Memories of the Daily News, a Giant Gravely Diminished

The Lobby

You could feel the rumble of power, all through the building.

The New York Daily News had the highest circulation in a country that used to read newspapers. 

I was privileged to work there two summers – 1956 and 1957 – as a copy boy, doing lowly tasks like fetching a liverwurst sandwich and a container of beer for the sports editor, Charlie Hoerter.

Every so often, he would lurch back into the department at 9 or 10 PM and fire me or some other hapless wage slave.

“He won’t remember,” my mentors told me, and they were right.

The building quivered and shook in the evening, as the presses emitted 2-million copies and dropped them onto powerful trucks idling in the bays. Those trucks would speed them out all over the Northeast, put them on trains, delivering salty murder tales and sassy sports articles and snide editorials aimed at bleeding-heart liberals (like me, and my father, who moonlighted a few nights a week in Sports.)

We didn’t like the editorial slant but we lived for inside stuff on our Brooklyn Dodgers, by Dick Young, one of the best baseball writers I have ever read. Dick liked my father, and used to talk respectfully to me, a 17-year-old who asked questions, and later he welcomed me to onto the beat.

The Daily News had platoons of world-wise reporters, including pioneer women like Kitty Hanson, who could absolutely make my day by sashaying from the elevator to the news room in a summer dress. Oh, my.

Every afternoon, just before 3 PM, I would enter through the vast, high lobby, with its gigantic globe rotating in the middle. Tourists were respectfully quiet but not the printers or copy editors, planning a foray to the Old Seidelburg at 41st and Third.

One of the better sports copy editors would go there every time the Milwaukee Braves got to town, to fight with Johnny Logan, the Braves’ shortstop. It was their little ritual.

Between the late '50s and early '70s, the Daily News morphed into one damn good New York tabloid, along with New York Newsday. I know because I was a metro reporter for the Times from ‘73 to ‘76, trying to match wits with Daily News and New York Newsday reporters who knew all about crime and schools and City Hall and transit.

I have told the story of the best newspaper lead I ever read, three times as good as mine: 

https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/manafort-and-gates-may-have-lucked-out

When the federal government chose to stiff New York during a financial crisis, an editor named William J. Brink (patriarch to other newspaper people named Bill Brink) wrote the best headline any of us will ever see: 

FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/02/nyregion/william-j-brink-editor-is-dead-at-89-credited-with-vivid-headline.html

To our chagrin, people stopped reading newspapers when they could convince themselves they were learning something from comedians on late-night tv or underwear guys typing blogs in their basements (like me these days.) The Daily News dwindled, with a smaller staff but a keen eye for NYC phonies and buffoons who somehow fooled the people Out There.
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Now the Daily News hangs on in some anonymous skyscraper, owned by a company called Tronc, a name that says everything about the kind of person who would own it. (Tronc!!! It sounds like a jackass, braying.)

On Monday, this Tronc “laid off” half the newsroom. I know a lot of good people who could swear they have been “fired.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/business/media/tronc-daily-news-layoffs.html

I also know some good people who are still working for the New York Daily News, as long as Tronc feels like it. 
The old building on East 42 St. still has the globe, and the name, but the trucks don’t rumble anymore. We have all lost something.
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(For more on the Daily News lobby, please see)
https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/26867

Jackie Robinson and Dick Young: There were giants on the earth those days