A Pause to Copy: Memoir of Louis M. Lyons-Journalist
with Conscience and Integrity Volume Iv

By Franklyn Grace Lyo and M.A. Lyons

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 11, 2008
• ISBN: 9781469106632

Franklyn Grace Lyo

Mary Ann Lyons, Ph.D. lives on a farm in Maryland with her family. She received her B.S. in Kinesiological Sciences and her M.A. in Physical Education, Health and Recreation from the University of Maryland-College Park, Class of ’75, ’82 and her doctorate in Educational Psychology-Human Learning from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Class of ’91. She holds an Advanced Professional Certification in Secondary Mathematics Grades 5-12 from the Maryland State Department of Education. She was a teaching professor/lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison 1991-1994 and a visiting full professor at Temple University in Philadelphia 1995-2000. Currently she is a tenured teacher of secondary mathematics for the Frederick County Public School System in Maryland, is the Director of the Louis M. Lyons Foundation and a Consulting Editor for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She is the grand-daughter of Louis M. Lyons. Frankee Lyons lives on the Red Sleigh Farm in Mount Airy, Maryland with her family. She is a rising senior at Linganore High School. Her bi-monthly newspaper commentary column is published in the Frederick News-Post and can be found on-line at www.FrederickNewsPost.com/columnists. Frankee is a volunteer docent at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a volunteer at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. and a Student Area Coordinator for Amnesty International. She is a member of her high school’s county championship Academic Team, the National Honor Society, the National English Honor Society and the National Merit Scholars Program. Frankee is a student in the Hood Start Program at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland where she studies History, Literature, Sociology and Media Production. Each day she surrounds herself with good books, great films, speedy technology, deep friendships, inspirational teachers, awesome grandparents, pleasure-seeking cats and her humorous, challenging, supportive, caring and loving sisters. Frankee is the great grand-daughter of Louis M. Lyons.

Book preview

Copyright © 2008 by M.A. Lyons.

Selected Articles are republished with permission courtesy of The Boston Globe

Front Cover: Louis M. Lyons, 1940s

Back Cover: Louis M. Lyons, Harvard Yard, Photo by J.W. Lyons

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

EDITOR’S PREFACE

WITH CONSCIENCE

AND INTEGRITY

LOUIS M. LYONS

Volume IV

Memoir of Louis M. Lyons

Journalist

INTRODUCTION

ONE

Cub Reporter

TWO

The First Real Story

THREE

Police Strike

FOUR

Night Side

FIVE

City Room After Shift

SIX

Vagrant Instincts

SEVEN

Leather Puttees

EIGHT

Benefactors

NINE

Jack Lyons’s Boy

TEN

Financial Writer

ELEVEN

Unionman

TWELVE

Another Job

THIRTEEN

College Faculty

FOURTEEN

Agricultural Editor

FIFTEEN

Tyro on Meiklejohn

SIXTEEN

Coolidge

SEVENTEEN

Apprenticeship

EIGHTEEN

Green Reporter, Your Honor

NINETEEN

Graduate Student at Harvard

TWENTY

Sensitive Ear

TWENTY-ONE

Writing—Tool of the Trade

TWENTY-TWO

Fog

TWENTY-THREE

Leg Men

TWENTY-FOUR

The Grail of Journalism: Objectivity

TWENTY-FIVE

Tribe of Realists

TWENTY-SIX

The Lobster Watch

TWENTY-SEVEN

Three Old Time Reporters

TWENTY-EIGHT

Shadow of Sacco-Vanzetti

TWENTY-NINE

Victims of Politics

THIRTY

Unhinged

THIRTY-ONE

Excuses

THIRTY-TWO

Editorial Writers

THIRTY-THREE

Pounding and Pressing

THIRTY-FOUR

Uncle Dudley Writers

THIRTY-FIVE

Schlesinger Bowdlerized

THIRTY-SIX

President Emeritus,

Charles W. Eliot, Harvard:

Marks of an Educated Man

THIRTY-SEVEN

Coverage: Eliot vs. Valentino

THIRTY-EIGHT

Luck of the Find

THIRTY-NINE

Oversighting Profiles

FORTY

Hard-Mouthed Idealism

FORTY-ONE

Lindy

FORTY-TWO

Lindbergh Kidnapping Trial

FORTY-THREE

Lindbergh Verdict

FORTY-FOUR

Dangers of Eye Witness Testimony

FORTY-FIVE

Shipwreck Survivors:

Interview Scoop

FORTY-SIX

An Eclipse of the Sun

FORTY-SEVEN

Reporter Ingenuity

FORTY-EIGHT

Vicarious Pulitzer Awards

FORTY-NINE

World’s Wise Men

FIFTY

Advertiser Pressure: The Milk Story

FIFTY-ONE

Property of the Globe:

Cranberry Bogs Stories

FIFTY-TWO

Natural Newspaper Editor

FIFTY-THREE

Blanch Celery, not Blanche Celery: BROCcoli not BroCOli

FIFTY-FOUR

Illusions of Newspaper Titles

FIFTY-FIVE

Heart and Spirit of the Globe

FIFTY-SIX

Winship

FIFTY-SEVEN

Lunch and Cigars with the Editors

FIFTY-EIGHT

The Rise of Populism

FIFTY-NINE

New Form of Editorial

SIXTY

Mergers

SIXTY-ONE

Prince of Whales, Edward VIII

SIXTY-TWO

Tenets of the Monitor

SIXTY-THREE

An Irreverent Staff

SIXTY-FOUR

Transcript Colleague

SIXTY-FIVE

City Editor

SIXTY-SIX

Bottleneck

SIXTY-SEVEN

Quit on the Spot

SIXTY-EIGHT

File a Split Wire

SIXTY-NINE

Written Without Notes

SEVENTY

Epigrammatic Brevities

SEVENTY-ONE

Verbatim

SEVENTY-TWO

Tut-Tut Talk

SEVENTY-THREE

Neighbors of Rural Youth

SEVENTY-FOUR

Farm Lessons

SEVENTY-FIVE

Early Economics

SEVENTY-SIX

Homestead

SEVENTY-SEVEN

Reading List

SEVENTY-EIGHT

Peddlers

SEVENTY-NINE

Taking Stock

EIGHTY

Horse Financing

EIGHTY-ONE

Tolerance

EIGHTY-TWO

Chopping Wood

EIGHTY-THREE

Social Awareness

EIGHTY-FOUR

Schooling

EIGHTY-FIVE

In On Foot

EIGHTY-SIX

A Week of Headlines

EIGHTY-SEVEN

Presses Washed Out

EIGHTY-EIGHT

Words of Encouragement

EIGHTY-NINE

Man on the Beat

NINETY

Newspaper Row

NINETY-ONE

Rewrite Man

NINETY-TWO

Election Coverage

NINETY-THREE

Election Nights

NINETY-FOUR

Cardboard Box Polling

NINETY-FIVE

Off the Hook

NINETY-SIX

Early Returns

NINETY-SEVEN

Emily Post

NINETY-EIGHT

Acme of Integrity

NINETY-NINE

Alf Landon

ONE HUNDRED

Non-Aligned Neutrality

ONE HUNDRED ONE

Legends

ONE HUNDRED TWO

Privileged Characters

ONE HUNDRED THREE

Advertising

ONE HUNDRED FOUR

Babe Ruth: Circling Around

ONE HUNDRED FIVE

Sacred Cows

ONE HUNDRED SIX

Cooperative Movement

ONE HUNDRED SEVEN

Sit Down Strikes

ONE HUNDRED EIGHT

Reorganization

ONE HUNDRED NINE

Sunday Editor

ONE HUNDRED TEN

Sunday Writer

ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN

Theater Critics

ONE HUNDRED TWELVE

Yellow Journalism

ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN

Confidential Chats

ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN

Jaded Moralizing

ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN

Pre WWII

ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN

Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN

JFK—Off the Record

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN

Scoops

ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN

Lowest Common Denominator

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY

Cutting Room Floor

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE

Brevity

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO

An Issue of Conscience

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-THREE

Reporting

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOUR

Reporters’ Club

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE

Early Excitement Gone

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIX

Transmission Typos

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SEVEN

Civilizing Forces

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-EIGHT

Commuting to Boston

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-NINE

Suburban Citizenship

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY

Moving to Cambridge

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-ONE

Harvard’s Attitude

Regarding Journalism

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO

Nieman Fellowship Program

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE

Selected as Nieman Fellow

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FOUR

Lunch with Felix Frankfurter

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FIVE

Professor Samuel Eliot Morison’s Student

ONE HUNDREDTHIRTY-SIX

Harvard Coursework First Term

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SEVEN

Bruening and Elliott:

Government Regulation Class

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-EIGHT

Felix Frankfurter’s Law Course

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-NINE

Midyear Exams

ONE HUNDRED FORTY

Harvard Second Term

ONE HUNDRED FORTY-ONE

Granville Hicks

ONE HUNDRED FORTY-TWO

Irving Dillard:

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ONE HUNDRED FORTY-THREE

Edwin A. Lahey:

Chicago Daily News

ONE HUNDRED FORTY-FOUR

Harvard Lectures

ONE HUNDRED FORTY-FIVE

Archibald MacLeish’s Nieman Dinners

ONE HUNDRED FORTY-SIX

First Class of Nieman Fellows: Adding Up the Experience

ONE HUNDRED FORTY-SEVEN

Lunch with the

President of Harvard

ONE HUNDRED FORTY-EIGHT

Pro Tem Curator

ONE HUNDRED FORTY-NINE

Conceptualizing the

Nieman Program

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY

Second Year Nieman Dinner Guests

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-ONE

Henry L. Mencken: Baltimore Sun

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-TWO

Offer: U.S. Information Officer, England, WWII

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-THREE

Counter Offer: Nieman Curatorship

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-FOUR

Harvard’s Notions of Publicity

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-FIVE

Crimson Public Relations

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-SIX

Chairmanship of the Nieman Selection Committee

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-SEVEN

Too Many Well

Qualified Candidates

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-EIGHT

Decision by Committee

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-NINE

Optimal Number of

Nieman Fellows

ONE HUNDRED SIXTY

Moderator of Nieman Sessions

ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-ONE

Fellows on Campus

ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-TWO

Conservatism Behind

Harvard’s Public Image

ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-THREE

Time Limit on FDR’s Remarks

ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-FOUR

Absence of Prejudice on

Harvard’s Campus?

ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-FIVE

Libeling Colleges

ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-SIX

McCarthy Hysteria

ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-SEVEN

Irreconcilable Communism

ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-EIGHT

The Furry Case

ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-NINE

Harvard Commencements

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY

Crisp Epigrammatic Citations:

Bestowing Honorary

Harvard Degrees

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-ONE

Ancient and Universal

Company of Scholars

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-TWO

Radio Days

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-THREE

Radio Broadcast Journalist: WGBH

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-FOUR

Wire Services

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-FIVE

Broadcast Writing

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-SIX

Tyranny of Time

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-SEVEN

Radio Commentary

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-EIGHT

Informed Reports

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-NINE

Cambridge Listeners

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY

Interviewer

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-ONE

Television and Radio Journalist: WGBH Simulcast

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-TWO

On Becoming a Public Character

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-THREE

Station Programming

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR

The Press and the People

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FIVE

Edward R. Murrow

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-SIX

Television Production

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-SEVEN

Daily Broadcasting Routine

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-EIGHT

Robert Frost

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-NINE

Peabody Award for

Broadcasting 1957

ONE HUNDRED NINETY

Greatest Spirits I Had Known

ONE HUNDRED NINETY-ONE

No Morgue

ONE HUNDRED NINETY-TWO

Death of Robert Frost:

Bravery is All

ONE HUNDRED NINETY-THREE

Death of President Kennedy: Realization of Loss

FINAL THOUGHTS

July 1981

Remembrances

ABOUT THE EDITOR

The Louis M. Lyons Foundation

Dedicated

to the

Preservation, Research and Education

of

Conscience and Integrity in Communications

WITH CONSCIENCE AND INTEGRITY

Volume I

The Ruralist

Columnist 1920-1922

Volume II

G’Nights

The Dialect of Home

Editorialist 1927-1931

Volume III

War Scribe

First Reports Out: Europe Post V-E Day

Foreign War Correspondent 1945

Volume IV

A Pause to Copy

Memoir of Louis M. Lyons

Journalist

Volume V

Pruitt-Igoe: The True Story of Bidwood #19

. . . and I set to with such relish as to have accumulated a pile of hand-written manuscripts the first week, stopped only with the realization that I was going to have to copy it all, for no one else could interpret my scribble. So I shall continue to write, after this pause to copy.

Louis M. Lyons

Cambridge

July 1981

EDITOR’S PREFACE

WITH CONSCIENCE

AND INTEGRITY

Louis M. Lyons was a twentieth century American print and broadcast journalist, son of Massachusetts, who was born in September of 1897 and who died in April of 1982. The body of work he left behind spans the spectrum of communications and events of that century. His legacy rests with those who see the world and comment with conscience and integrity. Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism annually awards journalists whose exemplary work represents the best of communications with conscience and integrity. This award is named in honor of my grandfather, Louis M. Lyons.

America in the early 1960’s was difficult for this wordsmith. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was deeply felt by him. The moral compass of the country was disturbing to him, primarily the issues of race relations here at home and the bloodbath in Southeast Asia. Personally and professionally saddened by these national disgraces and the lack of inspirational leadership, he listened to the comforting advice of his friend, publisher Alfred P. Knopf. Knopf implored him to write his memoirs to gain perspective on where we’ve come as a country and to offer hope for where we are to go forward together.

The typewriter on the desk in his den on the second floor of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Kenway Street became his retreat. He wrote there during the late winter of 1963 through the early spring of 1964. His style of writing was stream of consciousness. His memoir became a conversation from his heart, beaten out by hand on the keys of his battered manual word machine. The chapters were not written in the chronological order of his life. They do, as was his intent, flow together effortlessly. Meant to be delivered as a rough draft copy to Knopf, they were left unpolished, the edges untouched by a copy editor. Months into this endeavor, the shock of Alfred Knopf’s untimely death resulted in the manuscript being boxed and shelved away in the third floor attic of his home. Without his friend’s presence eagerly awaiting the read and with the loss of his encouragement, the project ceased to exist. Decades later, shortly before his own death, the box was found. His perusal of the contents led him to compose his final thoughts.

The manuscript was acquired by well-meaning friends after his death and pieces were re-produced out of context by many, including the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Nieman Foundation in their Nieman Reports. Indeed, the effort of his original manuscript renewed his own memory as a few years later he undertook the massive literary effort of writing a comprehensive history of The Boston Globe and writings for the Nieman Foundation. Themes found in his previous writings pre-1963 wound their way onto those pages. An overlap is obvious. He comments on this in his final thoughts written in 1981, wistfully remarking that he wished he had had the manuscript in hand when he subsequently wrote the books and other writings because it would have made the tasks so much easier.

After his death, the original manuscript was kept by his widow Totty[spelling?] at Kenway Street. After her death, it was lovingly hidden away in the sock drawer of his youngest son, Thomas Tolman Lyons, for many years and then transferred to his second son, my father, John Winship Lyons, where he kept it hidden in the back of his top desk drawer. Totty’s daughter, Sheila King, kept a full photo-copy of the manuscript along with the original final thoughts in a box deep in the back of the top shelf of her daughter’s closet.

In the spring of 2004 the family decided to allow the manuscript to be made public. By unanimous agreement, the children of Louis M. Lyons gave me, his granddaughter, the distinct privilege and honor of being his final editor.

I then began an exciting journey through the life and times of my grandfather. Transcribing the memoir into a digital format became the thrust of my initial efforts. After purchasing a laptop computer, my daughter (his great-granddaughter Margaret Jessee Lyons) and I spent a week in July on the Outer Banks of North Carolina beginning what would turn into an eight month task for me of digitally preserving the original manuscript in preparation for editing and publishing.

After having read through the manuscript several times, and in the midst of transcribing and editing them, by the fall of 2004 I decided I was ready for the road. I traveled from my farm in Maryland to Cambridge, Boston, Springfield, Reading, Norwell and Newburyport in Massachusetts to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Vermont and Washington, D.C. I retraced his steps, speaking to his children, his remaining colleagues and his contemporary professionals and walked the same streets and roads as he did while contemplating the same sunrises and sunsets of his life. During my travels, after a day or evening of being the recipient of first class meals, hospitality and warm talks of memories of my grandfather, I would retreat to a hotel room and continue the clacking input of his memoirs to digital disk, the next day finding me back on the road.

The text of the memoir revealed tangents of writing that were not well known to his family nor to his colleagues. Hidden within the pages were slivers of revelations that sent me off in new directions. He mentioned that he wrote for the Christian Science Monitor a column called The Ruralist and His Problems which led me to the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston to talk with their curator and librarian archivist. Showing them the original manuscript and elements of his writing samples, they agreed that he could be the heretofore anonymous writer of these columns. In those days columnists’ writings were considered the property of the publisher and therefore writers were not given bylines. Fires had destroyed their business records from the early part of that century, and so they were unable to document his contributions to their organization.

The columns were written in the early 1920’s while he was living in Springfield, Massachusetts and writing for the Springfield Republican. His wife’s mother and her sisters Ruth and Ethel were practicing Christian Scientists, even though he and his wife were not. Through his earlier work as an agricultural reporter in Springfield and his then current position as a reporter, his knowledge of the western Massachusetts’ countryside, seasons, harvests and farmers’ issues was vast and deep. The archivist had me follow her to the microfiche files of the Christian Science Monitor, where we spent the afternoon searching out an example of these early columns, of which we found two. The writing was his. I was told that the archives of the paper had invested in ProQuest, a process of scanning the newspapers for digital preservation and then meticulously cataloguing the information. This service was not available for the public to peruse or research in their library. As a child of card catalogues and the stacks, having completed my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertations on typewriters with bottles of white out in the pre-computer age, I cringed at the thought of hours besides boxes of rolls of microfiche, trying to piece together these columns with a bucket of quarters in the middle of my local library. Back at the hotel I made a round of calls and found that the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. had the ProQuest of the Christian Science Monitor all the way back to the beginning of the paper. This meant that the early 1920’s would be part of this file. They invited me to come and research my grandfather’s work using their resources. I drove straight down to D.C. from Boston through the night, afraid that the persons that I had talked to that late afternoon would somehow change their mind by the next morning. It was worth the ride. I spent the next few days in fourteen hour stretches sequestered in a basement room with complete access to the archives. The museum was undergoing renovations at the time, and so for my inconvenience they gave me free prints of his columns and all the other coverage of his life over the years as published by the Christian Science Monitor. I left clutching all 128 columns of The Ruralist and His Problems and feeling profoundly the kindness of strangers.

Feeling a newfound confidence, I returned directly to Cambridge to the WGBH studios in search of anyone or anything reminiscent of my grandfather. He was one of the first radio news broadcasters and then one of the first television news anchors for the station. To my delight the head of WGBH took my call and enthusiastically recalled his memories of my grandfather. He invited me to the studio directly. I showed up promptly. I was met by the head of the preservation department. She was delightful and introduced me to a young man whose duties were to catalog on the computer the warehouse of radio and television tapes and to help select those worthy of digital preservation, an incredibly expensive process and therefore reserved for only a highly select few. He immediately told me a story that happened to him many months before when he came upon film tapings of Edward R. Murrow being interviewed by Louis Lyons. He slipped the films to the union technicians in the building and asked them to transfer them to videotape, a process that also was expensive and done only after a highly selective process. He said he knew these tapes were exceptional, after all, Edward R. Murrow! He then began seeing Louis Lyons tapes everywhere and occasionally would slip one down the hall to his buddies in the tech shop to have them transferred to video format.

The computer screen in front of him was blazing with columns of dates and names and programs. He picked up a small cardboard box, opened it revealing an old wheeled tape from a radio program long ago. He explained that these tapes would deteriorate if played now, and therefore only one play through would be left and that play through would have to be done by a certified technician that would be preserving it to the next level of technology. After that play through, the tape was unusable. Many of the tapes disintegrate during the process. He rolled his chair across the room and dug out a handful of videos.

Offering to set me up down the hall with a video machine, he settled me in front of a screen, showed me how to manipulate the controls, switched off the lights and closed the door. I then watched hours of my grandfather interviewing Murrow, Navy Admirals, freedom rider photographers and others. My favorite was a Christmas program where he traded places with Julia Childs and they filmed in each other’s studios pretending to be the other. She could be seen developing strips of film with the conductor of the Boston Symphony and he making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in her apron at her kitchen counter with her fancy knives. A pre-broadcast taping of his anguish and anger at hearing of the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was riveting. I wept. Seeing my grandfather alive again and hearing his voice after 22 years since his passing was unbelievably moving. I am glad I was alone.

I had to rewind the first tape three times because I found it hard to pay attention to the content of the interview. I was focused on his hands, his face, his voice, his eyebrows, his coat jacket, his tie, his collar; everything except the words exchanged between him and Murrow! While rewinding one of the tapes, I became bored and sketched the initials LML with the dates 1897-1982 on a piece paper and used a thumbtack to attach it to a blank bulletin board in the room. Hours later, the young preservationist stuck his head into the room and asked me how I was doing. We chit chatted while I gathered up the tapes. He stood dumbfounded in the center of the room. I asked him if he was ill and he shook his head and pointed to my paper. What is that? Where did that come from? What does that mean? he gasped.

Apparently he did not know that LML were Louis Lyons’s initials. He hustled me out the room and down the hall and opened a door to a huge warehouse of tapes. He walked me along the floor to ceiling shelves saying over and over LML. LML. LML. LML… . They’re all LML! I had no idea. I thought the only Louis Lyons tapes were those marked ‘Louis Lyons.’ Oh… my… God! I smiled and nodded in pride. I returned to the station several times and had many wonderful conversations with the staff. They were busy telling me that they had received a grant to digitally preserve the Lyons-Murrow interviews. True to their word, a year later my Cambridge relatives, Sheila and Bill King, sent to our farm in Maryland a tape of the PBS rebroadcast of these interviews that had aired in Boston on WGBH in 2006. This was a wonderful tribute for my grandfather and an exciting moment for our family. My experiences at WGBH were a preliminary survey of the field of his broadcast artifacts. It is rich and idle. There is a paucity of funds for film preservation and the sheer volume presents a daunting task. The delicate procedure resulting in the disintegration of the original tapings is problematic and risky. I look forward to returning to the warehouse one day with a plan and funding.

In February of 2005 I had completed the data entry of the manuscript and was contemplating the publishing process. At this time my mother reminded me that my brother, Louis M. Lyons II, had been bequeathed the morgue books of my grandfather’s Boston Globe writings and the scrapbooks kept of many of his newspaper articles from the Springfield Republican. Lugging two huge suitcases up to the farm one morning, he unzipped a treasure trove of the original yellowing and brittle newspaper clippings and presented them to me in the middle of the living room floor. Weeks went by as my family patiently allowed me to sit on a stool in the middle this room and arrange and read and share all of the exciting articles. After having read the behind the scenes stories of these events in his memoir, to actually see the final production and publishing of these events was intriguing. I was particularly astonished by the Globe’s morgue book, given to him upon his retirement covering all of his World War II correspondence.

In his memoir, my grandfather only briefly mentioned this experience in Europe in 1945 and likewise he briefly mentioned his writings of an editorial column that he wrote concerning his home life in Reading, Massachusetts between 1927 and 1931. His children had mentioned these stories to me several times. I then started to reevaluate the project in front of me.

Around this time the Curator of the Nieman Foundation made a connection with the Dean of the School of Journalism at Northwestern University on my behalf. I was invited to send my edited version of the manuscript to them and they might then be interested in considering including it in their revitalization of journalism curricula for students and scholars in the field of communications. I was hesitant. I wasn’t ready. I was missing something. I agreed to send it along when it was ready. Little did I know at the time that more than two years would pass before I felt that I had properly designed the presentation of my grandfather’s work.

The memoir and accumulating writings presented more than one book possibility. I was overwhelmed and out of money. I packed the laptop and the piles of papers and morgue books up, placed them under my bed and began teaching mathematics at a local public high school in the fall of 2005. I was haunted and weighted down by the lack of movement of what I began referring to as the LML Project.

The summer of 2006 found me on my hands and knees dragging all of the neglected works in progress out in front of me from their winter hibernation under my bed. With the encouragement of my three daughters, Jessee, Franklyn Grace Lyons and Annee Lyons, I renewed my attempts to bring my grandfather’s writings to the publication stage.

My first step was to formalize the business aspects of the project. I created a non-profit organization, The Louis M. Lyons Foundation, and dedicated its purpose to the preservation, research and education of conscience and integrity in communications.

Around this time, Shirley Elder, the wife of my grandfather’s eldest son Richard Louis Lyons, sent to the farm a green folder with a few mimeographed editorial stories that had been mentioned by many in the past. With no dates and a guess by his daughter, Margaret Lyons Ford, that they may have been published in the Springfield Republican and a cover page typed by Richard remembering some of his childhood neighbor friends forever preserved in these stories of almost eighty years before, I was hooked. I needed to find out where and when they were written. They all possessed his byline.

My daughters Frankee and Annee then spent a summer week of twelve hour days with me in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress. We began by subtracting 75 years from the current date to determine when my uncle was five years old. Then we, gulp, scrolled through each and every AM and PM section of each and every day of every Massachusetts publication from 1925 onward on microfiche; an awesome task. We discovered they were originally published in The Boston Globe. We then found and dated all of the columns in the green folder and discovered quickly that there were more and more and more of them. We finished with 77 editorials in all.

Back on the farm the pile of the LML Project had now grown. I made a decision to produce an LML Collection beginning with his writings in chronological order: Volume I, The Ruralist, his columns from 1922-1924; Volume II, G’Nights: The Dialect of Home, his editorials from 1927-1931; Volume III, War Scribe: First Reports Out: Europe Post V-E Day, his articles from 1945; and Volume IV, A Pause to Copy: Memoir of Louis M. Lyons, Journalist My rationale was that a student of writing would study a progression of his writing, a developed mastery of different styles and a variation in method that became a word tapestry woven across a career of a voice in journalism. I contacted a publisher, recommended by Shirley and selected by my children for being Green, and agreed to a multi-book arrangement. I was committed. But then again, I procrastinated by shoving the mass onto a table in the hallway in front of my bedroom. I returned to teaching in the fall of 2006. Every day I walked by the mess on the table and sighed.

The summer of 2007 brought the final steps in the publication of these books. A major obstacle to the completion of The Ruralist and G’Nights was gaining the permission from The Boston Globe to use LML’s previously published materials. After a year of negotiations, a hero named Toby Leith, the Content Licensing Manager for The Boston Globe, formally granted me permission to republish. One person can make a difference… the power of one!

With the light at the end of the tunnel now visible, my daughters chose to dust off a manuscript of their grandfather’s, Louis’s son John, which John wrote in 1971. It is the true story of his involvement with others in the final years of the Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing project in St. Louis, Missouri from 1969 to 1971. It is an important story of black vs. white and black vs. black fears of the time and became Volume V, Pruitt-Igoe: The True Story of Bidwood #19 in the LML Collection. My father has no idea about this and will not find out until after the book goes to press. Not only is the work significant and an example of conscience and integrity, it is also a tribute to him from his grandchildren for being the backbone, along with their grandmother Grace, of the entire effort.

All three of my daughters have given effortlessly to this project. Jessee preserved my father’s book, helped with the transcribing of the beginning chapters of the memoir, and was the first one standing to tell me This is important and you must do it. Frankee preserved the WWII articles and was a phenom on the microfiche research. My youngest, Annee, preserved the editorials and the columns and also helped with the microfiche, although she admittedly got stuck on reading the original articles on Babe Ruth, FDR, the Marx Brothers and her favorite—the Will Rogers’ Dispatches that filled the body of the newspapers of the late twenties. These distractions reduced her microfiche output considerably! And so be it, the true, living legacy of my grandfather. He would be proud of their tenacity and interest. He would be awestruck by our farmhouse humming to the whirlwind of four laptops going all at once throughout the summer nights and days. My children recognize the significance of his contributions and the need to bring his works into the hands of twenty first century students and scholars of communications as well as the necessity of enlightening the following generations to the ability and possibility of communicating with conscience and integrity.

My greatest pride in this endeavor was the ability to have delivered to my father and mother, my Aunt Mardie, my pal Uncle Tommy and my godmother Aunt Eleanor, my Uncle Rich and Aunt Shirley, my Aunt Emily, and my Aunt Sheila and Uncle Willie these texts. For it is they who will derive the most meaning from the words. It is they who make me proud to be a Lyons.

The LML Collection represents a gathering of my grandfather’s writings which is in no way exhaustive of his entire life’s works. This is a beginning. Along the way more of his writings may be added, along with the writings of others, that illuminate the power of writing with conscience and integrity to change the world. That is our hope. Cheers.

Mary Ann Lyons, Ph.D.

The Red Sleigh Farm

Mount Airy, Maryland

7/7/07

LOUIS M. LYONS

Louis Lyons was a man of many talents. A leading reporter of The Boston Globe, one whom Felix Frankfurter called the best reporter of his generation, an innovative curator of the Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, one of public broadcasting’s first and most honored newsmen. He knew everybody, and could summon the great and near-great to his nightly news program which he always began with Here’s the news… and ended with… that’s the news.

Growing up in Norwell, he married his high school sweetheart, Margaret Tolman, lived for almost 30 years in Reading, Massachusetts. Active in town affairs he commuted to The Boston Globe (1923-1946) where he covered everything from city hall to FDR’s New Deal and post WWII Europe.

His tennis court was the center of neighborhood life. In 1946-1949 his life went through dramatic changes. Harvard President Conant made him the full-time Curator of the Nieman Foundation for journalism and his loving partner of 27 years, Margaret Tolman, died in 1949.

A whole new life began in Cambridge. He married his secretary, Totty Malone, in 1950, a 32-year full-time partnership of great love and joy. His interests were lively and varied, he loved good talk. The living room on Kenway Street in Cambridge was a place of great warmth, martinis, story telling and many visitors.

Thomas Tolman Lyons

Newburyport, Massachusetts

Summer 2006

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Louis M. Lyons, 1940s

Volume IV

A Pause to Copy

Memoir of Louis M. Lyons

Journalist

For my father

John Winship Lyons

INTRODUCTION

My grandfather buried the lede deep when he wrote his memoir, all the way at the very end. His last words, of realization of loss, captured the reason for his writing journey. He was in the winter of his sixty-sixth year in late 1963, President Kennedy had just been assassinated in November, war was brewing in Southeast Asia, he had returned from a three month tour of Africa to a home nation deeply divided by racial hatred and violence in the intervening years and he was witnessing the advent of technology changing the speed of information flow and shrinking the nation and the world at a breathtaking pace. His personal and professional life had spanned the spectrum of horse drawn wagons and the telegraph to jet airliners and satellite feeds. The world seemed to be spinning faster with each news cycle. While a nation grieved the death of their young president, time stood still. The present lingered. It was painful to look back, yet impossible to see ahead. The death of John Kennedy was a shock. The country lost their leader. Boston lost their son. Harvard lost their educated man. Youth and hope were gone.

My grandfather turned to his craft as a wordsmith for solace, to try to make personal sense of the events. He looked back on his life and wove together a seamless story that traced his foot prints through the world as a son of Massachusetts and a twentieth century print and broadcast journalist. The story is a memoir, not an autobiography. It is storytelling at its best. Each story segues into the next, his voice carrying the reader along as if they were spending an afternoon with him in his living room at 9 Kenway Street in Cambridge, watching the sun fall lazily under the yardarm while being transported back in time. The story is over when he finally squares the circle and gives us those final words. When he wrote the last phrase, he stopped. His story was over. He placed the pages in a box and put the box in the attic. It was early 1964. That June, Harvard conferred upon him an Honorary Doctorate. Seventeen years passed. In July of 1981, in his eighty-fourth year, the box was rediscovered. He reread his story. It generated new remembrances. He bridged the gap of time. He wrote it all down. He placed the newly spun pages into the box and back up under the attic eves.

His last seasons began. That summer turned into a colorful, aromatic fall, followed by a crisp, clear winter. Spring found his family and friends gathered at Memorial Chapel in Harvard Yard, eulogizing his life lived with conscience and integrity. I sat in the second pew, several months along carrying his great granddaughter, who would be born the following season in July and named Margaret after the little girl in pigtails who shared the barge rides to school with him in his youth in Norwell and Jessee after the little girl’s mother. Amidst our grief, of our realization of loss, time quickly gave us this new spirit. Youth and hope were ours. Twenty two years later, I sat before a box of over 500 brittle and yellowed pages of his memoirs. The manuscript was untitled and unedited. Roman numerals delineated untitled sections. Paragraphs ran on for pages. As I read and reread the manuscript, I believed that the editing of this work should preserve the story as he had told it, each word in the precise order as he had written it. Chapters were cut by the storylines and titled accordingly. It has been my privilege and honor to be my grandfather’s final editor.

—Mary Ann Lyons, Ph.D.

8/8/08

ONE

Cub Reporter

Calvin Coolidge was governor the spring of 1919 when I began as a cub reporter on The Boston Globe. Daylight saving was a new notion and an intense controversy. The