Session: 1234567891011121314151617         Page 12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940 of 824

chicken?

I exaggerated a little bit in that one of the good things about working for the Herald Tribune versus the Times was that you would get three assignments a day, whereas the guy at the Times got one. Now they weren't very big assignments but they were--yes, my first month at the Tribune was in one of those shacks--do you know what a shack is? I think they still have them but maybe they don't, but they used to. They'd have a shack in Harlem, and a shack in the Bronx, and a shack in Brooklyn, and a shack in Queens, and a shack in Midtown. The shack was essentially to cover police activities and you had a short wave radio in there that would be transmitting police news. When you heard a certain signal or a certain command, you knew it was a story worth going after. There I learned about the importance of geography in life, namely, if a lady had her purse pickpocketed on Park and 57th, that was worth a story; if three men got killed in Harlem, don't bother.

You say you learned this at the Tribune?

In the shacks, listening in, because, most of the people in the shacks were old men, were broken down reporters. Then they would also educate kid reporters like me by sending them out to the shacks for a month to learn how--one of the things good about it, you learned the geography of New York and how to get around.

Do you think that those reporters who were teaching you that were