My Ears Are Bent Read Online Free

chicken with thick slices of red, sugar-cured ham. We took over the establishment and installed a night wire downstairs. The hotel is operated by five brothers and their mother, theColligans. One of the brothers has a daughter who once won a prize in the Irish Sweepstakes. The hotel is a block from the Delaware River, and the Delaware toting ice is one of the most stirring spectacles I have seen. It makes you feel religious, or patriotic, or something. We used to go down there at night and watch slabs of ice as big as box-cars piling up against the bridge pillars; late at night we could stand on the porch of the hotel and hear the crunch of the ice in the river. There is a canal on each bank of the Delaware and they froze solid and we used to go down with two little sleds owned by the hotel and take belly-whoppers on the ice. Next morning we would eat great stacks of pancakes and Philadelphia scrapple and rashers of Mrs. Colligan’s red ham. I enjoyed the sledding in Stockton; it was the last exercise I had until the following winter, when I got in an airplane wreck near Cleveland after flying over the flooded Ohio River valley.
    The hotel kept its groceries out back in a cave torn out of the side of a hill. In the cave was a big barrel containing 180 red-legged terrapin which William Colligan, the eldest brother, had snatched out of a mountain stream in Sussex County. We had terrapin stew every night for a week, a stew made with sherry. After that we just played with the terrapin; someone would bring an armful of the terrapin into the bar every night. We had a lot of visitors inStockton. Each weekend our wives came out. One stormy night Thomas Benton, the painter, came out. He had been sent to make sketches at the trial by my newspaper. When he saw our oak fire he pulled off his shoes and sat down in front of it and talked until midnight about the beauty of the United States.
    After dinner each night we had to leave the crowd in the bar—there were two bars in the hotel; one for the local farmers, one for the guests of the hotel—and go upstairs and write our “overnights,” stories written to run only until the trial got under way next day. That is, they would run in the Home and Twelve O’Clock editions and be thrown out of the Night. Everybody used one room, a big room with a fireplace in it, and by 10 P.M. the room would be full of cursing reporters whacking out nonsense on portable typewriters. Wesley Price, who acted as a sort of walking city editor during the trial, would go from typewriter to typewriter, snatching out takes of copy. He would look at the stuff, groan, and send it down, sheet by sheet, to the sleepy telegraph operator he had stationed in the hotel office. Girls from Trenton and Philadelphia used to come to Stockton at night and they would stand in the door and interrupt us to ask if we believed Hauptmann was guilty. One of our photographers would screw flash bulbs in the sockets in the bathroom and when one of the Trenton tramps went in we would hear her scream whenshe switched on the light and got the full blast of the high-powered bulb right in her eyes. One of our reporters, Sutherland Denlinger, used to sing spirituals and military songs while working. He got so he could sing “Tiddly Winks God Damn” and write an analysis of the previous day’s testimony at the same time.
    We kept the typewriters going sometimes until 3 A.M., stepping out on the upstairs porch at intervals to watch the snow piling up in the peaceful, deserted village street. In the morning all the ashtrays would be full of butts and the wastebaskets would hold piles of crumpled copy paper and empty applejack bottles. Whenever I see a bottle of applejack I think of the Hauptmann trial. It was a mess. I have seen six men electrocuted, and once a young woman who had been stabbed in the neck died while I was trying to make her lie still, and one night I saw a white-haired Irish cop with a kindly face give a Negro thief the