Apprenticeship for Legend

On the register of journalistic recognition, the City News Bureau of Chicago makes only a modest mark. It is an unsung news-gathering cooperative, started 75 years ago by the city's daily newspapers, and it is still wholly dependent on them and the 15 Chicago radio and TV stations that meet its bills. C.N.B.'s 40 reporters start at coolie wages of $65 a week and do coolie tasks. They take pollen counts every summer day and hourly temperatures the year around. They record marriage licenses, divorces, births, deaths and the sordid minutiae of police blotters. They never get bylines, and a large share of the copy they write is never used.

But on journalism as practiced in Chicago, the bureau has left an indelible impression. It is one of the country's most exacting and most practical proving grounds for the apprentice newsman getting the feel of his city, for the cub police reporter learning the practical problems of his beat. Chicago has long enjoyed a reputation for producing reporters who could respond like fire dogs to fast-breaking stories. To this day, the legend survives that Windy City newsmen uptilt their hatbrims and race off at 45DEG angles. No man has given more sub stance to the legend than Isaac Gershman, 70, who was general manager of the C.N.B. until his retirement this month.

Adding to the Lore. Gershman's retirement spotlighted C.N.B.'s role as an excellent place for journalistic novitiates and as the source of journalistic legend. And both reputations seem deserved. Each spring the bureau gets applications from 400 aspiring young journalists. Since 1959, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism has sent some of its most promising students to C.N.B. for three months of on-the-job training. Even outside the Middle West, City News training is recognized as a valuable apprenticeship for the newsman en route to a big-city byline.

In his long tenure there, General Manager Gershman infected bureau hands with his own conviction that the only good reporter is one who double-times to every story and double-checks every source. But even before his time, C.N.B. had made impressive contributions, both apocryphal and real, to the encyclopedia of journalistic lore. In 1903, when a smoke-blackened man crawled out of a manhole before the eyes of a C.N.B. legman named Walter Howey (later editor of Chicago's Herald and Examiner), Howey commandeered a phone in a nearby bookie joint and short-circuited, so the story goes, every other public phone in the vicinity. After thus assuring himself an exclusive, Howey covered Chicago's Iroquois Theater fire, in which 583 died.

Through the Wall. Gershman nourished initiative partly by his insistence on exemplary routine. When a bureau hand named Jack Mabley turned in an account of a traffic fatality, he was sent back across town--five miles by street car -- to get the middle initial of a survivor. "Once you do that," says Mabley, today a columnist for Chicago's American, "you never forget again."

By such insistence on good legwork, Gershman and his predecessors encouraged reportorial enterprise. In 1924, by applying a stethoscope to a flimsy wall in Chicago's old Criminal Courts Building, C.N.B. Reporter George Wright tuned in on the murder confession that Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were dictating to a state's attorney.* Before the first newspaper reporter reached the scene of a 1958 school fire that took 96 lives, C.N.B. had sent out 100 bulletins. A quick-thinking C.N.B. rewrite man had phoned around until he reached an eyewitness.

Head Count. The morning of Feb. 14, 1929, has been written into C.N.B.'s record book as the occasion of the bureau's best-known--and most highly embroidered--example of Chicago-style journalism. A new man called in excitedly to report that a bloody massacre had been discovered in a North Clark Street garage. Gershman was inclined to discount the story. Only as a precaution did he order a C.N.B. bulletin drafted to the effect that a few men had been injured in a fight; then he dispatched another reporter, Walter Trohan, now chief Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, to the address.

Although Trohan followed orders and arrived by slow trolley, he was still the first newsman to walk in on the St. Valentine's Day killing of seven Chicago hoods. According to legend, Trohan could not furnish a decisive census of the stiffs that were lined up where they fell--at the base of the garage wall. The police, Trohan said, were still totting up the tangled legs and dividing by two. "For God's sake, don't count feet," Gershman is said to have replied, "count heads!"

* An exploit that Playwrights Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, himself a C.N.B. alumnus, immortalized in The Front Page.

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