75 years on the planet: Four cases

That question occurs to me now because four acquaintances of mine recently expired at or near Ezekiel’s allotted three-score-and-15 mark. All shared some affinity for the written word, but otherwise their backgrounds and experiences varied widely. Of the four, two were born poor and powerless; two were well off and well connected. Three of them built rewarding lives for themselves and for most everyone who crossed their paths. One left a trail of bitter recriminations seemingly wherever he went. Consider:

Literary optimist

Paul Hogan, bookstore manager, died November 11, 2015 in Philadelphia, age 77: For nearly half a century Hogan managed Robin’s Bookstore, a legendary Center City counterculture hangout whose customers were often drawn not so much by books and magazines as by Paul’s sheer joy in exchanging ideas with whoever walked in, children included.

Paul’s Dickensian childhood — shuttled from one foster home to another — endowed him not with bitterness but with an almost childlike appreciation for life’s small pleasures, especially the joy of reading. In books, Paul found the conduit to all the travel, adventure, and education he couldn’t afford. (He may have been the only GI in the history of the U.S. Army who brought The Brothers Karamazov along to boot camp.)

After the untimely death of his wife Jackie when he was 55, Paul thought his life was over. But two years later he met Trudy Rubin, the Inquirer’s foreign affairs columnist, and embarked on a remarkable new partnership: Trudy brought Paul the sort of high-level travel and adventure he had previously experienced mostly through books. Paul, for his part, brought Trudy a first-time midlife marriage; more important to you and me, he injected his infectious and unpretentious optimism into dinner conversations with the hard-nosed, world-weary diplomats whom Trudy numbered among her sources. America couldn’t have asked for a better ambassador, even if he was unpaid (as he often was at Robin’s, come to think of it).

Scant days before Paul died of esophageal cancer, Center City artist Burnell Yow tried to take him outside for a walk in his wheelchair, but Paul was beyond moving. “Life sucks,” Yow remarked empathetically.

“No, Burn,” Paul replied, "Life is good. I’ve had a good life. You want to go with me?”

Newsroom revolutionary

Acel Moore, journalist, died February 12, in Wyncote, Pa., age 75: Gene Roberts, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s legendary editor from 1972 to 1990, believed in hiring outsiders because, as he once said to me, “You can make a good newspaperman into a good Philadelphian, but I’m not sure you can make a good Philadelphian into a good newspaperman.” Acel Moore made mincemeat of Roberts’s rule.

He was an aspiring black journalist with a Philadelphia public high school diploma at a time when major American newspapers, staffed mostly by Irish and Jewish editors and reporters, were professionalizing their staffs by hiring only college graduates, inevitably white. Acel’s subsequent rise from Inquirer copy boy to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, editor, and columnist is the stuff of legend, and so is his recruitment and mentoring of black staffers in metropolitan newsrooms across the country. But advocacy for Acel’s racial group was peripheral to his real cause, which was meaningful journalism.

Most journalists — including myself — like to pretend that we know what’s going on in any given situation, when in fact what we know is a narrative we’ve spun so neatly and eloquently that we’ve become invested in it. Acel not only knew what was happening at the blue-collar rowhouse level in Philadelphia, he cared — precisely because his friends and relatives lived in those neighborhoods. His fury at the MOVE disaster in 1985 (in which Philadelphia police dropped a bomb that destroyed an entire city block) was not theoretical but genuine, because the victims were black men and women just like him.

Without diverse newsrooms, how could America’s news media ever have understood the two most important domestic news stories of the 20th century: the civil rights revolution and the rise of gender equality? Acel instinctively grasped the answer: They couldn’t.

A muse’s bloodlines

Alice Albright Arlen, screenwriter, died February 29, in New York, age 75: I first met Alice in Chicago in the early ’70s, when I was working on a book about Chicago’s business establishment. She struck me as an ideal guide. On the one hand, Alice was descended from journalistic royalty: Her great-great-grandfather, Joseph Medill, founded the Chicago Tribune, and other relatives launched the New York Daily News, the Washington Times-Herald, and Newsday on Long Island. Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of State, was once her sister-in-law.

On the other hand, Alice seemed to function as an encouraging muse for other journalists, like her first husband, Jim Hoge, then editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, or her second husband, the New Yorker writer Michael Arlen, or even me. (She told me I was a good listener.) Only years later, in New York, did Alice emerge as a creative force in her own right, with her screenplay for the 1983 Mike Nichols film Silkwood (nominated for an Academy Award) and Louis Malle’s 1985 film Alamo Bay.

The problem was that Alice refused to buy into my story line. I was dazzled by her heroic lineage, but she saw her illustrious ancestors for the fallible and pompous poseurs they probably were. To inject some emotional oomph into my book, I contrived the idea of driving Alice and her then-fiancé Michael Arlen out to Graceland Cemetery, burial ground of Chicago’s pioneer families. I hoped the sight of this descendant and her soon-to-be-husband walking among the graves of her Medill and McCormick ancestors would charge my creative batteries, but Alice would have none of my stunt. “Good God,” she laughed, as she examined the overblown monuments and ludicrous statuary in her family plot, “have you ever seen anything so ridiculous?”

Alice surely benefitted from her inherited position and contacts, but her most liberating force was inside of her. In 1969, when Chicago’s State’s Attorney Police infamously raided a Black Panther apartment and murdered the Panthers’ chairman, Chicago’s four newspapers lacked any black reporters (see Acel Moore above) and — believing their own rhetoric about the Panthers’ violent racial anger — were reluctant to send a white reporter to cover the story. Finally the Sun-Times dispatched the closest thing it could find to a black reporter: a longhaired, bearded fellow named Bran Boyer. He arrived at Panther headquarters to find an assortment of black and white Chicagoans who had gathered to commiserate with the Panthers. "And there, sitting on the floor," Boyer later wrote, "was the wife of the Sun-Times editor. Listening. Looking confused, curious, and sympathetic." That's right: Alice had ventured where Chicago's journalists feared to tread.

Not-so-bon vivant

Harry Jay Katz, playboy, died February 23 in Elkins Park, age 75: Paul Hogan (above) had an uplifting effect on just about everyone he met; Katz invariably made you feel like you needed a bath.

Katz’s father made a fortune by developing a machine to mass-produce seamless stockings. Katz squandered his inheritance on a lifestyle of seemingly endless partying and debauchery. He was out on the town almost every night, often with a new woman. He once estimated (when he was 55!) that he had slept with 4,000 women, which is at least theoretically possible (you do the math). His insatiable lifestyle may have single-handedly sustained Philadelphia’s pitiful nightlife scene through much of the ’70s.

Katz deployed a charming demeanor and a seemingly unlimited checkbook to exploit trusting people. He did not lack wit or humor, but it usually came at someone else’s expense. Like Bill Cosby, he preyed on the vulnerable and impressionable, especially women. Like Donald Trump, he seemed to take pride in his ability to con people. Whether the victim was a woman “friend” who wound up dead in his hot tub, apparently of a drug overdose, after a night of partying in 1995; or a security guard who lost his job after Katz suavely talked his way into the office of Philadelphia magazine one night in the early ’70s; or the Drummer, Philadelphia’s very first alternative newspaper, which ceased publication in 1979 after losing a libel suit provoked by a Harry Katz column, bad things tended to happen to those who crossed Harry’s path.

Is there a moral to these four vignettes? Off the top of my head, I can think of one, from the aphorist Frank Tyger: If you want happiness, provide it to others.

For Bruce Klauber's remembrance of Harry Jay Katz, click here.