Woodstock II. The flower children and the heavies. And behold how quickly the day hath melted into night.
Bobby Seale strapped to a chair with a gag in his mouth by order of Judge Julius Hoffman as the original Eight were turned into the Seven.
The Weathermen launching a kamikaze attack against two thousand Chicago cops during the Days of Rage in October, Ferguson’s old school pals girded in football helmets and goggles, jockstraps and cups bulging on the outside of their pants, poised to do battle with chains, pipes, and clubs. Six of them were shot, hundreds were carted off in paddy wagons. To what end? “To bring the war home,” they shouted. But since when had the war ever not been at home?
Four days after that: Vietnam Moratorium Day. Millions of Americans said yes, and for twenty-four hours nearly everything in America stopped.
One month to the day after the Day: Seven hundred and fifty thousand people marched on Washington to end the war, the largest political demonstration ever seen in the New World. Nixon watched a football game that afternoon and told the country it wouldn’t make any difference.
At the Weathermen gathering that December in Flint, Michigan, Bernardine Dohrn extolled Charles Manson for having killed “those pigs,” meaning the pregnant Sharon Tate and the others who had died with her in the house. One of Ferguson’s old pals from Columbia stood up and said: “We’re against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honky America. We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.”
Then they went into hiding and never appeared in public again.
And there was Ferguson, back in his role as the smallest dot at the center of the smallest circle, no longer surrounded by Columbia and New York but by the Times-Union and Rochester. As far as he could tell, it had been a fairly even trade, and now that he was in the clear (his 4-F notice arrived three days before he started work), the job was his as long as he could prove he deserved it.
There were two dailies in Rochester. Both of them were owned by the Gannett Publishing Company, but each one had a different purpose, a different editorial doctrine, and a different outlook on life. In spite of its name, the morning Democrat and Chronicle was solidly Republican and pro-business, whereas the afternoon Times-Union was more in the liberal camp, especially now that McManus was in charge. Liberal was better than conservative, of course, even if it was finally just another term for middle of the road, which was hardly where Ferguson stood on any political issue of the moment, but for the time being he was content to be where he was, writing stories for McManus and not for the East Village Other, the Rat, or L.N.S., which had gone through such a violent split that it had broken into two separate organizations, the hardline Marxists in New York City and the counterculture dreamers on a farm in western Massachusetts, which was where Marshall Bloom had killed himself, just twenty-five years old and now dead from carbon monoxide poisoning, and with that death Ferguson had begun to lose faith in the closed-off world of far-left journalism, which at times seemed to have gone just as insane as the splinter groups from defunct SDS, and now that the Los Angeles Free Press was publishing a regular column written by Charles Manson, Ferguson wanted no part of that world anymore. He hated the right, he hated the government, but now he hated the false revolution of the far left as well, and if that meant having to work for a middle-of-the-road paper like the Rochester Times-Union, then so be it. He had to start somewhere, and McManus had promised to give him a real chance—if and when he proved himself.
It was a rough initiation. He was put on the city desk, the youngest of several reporters working under a man named Joe Dunlap, who correctly or incorrectly saw Ferguson as McManus’s fair-haired boy, his hotshot Ivy League protégé, the chosen one among the newcomers to the staff, and consequently Dunlap made a point of being hard on Ferguson, for it was the rare article Ferguson handed in to him that was not extensively rewritten, not just the leads and the slant of the stories but often the words themselves, always to the detriment of the piece as a whole, Ferguson felt, making his articles worse rather than better, as if Dunlap’s editorial axe was an instrument not for pruning but for chopping down trees. McManus had warned him about that during their first talk at the West End and had instructed him never to complain. Dunlap was a boot-camp sergeant out to break his spirit, and as a raw buck private Ferguson had to do what he was told, keep his mouth shut, and not allow his spirit to be broken, no matter how many times he would be tempted to punch Dunlap in the face.
Other people were less difficult to work with, some of them downright pleasant in fact, people who little by little began to count as friends, among them Tom Gianelli, a chunky, balding photographer from the Bronx who often went out on stories with Ferguson and could imitate the voices of two dozen Hollywood actors and actresses to near perfection (his Bette Davis was sublime), and Nancy Sperone, a recent graduate from the University of Rochester who had landed a spot on the Women’s Page and was going for an advanced degree in after-hours flirting, which helped get him through the early adjustment period without having to sleep alone every night, and Vic Howser from sports, who was tracking Bobby’s progress with the Orioles and responded no less happily than Ferguson did when Bobby went two for four in his one World Series start against the Mets, and beyond the people he was coming to know and like at the paper there was the paper itself, the big building and the hundreds of employees who worked there every day, editors and movie critics, receptionists and telephone operators, obituary writers and fishing columnists, reporters typing up stories at their desks, copyboys running around from floor to floor, and the huge, on-site printing press down below, cranking out a new paper every morning in time to hit the streets by noon, and despite the grumpy, butchering Dunlap, who had emerged as the second coming of Edward Imhoff, Ferguson enjoyed being part of that complex swarm of bustling bodies and never regretted the decision he had made.
No regrets, but even though Nancy Sperone was an unencumbered single woman, which had not been the case with the tempting but off-limits Margaret O’Mara George, Ferguson knew from the start that she was not the answer. Nevertheless, he went on going out with her and sleeping with her during his first nine months in Rochester, which was the first time in his life he had entered into a less than passionate, off-and-on affair with a woman he was fond of but could never bring himself to love. The native-born Nancy showed him around town by introducing him to one of Rochester’s famous Friday Night Fish Fries, dragged him to a joint called Nick Tahou Hots to indulge in another Rochester dish known as the Garbage Plate (an experience Ferguson swore he would never repeat for as long as he lived), and sat through several old movies with him at the Eastman House archive, among them Bresson’s A Man Escaped and Kazan’s 1945 sob-a-thon A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which induced both of them to shed the requisite oceans of blubbering, nonsensical tears. Nancy was bright and companionable, an earnest reader of books and a talented journalist who had joined the Times-Union as another one of McManus’s new wave of kids, a dark-eyed brunette with short hair and a large, round face (her Little Lulu face, as Nancy called it), a bit on the heavy side, perhaps, but sexy enough to make Ferguson long for her body whenever they were apart for more than a week or ten days. It wasn’t Nancy’s fault that he couldn’t love her, but neither was it Ferguson’s fault that Nancy was looking for a husband and he had no interest in looking for a wife. In mid-December, when he went down to Florida for a short weekend visit with his parents, he understood that he and Nancy were going nowhere, but still he went on seeing her for another four months after he returned, muddling along as previously until Nancy found a new man who wanted to marry her, which was a good thing, Ferguson decided, since all through the months of not being able to love Nancy Sperone there had been the dawning awareness that after one full year and the better part of another year with no Schneiderman in sight, he still hadn’t recovered from losing Amy. He was still mourning her absence—as if hanging on in the aftermath of a divorce, perhaps even a death,
and there was nothing to be done about it except to keep hanging on until he didn’t feel it anymore.
Almost a year had gone by since he had last been with his parents, and now that they had fully settled into the alien world of southern Florida, they had turned into creatures of the sun, tanned and healthy-looking ex-northerners living and working in the Land of No Snow, advocates of long walks on sand-covered patches of earth (his mother) and outdoor tennis every morning from January through December (his father), and yes, Ferguson was glad to see them again, but they had both changed in the gap between visits, and those changes were the first things he noticed when they picked him up at the airport early Friday evening. Not so much his mother, perhaps, who was still rushing around with her photography work at the Herald and liked nothing better than to talk newspaper talk with her son, but she had been trying to quit smoking in the past six months and had put on weight, perhaps ten or twelve pounds, which made her look different somehow, both older and younger at the same time, if such a thing was possible, whereas his father, who was nearing fifty-six and still strong because of his daily tennis routine, nevertheless struck Ferguson as slightly diminished, with grayer, more thinned-out hair and a slight limp when he had to walk for more than fifty or a hundred yards (a pulled muscle, or else permanently aching feet), no longer the numb and silent Dr. Manette toiling away at his workbench but a clerk in the classifieds department at the Herald, a job he professed to enjoy and even love, but it had turned him into a lowly Bob Cratchit, and Ferguson couldn’t help thinking of what a long, slow fall it had been from 3 Brothers Home World to this.
The best day of the Friday-to-Sunday visit was the last day, when they went out for a large, unhurried brunch at Wolfie’s on Collins Avenue, the good smells of fresh onion rolls and smoked fish flooding the room as the three of them ate lox and eggs in honor of Ferguson’s grandmother, whom they talked about at length, along with Ferguson’s grandfather and the now vanished Didi Bryant, but mostly his mother asked him questions about Rochester and the Times-Union, wanting to know everything about everything, and Ferguson told them nearly everything he could, failing to mention his involvement with Nancy Sperone because it probably wouldn’t have sat well with his father, the mere thought of his boy going around with an Italian Catholic girl no doubt would have upset him, leading to some bitter us-versus-them remarks about schvartzes and shiksas (words that Ferguson hated, two of the ugliest words in the Yiddish lexicon), and so he left Nancy out of it and talked about McManus and Dunlap instead, about Bobby George hitting his first big-league home run in Boston last July and now just four months away from becoming a father, about some of the articles he had written and the tawdry, beaten-up apartment where he lived, which led his mother to ask the question all mothers ask their children, whether those children are small, piss-in-the-pants tykes or twenty-two-year-old college graduates:
Are you okay, Archie?
I sometimes wonder what I’m doing there, Ferguson said, but I think I’m all right, still feeling my way for now, more or less okay, more or less happy with the job, but one thing is clear, one thing you can be absolutely certain about: I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in Rochester, New York.
* * *
THREE-ALARM FIRES. THE twentieth anniversary of an unsolved murder case. Anti-war activity at the local colleges and universities. The breakup of a ring of dog snatchers. A fatal traffic accident on Park Avenue. The establishment of a new tenant association in the black neighborhoods on the west side of town. For five months Ferguson toiled as a lowly cub reporter under the suspicious gaze of Joe Dunlap, and then McManus pulled him off the city beat and handed him something big. Apparently, Ferguson had passed the test. Not that he had ever known the precise nature of the test or by what standards McManus had been judging him, but however it had happened, one could only conclude that the boss now felt he had graduated to the next level.
On the morning after Christmas, McManus summoned Ferguson to his office and told him about a thought that had been turning around in his mind lately. The sixties were just about done, he said, there was less than a week to go before the big ball dropped, and what did Ferguson think about writing a series of articles on the past ten years and how they had affected American life? Not a chronological approach, not a time-line summary of major events, but something more substantial than that, a sequence of twenty-five-hundred-word stories on various pertinent subjects, the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the growth of the counterculture, developments in art, music, literature, and film, the space program, the contrasting tonalities among the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, the nightmare assassinations of prominent public figures, racial conflict and the burning ghettos of American cities, sports, fashion, television, the rise and fall of the New Left, the fall and rise of right-wing Republicanism and hard-hat anger, the evolution of the Black Power movement and the revolution of the Pill, everything from politics to rock and roll to changes in the American vernacular, the portrait of a decade so dense with tumult that it had given the country both Malcolm X and George Wallace, The Sound of Music and Jimi Hendrix, the Berrigan brothers and Ronald Reagan. No, it wouldn’t be the usual kind of reportage, McManus continued, it would be a look back, a way of reminding Times-Union readers where they had been ten years ago and where they were now. That was one of the advantages of working for an afternoon paper. More leeway, more time to dig around and investigate, more opportunities to run feature-length stories. But it couldn’t be just a dry rehash. He wasn’t looking for an academic history but articles with some bite to them, and for every book and back-issue magazine Ferguson read for his research, McManus wanted him to talk to five people. If he couldn’t get hold of Muhammad Ali, then he should track down his trainer and cornerman, Angelo Dundee, and if he couldn’t get through to Andy Warhol, then he should call Roy Lichtenstein or Leo Castelli. Primary sources. The ones who did the doing or were close by when something happened. Was he making himself clear?
Yes, he was making himself clear.
And what did Ferguson think?
I’m all for it, Ferguson said. But how many pieces do you want, and how long do I have to write them?
About eight or ten, I would imagine. And roughly two weeks to write each one, give or take. Is that enough?
If I give up sleeping for a while, I suppose it will be. Do I hand them in to Mr. Dunlap?
No, you’re finished with Dunlap. You’ll be working directly with me on this.
And where and how do I begin?
Go back to your desk and come up with fifteen or twenty ideas. Subjects, titles, musings, whatever seems most urgent to you, and then we’ll figure out an overall plan.
I can’t tell you how much this means to me.
It’s a job for a young person, Archie, and you’re the youngest one I have. Let’s see what happens.
Ferguson put everything he had into the articles because his entire future at the paper depended on them. He wrote and rewrote, he whipped through more than a hundred books and close to a thousand magazines and newspapers, and not only did he talk on the phone to Angelo Dundee, Roy Lichtenstein, and Leo Castelli but to dozens of other people as well, assembling a chorus of voices to accompany the texts he wrote on the good-old-bad-old days of recently vanished yore, eight twenty-five-hundred-word stories that covered politics, presidents, and the pandemonium of social dissent, along with excursions into the music of John Berryman’s Dream Songs, the slow-motion massacre at the end of Bonnie and Clyde, and the spectacle of half a million American children dancing in the mud one weekend on a farm in New York State just two hundred and fifty miles south of Rochester. By and large, McManus was satisfied with the results and edited his work only lightly, which was the most gratifying part of the exercise for Ferguson, but the boss was also pleased that the articles elicited scores of letters from the public, most of them positive, with comments such as “A big thanks to A. I. Ferguson for leading us on a walk down Memory Lane,??
? but with a fair share of negative comments as well, attacks on Ferguson’s “pinko views of our great country” that stung a little, he had to admit, even though he had been expecting worse. What he hadn’t been expecting was how much hostility he would feel from some of the young reporters on the staff, but that was how the game worked, he supposed, every man for himself in the scrum to grab the ball, and as Nancy pointed out each time he published another piece, their resentment only proved how well he was doing his job.
There were supposed to be ten articles in the series, but Ferguson had to stop just as he was preparing to tackle the ninth one (on long hair, miniskirts, love beads, and white leather boots—the novelties of mid- and late-sixties fashion) when another hammer blow was delivered from beyond. The anti-war movement had been relatively quiet in recent months. The gradual withdrawal of American troops, the so-called Vietnamization of the war, and the new draft lottery system had all contributed to the lull in activity, but then, in the final days of April 1970, Nixon and Kissinger abruptly expanded the war by invading Cambodia. American opinion was still divided down the middle, roughly half for and half against, which meant that half the country supported the action, but the other half, the ones who had been marching against the war for the past five years, saw this strategic incursion as the end of all hope. They took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, massive demonstrations were organized on college campuses, and on one of those campuses in Ohio, nervous, badly trained young National Guardsmen fired live ammunition at the students, a three-second fusillade that wound up killing four and wounding nine, and so horrified were most Americans by what happened at Kent State that they spontaneously opened their mouths and sent forth a collective howl that spread across the entire land. Early the next morning, May fifth, McManus dispatched Ferguson and his photo partner Tom Gianelli to the University of Buffalo to report on the demonstrations there, and suddenly he was no longer investigating the recent past but living in the Now again.