Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (6 page)

“
He didn’t think of Port Chester fondly,” his daughter recalled. “It was a small town and my Dad had visions of a big bustling city.” Ed, in one of his
Item
articles, wrote, “
It is not yet decided if the Saxers’ annual dinner will be in Port Chester or New York City.” It’s unlikely that the baseball team traveled en masse to the city for their annual dinner, but it was apparently Ed’s wish. If the team wouldn’t go there
he himself certainly wanted to. He wasn’t ready to make the leap, yet the city’s magnetic pull would soon have an effect on him.

The young athlete: with the Port Chester basketball team, circa 1916. Sullivan is the second from the right. (Globe Photos)

By the spring of 1919, Ed wore two hats—athlete and reporter—and the two roles became one and the same. With his hard-charging competitive spirit he was voted captain of the baseball team, one of his proudest achievements; as a freelance reporter for the
Item
, he reported on the very games in which he himself played. It was a conflict of interest, to be sure, but one the paper freely admitted on May 20:

“To maintain a position of strict neutrality in the Port Chester–Greenwich athletic engagements is a tough proposition, for it is only human and natural that the contentions of the Port Chester teams should be upheld by our correspondent. The following article is from the pen of our High School writer, who is a member of the team, and therefore hardly in a position to give an unbiased view on the merits of Port Chester’s grievances. It is published as Port Chester’s side of the story.”

The young reporter’s coverage of his own teams was as spirited as it was partisan. “
Port Chester High sure came back with a vengeance yesterday afternoon, when they defeated the crack Mount Vernon team to the tune of an 8–2 score,” Ed wrote. Furthermore, he enthused, “
Port Chester displayed the same punch and aggressiveness that they showed in the recent Mount Vernon game and outclassed the New Rochelle High School team at every stage of play.” Typical of the sports headlines that spring was “High School Plays Excellent Ball.”

Ed’s own role in these contests was always fully reported. “
Sullivan drove in both runners ahead of him with a circuit-clout [home run] into deep center field,” he wrote that summer. “
The slugging of Walker of the visitors and Sullivan of the Saxers were added features of the game.”

Covering local baseball for the
Item
was a taste of celebrity, and Ed loved it. He attracted far more attention as a reporter than he had as an athlete. He clearly relished his reporting, writing lengthy blow-by-blows of the day’s athletic skirmishes, spotlighting his opinions even more prominently than his bat and glove work. In an age before television, before radio became commonplace, the newspaper was the only way for townsfolk to get the full story. And in Port Chester the only source of a complete postgame report was Ed’s animated coverage. The
Item
, with a daily circulation of thirty-six hundred, spread the name Ed Sullivan to barbershops and taverns and informal bull sessions all over the area.

The young sports reporter became a minor hero in town, finding himself center stage for the first time in his life. It was a feeling he enjoyed, perhaps even craved, immensely.

CHAPTER TWO
Two Loves

T
HE
P
ORT
C
HESTER
H
IGH GRADUATION CEREMONY
in June 1919 paid homage to the sacrifices of the Great War. Many of the forty-one seniors presented a pageant entitled “The Torch,” in which students played The Captive Nations and The Allied Nations. As the Three Fates swirled and danced, Mother Earth fought Strife and Greed. In the end, Democracy defeated the Forces of Evil.

Ed played the role of Strife, which was as close as he was to get to his dream of taking part in the war. Armistice had been signed eight months earlier. Instead of facing the trenches of Europe, as had the boys who graduated a year earlier, he received varsity letters for basketball and baseball. In the final class assembly he led the school choir in a rousing rendition of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and in the graduation ceremony he gave a speech about the importance of continuing to conserve even after the war.

The
Port Chester Daily Item
reported, “
He delivered his address with a natural ease that served to make his words all the more impressive and called for extended applause when he had finished.” It would be the only printed account of Sullivan onstage that described him as having “natural ease.”

And he may have written the article himself. The piece had no byline, and on June 24 the paper had added a new name to its masthead: Edward V. Sullivan. Two days before graduation, the seventeen-year-old was hired full-time for $10 a week. One of his father’s brothers, most likely Florence the New York attorney, had offered to put Ed through college. But Ed turned him down. School had never interested him, and besides, the high school graduate already had his dream job, sports reporter.

The
Item
proudly displayed its rock-ribbed Republicanism. “Splendid Record of Republican Town Administration” was a characteristic headline. Denouncing what it called the misguided leadership of President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was a routine exercise on its editorial page. The paper reflected the Victorian morality of 1919, with a raft of stories like “Commission to Force Women Bathers to Wear
Stockings.” (“Young women bathers at Oakland Beach who have been in the habit of showing off their physical charms by parading stockingless through the park … may be deprived of that privilege.”) In addition to covering local events, the
Item
reported the personal, with a steady stream of articles like “Wife Won’t See Hubby” (“says the sight of him nauseates her”), “Wifey Acted As Her Own Detective” (because her husband was “mushing it up” with another lady), and “Wife Confesses to Kissing Another.”

Item
publisher Tom Blain got his money’s worth from Ed, turning him into a newspaper jack-of-all-trades. Aside from his sports beat, the cub reporter covered weddings, fires, courts, social events, and funerals, and also handled layout and other production chores. “
I never worked so hard before or since,” Sullivan recalled.

The paper didn’t give its three staff reporters bylines, so it’s not known who covered what, but the sports section was clearly Ed’s. A month after he went full-time, a burst of energy infused the
Item
’s sports section. He launched a new column,
In the Realm of Sport
, and expanded coverage of boxing and tennis. In some of Ed’s pieces he adopted an approach that was like nothing else in the
Item.
Instead of blocks of text he wrote short clips of pithy opinion, a layout style then fashionable in the New York papers:

“Slim” Kelly played a fine game for the Electrics at the hot corner. “Slim” is rapidly developing in to a crack third-sacker.

The Abendroth–P.R. Mallory game was a fine exhibition of baseball as it ain’t.

Of course we realize the teams had an off day. They always have.

If you stand on your head while reading the league standings, the Abendroth team is leading the league.

Well, so long!

When readers disagreed with Ed’s firmly opinionated reports, the young reporter always stood ready for a fight. He ignited a major fracas with his coverage of an exhibition game between the Philadelphia Athletics, a professional team, and a Port Chester semipro squad. He opined that the Athletics made “
a laughingstock” out of the Port Chester team by using their third-string catcher. It may have been true, but the editor soon got a phone call from an irate reader demanding an apology. Sullivan was biased, the caller claimed, because he played catcher for a competing local team, a Catholic squad called the Saxers.

Ed refused to apologize. He told his editor that his opinion came from his baseball expertise, not his team affiliation. Blain, exasperated with his young reporter, snorted, “
Oh, you Irish!” Complicating the situation, the caller was W.L. Ward, a local hardware store owner and prominent Republican booster—not a man Blain wanted to offend. Reluctantly, the editor called back Ward and told him no apology was forthcoming. “
Good for him,” said Ward. “Tell him always to stick to his guns if he’s right.” Ed was impressed with what he saw as Ward’s largesse. As he put it, “
Even to a young Democrat, Mr. Ward’s support of my position was impressive proof
of his genuine bigness.” Sullivan arranged a match between the two local teams as a way of settling the dispute.

Although Ed was on his way up at the
Item
, garnering a raise to $12 a week, a larger world beckoned. In the fall of 1920 he learned of an opening for a sports reporter at the Hartford
Post.
Without hesitation he made the trip to Connecticut to apply and was hired that day—at $50 a week. He was overjoyed at the job offer. The Sullivan family, however, had a heated discussion as to whether he should take the position. His mother and Helen saw it as a great opportunity but Ed’s father said he should remain in Port Chester. Yet Ed himself felt no doubt about taking the job. Before he left, the town of Port Chester threw its departing celebrity a grand going-away party, presenting him with an engraved watch. The
Item
, in reporting his departure, boasted that he had “
built up its sports page from a humble beginning to a place where it was on a par with the best in the country.”