October 14, 2004

Times FeatureMurry Frymer

Today’s News, Yesterday’s News

By Murry Frymer
Times Columnist

As the news images roll across my TV screen these days, so many remind me of stories I covered as I made my way through this journalism career. Memories are ethereal, until I see a picture that brings it all back and then I try to recount them.

The deaths of Rodney Dangerfield and Christopher Reeve are a couple of those memories—interviews in the prime of both their careers.

Rodney Dangerfield was Jacob Cohen, an aluminum-siding salesman, getting over a failed marriage, trying once again to start a career in show business when I talked with him. It was at a new Manhattan comedy club called “Dangerfield’s,” born with some money Dangerfield had accumulated with early success. While workmen puttered around the dark room, Dangerfield talked about his earlier failures and how his retirement from comedy after his first efforts was so unremarkable that nobody but he himself knew of it.

Rodney Dangerfield and Christopher Reeve Illustrations by Jim Hummel

Another memory is of Chris Reeve, a very young, good-looking actor who sat on the edge of the stage in a San Francisco theater one afternoon while I looked up from the front row. He was in a one-night performance of “Love Letters,” a two-person romance. And his talk was of a career that was already in flight and seemed virtually unstoppable.

Show business was a constant beat in my career. I never did get to cover a war, so the pictures of the current conflict do not have personal memories as they might for other reporters. But I do remember so very well my first job in journalism, as a copy clerk with the Cleveland Press during the waning days of the Korean War. My job was mostly running errands and filling paste pots for reporters to paste the pages of their stories together.

But I had one especially trying task. I was sent to the homes of Cleveland families who on the very day I visited had received telegrams from the Defense Department informing them of the death of a son or husband in the war. It was completely unnerving for me, a youngster still not finished with high school, to ring those door bells, identify myself and ask the red-eyed woman who stood before me if she could part with a photo of her son to run in the next day’s newspaper.

I especially remember the mother who pulled out a scrapbook of pictures and had me sit next to her on the couch while she went through them page by page looking for just the right photo to be printed in the paper. The tears flowed, eventually from both our faces, as she kept saying such things as: “This was Billy at his high school prom,” and “This was when he won an award for an essay he had written,” etc. I didn’t want to take the more important pictures in case they were lost by the newspaper. But mostly I wanted to take any picture and flee.

And strangely, the mother did not seem to resent my intrusion, but welcomed the opportunity on this very day of her horror to show off her son in the pages of his life, including how handsome he looked in his Army uniform. Getting his picture in the paper as a casualty was going to be the final page.

I’m glad I never got any closer to combat death than that. I wondered if other reporters—which I fashioned I was—wept on assignments.

And on the other hand, I’m glad I got to know a few celebrities in the early days of their own lives and share a few laughs. Strange, I long ago had forgotten about the interviews until the news of their deaths reminded me.

The pictures keep floating across my TV screen. A memory flickers and is quickly gone.

Contact Murry Frymer at murry@timesmediainc.com.