In a thinly disguised effort to break the unions, the parent Tribune Company had continued publishing, eventually luring back a number of editors and reporters with threats of imminent permanent replacements. A few weeks into the strike, rationalizing that I needed to work to support my nearly year-old son and a pricey co-op apartment in Brooklyn Heights, I caved to that fear. Told by the paper’s executive editor that he was soon to choose a permanent replacement for me, I crossed the line, wrote a column on the Knicks, and found it plastered with my photo the next morning at a neighborhood newsstand on the back page. A wave of nausea engulfed me. I left the paper on the newsstand, walked across the street, and vomited into a trash basket. I went back on strike, grateful, at least, that my father hadn’t lived to see his son cross his union picket line.
He never did get my work the way Rod Mullin could relate to Chris’s. Basketball is a relatively simple game—the ball goes into the basket or it doesn’t. The team wins or it doesn’t. But sports journalism was a mystery to a man who wasn’t much interested in printed words and cared little about professional sports. Who went to work every day at the post office, valued his union as the deity, and lived by the doctrine that a picket line was sacred, never to be crossed. That didn’t mean he wasn’t proud of my byline, the evolution of the family lineage from barely literate immigrant (his father) to blue-collar working man to college-educated scribe. My father worked literally across the street from the Garden, but we walked in worlds that were nothing alike, though they intersected one summer day in the late eighties when he was walking along a Brooklyn neighborhood’s commercial strip and came upon a crowd outside a store.
“What’s going on?” he asked someone.
“Chris Mullin, the basketball player, is signing autographs,” he was told.
Until the day he died, my father cut my stories from the paper and slipped them into the bottom drawer of his bureau. I suspect he didn’t actually read much of them before he stored them. I’m certain that he had no idea who Chris Mullin was, but he got on line and waited to reach the front. “My son writes about basketball for the News,” he said. Hearing my name, Mullin smiled. “One of the best,” he said, grabbing my father’s hand, making a new fan.
At the Mullin home in Brookville, we reminisced about our fathers, the no-frills work (Rod Mullin had been a customs inspector at Kennedy airport) they did without fanfare, without complaint. When I left for the ride back into the city, I was contemplating the theme of a bittersweet Mullin homecoming for my story, when I was struck by the realization of how poignant that piece could be if I had also been making a return with the rest of the Daily News strikers, who happened to be going back on the job following the sale of the newspaper that very day.
The Times, I knew, would be happy to run my story on Mullin, but it would be just that: a story, lacking in any personal involvement. I, however, had been writing general columns at the News for a short while and was thinking like a columnist, not a reporter—driven by emotion, a spontaneous muse. The thought of returning to the News with my fellow strikers after five months of picket line duty, of shared fears of financial calamity, of careers prematurely dangling on the threshold of ruin, was suddenly quite tempting. Like Mullin’s, my return would be bittersweet, the paper having lost some of its finest journalists, along with a healthy chunk of circulation. But the strikers, too, would be pushing forward through the pain of loss, moving on with life.
I suddenly questioned whether I wanted to or should leave the gritty tabloid, the working man’s paper—my father’s paper—for the upscale Times. I had a pretty good idea of what he would have wanted. Earlier in my career, while still at the Post, I had been invited to lunch by the Times’s sports editor for what turned out to be a courtesy introduction. Even a call from the august Times had seemed like something worth bragging about—except to my unimpressed, blue-collar father.
“Nobody reads that paper,” he said with disdain.
Come again? Nobody reads the freaking New York Times? Not only deflated, I was embarrassed for him and mortified for myself—until I mentioned the conversation to Michelle. On the contrary, she thought his response was endearing, refreshingly honest, in no way crazy. “I bet in his world, in his neighborhood, he’s absolutely right—nobody reads the Times,” she said.
When I persisted in complaining about my family’s being stuck in the proletarian mind-set and mud, with little sense of upward mobility and without interest in or appreciation of my work, she cut me off. She told me that she had once had similar feelings about her family but had long come to grips with her upbringing and even her father’s bizarre double life. In young adulthood, she had grown a healthier respect for him, especially when she learned of the position of influence he had risen to in the steamfitters’ union. Maybe her father didn’t have the time or ability to mentor her into academia, but neither had he tried to quash her ambition of going to college when many other young women of her generation and class standing were nudged off to work or into marriage. And while her brother also became a steamfitter, her father had provided precious funds to help her pay for college.
“I don’t know
