Terror at the Fair

Chapter Thirty-Four

About twenty minutes after leaving with Betty Ann, Metzger returned to the pressroom.

“Ah, did you get the lovely Miss Wells hooked up with the lovely Miss What’s-Her-Name from down Georgia way?”

The PR man grinned. “Holly Webster. I did indeed, and they truly are an attractive pair to behold together. Miss Wells herself could certainly have been a beauty queen, don’t you think?”

“Okay, enough,” I said, holding up a hand. “Stop your drooling, Metzger, and tell me what you’ve got for in store for me today.”

“Ah yes, of course,” he said, consulting papers on his ever-present clipboard. “There’s a whole group, more than a hundred in all, of retired employees of the New York Central Railroad and their families who have come by train—on the New York Central, of course—from the East to see the fair and tour the city for a few days. I thought you might find it interesting to spend time with them.”

I shot him a look, and I wasn’t smiling. “Think this’ll be any better than the three-generation family of colossal bores from Indiana you hooked me up with?”

Metzger laughed nervously. “Well, for one thing, there are a lot more folks in this group. Somebody’s bound to be interesting.”

“I suppose so, given the law of averages, but what if I have to work my way through all one hundred of these pensioners and their loving spouses before I find the one fascinating story in the lot? It could end up taking all week.”

That stopped Metzger, who allowed a woebegone expression to take over his face, if only for a moment. “Afraid that’s the best I can do at the moment, Snap. I have to be honest; I’m running out of ideas for you. It’s hard coming up with something, or someone, fresh every day.”

I sympathized with the rotund PR man and took pity on him. “I think your initial excitement at having a reporter for a Chicago daily here every day has changed to a frustration. It’s like having to constantly feed a beast,” I said, “and I happen to be the beast. Tell you what: I’ll meet with this bunch from the—what is it—New York Central? Who knows, maybe something will present itself.”

As it turned out, very little presented itself, although I did find a couple named Phelps who had lived in eleven different towns in Upstate New York and Ohio over the course of forty-five years. Calvin Phelps had been a station agent for the railroad, and he and his wife, Sylvia, were childless.

“Cal and me, we both always just liked change,” the well-padded Sylvia told me with a sweet smile, bright blue eyes twinkling behind rimless bifocals. “Almost every time the opportunity came up for him to work in another town along the main line, we took it.”

“’Course we never bought a house, always rented,” he said, passing a hand over a full head of white hair and grinning. “But I wasn’t interested in being a homeowner anyway. Never liked the idea of being tied down.”

“What has been your favorite place in all those years?”

“I dunno,” he said, turning to his spouse. “I liked ’em all, but I suppose maybe Batavia, eh, Syl?”

“Batavia was nice,” she agreed, bobbing her head, “although I think for me it I’d pick Palmyra, where we stayed six years and made so many friends. We had such a nice minister there, too, Reverend Hawkins, who gave those inspirational sermons that made you want to rush right out and change the world. We’re Methodists, always have been. But when he got transferred to another church someplace down in Pennsylvania, we pushed on, too.”

“Now you’re retired and don’t move around anymore, I suppose.”

“Now there you are wrong, young man,” Sylvia Phelps said, gently shaking a finger at me. “We decided to retire in Canastota because several trains a day stop there. Cal has a lifetime pass on the NYC for both of us, and he and I are always off visiting the nice friends we made in the places where we lived all along the line. Many times, we even stay overnight with these folks, and they seem happy to have us.”

“And we still don’t own a house,” her husband said with pride. “Shoot, we even took the train all the way to New York City one time. I had to see the Grand Central Terminal once before I died, and it was worth it. Ever been there?”

I shook my head. “Great place, you’ve just got to make the trip someday,” he said. “You’ll never forget it.”

I promised I would and we parted. So I got my story after all. Something of an American saga. To cap it off, Phil Muller showed up and took a shot of the oft-traveled couple. When I got back in the pressroom typing and then dictating the Phelps’s nomadic tale, Betty Ann Wells of the Daily News returned, slumping into the chair at her newspaper’s desk with a protracted groan, kicking off her patent-leather pumps, and wiggling her toes.

“Well, Miss Betty, how did your session with our Georgian beauty go?”

“She is beautiful, absolutely no question about it. Just being around her made me feel dumpy.”

“Now there I insist on drawing the line. I simply cannot imagine anyone making you feel dumpy under any circumstances.”

“Well, thank you, Mr. Snap Malek. You are a throwback to the lost days of gallantry. Back to the interview: I’m afraid it was a lot like the way you described your session with the Alabama girl. Don’t get me wrong; Miss Holly Webster is a very proper young lady who knows how to water-ski extremely well, but she does not have a lot to say, other than how much she loves Georgia and all of those wonderful people back home. I could almost smell the magnolias and visualize the peach trees and see Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation when she talked.”

“Sounds familiar. But you’ve got yourself enough for a piece?”

She threw up her hands and let them drop into her lap. “Oh, I suppose so, and our photographer took a whole slew of shots of her. One is almost sure to run with the story tomorrow. We never miss a chance at getting some cheesecake into print, you know, like all the other papers in town, including your own.”

“Definitely including my own,” I concurred, leaning back and lighting up a Lucky. “So it sounds like you can call the day at least a qualified success.”

“I guess so. Do you mind if I ask you a business question?”

“Not at all.”

“Do you think there’s any chance the Trib would ever hire me as something other than a feature writer?”

“You’re talking about the news side, right?”

“Of course.”

“There’s always a chance, but—”

“But not much of one?”

“Well, we’ve got far and away the biggest newsroom staff of any paper in town, so if things eventually do open up for more women, the Tribune is most likely to be the place where it opens up first.”

“That doesn’t sound very encouraging.”

“Sorry, but to be honest, I don’t see anything happening in the near-range future. Maybe someday, though…”

She nodded somberly and turned to the sturdy Underwood on the desk marked DAILY NEWS, where she began transcribing the notes on her labored interview with the lovely water-skier who had almost become Miss Georgia.

More than a decade would pass before Betty Ann Wells, who went on to make a name for herself as a Daily News feature writer, joined the Tribune, first as a general assignment reporter, then as a foreign correspondent, first in London and later Paris. When she got stationed in the latter city, she ventured into Algeria, reporting on that North African land’s war of independence from France. Her coverage there would win her a Pulitzer Prize.