James W. Roder, a district man For the Associated Press who covered the Bronx at night from 5:30 P.M. to 2 A.M., had been a newspaper man in New York City for almost thirty years upon his death at the age of forty-nine. Jim had worked previously for the old New York American and the now defunct City News Association, was known as a good reporter, hard-working, keen, and resourceful, with excellent contacts among the police and officials of the borough.
Jim was a short, wiry man, white-haired at forty-five, who gave the appearance of being somewhat taller than he was. He moved jauntily, had a gray, bristly mustache, very alert blue eyes, a mild, thoughtful manner, and always wore the same light blue sports jacket and slacks. He was a lively raconteur, a Friday night boxing fan, a constant, loving reader, and, after a fashion, an amateur painter—he liked to make copies of modern paintings, especially those by Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Modigliani. He lived with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law in a three-room apartment within walking distance of the 48th Precinct, at Bathgate and Tremont Avenues, which was Bronx police headquarters.
While an aggressive enough reporter, Jim was in some important ways unassertive, hesitant, nervous. He used to worry about his job, for instance, talk frequently about making a trip to Europe—he always said he particularly wanted to visit Athens—but usually he would either stay home on his vacation or spend a few days at the home of his wife’s sister in Connecticut. Even though he had an expense account, he would never take a taxi to the scene of a story, and rather than rent a bigger apartment, he and his wife slept on a hideaway bed in the living room, giving the bedroom to their daughter and her husband. Like many another newspaper man, he had vague longings to write but did not seriously attempt it. And at the same time over the years he turned down on different pretexts a couple of good jobs, one, when City News folded, on the New York Times, choosing instead to go to work for the AP.
In the Bronx, Jim and reporters for the Times and the New York Mirror shared a traditionally bare, dirty office called the “shack,” on the third floor of a walk-up building across from headquarters. The shack consisted of a narrow hall, where two telephone booths were installed, and two small rooms—a front room, furnished with a worn couch, a desk (without typewriter), several wooden chairs, and an AM radio and a police radio, and a back room in which there was only a wash basin and an old uncovered bed spring where a tired or drunk reporter used to flop during the night using a couple of telephone books as a pillow.
Walking or taking the bus to work, Jimmy used to arrive punctually at the shack, call his city desk—“Hello, Bernie, Jimmy. Anything for me?”—and then go across the street to the precinct for the first time that night. He would talk to the desk lieutenant or sergeant on duty, check the borough and city-wide police tickers in the Communications Bureau, and drop in on the borough Homicide Bureau and the Motor Vehicle Bureau, and finally the precinct Detective Bureau. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he would say, and then, after a short conversation, “Anything doing?” Usually there was little, and Jimmy would return to the shack and read the late editions of the afternoon papers until the other reporters arrived about 7 o’clock.
From time to time, a good story would break in the borough after dark—a sensational murder or a horrible disaster—but except for a run-of-the-mill fire, auto accident, hold-up, stabbing, or suicide, which Jim or one of the other reporters would cover by phone and which all would then call into their offices, most nights were uneventful.
The reporters would sit around and talk, turn on both radios and listen simultaneously to police calls and the ball game, watch the cars and people passing along Tremont Avenue, go out for coffee or across the street to the precinct several times during the night. “It’s a slow night,” one would remark. “How about some coffee,” Jimmy would say. Detectives, free-lance photographers, reporters from other parts of the city would come by, and occasionally, in a spasm of boredom, all would go to a movie. Sometimes, Jimmy would work up a feature out of some angle in a routine story and pass it on to the others. Sometimes, when it was late and quiet, he would reminisce nostalgically about big stories he had covered, various newspaper men, the days of prohibition, the Snyder-Gray murder case, the Lindbergh kidnaping, Arnold Rothstein, “Two Gun” Crowley, Vincent Coll, Judge Crater.
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Jimmy also used to pass a part of almost every night reading. On pay day, when he picked up his check and said hello to the fellows at the AP office in Rockefeller Center, he usually would browse around in the midtown stores that specialized in recently published, remaindered books, buying one or two. And he constantly reread Shakespeare and James Joyce, who were his favorite authors. One of Jim’s best friends was a Bronx police sergeant named Edward O’Rourke who introduced him to Finnegans Wake. O’Rourke, six feet four, with a long, bony face, deepset dark eyes, and black hair, had been born on a small farm in Abbyfeale, Ireland, and as a young man had both studied for the priesthood and had a “taste for writing.” O’Rourke was fluent in Latin, ancient Greek, French, and Gaelic. He used to say that a familiarity with twenty-six languages, Greek and Roman history and mythology, Irish history and folklore for the past fifty years, and all of English literature was necessary to read Finnegans Wake. He encouraged Jim to read it, at first for the “sound of the language” and later for understanding.
On some nights, the photographers and reporters—all but Jim—would roughhouse a little. They would drink, begin to toss the shack’s meager furniture out of the window, and disappear for hours in a car. “Where’ve you been?” Jim would exclaim exasperatedly. “Leave me all alone! Suppose a story’d broke.” Occasionally, a story did break and then he would hold it back, not phoning it into his office until he could reach the others. He used to cover consistently for one reporter, a heavy-set, middle-aged, balding man, who on summer nights would strip down to his underwear and shoot marbles in the shack, and got drunk almost every night.
Jim customarily would call his city desk for a “Good night” a few minutes before 2 A.M., and then, with the morning papers under his arm, walk home from the shack through the dark and silent streets, sometimes in a brooding, irritable mood stopping for a cup of coffee at an all-night luncheonette on Webster Avenue. Reaching home, he would stay up to six or seven, reading in the kitchen, and then go to bed, sleeping until one or two. Then, in the afternoon, he would watch the ball game on TV, paint, read, or take a walk until supper. Over a long period of years his daily life scarcely varied, except on his days off, Saturday and Sunday, when he and his wife might have guests, visit relatives, see a movie, or go to a museum.
Only a short time before Jim’s death a reporter coming into the shack one night casually asked him, “How’re you?”
And Jim replied, “I think I’m coming to the end of my rope.”
Shocked, the reporter said, “What do you mean, Jim?”
“Aaah, never mind, kid,” he said. “Forget it. Forget I said it.”
But, it was clear Jim was feeling very tired, discouraged, and resigned. He was fed up with covering the Bronx, the tedious nights, the ugly, repetitious stories, the long flights of precinct stairs, and dismayed by a realization of his general aimlessness. He could not seem, though, to bring his everyday life and his dissatisfaction together in any intelligent change. He felt too that despite his capabilities he had never gone very far in the newspaper business, that he had stayed on the districts while the focus of news had shifted from local to international. And he felt that the attitudes of press associations and newspapers toward local news had become stereotyped and offhand. In any case, like most reporters, he had observed a lot more than had ever got into the papers—innumerable facts, situations, occurrences, emotions were not considered “news”—and his perceptions and his true responses had been left unexpressed.
Jim died of a heart attack on a Sunday night a few weeks before his fiftieth birthday. His funeral was attended by his grieving family and friends, a large number of cops, detectives, and newspaper men, and an official representative from the Bronx district attorney’s office. As a kind of tribute, two radio cars from Bronx police headquarters escorted the funeral cortege on its way to a cemetery in Queens, down the Grand Concourse, across Tremont Avenue and past the shack to the borough line.
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