Gullibility has its Rewards
When a City Exploded in Joy
Gullibility Has Its Consolations, Especially for Young Writers
In the autumn of 1969, I was a 19-year-old college freshman who felt unduly burdened by my father’s insistence that I get a job as well as attend the occasional class at Fordham University in the Bronx. Dad did more than insist I work—he got me a job. Every couple of days, I’d take the D Train down to 50 Rockefeller Center, where I played statistician in the smoke-filled offices of the sports department of the Associated Press.
Sports was Dad’s game. It wasn’t mine. Nor, for that matter, were statistics. To extend the comparison even further, work wasn’t my game either. If hippiedom hadn’t ever been invented, I’d have still found a way to while away endless hours and days doing nothing more demanding than speculating about what the “true” lyrics to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” were. And what they meant.
It was too early in my career as a layabout-without-portfolio to be much noticed by the hard-bitten working men and women of the AP. I looked and acted pretty much like a typical college kid of the day. My hair had not yet reached girlie-boy length. I was polite. I addressed my elders as “sir” or “ma’am.” I was, after all, a product of the Catholic South—South Buffalo, New York, that is, where disrespect of elders was a crime punishable by three years in Purgatory or a week of jug in the Jesuit high school I’d recently graduated from.
My job was elemental: I cared for and fed a double bank of about twelve clattering teletype machines—wired-up black metal typewriters out of whose shuddering maws unscrolled an unending stream of the day’s sporting news. I’d rip these paper feeds into digestible sheets, transcribe incoming final scores onto a template containing the various league’s standings, then send this information out to thousands of newspapers in time for the next day’s editions.
Like the copy I produced, I went largely unnoticed in the bustling office, which was fine by me. When I got noticed at all, it might be by some fatherly old hand who would marvel approvingly that, while I was no All Star at the teletype-paper-replacement game, at least I wasn’t a long-haired peacenik destroying the country, like the rest of the city’s college kids.
One such guy, an editor nicknamed “Spike,” had a long, ruddy face topped with a shock of bright white hair clipped in such a way that it stood straight up, as if each strand of hair stood at attention. When he once praised me for not being a hippie, Spike said it as both compliment and warning. Hippie-types weren’t welcome in the AP sports department. I invariably met his praise with an uneasy smile and shake of the head.
In truth, I was a peacenik in the making. I’d become more and more fascinated with and concerned about the non-sports news of the day: Vietnam. Fordham and the college deferment required to attend was the only thing standing between me and three years of unwilling “service” to my country. Though I took full advantage of it, the trade-off didn’t sit well with me. I’d begun to Think About the War. And out of that muddled process, I resolved to Take Steps. Something Needed Doing. And I Needed—gulp—To Do It.
Which was where the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam came in. The war’s growing number of opponents (much smaller than Spike could have imagined) were set to gather in D.C. in mid-October. If you couldn’t attend, the idea was to show your opposition in some way in your daily life.
Boldly, I Decided To Act. To Take a Stand. I would…wear an armband. A black armband, in solidarity with war protesters whose ranks I couldn’t imagine joining.
Though I would have been content to wear my armband around campus, I reluctantly concluded that the only place it could have some impact was at work. I steeled myself to risk the wrath of Spike and hopped on the D train.
It was a Thursday. I stepped out of the subway’s squealing murk and into the bright sunshine of a gorgeous late-autumn afternoon. The sun charged me up, filling me with righteous resolve. I would be…impolite in the name of peace, and let the devil take the hindmost.
Anti-Vietnam Demonstration by Albert R. Simpson; National Archives
Lost in thought, swollen with dreams of righteous glory and not five steps out of the subway exit, the city exploded around me. Laughing people streamed out of buildings gripping hands and skipping and dancing their way along the sidewalk and into the street, where traffic had stopped where drivers jumped of their seats, laughing and leaning on their horns. Office windows flew open. Confetti fell on the heads of the celebrants below.
My heart, already inflated like a dirigible by visions of my own imminent bravery, swelled to bursting. Confused but joyous, hardly daring to breathe, my mind seized on the only possible explanation for such jubilant craziness:
The war in Vietnam was over.
Then I caught sight of a guy waving an orange-and-blue pennant. Then I saw another. And another. The New York Mets had just beaten the Baltimore Orioles, winning the 1969 World Series.
The Hindenburg took less time to deflate than my heart did. Immune to the surrounding celebration, I trudged through the crowd to an office full of awestruck, frantic sportswriters. Polite to the last, I smiled and tried to look excited.
One of the writers noticed my black armband and grinned.
“Whatsa matter, kid? You an Orioles fan?”
I shrugged. “Not really.”
He persisted. “Someone die or something?”
“Not really.”
There was no explaining how foolish I felt. I slipped into the men’s room and threw the armband in the trash.
My big brave day of self-revelation played out only in the courtroom of my wounded ego. I stood accused of being the only sports statistician on the planet who could mistake a sports miracle for a real one.
It wasn’t until later—much later—that I started telling this story for the amusement of friends and family, many of whom had firsthand experience of a bottomless gullibility that I thought was a deep secret.
But gullibility has its consolations. For a few unforgettable seconds on that sunny city day, thousands of strangers and a bunch of underdog athletes allowed me to experience a glorious day that never was—but should have been.
This piece first appeared, in a slightly different form, as “Teletyping the Anti-War Blues” on Open Salon.
I read this wayback, J, and it’s still great. And possibly more relevant than ever, because the gullibility you saw in yourself (and felt ashamed of) is so human - the ability to acknowledge mistakes and misperceptions is a wonderful thing, and it gets more wonderful in these times of shrieking certainty. I think if anyone is self-aware at all, they realize when and how their original ideas were wrong.
This made me lol (in the modern vernacular)--and a little more to boot
At that time I was not yet a Met fan, but yes, an anti-war fan
And crossovers, as you describe, can be so rich...