catcall

The New York Times Go By Fast

My grandfather, Stephen Hills, is 91 years old and is one of the most interesting people I know. He has lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn his entire life and still resides in the same apartment he has lived in for the last 50 plus years that overlooks Owls Head Park and has a view of the Statue of Liberty.

He believes in cocktail hour 7 days a week, dressing WELL (In case you weren't aware, mixing plaids and stripes is OK when you are as cool as he is), he truly -- i KNOW what you are about to say so just don't, Surgeon Generals -- makes smoking a cigarette look debonnaire and delicious in that 1950's Sinatra/Rat Pack way, and he tells a story better than anyone I know.

He is the only person who calls me Kate.

He was interviewed by The New York Times today with 3 other gentlemen on the 50th anniversary of the closing of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. It was founded in 1841 and closed it's doors in 1955. My grandfather joined The Eagle in 1937 as a reporter, having worked at The Brooklyn Times-Union as a clerk, and eventually became the Eagle's Sunday editor.

Excerpt from the article:

The Eagle's coverage included the Civil War, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge and the consolidation in 1898 of Brooklyn, along with other boroughs,into the city that is now New York. The paper won four Pulitzer Prizes and even had Walt Whitman for an editor in the 1840's. In 1941, an Eagle headline immortalized a credo of Dodger fans, "Wait 'til Next Year."

The men recalled that in the Eagle's newsroom at 24 Johnson Street, the first edition would go out at 10:30 each morning, full of overnight news. The day's final edition would be finished around dinnertime, shortly after the horse racing results were telegraphed in from the local tracks.

"We'd look over the morass of wire copy and daily stories, and when we saw a spark of Brooklyn in any of them, we'd jump on it," Mr. Frigand recalled. "Then we'd write the stories on the fly and hopefully beat The World-Telegram and The Journal American to the punch. After you wrote the first part, a copy boy would pull it out of your typewriter and bring it back printed on a page proof before you even finished the rest of the story."

They recalled daily lunch hours that doubled as drinking sessions.

"Drink was part of a man's diet in those days," Mr. Hochman said. "We had a copy editor who always hid his raises from his wife so he could spend the money at the bar."

They pulled out old copies of The Eagle, the broadsheet pages yellowed and crumbling. A banner headline across the top of the front of the Dec. 11, 1941, paper declared: "Yank Bombers Sink 3 Jap Warships." The paper of Sept. 1, 1939 - the "8 Star Sports Complete Edition" - had a huge "WAR!" headline, each letter as big as a dinner plate.

"That was woodblock type," Mr. Hills recalled. "We didn't have any iron type that big."

As I look around where I work right now, I wonder: in 61 years, who will I be sitting next to while I get interviewed about the old days? What will I say?


Love you Papa. - Kate.

posted by gracegow @ 8:13 PM