FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14
It was another lonely Friday night in the newsroom of the Bay Shore Beacon, and Douglas Sachman was waiting for someone to die.
Doug worked three to midnight, the graveyard shift, every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Like most small dailies, the Beacon published six days a week, Mondays through Saturdays. On weekdays, the paper came out in the afternoon. On Saturday, it was published in the morning so readers would have the entire day to shop the ads. By Friday afternoon, the news staff had wrapped up the Saturday morning edition and would return early Monday to prepare that day’s afternoon edition.
But a reporter and an editor were needed to work the weekend graveyard shifts because Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights were the most common times for people to die, both from natural and unnatural causes. This was an article of faith among editors and reporters, just like it was an article of faith that deaths, natural or unnatural, were the lifeblood of the newspaper game.
Doug worked the graveyard shifts because he was the newest reporter at the Beacon. He worked them with Alfred Hachadourian, the assistant editor. Hach was sixty-four and treated Doug like a grandson. Hach had been the city editor at the Yonkers Herald but was canned six years ago in a cost-cutting move. After a year looking for work, Hach heard the Beacon was hiring and took a steep pay cut to get the assistant editor’s job, on the theory that a move to Bay Shore was better than a move to the county poorhouse.
Doug had plenty of time to think during his graveyard shifts. He often dwelled on how much better his life would be if he’d been born a few years earlier than 1906. Not too many years earlier, certainly not nine or ten years earlier, because then he might have died in a tangle of barbed wire somewhere in Europe. But 1904 would have been good because now he might be working for The Boston Globe or The New York Times instead of the boring Bay Shore Beacon on Long Island, New York.
Doug wanted to be a newspaperman ever since his junior year at Tufts College, when he was deputy editor of the student newspaper and covered the electrocution of Sacco and Vanzetti at Charlestown State Prison. Well, to hell with Sacco and Vanzetti. And to hell with everything else that happened last year, like Babe Ruth hitting sixty homers and Jack Dempsey losing his boxing title and Mae West going to jail for obscenity. And to hell with the Mississippi flood that drowned five hundred people and the lunatic school bomber who killed those thirty-eight little kids in Michigan. And most of all, to hell with Charles “Lucky” Lindbergh for flying solo across the Atlantic in the greatest news story of the entire twentieth century.
Why did all those cosmic events have to happen in one single year, 1927, the year before he graduated from Tufts? In 1927, every newspaperman in America thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Meanwhile, thousands of people who never considered the newspaper game suddenly decided being a reporter would be the best damn job in the world. Today, every half-decent newspaper in America was full-up with reporters. And this left Doug Sachman earning a paltry twenty-two dollars a week at this crappy newspaper and waiting for someone in Bay Shore to die.
Of course, Doug’s business card didn’t say Douglas Sachman, Bay Shore Beacon Death Reporter. It said Douglas Sachman, Bay Shore Beacon General Assignment Reporter. But it could have said Death Reporter because even when he wasn’t working graveyard, Doug mostly wrote only two types of stories: obituaries and fatal car crashes.
For some reason, the citizens of Bay Shore were killing each other at a prodigious rate with their cars. People were also dying from falling off boats, being struck by trains, getting beaten to death in the local insane asylum, and in one instance falling into the town’s open garbage burning pit. But mainly car crashes were killing off the community’s residents. Doug wrote about fatal car crashes every week. Autoist Is Crushed to Death Against Own Car as He Is Repairing Tire was his first car death story. Hit-Run Driver Kills Bicyclist, 14, on Sunrise Hwy was one of his latest.
Doug didn’t recall so many fatal car crashes in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where he grew up. Part of the problem was traffic lights. Bay Shore had none, and the town council kept denying urgent requests from worried residents to install them. The council’s position was that Bay Shore was too small for traffic lights. From the Beacon’s office at the heart of Main Street, it was a mere half mile to Southside Hospital at the eastern end of Bay Shore and the same distance in the other direction to the western end of Main Street. A half-mile to the south was the Great South Bay, and a mile north was Sunrise Highway, the hamlet’s northern boundary. In Bay Shore, people walked to work, shop, and visit friends. But there were more drivers on the roads these days, and cars were getting faster and larger. It was a combination that justified having a reporter at the Beacon assigned full-time to the death beat.
Being the death reporter at the Bay Shore Beacon was not Doug’s plan when he decided he wanted to be a newspaperman. But the worst part was he hadn’t even gotten this job at the Beacon on his merit. No, he got this job because his uncle, Earl Touhey, called in a favor with the Beacon’s publisher. Earl, who wasn’t even his real uncle but his mother’s sister’s brother-in-law, owned the Ford dealership in Bay Shore and was one of the Beacon’s largest advertisers.
Even with Uncle Earl’s help, Doug almost didn’t get the job. You had to pass a typing test to get a reporter’s job at the Beacon, but Doug had made it through four years of college without learning to type. At Tufts, typing was considered suitable for Gibbs School girls in Boston who were training to be secretaries, but not for the Tufts men in Somerville who were preparing to be their bosses.
Doug learned about the typing test from Uncle Earl a few weeks before graduation. “There’s a job for you here at the Beacon,” Earl said via long distance. “But you have to type twenty words a minute. You can do that, right, bud?” Doug assured him he could, so he bought a second-hand typewriter and a book on how to type. To practice, he typed the final papers for each of his fraternity brothers in their senior English seminar, but it wasn’t enough. He managed a top speed of only fifteen words a minute and had to ask the pretty girl giving him the test for three tries. But after the last one he smiled at her and told her how much he wanted the job, and she boosted his score to twenty.
Doug wasn’t sure that the girl, who he soon learned was Casey Mowbray, the publisher’s assistant, did him a favor. It allowed him to keep his job at the Beacon, but it condemned him to the death beat and weekend graveyard shifts. And the only thing worse than writing obituaries and articles about fatal car crashes was writing Home News items.
At the Bay Shore Beacon, anyone could call the paper and get anything about their lives published in the paper’s Home News section, which was the best-read page in the newspaper after obits. During the week, the Society Desk handled Home News, but on weekends Doug took the calls. The items he handled today were typical:
Born to Mr. and Mrs. Anton Graybosch of Fifth Avenue on Tuesday at Southside Hospital, a baby boy. Friends of Mr. and Mrs. Graybosch are showering the proud parents with their sincere good wishes over the event.
Mrs. J. Krause of Fourth Avenue and Mrs. Ann Pollard of New York City left Monday for a trip to Canada. They will visit Montreal, Quebec, the Thousand Islands, and other points of interest.
Miss L. Sweeney of Fourth Avenue is recuperating at Southside Hospital after an operation for appendicitis.
Mr. and Mrs. William Robbins and son Robert of South Bay Shore Avenue cruised to Sag Harbor last weekend in their new yacht the “Bob.” They entertained a number of friends aboard the boat.
Brian Jr., son of Brian and Ellen Long of First Avenue, will celebrate his eleventh birthday on Wednesday with a party for nine of his friends.
Doug hated writing Home News items. No question, his talents were unappreciated at the Bay Shore Beacon.
Doug’s thoughts were interrupted by Al Hachadourian. “Hey, Doug,” Hach said, “I just got a call from a reader. Bad car crash on Windsor Avenue, north of the tracks.”
“Deadline was an hour ago, Hach. And it’s almost time to go home.”
“I know, but stop at the Third Precinct before you come in tomorrow. If it’s standard Police Blotter stuff you can write it up. Otherwise we’ll save it for the Monday morning crew.”