miscellany

excerpts from a 2007 talk at Boston University*

* * *

Peter Schjeldahl [SHEL-dahl] started work as a reporter in 1962 at the Jersey Journal, in Jersey City:

Hudson County, New Jersey, was epically corrupt. Several Jersey City mayors have gone to jail. One day, in 1963, a reporter hung up the phone and announced, “Tony Pro is having another press conference.” Mysteriously, everybody laughed. “Let’s send the kid,” someone said.

At the Teamsters headquarters in Union City, Tony (Pro) Provenzano sat behind an immense desk, flanked by central-casting bodyguards. Other reporters lounged and smoked. Only I had a notebook ready. Tony Pro told a series of obscene jokes about Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who was crusading against the Mob. And that was that. Tony Pro stood at the door shaking hands with us. Crinkle. In my palm was the first fifty-dollar bill I had ever seen. I said thanks, but I really couldn’t. I set the bill down when he wouldn’t take it back.

Staring eyes greeted my return to the paper, and the editor-in-chief called me into his office and shut the door. He said, “I don’t know what you did or what you said, and I don’t want to know. Never do it or say it again.”

see source, archived*