to you, and then we’ll figure out an overall plan.
I can’t tell you how much this means to me.
It’s a job for a young person, Archie, and you’re the youngest one I have. Let’s see what happens.
Ferguson put everything he had into the articles because his entire future at the paper depended on them. He wrote and rewrote, he whipped through more than a hundred books and close to a thousand magazines and newspapers, and not only did he talk on the phone to Angelo Dundee, Roy Lichtenstein, and Leo Castelli but to dozens of other people as well, assembling a chorus of voices to accompany the texts he wrote on the good-old-bad-old days of recently vanished yore, eight twenty-five-hundred-word stories that covered politics, presidents, and the pandemonium of social dissent, along with excursions into the music of John Berryman’s Dream Songs, the slow-motion massacre at the end of Bonnie and Clyde, and the spectacle of half a million American children dancing in the mud one weekend on a farm in New York State just two hundred and fifty miles south of Rochester. By and large, McManus was satisfied with the results and edited his work only lightly, which was the most gratifying part of the exercise for Ferguson, but the boss was also pleased that the articles elicited scores of letters from the public, most of them positive, with comments such as “A big thanks to A. I. Ferguson for leading us on a walk down Memory Lane,” but with a fair share of negative comments as well, attacks on Ferguson’s “pinko views of our great country” that stung a little, he had to admit, even though he had been expecting worse. What he hadn’t been expecting was how much hostility he would feel from some of the young reporters on the staff, but that was how the game worked, he supposed, every man for himself in the scrum to grab the ball, and as Nancy pointed out each time he published another piece, their resentment only proved how well he was doing his job.
There were supposed to be ten articles in the series, but Ferguson had to stop just as he was preparing to tackle the ninth one (on long hair, miniskirts, love beads, and white leather boots — the novelties of mid- and late-sixties fashion) when another hammer blow was delivered from beyond. The anti-war movement had been relatively quiet in recent months. The gradual withdrawal of American troops, the so-called Vietnamization of the war, and the new draft lottery system had all contributed to the lull in activity, but then, in the final days of April 1970, Nixon and Kissinger abruptly expanded the war by invading Cambodia. American opinion was still divided down the middle, roughly half for and half against, which meant that half the country supported the action, but the other half, the ones who had been marching against the war for the past five years, saw this strategic incursion as the end of all hope. They took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, massive demonstrations were organized on college campuses, and on one of those campuses in Ohio, nervous, badly trained young National Guardsmen fired live ammunition at the students, a three-second fusillade that wound up killing four and wounding nine, and so horrified were most Americans by what happened at Kent State that they spontaneously opened their mouths and sent forth a collective howl that spread across the entire land. Early the next morning, May fifth, McManus dispatched Ferguson and his photo partner Tom Gianelli to the University of Buffalo to report on the demonstrations there, and suddenly he was no longer investigating the recent past but living in the Now again.
The school had gone through weeks of fractious conflict in late February and early March, but even the more subdued eruption after Kent State was much wilder than anything Ferguson had seen at Columbia, especially on the second day he was there, a wintry Buffalo day in mid-spring, with snow on the ground and ice winds blasting in off Lake Erie. No buildings were occupied, but the atmosphere was more charged and potentially more dangerous as close to two thousand students and professors were attacked by helmeted riot police carrying guns, clubs, and tear-gas rifles. Rocks were thrown, bricks were thrown, the windows of police cars and university buildings were smashed, heads and bodies were smashed, and once again Ferguson found himself dead center between two warring mobs, but it was scarier this time because the Buffalo students were more willing to fight than the Columbia students had been, some of them so incensed and out of control that Ferguson felt they might have been willing to die. Whether he was a journalist or not, he was just as exposed as they were, and much as he had been swept up into it two years earlier with the blows to his head and hand, this time he was teargassed along with everyone else, and as he pressed a wet handkerchief against his stinging eyes and vomited his lunch onto the pavement, Gianelli took hold of his arm and pulled him away to look for a spot where the air would be more breathable, and a couple of minutes later, when they had come to the corner of Main Street and Minnesota Avenue just off campus, Ferguson removed the wet handkerchief from his face, opened his eyes, and saw a young man throw a brick through the window of a bank.