"Pretty Much Routine"

As the second edition rumbled off the presses at 12:10 a.m. Thursday morning last week, the New York Times radio room picked up a staccato message from the sealanes off Nantucket Island: POSITION 40.34 N, 69.45 W . . . INSPECTING OUR

DAMAGE. Flashed to the third-floor city room, the SOS was the first any Manhattan newspaper knew of the collision between the Italian liner Andrea Doria and the Swedish American Line's Stockholm (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). The Times stopped its presses, hustled to cover the story. In the next 36 hours it proved once again what newsmen have known ever since the sinking of the S. S. Titanic* in April 1912: the sedate, sometimes plodding New York Times can get up and gallop like a quarter horse on a fast-breaking disaster.

On the Street. Unlike the Titanic story, when Times editors, working with scattered wireless reports, scooped the world, there were no great news beats this time. At 12:34 a.m. Associated Press sent out the first bulletin, and the first radio bulletins followed soon after with the barest facts. By 2:30 a.m. every Manhattan morning paper--the Times, the Herald Tribune, the News, the Mirror--was on the street with bulletins and sketchy stories. The A.P. alone had 35 men on the story by 7 a.m., wirephotoed its first aerial pictures of the stricken ships by 8:35 a.m., fully 90 minutes before rival United Press. Before noon, on NBC and ABC, TV audiences saw movies of the Andrea Doria. At the peak, the afternoon World-Telegram and Sun had 61 men on the story, practically its whole cityside staff, devoted its entire final-edition front page to pictures of the listing Andrea Doria and the broken-nosed Stockholm wallowing in a glassy sea.

But no one could match the coverage of the Times. Routed out of bed shortly after midnight, Managing Editor Turner Catledge ran the show himself from his office in the corner of the city room. At first Catledge thought that all he needed was a small box, but as the plight of the Andrea Doria grew more desperate, he put all 15 men of his night staff to work, splashed on an eight-column, three-line, 48-point headline, second only to the 60-point head the conservative Times reserves for "declarations of war." As stories poured in from the foreign desk, the national desk, even the obituary desk, advertising was killed to make more room.

By 2:30 a.m., with 1,240 words on the disaster already in the paper, the Times really started moving. By 7:30 a.m., rolling out its fifth and final edition of the day, the Times had 5,000 words on it; six stories, besides a sharp, authoritative lead, were on the front page alone.

All through the night and on into the morning the Times waited for what it hoped would be an eyewitness report from Times Madrid Correspondent Camille Ci-anfarra, traveling aboard the Andrea Doria. "We ought to get some good cover age from Cianfarra," said Catledge. But the story never came. Sleeping in his cabin, Timesman Cianfarra, a veteran of more than 25 years, was killed instantly by the Stockholm's ice-crusher bow, along with his daughter.

A Sound of Awe. Shocked and sad dened, the Times added an obituary to its growing list of assignments for next-day's paper. By the time the story was buttoned up, the Times had 20,000 words spread across seven pages. Almost its entire front page was devoted to the shipwreck, with three pictures of the sinking Andrea Doria and the wounded Stockholm. For the lead, the Times called on Pulitzer-Prizewinner Meyer Berger, who had sat at his desk all day stitching together fragments from Times reporters, wire copy and the ship lines. His story spread across four columns, and in his clear, quiet prose, Berger wrote the most moving account of all. At last, wrote Berger, "it was nine minutes after ten under a brilliant summer sky when the Andrea Doria, in a final plunge, went down in 225 feet of water, her hull glistening, her shroud a rain of spray caused by her violent death . . . There was no sound from the rescue ships, only a murmur, a sound of awe."

Wrote the Times in one of the most moving editorials Manhattan newspaper readers would read in many a day: "We mourn today for those who died, the ones we knew and the ones we did not know. We lament, too, the death of a ship--a gracious ship that now lies with all her cabins and saloons and murals, her spacious decks, her lovely lines, her exquisite and powerful engines, probably forever, in forty fathoms of water."

The job done, Managing Editor Turner Catledge sent off a brief "well done" to his staff. To hear him tell it, the old Times was not even breathing hard. Said he, with a mile-wide grin: "Hell, that's what the news is--an emergency. Why, we look at this as pretty much routine."

* Long afterward, when the late Carr Van Anda, managing editor, was visiting Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail in London, Northcliffe's editor opened a desk drawer and showed him a copy of the Times dated April 19, 1912. Said he: "We keep this as an example of the greatest accomplishment in news reporting."

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