Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal

CHAPTER 12To Chicago with a Growing Family

IN NEW YORK ON MAY 2, 1954, Barbara gave birth to our first child, Lisa, at Mount Sinai Hospital. Husbands were not welcome in the delivery room as they are today. As I waited with other men in the obstetrics floor’s waiting room, Barbara was in labor alone. An attending nurse, looking in after hearing her moaning and crying out in pain, said: “Stop complaining. You brought this on yourself.” Hardly a credit to the noble nursing profession.

The first night that we returned to the purple-walled West Eighty-Eighth Street apartment, with newborn Lisa crying with colic and the new parents inexperienced, worried, and tense, my mother chose to drop by for a visit and to bring along her then-boyfriend Max Geiger. ...