Recapturing past glory and clatter of newsrooms

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CITY ROOM

By Arthur Gelb

G.P. Putnam's Sons, $29.95, 664 pages

REVIEWED BY WESLEY PRUDEN

Once upon a time, in a time and place now far away, there was a newspaper that set the standard for what every newspaper wanted to be when it grew up. Every young reporter in Peoria, Little Rock and Omaha dreamed of one day working there. The New York Times of that time and place is gone now, along with most of the artifacts and traditions of the era before television, when everybody in every town who could read invariably read the newspaper, and often two or even three.

The "gentlemen of the press" have been replaced by "the members of the media" (difficult even to say in mixed company). The rogues and rascals who made the city rooms fascinating places to obtain a higher education have been replaced by the young men and women that the rogues and rascals would have disdained as "college boys." The "morgue," the repository of a city's history, has been replaced by the "library." Lawyers and accountants, who wouldn't have been allowed in city rooms in that bygone era, are now occasionally allowed to speak to editors.

Gone is the clatter of the typewriter, gruff editors in green eyeshades, the brass spittoons, cigaret smoke, the booze and the bookies. Old city editors used to say that the best newspapermen were the Jews, the Southerners and the Irish -- the Jews were drawn to newsprint for the opportunity to do good, the Southerners for the love of the language and opportunity to spin stories, the Irish for the free booze that press agents, on the scout for a kind printed word for a client, slipped into the bottom drawer of a reporter's desk.

Exciting times, robust and swashbuckling times, and probably unconstitutional now. Arthur Gelb, who was a reporter, critic and Metropolitan editor of the New York Times in the last of those glory days and who became the managing editor at the end of his career, has masterfully recreated that era when the men and women who produced newspapers and even the New York Times usually took their work and not themselves seriously. The priorities have been reversed in the modern era, and it shows. Neither the times nor the Times is quite what it used to be, but it was great fun while it lasted.