Assignment to Hell Read Online Free Page A
Author: Timothy M. Gay
they lived in the heart of Kansas City, all manner of farm animals wandered around the Boyles’ backyard.
His dad ran a butcher shop where Hal and his brothers worked before and after school. Young Hal didn’t care for the stench out back but loved the old-timers who stopped in to exchange wisecracks and talk politics andsports. His AP colleague and fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Don Whitehead once wrote of Boyle: “He gazes at the world through the eyes of a boy looking across the meat counter and finding the procession of customers interesting and exciting.” 34
In the summertime the Boyles liked to host big neighborhood gatherings, with tons of fried chicken, ham, watermelon, and cold beer. 35 But times weren’t always rosy; at the height of the Depression, the Boyles were forced to shutter the meat shop at Twenty-third and Vine. 36
As a kid Boyle became infatuated with Richard Harding Davis, the dashing
Harper’s Weekly
correspondent who helped create the legend of Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War. When just twelve, Boyle told his mother he wanted to be a famous war reporter like Davis.
At Central High, he won various essay contests and was introduced to the joys of Emily Dickinson and other great poets. He was so taken with Dickinson that he named a collection of his columns after one of her classic verses: “A day! Help! Help! Another day!” He also mastered enough philosophy to one day be christened “The Pavement Plato” and the “Poor Man’s Philosopher.”
He spent a year at a local junior college before enrolling at the University of Missouri in Columbia. His Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity brothers were floored by his off-the-wall political views and often flattened by him in late-night wrestling matches. “No Sig Ep,” the
Kansas City Star
once wrote, “ever felt himself safe from the clutches of Boyle’s steel-like arms.” No matter the hour, Boyle celebrated his wrestling triumphs by shrieking like Tarzan. 37
Around campus he became celebrated for witty—and usually obscene—limerick composition, plus an uncanny ability to commit chunks of poetry to memory. AP arranged for him to work out of its Columbia office, so through most of his college days he had dual responsibilities. He graduated on the same afternoon with degrees in both journalism and English and did so well he earned a scholarship to attend Missouri’s Graduate School of Journalism. In 1934–1935, he completed his grad school course work but never finished the requisite thesis.
Boyle’s farewell party in Columbia when he was promoted to AP’s St. Louis office achieved such notoriety it was written up in the
Daily Tribune
. Thrown at the Log Cabin tourist camp, the soirée featured singing, dancing, and some drunken fisticuffs over a young lass, “but casualties were minor,” the paper reported. 38
In 1936, he was assigned to the Kansas City AP office as a full-time reporter. Boyle spent a week covering the tragic gas explosion in New London, Texas, that killed nearly three hundred people—many of them schoolchildren. It was a grisly story that riveted the country for weeks. Among the other reporters interviewing grieving New Londoners was his counterpart from United Press, a fellow Missourian named Walter Cronkite.
Back in Kansas City, Boyle met Mary Frances Young, a secretary and spitfire blonde who shared his passion for joie de vivre and, once they could afford it, travel. Frances followed Hal to New York in 1937 when he was transferred to the New York City AP office. They were shopping at Macy’s one day when Boyle offered Frances the cheapest wedding ring in the jewelry department; she accepted the proposal but declined the ring: it would have busted their budget. 39
In New York, Boyle worked his way up to nighttime city desk editor. The Boyles eventually moved into a snug apartment at 110 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. They kept it through the war and for years after. 40
C
His dad ran a butcher shop where Hal and his brothers worked before and after school. Young Hal didn’t care for the stench out back but loved the old-timers who stopped in to exchange wisecracks and talk politics andsports. His AP colleague and fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Don Whitehead once wrote of Boyle: “He gazes at the world through the eyes of a boy looking across the meat counter and finding the procession of customers interesting and exciting.” 34
In the summertime the Boyles liked to host big neighborhood gatherings, with tons of fried chicken, ham, watermelon, and cold beer. 35 But times weren’t always rosy; at the height of the Depression, the Boyles were forced to shutter the meat shop at Twenty-third and Vine. 36
As a kid Boyle became infatuated with Richard Harding Davis, the dashing
Harper’s Weekly
correspondent who helped create the legend of Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War. When just twelve, Boyle told his mother he wanted to be a famous war reporter like Davis.
At Central High, he won various essay contests and was introduced to the joys of Emily Dickinson and other great poets. He was so taken with Dickinson that he named a collection of his columns after one of her classic verses: “A day! Help! Help! Another day!” He also mastered enough philosophy to one day be christened “The Pavement Plato” and the “Poor Man’s Philosopher.”
He spent a year at a local junior college before enrolling at the University of Missouri in Columbia. His Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity brothers were floored by his off-the-wall political views and often flattened by him in late-night wrestling matches. “No Sig Ep,” the
Kansas City Star
once wrote, “ever felt himself safe from the clutches of Boyle’s steel-like arms.” No matter the hour, Boyle celebrated his wrestling triumphs by shrieking like Tarzan. 37
Around campus he became celebrated for witty—and usually obscene—limerick composition, plus an uncanny ability to commit chunks of poetry to memory. AP arranged for him to work out of its Columbia office, so through most of his college days he had dual responsibilities. He graduated on the same afternoon with degrees in both journalism and English and did so well he earned a scholarship to attend Missouri’s Graduate School of Journalism. In 1934–1935, he completed his grad school course work but never finished the requisite thesis.
Boyle’s farewell party in Columbia when he was promoted to AP’s St. Louis office achieved such notoriety it was written up in the
Daily Tribune
. Thrown at the Log Cabin tourist camp, the soirée featured singing, dancing, and some drunken fisticuffs over a young lass, “but casualties were minor,” the paper reported. 38
In 1936, he was assigned to the Kansas City AP office as a full-time reporter. Boyle spent a week covering the tragic gas explosion in New London, Texas, that killed nearly three hundred people—many of them schoolchildren. It was a grisly story that riveted the country for weeks. Among the other reporters interviewing grieving New Londoners was his counterpart from United Press, a fellow Missourian named Walter Cronkite.
Back in Kansas City, Boyle met Mary Frances Young, a secretary and spitfire blonde who shared his passion for joie de vivre and, once they could afford it, travel. Frances followed Hal to New York in 1937 when he was transferred to the New York City AP office. They were shopping at Macy’s one day when Boyle offered Frances the cheapest wedding ring in the jewelry department; she accepted the proposal but declined the ring: it would have busted their budget. 39
In New York, Boyle worked his way up to nighttime city desk editor. The Boyles eventually moved into a snug apartment at 110 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. They kept it through the war and for years after. 40
C
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