On Tuesday, March 30, early in the morning, I took the commuter train from Grand Central Station to Valley Stream, Long Island. The station was abustle, as it was every working day, with what one writer termed the “wage slaves” arriving from throughout the Metropolitan area to put in their eight hours of labor in the offices and skyscrapers of the great city. As the eternal outsider, I observed how most of the men were well-dressed, with suits and ties, leather shoes, the femmes in skirts and high-heels. The snack bars and newsstands were doing a lively business and there were always one or two people hovering around the Information booth in the center of the vast ground floor, as well as lines in front of the row of counters selling tickets to the outlying stations. There was a pleasant hum of purposeful, businesslike bustle, a tiny sliver of the daily weekday routine that embraced the working years and lives of millions who had not escaped from what some considered to be the “rat race”, the eternal striving for wealth and security. The scene at Grand Central brought to mind several old films in which the Station was used as a key scenario, such as The Clock with Judy Garland and Robert Walker, The House on Carroll Street and by extension, even the 1953 Italian classic, Vittorio de Sica’s Stazione Termini with Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Cliff. There was even for me a distant filmic whiff of that great British classic, Brief Encounter, most of which is set in a provincial station in England.
However, for my part, I was no longer part of that New York scene anymore. I could contemplate it as an expatriate, seeing the spectacle with detachment, knowing I would soon be returning to my routine in Madrid, working out of my comfortable apartment, making my own hours, calling my own shots, doing it “my way”.
The commuter train took close to an hour to get to the Valley Stream station, with few people in the compartment, since the crush of commuters were travelling in the opposite direction. Outside the train window the Long Island suburban communities slid by, two-family houses, parking lots, shopping centers.
At the Valley Stream station I walked down a flight of stairs to the street level. There were a few food stalls and a taxi stand. Shortly I arrived at the Balan Graphics facility where the paper was laid out each Tuesday. It was a large, flat one-story building inside which a dozen or so young women, with the help of the Variety section heads, pasted down strips of articles on large adhesive panels placed on spacious wooden, slightly tilted, desks. Neon lights overhead, no windows in the large room. Occasionally a telephone on the side of the room rang, giving last-minute orders concerning the contents of the issue being laid out. At a separate table sat three or four of the reporters. Every now and then a page proof would be handed to them, and one would stop reading his newspaper or interrupt a game of low-stakes poker he was engaged in with the others to start checking the page.
One of the half dozen ladies that pasted up the editions, Marge Prezioso, in an article in the Variety Souvenir Album, recalled:
“The type had to be developed; it came out on long rolls of film. Each story was numbered for identification on the front in black. On the back of the film, in non-reproducing blue ink, a number was also put in case the stories got mixed up, which they sometimes did. Wax was our best friend and our worst enemy. It was easy to move stories around, but if things weren’t burnished enough they could fall off. Stories were xeroxed and sent off to Manhattan for proof reading by messenger. Stories from Variety arrived at Valley Stream by teletype, fax or messenger. Sometimes the messengers fell asleep on the train, missed their stop and wound up out in Babylon, a Long Island suburb. Ads had to be type-“spec”ed, which meant that each and every word had to be labelled as to size, typeface, width and leading. The typesetters would input this information using codes. We only had two screens that could actually show what the finished ads looked like. Needless to say this led to some tension between typesetting and paste-up when the type didn’t fit. What a difference from today when all you do is highlight something, and it can be changed. At the beginning our typesetting equipment was old. It would break down for hours at a time. We made the best of this and went out to dinner at the Steak Loft until it was fixed. To work at Balan you had to know how to knit, crochet, play cards, or be an avid reader.”
Syd Silverman was already on hand at Balan when I arrived that morning, and he led me over to the desks where the pages of “my” Latin issue were to be laid out. The broken-page advertisements had already been pasted down with wax on each page. One of the girls, toting an x-acto knife, brought over strips of printed text containing the articles written by me and others on our typewriters and with Syd’s guidance and my occasional input regarding the importance or not of a given item, affixed them to the board, until the page was full. If an article was too long to fit in a given space, it was “jumped” to a catch-all page further back in the Latin section. Such “jumping” was frowned upon by many publications, but was standard practice in Variety.
Promptly at noon all activity at the plant ceased and the reporters and Syd put on their coats and sallied forth to have lunch at the Valbrook diner, a ten-minute walk past suburban houses. I was told that Syd sometimes would stop on the way to a local bar for a shot of Dewar’s, his favorite whisky.
The diner was a classical, upscale specimen in the shape of a railroad car, with booths and tables and aproned waitresses serving the tables. Syd’s favorite was a chicken salad sandwich, but American delicacies such as Yankee pot roast with mashed potatoes and peas, roast turkey dinner, meatloaf, blueberry pie and other local delicacies were on the menu. After about an hour the crew returned to Balan Graphics and when the last page proof had been checked the muggs filed off to the train station that took them to Grand Central.
The issue was completed. The “weekly miracle” had again been achieved. The Latin American entertainment section of the 128-page issue ran a whopping 59 pages of which 37 pages were advertising, plus the back cover, taken by the British conglomerate EMI. A rousing success! It comprised 130 short and long news articles.
The following morning, as I passed through Times Square, I could see the issue on one of the newsstands. The front page proclaimed “Hispano Show Biz: Young Cyclone”. Underneath appeared my by-line! I had risen from being a local scribbler and editor for expatriates in Madrid to being visible on the kiosks in the heart of the world of entertainment, also visible throughout the world in the 50,000 copies of the paper that circulated. It was my moment of glory and achievement.
Syd greeted me when I came into the office and later we had lunch together in a small Italian restaurant down the block called La Strada. Sitting in a booth, after cocktails and a light lunch, I suggested that perhaps in the future I could do another Latin section in two years. To which Syd replied that it should be done on a yearly basis. And so it was.
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For the following 25 years, until 1999, each November I would take my swing through Latin America and the U.S. Hispanic centers, winding up at the old building on 46th Street, until the paper was sold in 1987 and the venerable brownstone was demolished. After that I would hang my hat each March in the new digs on Park Avenue South and finally in an office on West 17th Street.
The Latin sections were profitable ventures for both Variety and for myself. Moreover, they enabled me see old college friends and visit my mother for a month each year. As for Latinoland, I have never returned there since then. But the memories of the places I visited and the many people I met linger on in my memory.
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