wire.

Photo by Andy Shillabeer. Courtesy of Robert M. Smith.

If you can talk about cabbages and kings, why not typewriters with wings?

Well, Alice, the New York Times recently did just that. But would you believe the Times got it wrong?

On page three under the heading “In Times Past” the curator of the Museum at The Times described what he called a Patch of Pride. The piece has a photo of a round white patch with a black typewriter with wings in the center. The words The New York Times appear around the top and Rewrite at the bottom.

The Timespiece reports that “there was such esprit de corps on the rewrite bank” in 1968… that Lawrence Van Gelder, who was then on rewrite, designed the four-inch patch. In those days, the article says the rewrite men “wore the patch on racing drivers’ jackets.”

Esprit de corps?

Not hardly, Alice. Not even through the looking-glass.

It was a spring evening in 1968 when we trooped out, the whole rewrite bank, and entered the adjacent men’s room. There were about eight of us.

We all added to our evening ensemble, re-combed our hair, checked ourselves in the mirror, and giggled.

Satisfied, we marched out of the men’s room. All right, sauntered.

We were all wearing light blue Italian racing jackets, with a prominent yellow zipper gliding from bottom left to top right. It had the winged patch over the heart.

The patches had been custom made, in New York, I think. The 100%-cotton jackets were indeed Italian. The label on mine says Sala-Sport in Milan.

A photo of the jacket-cum-patch appears with this article, but middle-age girth made me transfer my patch from the racing jacket to another jacket, so a bit of digital legerdemain has been involved.

We took our seats in the Rewrite rows at the front of the newsroom and waited, but not for long. There was a steely cohesion among us, the racing-jacket-clad cadre.

The newsroom immediately went dead quiet.

My colleagues on rewrite were a motley group. I was lusting to get off rewrite to be a “real reporter.” My friend, Long John (McCandlish) Phillips, who exposed a Jewish Klansman, was the poet of prose. Mike Kaufman, long hair always slicked back and mustache always groomed, would beat feverishly at his poor typewriter.

Larry Van Gelder was a Columbia Law graduate who seemed so entirely indifferent to his vocational world that I thought he needed a passport to get into the newsroom. And then there was a wafer-thin hippie with dark ringlets whose name slips my mind but whose only connection with rewrite seemed to be the standard swivel chair he occupied in the bank. He spent most of his time creating rubberstamps with modish sayings.

As we sat there, the Metropolitan Editor, A. M. (Abe) Rosenthal finally stepped cautiously out of his office. He strode with evident curiosity more than 40 feet toward the rewrite bank.

What does it mean? Rosenthal asked.

We cringed. It was not likely that the Times would fire the whole rewrite bank for wearing racing jackets, right, Alice?

Almost every night it turned out to be our job to save the paper, or, at least, one of its reporters. On occasion we re-wrote prose so mangled it took arc welding to straighten it out. We wrote stories from telephone notes that may have made sense in the dim coziness of the bar where they were dictated but made no sense in the vivid light of the newsroom. Phone booths seemed to result routinely in the strangulation of syntax.

We wrote stories that led the paper from the mumblings or ravings of reporters on the phone and from materials in the morgue.

If the paper had a posterior, we routinely rescued it.

So, Alice, what in the world was the problem?

Ultimately, the stocky, dark-haired Kaufman rose to respond to Rosenthal.

Mike went on to be a foreign correspondent in Africa, India, and Poland. He had a bottomless well of joy and energy. He had been born in Paris of Polish-Jewish refugees.

Mike marched without apparent fear far enough toward Rosenthal so that, sitting in our seats with jackets zipped, even though we strained, we couldn’t quite hear the conversation.

To a man, we felt unappreciated for our nightly accomplishments. Raises were not forthcoming, nor were reporting assignments that might just get us off the rewrite bank for fresh air and observation.

We were protesting. Quietly protesting.

Kaufman told Rosenthal that.

Rosenthal looked at Mike for a long moment.

He said nothing, but then turned and walked back to his office.

My own relief – – physical and psychological – – had come earlier that evening, as it did nearly each evening, with my last shriek of “copy” so a copy boy – they were all boys — would pick up the page I had just yanked from my typewriter. Breath had become possible again.

When Rosenthal headed doggedly back to his large office, I unzipped the racing jacket and headed, finally, for dinner. I don’t remember where I went that night. Maybe for a hot dog with one of my colleagues at Nathan’s in Times Square. Or a Brazilian dinner with Long John.

For sure, I did not wear my new blue-and-yellow jacket.

So, Alice, maybe you can see us, if you look very, very closely, at the small, cracked corner of the looking-glass.

But, Alice, don’t believe what they’re saying. We were protesters. Stylish protesters. That winged typewriter poised to leap off the baby blue jacket at any moment was not a patch of pride. It was not like the US Army’s Combat Infantry Badge.

It was a patch of protest, and should be so recorded in the Museum on the 15th floor of the Times.

The Timescalls the patch an artifact.Somehow, Alice, I resent that on behalf of the elegant patch. On the other hand, I would not mind if the Timescalled me an artifact. At this point, that may be true.

Friends press me for details.

Who conceived of the patch?

I don’t know.

I remember our meeting and discussing the project and its execution. Some of us sat in the swivel chairs and turned them to face the rest of us. We had a very high-spirited meeting of the group. But memory does not allow me to credit the architect of the protest and the designer of the jacket. I do remember somebody volunteering to get the jackets from Italy and somebody else roughing out the typewriter design.

And these journalistic friends press for still more: Did the patch have any effect?

No, the wings didn’t work. We didn’t get raises. Or recognition. Or even manage to escape the Timesbuilding.

Too bad, they say, in a commiserating Greek chorus.

Then, inevitably, being good journalists, they ask how long we wore the jackets.

The artifacts were on display for – – one night. They didn’t even make it to Nathan’s.

One other important thing should be recorded in the Times Museum (closed to all but the paper’s employees) is that, even in our supersonically generated narratives, we rewritemen did not follow the diagonal tilt of our zippers. We unfailingly reported the story straight down the middle.

There you have it, Alice. We did advocacy in life, but not in reporting the news.

Much of this article is taken from Smith’s book, Suppressed: Confessions of a Former New York Times Washington Correspondent.

The Times has never publicly investigated why it did not use the Watergate information.

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