Oral History Interview with Robert Schulman, June 25, 2007, Part 2

O. LEONARD PRESS: Let’s pick it up at, let’s pick it up at, back in—and, and throw in—any questions you have, throw in. I mean, this is not an exclusive affair. He’s a subject. [laughter] We’re, we can take any number of interrogators. Go back to the, the early ’30s when you, when you’re going to college, okay?

ROBERT SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: Up until that time, up until that time, you had been greatly persuaded in your inclinations by the fact that your father was a great reader. You were surrounded by books.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: And you weren’t interested in some of the things the other guys were, although sports were not one of those.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: You, when you started college, did you have any idea where you wanted to go with this?

SCHULMAN: No. And sadly, such was the, such was the chemistry of, of the Bronx and Manhattan for Jewish families so that even though I was not religiously a Jew, you know, in all other ways, I was certainly 1:00Jewish. And the question was, what career, and you know, there are multiple funny stories about this. “I don’t, I don’t mind, son, what you’re going to do, as long as it’s be a lawyer or a doctor.” [laughter] And I, without, without any influence by my father, obviously—well, my mother, when I went to NYU-Heights, decided that the thing to do was to head for medicine. And— PRESS: Your father was an electrical engineer, but you weren’t inclined— SCHULMAN: I had no capacity, and still lack any capacity for, for mathematics or technical—I mean, we had all these marvelous instruments to draw circles and plug in things and do that, you know. I didn’t know how to, 2:00I didn’t know how to plug anything if I had some help from two Poles. But— [laughter] So— PRESS: There’s no, no, no ethnic jokes.

SCHULMAN: No, you’re right. It, some of my best friends are Polish. [laughs] So that I became sadly, in a lot of ways, involved in an accelerated pre-med course, which would have had me in my senior year splitting time between that campus and medical school. Now, there were taxing problems involved in that whole concept, one of which was that all the established medical schools of any quality, unless you went to the Dominican 3:00Republic [laughs], had quotas for Jewish kids. An extraordinary number of Jewish college graduates ended up going to McGill Medical School in Canada. Physicians and Surgeons, which was the Columbia University related, was very stiff and difficult to get into. And the course I was taking were singularly unfit for me. Comparative Anatomy, Quantitative, Quantitative Organic Chemistry, extreme Advanced Math—and here I was wanting to read the Beowulf and, and study Shakespeare and act in—and indeed, the only course I ever flunked in my life, I got an F in Organic Chemistry because there were so damned many computational, dreadful, 4:00and my father was very grieved and he tried his best to help me because, of course, with his devotion, he was always closely associated with what I did at home. [laughs] And, from time to time, in younger years, I got spanked for—oh, of course. And— PRESS: Corporal punishment?

SCHULMAN: Y-, indeed. Indeed. I mean, there was no, there was no whip. But I was, it, it was— PRESS: At home or at school are you talking about?

SCHULMAN: At home. Oh, no. No, no. No. The only, the only time I was ac-, accosted at school was in the first grade when Ms. Riley for whatever reason slapped me. That goes back, I, I—this is disruptive, but it reminds, I’m reminded, and this is my notion—it’s never been psychologically 5:00studied. My impression is until my mother’s death at seven, I was a shy kid. I was so shy that in kindergarten I was named King of the May, I want you to know. And I wore a crown and I had a princess and we walked up to the Bronx Zoo in a parade. My mother died and one of the episodes that remains with me forever is that a neighbor woman, wanting to be helpful, met me on the street outside our house and said, “Oh, you poor little boy, you. What a shame.” And that stayed with me, “What a poor little boy.” 6:00And my interpretation, which my father never quarreled with, is that I suddenly changed and became aggressive and, and outspoken and no longer the shy little King of the May. So that, how about that.

SARAH MILLIGAN: What is the “King of the May?” SCHULMAN: At the, the May, May Day— MILLIGAN: Um-hm.

SCHULMAN: There was always a, a little ceremony and there was a pole, May pole, and things flew around the May pole for you to pull off. And you’d take, participated literally in a costume parade and so on to a nearby whatever. In our case we went to, paraded to the zoo. That was, it was May Day. At any rate, 7:00whether that is accurate or not, who knows. But the result is one that is fairly obvious. [laughs] At any rate, what got me off onto this primordial exercise— PRESS: Your medical education— SCHULMAN: Oh, yes, [laughter] well, yes, thank you. In that same, in that same period, I’d become not only active in the theatre but more deeply involved with the campus newspaper to the point where as I approached my junior year, I was going to be either the editor or the managing editor. Tremendously involving. And we printed the paper in some obscure, musty, filthy print shop in downtown Manhattan. 8:00We had to be there until three o’clock in the morning and come back on the subway. Week, only a weekly paper, but we wrote lots of columns and inveighed against injustice and so on. And between the paper and the theatre and that F grade, I decided that it made no sense. And it was a shock, really, to Pop, that having made this commitment I should now be switching into what he had been thwarted from doing when he was a boy.

PRESS: To be a writer.

SCHULMAN: To be a writer. Yes. But I was writing then and, you know, we— PRESS: Were, were you aware—you were always aware of this, this ambition of his?

SCHULMAN: My father—oh, yes. Oh, yes. He had told me. One of our, one of the manifestations of his 9:00involvement with me, one of the many was that every Sunday morning, we would get up and together read the New York Times. But then I would also read the funnies and then we would, he and I—not my mother, stepmother—he and I would go for a long walk around the neighborhoods and then we’d stop on Southern Boulevard where there was one of those open stores, you know, that used to proliferate in the cities where the proprietor had an open— PRESS: Sure. Sure. Sure.

SCHULMAN: And he would get me a tootsie roll. Big deal. [laughs] PRESS: That it was.

SCHULMAN: Yeah. And we would discuss things and talk about problems and so on. And that was, that was his medicine, really. And it was mine. 10:00PRESS: I would guess, Bob, that this was very, very untypical, atypical even of father-son relationships, particularly, I don’t know, maybe in our culture totally, but particularly in that time and period when, when the men as I remember and have read were pretty damned preoccupied with just getting— SCHULMAN: With just making a living.

PRESS: Particularly during the, during the Depression.

SCHULMAN: And this was because. . .

PRESS: Of course, you didn’t have a mother at that time— SCHULMAN: Yes. Yes.

PRESS: Which made a difference, but even so, that—I was as close to my mother as you were to your father— SCHULMAN: Ah.

PRESS: Which seems to me was a probably more, more likely— SCHULMAN: More widespread— PRESS: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was [ ].

SCHULMAN: Relationship. I think that’s probably well taken, Len, because, although I indicated my mother was so fantastically devoted. Her, her, she had no, no formal education. She was always eager to learn and to participate. But she didn’t begin to have the, the outreach to issues, to movements, to, to literature, 11:00so on. It was my father who had it. And it was his devotion then, his life was— PRESS: You. Yeah.

SCHULMAN: As I have indicated, it, it was probably from his standpoint fulfilling, but he could have been a much broader man had he not so, not been so devoted to bringing me along.

PRESS: In any event, he was, he was not disturbed by your, your direction to journalism?

SCHULMAN: No. No. And so then, when I announced this one or two of my faculty were bothered at NYU, 12:00but certainly not Horace Wesley Stunkard, the professor of comparative anatomy. [laughter] PRESS: He was glad to see you gone?

SCHULMAN: Horace Wesley Stunkard went down in history one day—and, of course, those of us who were then melting away from his courses were enchanted. The campus was infested with people handing out cut-rate tickets to the Minsky Burlesque, 125th Street. [laughter] And it was one o’clock and then we were there for Professor Stunkard’s lecture on comparative anatomy and he got the ten minutes, and he wasn’t there. So, off a bunch of us went. Got on the train, went down to 125th Street to see Minsky’s Burlesque. And Sarah, if you don’t know about Minsky’s Burlesque—oh, 13:00some of the most marvelous strippers! I mean, you’ve heard of Gypsy Rose Lee, but you don’t know about Tempest West and, and— PRESS: Yeah. [ ] Real talent. That’s right. No, I mean, they really were.

SCHULMAN: Oh, they were artistic.

PRESS: They were.

SCHULMAN: You know, the remarkable young woman who had developed the capacity to— PRESS: Sally Rand?

SCHULMAN: Twirl, twirl tassels.

PRESS: Sally? Sally Rand.

SCHULMAN: No, no.

PRESS: Yes.

SCHULMAN: Sally Rand was the fan.

PRESS: Oh, oh, oh— SCHULMAN: Sally Rand was the fan dancer.

PRESS: Oh, God, yeah.

SCHULMAN: No, no, no. No. No.

PRESS: But—yeah.

SCHULMAN: No. No. She would not. She would not use her nipples that way. [laughs] PRESS: Who was it? She was famous, too. [laughter] I saw it in Boston at the old Howard.

SCHULMAN: Sally Rand was, by the way, a friend of my Greenwich Village aunt, Romany Marie, because Sally Rand was a real intellectual in her private life, believe it or not.

PRESS: I do.

SCHULMAN: Huh? Indeed. You know, 14:00you couldn’t tell a book by it’s cover. [laughter] PRESS: She didn’t have that much covered. I checked that. [laughter] SCHULMAN: So, I haven’t ended the, the—there we were, and at—Sarah, you wouldn’t know this, but Len knows this, at, at the, every intermission, hawkers would go up and down the aisles selling picture books and other stuff and so on. And the lights came on. And there in the balcony was Professor Stunkard. [laughter] Engaged in real comparative anatomy! How about that.

PRESS: Did he live that down?

SCHULMAN: Don’t you think we didn’t spread that word around campus. Well, so, I, I switched and turned all of my, gave up all of that stuff with the formulas and—although I did get far enough in Comparative Anatomy 15:00to dissect a cat for six months. And I got to know, I know, like, it became second nature for me to know that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. You don’t want to forget that. See? The values that come from a scientific education. [laughs] Anyway, I took courses in the obvious thing: economics and political science and history and an advanced course in Beowulf with one of the best professors there, John Boardman. I got so deeply involved in the newspaper and in the theatre, acting and then writing plays that John, Professor Boardman expressed great dismay. 16:00He had fully expected me to qualify for Phi Beta Kappa, and I did not. Of course, the scien-, the low grades in science didn’t help, but also I really didn’t give enough attention to Boardman and to Professor Zurcher, an author of many books in political science. So, one of those. But we had a good newspaper. And we had a couple of columnists who went on to their own fame. Alfred Kahn became a professor of economics at Cornell, and he was the miserable guy who was the architect of the deregulation 17:00of the American airlines.

PRESS: In Carter’s administration?

SCHULMAN: Car-, huh?

PRESS: In Carter’s administration?

SCHULMAN: Yes. Yes. And he’s still alive and still defends that, which a lot of people think was chaotic. And then, another one was Les Fiedler. He became a left-wing philosopher of very considerable renown, a literary critic, always extolled in the New York Times. I was sick and tired of his point of view, but anyway, he had talent. [laughs] So anyway, it was an interesting group. Plus, Herb DeWitt with the party name who wrote lots of stuff for us from taking the Communist point of view. And then as graduation neared, from NYU, with my father’s encouragement, I applied for graduate school at the Columbia Pulitzer School of Journalism. And there was really minor hope. 18:00You know, I thought I wrote pretty well, but NYU, when you had people seeking it from Ivy League colleges and, and from universities all around the c-, the world. And low and behold, I was accepted. With my father, never any question of paying for it. I don’t remember—obviously the costs were different than they are now.

PRESS: Yeah, but it’s always the value of [ ].

SCHULMAN: My father was, was, from what must have been a penurious pension was conscious enough on what he spent for himself and my mother and the house and so on that he could do this for me. And, and the, the year at 19:00Columbia was extraordinary. First of all, there were people literally from all over the world. There was an Italian, young Italian Count. There was a man whose real name was Harry Hirshfeld, but he changed his name, his byline was Henri Gris. He had covered the Ethiopian War. He was a Latvian journalist who had learned English. And the Ethiopian War was big in the mid-’30s.

PRESS: Thirty-six.

SCHULMAN: That’s right. Good man. [laughs] PRESS: I lived it. I knew.

SCHULMAN: And a number of, there were, class of sixty-three or so. Several very bright young women who went on to great success in journalism around the country.

PRESS: Hirshfeld was related to the Hirshfelds— 20:00SCHULMAN: No, not at all. Not at all. And as I said, he changed his name to Henri Gris. And he died only a few years ago. His great career was as a senior editor of the Enquirer and the Star. The, the scandal-making tab-, tabloid newspapers.

PRESS: It’s like a counter tabloid.

SCHULMAN: Yeah. That’s right. Exactly so. But he and I jointly wrote a piece that made it into Esquire. This was his idea and I shared in the— PRESS: While you were a student?

SCHULMAN: I’m sorry?

PRESS: While you were students?

SCHULMAN: While we were students. That’s right. It was the, the syndrome of short men in history. We took off, of course, from Adolph Hitler. But Prince Eugene—who was responsible for turning the, the Ottoman Empire away from taking Vienna, and it was the beginning of the downfall of the Ottoman Empire—he was a short guy. Mussolini, Mussolini was a short guy. And there were others. I’ve forgotten. 21:00PRESS: Like, like Napoleon.

SCHULMAN: And Napoleon. Pre-, exactly so. Yes. You know, and the psychology, being short, which, this isn’t universally applicable, but— [laughs] PRESS: No, no. Of course not.

SCHULMAN: Anyway.

PRESS: Go back for a minute.

SCHULMAN: I was going to talk about the faculty, was, which was extraordinary. Ex-, absolutely extraordinary. Every Monday, the editor of the Richmond News-Leader whose name was Douglas Southall Freeman, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert E. Lee.

PRESS: Richmond, Virginia?

SCHULMAN: Of course.

PRESS: Well, I didn’t know.

SCHULMAN: Well, Robert E. Lee and so on. But he was also a Baptist minister, teacher and, and, and a superb expert in military affairs. 22:00And every Monday, he came in. He lectured to us on the latest progress of the Spanish Civil War with a map and so on. [laughs] He made us go through experimental rating which had a, a, a—really it was prescient in terms of what later developed in, in, in the conscious of newspaper: that is, every complex front page story, somebody, an editor or reporter, must write an insert that gave the background of that story, which was not found at all in newspapers in those days. To interpret, to put into context the news that you were reading. 23:00Marvelous. And one day, in the spring, this was a little startling, there were, let’s see, there was Leonard Allen, there was Diana Hirsh, maybe one or two other Jewish kids, and he said, “Now folks—friends, friends, I want all of you to take note of those in the class who are of the Jewish persuasion.” I said, “Wait a minute, I’m not of the Jewish persuasion.” But, you—he said, “Those people are going to have to work twice as hard to achieve the same things that the rest of you are going to be able to achieve. So remember that.” Wasn’t that nice? [laughs] As a [ ]— PRESS: There was discrimination in journalism—is 24:00that what you’re saying?

SCHULMAN: Of course. Yes, indeed. As a matter of fact, to jump ahead to nine-, to after the war, in 1951, I had been back in St. Louis. I had been a stringer, part-time correspondent for Time-Life, making really, a little more money than I was making on my newspaper job, although I was a feature writer. When I was hired, and we’ll get to that later under interesting circumstances. But I, when I was hired to join the staff of Time and Life and move to Chicago to join the Chicago bureau, I was one of the very first Jewish people to be hired in Henry Luce’s empire because until then, he concentrated on Ivy League, primarily Yale, but also the other Ivy League schools, so much so that when I got to Chicago and I was 25:00doing a business story, and there was a big apparel firm there called Mandel, M-A-N-D-E-L, in Chicago. And one learned when one, I was working for Time and Life, the way to get news, of course, is to start at the top. So, there was a story about something involving retailing and I called Mr. Mandel. And got to him. Time, you know, opened doors, Sarah. And he said, “Excuse me, can I, do you mind, can I ask you a question?” I said, “N-, n-, no.” He said, “You say your name is Schulman?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Forgive me,” he said, “Are, are you Jewish?” I said, “Well, yes, I am.” He said, “A Jew working for Time magazine?” Anyway, that, 26:00and I worked for Time for the next eight, nine years. And Life and Fortune, but that’s another story.

PRESS: That— SCHULMAN: Anyway. Huh?

PRESS: That’s history, isn’t it? I mean— SCHULMAN: Oh, yes. Oh, of course. Oh, indeed. Indeed. It’s probably history too, in, in corporations, certainly like Goldman-Sachs, but AT&T and, and Kraft and all of those major corporate entities. But from time to time, I see signs in, in some of the, still traditional Wor-, Wall Street. 27:00And, of course, we’re not talking yet about discrimination against women. Wow. [laughs] But the women who were in my class, as I say, Diana Hirsh became a top editor of Newsweek. Well, Leonard Allen, his name was Leonard Feinstein. [laughs] He changed his name to Leonard Allen. He became the, the head of RTNDA, Radio and Television News Directors Association. You probably, Leonard Allen, you must have dealt with him at some time or another.

PRESS: Who was he with?

SCHULMAN: Huh?

PRESS: Was he with the association or— SCHULMAN: Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Yes. He was there.

PRESS: That was not an association I, I—I knew the, the, the end, you know, the— SCHULMAN: Anyway, to just quickly to get back to that faculty. Another of the faculty was 28:00Pringle, Ted Pringle who had written the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography then of, of Teddy Roosevelt. The nation’s leading l-, libel lawyer was our professor for that aspect. Each week the heads of the copy desk at the New York Times, Garst and Bernstein, Ted Bernstein and Bob Garst, came and functioned as our editors sending us out into the city on real assignments, and then we came back and produced a one page newspaper, being edited and framed and monitored by these two architects of style at the New York Times. It was a, really, and then we had at least one elective. Today, Columbia University is a two year thing. It’s gone even further this way. The dean is the New Yorker writer, you know him well. 29:00[laughs] Oh, I’m sorry, anyway. But that’s jumping ahead too much, anyway.

PRESS: Go back for a minute. I want—okay?

SCHULMAN: Yes, please.

PRESS: Because I want you to go back to NYU. You say y-, you started writing plays which is, I would expect, I mean. [laughter] Well, first of all, the writing and then the interest in the theatre and—I don’t know why, I think playwriting is a stage every writer has to go through, wants to go through.

SCHULMAN: Yeah. Although, it lasted, for me, in a much longer phase. It was not just a youth-, youthful thing. At that time I was really very presumptuous. 30:00PRESS: If you’re not then, when?

SCHULMAN: Huh?

PRESS: If you’re not then, when?

SCHULMAN: [laughs] Well, you’re right. You’re right. Whether I’ve strayed from that is a question we, we’ll examine some other time But I, I, there was a great theatrical weekend run by Stage magazine, and it drew critics, campus critics and, among other things, for our paper, I was the, of course, the campus drama critic. And we saw Burgess Meredith and Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset and visited with Burgess Meredith and his wife. Visited with Helen Hayes and The, The Twelve Pound Look, the Thomas, the Barrie—not Thom-, Barrie play. 31:00And this stirred me even more, and I was really—and Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! And that fantastic one act play that stirred New York and the country called Waiting for Lefty. It was a strike thing. And everybody was waiting. The cab drivers were going to go out on strike, and they were waiting for Lefty to give the word. And what bothered me that, there was, in addition, there was a, a well-known and accepted playwright in those days, those years, Michael Blankfort, and believe it or not, there was a lesser station, but still with lots of outreach, radio station in New York, the call letters of which escape me, but it was obviously not the big ones in New York. But they welcomed new voices. And I 32:00was, had a weekly program [laughs] where I could invite playwrights and actors and s-, and actresses. And I engaged and wrote in the campus paper there, I engaged in a big feud with Michael Blankfort about the in-, dreadful incursion of propaganda into the American theatre.

PRESS: Oh. [laughter] That is purism beyond purism.

SCHULMAN: Yeah. And of course it was the ’30s and, but still, the, in my judgment then—and today you’ve got it in the, in Actors’ Theatre in Louisville. The messages are polemics and very little is given attention to character and insight and human relationships. It’s the message. 33:00And that was what characterized what I considered the inappropriate plays in the Depression. They were all lectures on stage rather, at least too much so in my view. Anyway— PRESS: I thought that’s what theatre was, but go ahead.

SCHULMAN: Well— PRESS: From George Bernard Shaw forward.

SCHULMAN: Well, no. How can, how can you say that there was ever a message in every Shaw play? But the message is cloaked in— PRESS: Oh, sure.

SCHULMAN: Character. It is not a polemic.

PRESS: No, it isn’t.

SCHULMAN: And those plays, for the most part, why, these people, a lot of them, were then tilted toward the Communist Party approach.

PRESS: Just out of curiosity, how would you classify Pins and Needles?

SCHULMAN: Well, Pins and Needles was a delightful musical.

PRESS: Okay.

SCHULMAN: It was a musical.

PRESS: It was also a message.

SCHULMAN: Well, it all—sure. 34:00But look how it was— PRESS: Okay.

SCHULMAN: It was delightful.

PRESS: I understand you now. Okay.

SCHULMAN: Am I— PRESS: Yes.

SCHULMAN: Good. [laughter] PRESS: Go ahead.

SCHULMAN: Yeah. And that was my bumptious point.

PRESS: But you were, but you were writing a play.

SCHULMAN: Yes. Indeed. In later years, like around 1940—no, where am I? Yeah, around 1946 or -7, I was active in the Little Theatre of St. Louis, as an actor, and did twice, wrote plays that were produced by the Little Theatre of St. Louis. One of them, somebody suggested I ought to take it out. It was called The Wreckers. And it’s theme—and it had a message—was the importance of individual strength taking up against totalitarian infamy. And, but it was played 35:00out with a young couple dealing with a couple of robbers on the desolate St. Louis waterfront and so on. It was a good play, I think. But then, later, and this was a sad part of my career—as I mentioned earlier, graduating from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, I sent letters to a, ten or twelve newspapers around the country because the New York market for jobs was very tight. I mean, it was still the Depression, 1937. And while one of our guys, Jack Steele, got a job at the Herald-Tribune because he was the campus 36:00correspondent. And another of our friends got a job for that reason on the New York Times. One of my other, two of my classmates went to work for PR in the movies because they couldn’t get—and other went into advertizing, and several stayed on the faculty. Anyway, as I, I think I mentioned, Sarah, you, you missed this recollection. I was talking to Len about how absolutely, fantastically devoted my stepmother was. And when there came a telegram from the, O.K. Bovard, the great managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Pulitzer newspaper, offering me a job in St. Louis. My father kept that hidden from me for three days because he did not want to see me leave. 37:00And it was my stepmother who persuaded him that he needed to share it with me. Anyway, going to St. Louis in the ’30s, my parents had taken me to the Chicago World’s Fair, and that was certainly unforgettable. Imagine, going to Chicago. But to go west of the Mississippi—imagine. And I took two weeks on a bus and zigzagged my way. I went through Luray, Virginia to look at a cavern. I went to Indianapolis. I was fortunate to be there on, on, for the Indy 500. I rented a, a bunk in a hallway for a buck for the night and was able to go to the Indianapolis 500. And then finally, it was time to get to St. Louis and I got on a bus again and, and thunderclouds were gathering and it was dark and ominous. And I looked out the window 38:00and there was a sign that looked like it said St. Louis, East St. Louis. I thought, Oh, sh-, oh, shit. [laughs] Because this was the most poverty-ridden shack, shack-infested, dreadful-looking community. I thought, Holy smoke. It was not until we got to the Mississippi River that I realized that East St. Louis, which is in Illinois, was and remains like Camden, New Jersey, one of the most tragically and forever stultifyingly poverty-ridden communities. Anyway, 39:00so it was an exciting prospect, but—and here I was, one of three rookie reporters. I roomed, after a couple of weeks, at the YMCA. I roomed with a guy who had grown up in Illinois, Carbondale, Illinois, and went to U of Illinois, U of I, and then had gone, taken his way to a Pacific island, the Fiji Islands or somewhere and had himself a sailboat and girlfriend, and his parents got terribly distraught. And so Robert Lewis Taylor moved back into society, into the world and got a job on the Star Bulletin in Hawaii, and that was not considered—and then got a job, as I did, on the Post-Dispatch. And we roomed together and 40:00then both of us were doing reasonably well, but he much better than I because within our first six months, he was assigned to cover the Veiled Prophet Parade. That was the ridiculously extolled—it was sort of the pompous St. Louis society version of Mardi Gras. But you can imagine—with queens and floats—and not gay floats, but straightaway floats. And, and Bob Taylor did a marvelously saucy piece about the Veiled Prophet Parade. And I had—and, of course, in those days, you had to, you had to appreciate, I mean you had to earn a byline. Today, all you do is you get a job and your name is in the paper, wherever. You could work 41:00for months before you got your name in the paper. You had to earn it. And I had a byline, but about eight months into the Post-Dispatch, I was living with Bob and then, well, I, when I was sent out to cover a tragedy, and of course I had the usual things. I chased pictures. Whenever there was a death or something else, you had to go to the home of the victim’s family and somehow win or persuade or steal or borrow a photograph of the victim or victims. And on one occasion, and this happened to a number of other reporters, in journalism, you know, a man was killed in an industrial accident and I went to his home and knocked at the door, and this young, very pregnant woman appeared, and I said, “Mrs. Fitzpatrick?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Mrs. Patri-, Fitzpatrick, I’m from the Post-Dispatch. You, you’re, you’re the wife 42:00of Joe Fitzpatrick?” She said—she went like this—I said, “Well, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, there, there has been an accident.” “Oh, my God,” she said, and she swooned. [exhales] Well, a neighbor came. And in the process, I was able to get in the house and take a picture from the piano. That was standard. And then the, the photographic department made nice copies and sent them to the survivor afterward to make up for— [laughs] Anyway. My tragedy was that there was a bad accident involving a party of picnickers caught on a railroad trestle when a train came. And two of them were killed, but two survived. And 43:00I wrote, came back, and I didn’t write the story. That was not the practice then. You know, there were rewrite men. The, most of the women working—a few of the women were on Society. That was, Sarah, that was the, for women, you know. They had to be, shielded them from life’s realities. And, although a couple of them at the, the Post-Dispatch and then later at the Star-Times really became hot-shot journalists and got into the news. But not until after World War II. At any rate, I phoned in—that was the thing—I phoned in my facts to a rewrite man who was one of the long-time professionals at the paper, Ted Wagner, and came back to the office and then city editor, a man Ben Reese, he was about four hundred pounds, 44:00at least that’s what it seemed to you. And he had dark eyebrows and a stern face and he was big and he sat behind his desk and there you were, and he was looking up at you. And he said, “Schulman—” And he called Ted Wagner, who had written the story. And he said, “Explain to me how this happened.” Uh-oh. I lost all my composure and as I recall, among the things I said, “Well, the—” He said, “What about those two young men who survived?” I said, “Well—” He said, “What happened to them? How did they survive?” I said, “Well, Mr. Reese, I think, I think 45:00that they stepped off the track.” [laughs] He said, “If they stepped off the track, why didn’t the people who got killed step off the track?” Of course, what they had done was to get and hang from the edge of the viaduct. I knew this but that was the end of my career at the Post-Dispatch. I wept, literally wept. What happened—and the reason that this came from the playwriting is that during those first months I had also become interested in the, what the, the planning end of the Community Chest was doing on local radio. The man in charge of public relations, 46:00with the odd name of Fullerton Place. I’ll never forget—Fullerton Place. It was a man, not a location. [laughs] PRESS: Uh-huh. Nice, yeah.

SCHULMAN: He was interested in creating a program where case stories would be dramatized using what was a lovely situation. You had AFRTA, the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, an active chapter in St. Louis, with active membership of very talented actors and actresses. And there was not enough commercial radio going on for them to really keep sharp. And the had to do extra jobs. I c-, they could be used without pay for social, for Community Chest and dramatizations and have an opportunity to display their wares and, and get it, practice and so on. 47:00When he heard that I had been fired from the Post-Dispatch, he got in touch with me and he said, “You’ve had some playwriting stuff. Would you like to try?” So, for the next, I don’t know, two or three years, I had what was really a repertory company. And every week, I wrote a dramatization of one or another kind of case story and was able to use marvelous, they were really—and several of them went on to success on Broadway. [END OF INTERVIEW]