Up In The Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
“The winter of 1933 was a painful one. It seems like a hundred and thirty-three years ago, but I remember it distinctly. That winter, the fifth winter of the depression and the winter of repeal, I was a reporter on a newspaper whose editors believed that nothing brightened up a front page so much as a story about human suffering. ‘The man on the street is so gloomy nowadays,’ one of the editors used to say, ‘that a story about somebody else’s bad luck cheers him up.’ In the three weeks preceding Christmas there was, of course, an abundance of such stories, and for one reason or another I was picked to handle most of them. One morning I spent a harried half-hour in the anteroom of a magistrate’s court talking with a stony-faced woman who had stabbed her husband to death because he took a dollar and eighty cents she had saved for Christmas presents for their children and spent it in one of the new repeal gin mills. ‘I sure fixed his wagon,’ she said. Then she began to moan. That afternoon I was sent up to the big ‘Hoover Village’ on the Hudson at Seventy-fourth Street to ask about the plans the people there were making for Christmas. The gaunt squatters stood and looked at me with a look I probably never will get over; if they had turned on me and pitched me into the river I wouldn’t have blamed them. Next day I was sent out to stand on a busy corner with a Salvation Army woman whose job was to ring a bell and attract attention to a kettle in the hope that passers-by would drop money into it for the Army’s Christmas Fund. ‘Just stand there three or four hours,’ I was told, ‘and see what happens; there ought to be a story in it.’ The bellringer was elderly and hollow-eyed and she had a head cold, which I caught.”
—Joseph Mitchell, 1938
