Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal

CHAPTER 4College and Army

“YOU ARE THE MAN OF THE FAMILY NOW,” my uncles said to me following my father’s death, as our relatives all gathered at our Harrow Street house to mourn, console my mother and me, and then attend my father’s funeral. Many sons, especially young ones, must have heard these same words through the ages upon their fathers’ deaths.

We remained at Harrow Street for a time, but my mother gave up the house two years later and moved into a fifth-floor apartment at 141–72 Eighty-Fifth Road in the Briarwood section of Jamaica, Queens. I had canceled my plans to attend Oberlin College in the fall of 1942 and instead enrolled as a freshman at Queens College, part of New York City’s then-tuition-free municipal college system, now ...