<Begin Segment 5>

TI: So I'm curious, how did a seventeen year old high school dropout get a job as a junior reporter at a New York newspaper?

RD: Well, it wasn't because of my brilliance. One of my father's friend's mother contacted him, was a former journalist who was the vice president -- strike that, who was in charge of public relations, I'm not sure he was the vice president -- for the New York Stock Exchange. And she wrote him a letter, I don't know what she said. He didn't know exactly how old I was and she didn't tell him. And I didn't look like I was seventeen years old, and I didn't sound like I was seventeen years old. And he thought I had a college degree. I don't think I told him that, but I know he thought that, because I heard him on the phone. He told me, "Well, I can give you a recommendation to the Wall Street Journal or the New York Journal-American." Well, I know how to go through the Wall Street Journal. I didn't realize if I went in the New York Journal-American, I knew I'd be working for Hearst which I didn't particularly like. But I didn't realize I'd be on the financial side. So he had a phone call, and I went to see somebody, financial page editor, and he hired me. And I filled out a form that said I had this and that and the other thing, and nobody questioned it. Nobody had any notion of how old I was, I wasn't yet eighteen. So that was that. And I've been very fortunate. I applied for very few jobs in my life. Most of the jobs I've looked for have come looking for me. Most of the jobs I've had came looking for me. So my early career was based on fraud. But I did the job, and eventually I got fired for trade union activity.

TI: Interesting. Tell me about that. How did they find out?

RD: Oh, it was very simple. I was an agitator. And we almost had a strike, and they laid me off. And the Newspaper Guild, I was an active member of it, they were ready to... I said, "Don't make any fuss. I want to do some writing, and it's useful to be unemployed. I can get unemployment insurance." So I was going to write the Great American Novel.

TI: But you were agitating at the newspaper trying to organize there?

RD: Uh-uh. They were organized already, but they were a very inactive and inert group. It's a complicated story. So anyway, that was that. I got fired eventually, and it was time for me to do something else.

TI: Okay, so you're how old now? Are you eighteen, nineteen years old?

RD: I'd be nineteen. And I spent time on unemployment insurance, living away from home, writing the Great American Novel, a novel about my grandmother. And I ground out about a hundred thousand words on a small portable typewriter -- I'm a lousy typist. And then I sat down and read it, and I realized it was awful. I knew a woman with a fireplace, and I took it over to her place and burned the pages.

TI: Now, do you ever regret burning those pages?

RD: No, not at all. Not at all. I mean, I didn't really know what I was writing about. I was imagining what her life in Hungary was like. I knew something about her life when she came to the United States, I'd heard a couple of stories, but it was just awful. We need not go into that. I don't think fiction is my métier anyway. I then decided that I wanted to study history. Actually, an older woman I knew sort of helped me decide. She did work for an immigrant aid society, not HIAS, but another one. And she called me up one day and said, "Roger, we've got this class on citizenship for immigrants. They have to learn about the Constitution, and the teacher we had couldn't make it. Will you take it over?" I said, "Am I really qualified?" She said, "Look, I know you've read history, you're reading history all the time," which was true. They didn't know about the Constitution, and this is just to prepare them for that." So I went in and I loved it. I later found out that there'd never been any such person.

TI: There'd never been...

RD: There'd never been any such person. She'd had this job -- I mean, she had other classes, had run other classes, but she just had decided that this was a good thing for me to do. And that helped me decide. I mean, I read a lot of fiction, I read a lot of history, and this was, I had a year off. So I had done some work as a volunteer early on in 1944 during the election. I helped run a sound truck for the CIO PAC, Political Action Committee. And one day the sound truck was for the famous or infamous New York labor leader Mike Quill, who was a wonderful speaker, a hard drinker. He led the transport workers union. He had a limp, he said it was from fighting with the IRA against the British. His enemies said he fell off a bar stool. [Laughs] I don't know what the truth was, but he could talk. He could really talk. And we were up in the Bronx neighborhood where the Christian Front, which was a right-wing anti-Roosevelt group, was predominant. And what would usually happen is I would say a few words first and introduce him, and we'd get in the truck and we'd get on top and do that. We got in there and they started throwing things from the rooftop. Garbage, some garbage cans, he looked at me and he said, "Son," he said, "you stay down here." And he gets out limping, his limp was sort of hydromatic, he could shift into and shift out of it as he wanted to. And he climbed slowly up to the top of the truck, and I'm in the truck listening, I can't see him. But he's standing there quietly, not saying a word, and finally things settled down, and he looks up and he says, "Oh, you micks. Throw your garbage now, you lace curtain Irish. You was eatin' it before Roosevelt came in, and you put this little son of a bitch with a mustache in, and you'll be eatin' it again." And he went on like that for some time. How many votes we got there is something else again, but he was quite a guy. So I had some connections already. Afterwards I did a little work for them on a semi-volunteer basis. They'd pay me so much, I'd pay cash. I didn't want to interfere with my unemployment insurance. But I decided to go out to California and get into the university at Berkeley.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.