Meyer Berger
Reporter, New York Times
Berger left school at 13, was shy and
unassertive, his eyesight wasn’t up to much, and he was cursed with a
stomach complaint which prevented him straying too long from home. Thus
handicapped, he went onto the streets of the toughest city in the world
and became, in my view, the best reporter who ever lived.
A prolonged spell as a rewrite man,
taking stories apart and putting them together again, was his university.
He spent virtually all his career at the New York Times, where he soon
became the paper’s top colour writer. No one has ever written intros
that better encapsulated a story’s facts and spirit in a few lines:
On the death of a blind musician in the
Subway: “The sixth sense that had preserved Oscar England from harm
through the thirty-four dark years of his life betrayed him yesterday. One
step too many in the BMT Union Square station and he was wedged, lifeless,
between a north-bound express and the concrete platform.”
And on a failed circus escape: “Jackie,
a young but lassitudinous circus lion, won more than an hour of freedom by
escape from his cage in Madison Square Garden basement yesterday, but
frittered it away in dreamy brooding.”
His career climaxed with a report of a
multiple shooting for which he interviewed 50 people in a day, returned to
the office and wrote a story of 4,000 words in two and a half hours, not
one word of which was changed. The story brought Berger a richly deserved
Pulitzer Prize. He continued to spend days off, notebook in hand and
camera over shoulder, scouring the city’s sidewalks for stories,
stopping, talking and listening, and, when he’d got round the next
corner, jotting it all down. More than anyone else, Berger is the
reporters’ reporter.
