A Straphanger Trying to Write Up to A Bicyclist
After a recent afternoon around town, the story of a ‘prince’ of his city opened my eyes to the scenes that filled my head.
Straphanger is not a word I’ve spoken or written before, and until recently, when I was living the definition of it, not one I recall reading.
But there I was, riding southbound in a standing-room-only car on the Red Line of Boston’s infamous T. It was almost 5 p.m.; rush hour. Minutes earlier, I stepped onto the train from the platform overlooking the Charles River. Now we crawled underground, away from Beacon Hill, bound for the suburb of Braintree.
My short right arm was fully extended to fit my wrist inside a strap hanging from an overhead bar, while, iPhone in left hand, my eyes read from an app opened to a 21-year-old magazine story. It was a profile of the late newspaper columnist Murray Kempton by David Remnick in the March 1, 1993 edition of The New Yorker.
Kempton, whose byline ran on the pages of the New York Post and Newsday for roughly a half-century, was a slender gentleman who cut an immense figure among journalists. He rode to his office on a three-speed bike in a three-piece suit. He beat city streets and courthouse steps, telling Remnick that he “walked wide of the cosmic and settle(d) most happily for the local” stories and subjects. He won a Pulitzer Prize and multiple Polk Awards for journalism, and shared a Grammy for liner notes to a Sinatra anthology. He wrote four columns a week in a baroque style to a readership that was wide and varied, ranging from politicos to pimps (there’s an anecdote about the latter in Remnick’s story).
“He does not write down to his audience of subway straphangers,” wrote Remnick, who’s never written down to this straphanger, not even when he was writing in the early eighties about a long-defunct football team known as the Washington Federals. Yes, Remnick, New Yorker editor for a quarter century, was first a sportswriter for The Washington Post.
I’ve never lived in New York City, generally only read tabloids from the back page forward to the end of the sports section and, before hanging on Remnick’s words, knew little of Kempton’s work. Still, he fascinated me in a way artful storytellers usually do.
In his early reporting career, following service in World War II, Kempton covered labor issues and exposed racial injustices in the segregated South. Upon happily settling for ‘the local,’ he became a conscience for New York’s five boroughs. With sharp points at the end of nuanced lines, Kempton wrote, according to Remnick, “above all, about human character, about honor or the lack of it.” After his death in 1997, Newsday heralded Kempton as a “Keeper Of City’s History” who “Lived For Underdogs, Gave Them Grace.”
More than interesting, and somewhat inspiring, Remnick’s telling of Kempton’s story was instructive. Good manners, Kempton said, sometimes carried to the self-admitted point of eccentricity, never failed him when reporting from places where he was a stranger. And in the place he knew best, getting around was a must before sitting down to his typewriter.
“I need a scene, something to look at,” Kempton told Remnick. “I’d rather die than try to write out of my head four days a week.”
Before getting to Kempton in New York, I had gotten around a small part of Boston, making my way to a doctor’s appointment and filling my head with a few hours of scenes that would give me something to write.
They included my inbound ride during an off-peak commuting hour in the early afternoon. Seated across from me, an elderly woman held her phone close to her ear, listening to a BBC newscast for all of the few of us on board to hear. ‘Small world, indeed,’ I thought tritely of the sound of a British voice narrating the day’s headlines to a train car south of Boston.
After pulling into the Park Street station beneath the Boston Common, I hopped out to encounter a set of steps closed off by yellow caution tape and water dripping from a pipe above. It was a relatively minor inconvenience among the many problems facing the nation’s oldest subway system.
Avoiding the leaky mess, I hiked up a different stairway from the subterranean into the sunshine of a mid-March day made for late April in America’s oldest public park. The Common is a place of history, beauty and vibrancy; as best captured during my walk by three young men forming a frisbee-tossing triangle in a far corner of the park. Backpacks laying in the grass, jackets off, they zipped the disc around the horn, sending a signal that spring is on its way; if not already here.
Onward, I headed a half-mile up Charles Street, to a primary care practice on the broad campus of Mass General Hospital and checked in. A young Black male took my vitals, a young medical student seemingly of South Asian descent probed my recent medical history and my physician with Mid-Southern roots concluded my exam. Stopping by the lab on the way out, my blood samples were drawn by a young woman who spoke with what I heard as a Caribbean accent.
Each, different on the surface from me. Each, there to look after me, and my well-being. My small world is better because each is in it.
With a bandaid on my right arm, I rolled down my sleeve and left for the outbound train. In the interest of time, hoping to get ahead of the 5 o’clock onrush, I saved the walk back to Park Street for another visit and entered the closer Charles/MGH station.
Its long, narrow platform extended to a short, uncovered stretch overlooking the river’s Esplanade. I followed it all the way, to a spot offering both a view of the Charles — sun reflecting off the water, wind blowing in — and, with a slight turn of my head, the people assembling on both sides of the tracks.
Medical workers in scrubs mixed with office workers in suits and skirts, who blended with tradesmen and laborers in their uniforms of the day. All at the mercy of the T’s typically erratic timeline, anxious for their post-workday exodus.
Many got on the first train that arrived. It wasn’t mine, so I stepped back. Meanwhile, the driver leaned forward, poking her head out the window to announce that the car doors staring me in the face were “out of service.” Luckily, the rest of the car’s doors opened and, after everyone was herded inside, closed.
About five minutes after their departure, my train came in. While waiting, I searched for something to read, preferably about a writer. Remnick’s feature on Kempton showed up in the results: “Prince Of The City.” A fan of the author and intrigued by his subject and the story’s weighty title, I opened the link.
Then I hung on for the ride home. I kept reading beyond Kempton’s need for a scene. But I couldn’t get past it. I had the audacity of relating it to my own needs for the same.
Lifting my eyes, I studied the scene I was in. And considering we had to stop, or at least slow down periodically to allow ample distance between our train and the one ahead of us, there was more than ample time to do it.
I stood over a mother and her little girl. The child rested her tired head on mom’s lap. Behind us, a young woman chatted cheerfully on the phone in a foreign language. Eastern European, I guessed. And a few feet in front, by the door, a middle-aged guy with a ponytail and slight Southern twang told another rider that he enjoyed his time in town.
The crowded subway car, like the doctor’s office, was a kaleidoscope of people of different stripes and shades: an audience, if you will, as varied as Kempton’s. A thought closer to banal than baroque occurred to me. Different as we were, everyone shared these same moments of our lives. We were in it together.
Had I a little Kempton in me, I would have politely sought their stories. Why was the elderly woman streaming the BBC? Who were those frisbee players? How old was that daughter with her mother? Where was the young woman from? What did the Southern gent like about Boston?
They could have been players in a local column projecting, potentially, cosmic overtones. Perhaps in a clever but pointed take on our antiquated mass transit system and why Boston’s straphangers (and subway sitters) deserve better.
Without, of course, writing down to them.
Alas, I hope that simply recognizing — and respecting — that they all have stories to tell is enough to give them some grace, and honor a champion of the underdog.
Bob Socci has been the play-by-play radio broadcaster for the New England Patriots since 2013. You can find some of his other work at www.bobsocci.com and www.985thesportshub.com.
