The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee Jr.

of
Globe
readers were concerned. It stressed features, sports, and politics.
    The
Christian Science Monitor
emphasized foreign news, and most of its circulation was outside New England. It was not a competitive factor locally, but the
Monitor
’s longtime Red Sox beat writer Ed Rumill was respected and influential, not least because he was one of the few writers Ted liked and favored.
    From 1851 to 1956, the Boston papers were concentrated downtown on a two-hundred-yard stretch of Washington Street, along what was called Newspaper Row. The row was known as the “Fleet Street of America” but had more journalists per square foot than its London counterpart and teemed with traffic through the horse-and-buggy era, then trolleys and cars. Before radio and through the late ’30s, up to fifty thousand people would pack the area on Election Night to get results. Office boys and artists posted the latest news on blackboards or bulletin boards. If the night ran long, the papers provided music, entertainment, andpolitical analysis over loudspeakers. Candidates would hop from paper to paper giving interviews.
    Entertainers would also work the row during the day, hoping to attract publicity. In the ’20s, Houdini performed for a lunchtime crowd, drawing gasps and cheers when he freed himself from a straitjacket and chains while hanging by his feet. There were many other attractions and distractions, ranging from watering holes aplenty to indulgences of the flesh. Reporters wanting sex were accommodated by a prostitute who nominally worked as a waitress in a greasy spoon headquartered in one of the
Post
’s buildings.
    If there was one place that personified the dominant Boston journalism ethos of the day, it was probably the building at One Winthrop Square that housed Hearst’s
Record
and
American.
Walking inside, one saw a huge framed poster featuring a portrait of William Randolph Hearst himself, along with the patriarch’s guidelines to good newspapering. These included “Pay LIBERALLY for big, exclusive stuff and encourage tipsters.… Make a paper for the NICEST KIND OF PEOPLE, for the great middle class. Don’t print a lot of dull stuff that they are supposed to like and don’t.… Try to get scoops in pictures. They are frequently almost as important as news.… Pictures of pretty women and babies are interesting.”
    It was understood, of course, that “the nicest kind of people” were white. When a reporter called the city desk after responding to the scene of a murder, he would be asked, “Is it dark out there?” Meaning, was the murder victim black? If the answer was yes, there would be no story. The reporters were virtually all men, and the few women who cracked the ranks were mostly steered to “sob-sister” duty, turning out popular tearjerker stories that usually featured the widows and orphans of murder victims or of soldiers killed at war. The star sob sister at the
American
during World War II was Kitty Donovan. Gorgeous and a stylish writer to boot, Donovan turned out daily propaganda pieces about how awful the Germans were, under the standing headline DIARY OF A GERMAN HOUSEWIFE . The stories were pure fiction.
    One of the framed Hearst admonitions was to “please be accurate,” but that was taken with a large grain of salt. “Mr. Hearst did allow an awful lot of fakery,” Frank “Mugsy” McGrath, a former night city editor at the
American,
told reporter Dave O’Brian for his 1982
Boston Phoenix
article on the local history of Hearst. “There was stiff competition, so you did have to imagine a few things from time to time. Reporterswould sometimes spend a month on the scene of a big murder, and the papers would be demanding fresh angles and startling news leads every day. We’d all get together after work and swap stories and leads.”
    One legendary trafficker in tall tales back in the day was ace Hearst crime reporter Bob Court, who used to delight in bragging about all the fabricated