Making Other Plans

Goodbye to Hilden

   I was born in a four-room, cold-water, attached tenement flat in Hilden, a grimy mill village in Antrim, the bleakest county in Northern Ireland. Since the British were in control of that part of the storied island, my family, devout Roman Catholics, called it Occupied Ireland.

   Sharing the tiny rooms with me were my mother and father, aunt and uncle, and older brother. I didn’t know what it was like to sleep alone till I got married.

   That’s the way it is with the Irish. They tell jokes to keep from crying.

   John F. Kennedy said, “There’s no use in being Irish unless you know the world is going to break your heart.”

 There were only two streets in Hilden, both mean. At their terminus – the crotch – stood a fetid jute mill, grandly called The Linen Thread Company, whose foul emanations imperiled the lungs of the underpaid workers, which included my Aunt Rose, a tiny woman who was smaller than the rings of flax she lifted onto the spinning machines. .                  

  The streets themselves, patrolled by Protestant footpads, were dangerous for Roman Catholics. You could always identify the Catholics. They wore scapulars and were the fastest runners.

   There was only one way out of Hilden, and that was up. There was no down in Hilden.

It was the bottom. (I was not surprised but a bit disappointed to learn a few years after I left that my birthplace, which I thought might one day be a tourist attraction, was razed by the Ulster Improvement Authority to make room for a strip mall.)

   For me, “up” was Ellis Island, and, eventually New York City, another dangerous place. In Manhattan, you strolled on Park Avenue, strode on Fifth Avenue, and ran like hell everywhere else. I never stopped running.

   But New York was a magical town. To proud New Yorkers, every place else was Hilden. I worked in the ABC Television building at 1330 Avenue of the Americas, which everyone called Sixth Avenue. It was also known as Broadcast Row, for the three major television networks were nestled there side by side. My office was on the 29^th floor with a narrow view of Central Park, where you also had to run like hell.

   After a few breathless years in the ABC building, whose lobby reeked with the odor of Howard Cosell’s cigars, I learned the true function of a network vice president. It was to sit in an office with a window facing north and sound the alarm if you saw an iceberg coming. My job was somewhat more restricted. I had an office with a window facing the CBS building, and I was to sound the alarm if I saw Mike Wallace coming. He never did; I had to meet him on neutral territory.

 As the head of media for ABC Sports, I worked at seven Olympic Games, where you won medals for running.  I was at the tragic Games of Munich in l972, where eleven Israeli Olympians were assassinated by Arab terrorists. I stood near the ABC Sports studio as Jim McKay told the world of the murders in three stark words, “They’re all gone.” 

   I was a sailor in World War 11 for four years and six days without firing a shot. I hid behind a Navy-issue Underwood typewriter on U. S. destroyers in the South Pacific and wrote of the heroism of the guys who did the shooting while I tried to get their names straight without getting my feet wet.

   It’s never easy for one of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I worked my way through college playing the piano in dingy saloons where the drunken customers demanded endless choruses of “My Wild Irish Rose.” (When I complained to the owner of one Irish bar about the wretched condition of the piano, he had it painted.)

   During a long career in journalism and television, I ghost-wrote newspaper columns for Billy Rose, volunteered to attend a state electrocution although I was against capital punishment and stood in the hot Sinai desert in my new Gucci loafers while an insolent Peter O’Toole tied on his Roman legionnaire leggings and refused to speak to me. And on a cold October day, I buried my beautiful young daughter among strangers in an Ohio cemetery.

   My revels now are ending; the years are dwindling down, and as I record the Troubles I’ve seen, I sometimes think I can hear the Hilden footpads behind me.  I’m looking ov