The newsroom itself was nothing special, heavy on wood paneling, clunky Royal typewriters, and wall calendars curling at the corners. When I or either of my two older sisters entered, any employees milling about obediently looked up and paid homage -- which, given the advanced age of some of them, qualified as aerobic exercise. One of my father's most immutable beliefs was that even nonfamily members of the Advocate staff wanted -- no, deserved -- to know the most intimate details of our lives. "Too bad you blew that trigonometry test," the switchboard operator might say to me as she accidentally pulled the plug on a call in progress.
If there were pressures on me back then, I didn't feel them. And there was one neat advantage to being the boss's boy: I could slip into the back room and explore as if I were one of my early literary heroes, the Hardy Boys. There were mysterious elevator shafts (in one of them, a cousin of mine nearly plummeted to his death, foreshadowing a legendary episode of "L.A. Law"); giant 500-pound rolls of newsprint ("toilet paper of the gods," I'd dubbed them in adolescence); and -- these were what I loved most -- big, noisy Linotype machines. The apron-wearing operator would hang a cylinder of metal, referred to as a pig, into one of them. As the heating mechanism dissolved the pig, the operator tapped out lines on a keyboard, making impressions on the molten metal. The machine spit out slugs of type, which were pushed together to make lines and then arranged into pages. Every time I visited, the operator made sure I walked away with a slug that bore my name.
As a kid I could read my father's concerns about the business in the shades of red that marched across his neck. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was comparatively scraping by while many of his former classmates had commenced what was then becoming the main business of lawyers: getting rich. But he had never really wanted to practice law, anyway; he had hoped to join the diplomatic corps. He was serving as a lawyer at the Housing and Home Finance Agency, in Washington, D.C., when the call came.
Please join us, came the plea -- please help the family. My grandfather's brother had died, so my grandfather needed someone. My father, Bernard Hyatt, had served as a correspondent for Stars & Stripes during the war, and as the editor of a weekly publication while in law school, so he wasn't an outlandish pick. Technically, and genetically, my mother deserved the right of first refusal; but probably because of her gender, no one had thought to ask. My father spent three months making up his mind. He often reminded us later, with a pained look, that he could have quite comfortably retired from government in the early 1980s. Ultimately, he had accepted because he loved the newspaper's mission. My mother quietly gave up her promising job as an ethnological-research analyst at the National Archives. The newspaper, my father would later explain, "seemed like a very good way to spend your time."
And it might have been that simple, if not for the family dynamics. Unexpectedly fulfilling his diplomatic yearnings, my father often carried messages between family members who might not actually speak to one another for, oh, 25 years. Other members of the staff found their own unique modes of communication. It wasn't uncommon for two septuagenarian Advocate salesmen to try to settle a commission dispute like real men, stepping inside the newsroom for fisticuffs. Belly to belly, they would be unable to actually land punches. My father enjoyed the spectacle.
Among family members, inequities flew. My father's salary, for instance, was pegged to a cousin's, even though my father outranked him. My grandfather had handed out stock like M&Ms on Halloween; by my father's arrival, there wasn't any left. In fact, there was barely any left for my grandfather, who had inexplicably surrendered controlling interest without, it seems, noticing. Many times my father wondered if he had made the right decision. Had he given up too much to do this?
He was never really sure. Or that's how it seemed to me, anyway.
* * *
It's not as if everyone avoided speaking about succession. It was spoken about on more than one occasion -- just not in my presence. The last time may have been around 1975, while I was still in high school. "Let's get him in," cousin Joe, then the editor of the Advocate, would instruct my father, as if somebody had left the dog outside.
But my cousin never expressed such wishes to me. Nor did my father commit me to anything. I don't know, he'd answer cousin Joe, don't count on him coming in. My father really meant that he didn't want to impose that on me, I think. To his credit, he rarely gave in to people who asked about my probable succession.
When I got out of college and began applying for journalism jobs, my father didn't offer me any connections. Of course, I wondered whether he was withholding them so the Advocate would stand out as my obvious path. I still don't know for sure. But I think he wanted me to come to the Advocate in my own way, so he wouldn't feel responsible for my choice.
Whatever my father's intentions, I ignored the whole matter. I moved to New York City, and later, I kicked speculation into high gear by joining a weekly not unlike the Advocate. How clever, people said, the poodle is getting his grooming somewhere else before trotting back to the family kennel. I knew my father was hearing those comments, but he never mentioned them or questioned me about whether I'd join him.
He did not want to burden me by asking; I did not want to hurt him by saying no. So, remarkably, we continued to dance around the issue. "People tell me I should feel complimented that you work in an allied field," he might say, never letting on about whether that was enough for him.
