Assignment to Hell Read Online Free
Author: Timothy M. Gay
Rooney could also be something of a snoot. Ruthman met Rooney at the “R” mailbox freshman year. “Andy asked where I lived and my prep school. ‘I’m from Evanston, Illinois, and I went to Evanston High School,’ I said. Andy seemed surprised. ‘A high school—an elevated structure? And no prep school?’”
Ruthman remembered his “Room” (as they called one another) as fun to be around and an athlete who got the most out of his limited abilities. But Rooney could be stubborn to a fault.
Part of the hazing ritual at Sigma Chi, the fraternity they pledged together, was to tromp through the snow-covered hills of Madison County. Ruthman, an experienced wintertime hiker, owned a pair of sturdy, Iroquois-style snowshoes and urged Rooney to buy a similar pair. But Andy went cheap, getting snowshoes that constantly slipped off his feet.
“I had to pull his ass out of the snow the entire way,” Ruthman laughed seven decades later. 27 But the two of them avoided frostbite and got into Sigma Chi.
The young Rooney sometimes rubbed people the wrong way, Ruthman allowed, coming across as “brash” and “impolitic”—the very qualities that in the years to come Rooney turned into his own cottage industry.
When his draft number was called in the spring of ’41, Rooney mulled it over and concluded he wasn’t introspective enough to be a conscientious objector. So off he went that July to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he developed an instant—and lifelong—disdain toward martinets in uniform. He also learned that if you popped off to a noncommissioned officer, reprisals would come fast.
Rooney was in one of the few places he could abide on a military base—the mess hall—on December 7, 1941, when news came over the radio that the United States was now at war. 28 Post–Pearl Harbor, his outfit, now known as the Seventeenth Field Artillery Brigade, put him to work cobbling together a weekly newsletter. One of the brigade’s colonels came away from a conversation with Rooney convinced that the youngster was a Communist—or at least a serious subversive.
H AL B OYLE , R OONEY’S FUTURE F IRST Army jeep companion, was rebellious in his own way, too. His middle name, Vercingetorix, conveyed defiance: It came from a Gaul chieftain who gave the Roman Empire everything it could handle in 45 BC. Boyle eventually shortened the moniker to “Vincent.” Even while covering a world war Boyle exhibited “Boston tea party tendencies,” his great AP friend and editor Wes Gallagher wrote in 1944. 29
But Boyle had reporting in his blood; as a student at Central High School in Kansas City, Missouri, he finagled a job as a copyboy at the local Associated Press office. More than four decades later he was still working for the same wire service. But instead of sharpening pencils he was penning a nationally acclaimed column—and had been for thirty years. His first real reporting assignment in Kansas City came in 1928 when AP sent him to cover a triple hanging. 30
Boyle’s old man was an Irish immigrant, one of seventeen kids from a hardscrabble coal-mining family. “Every Irish family is a staircase to heaven,” Boyle was fond of writing. 31 In the case of the Kansas City Boyles of the 1920s and ’30s, the stairwell was cluttered. His hard-drinking pop disliked imposing discipline over Boyle and his three male siblings. “He thought boys had to get a few bumps in the process of learning to pit their strength against life,” Boyle wrote, “and he didn’t think it paid to interfere or protect them too much.” 32
Hal’s father was an ardent Democrat, a proud foot soldier for “Boss Tom” Pendergast, Kansas City’s notorious political strongman. 33 Hal inherited much from his old man, including feistiness and a fondness for drink.
Boyle’s mother was off the boat from County Mayo, a tart-tongued farm girl who provided her son with fodder for dozens of columns. She never got Mayo out of her blood; although
Ruthman remembered his “Room” (as they called one another) as fun to be around and an athlete who got the most out of his limited abilities. But Rooney could be stubborn to a fault.
Part of the hazing ritual at Sigma Chi, the fraternity they pledged together, was to tromp through the snow-covered hills of Madison County. Ruthman, an experienced wintertime hiker, owned a pair of sturdy, Iroquois-style snowshoes and urged Rooney to buy a similar pair. But Andy went cheap, getting snowshoes that constantly slipped off his feet.
“I had to pull his ass out of the snow the entire way,” Ruthman laughed seven decades later. 27 But the two of them avoided frostbite and got into Sigma Chi.
The young Rooney sometimes rubbed people the wrong way, Ruthman allowed, coming across as “brash” and “impolitic”—the very qualities that in the years to come Rooney turned into his own cottage industry.
When his draft number was called in the spring of ’41, Rooney mulled it over and concluded he wasn’t introspective enough to be a conscientious objector. So off he went that July to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he developed an instant—and lifelong—disdain toward martinets in uniform. He also learned that if you popped off to a noncommissioned officer, reprisals would come fast.
Rooney was in one of the few places he could abide on a military base—the mess hall—on December 7, 1941, when news came over the radio that the United States was now at war. 28 Post–Pearl Harbor, his outfit, now known as the Seventeenth Field Artillery Brigade, put him to work cobbling together a weekly newsletter. One of the brigade’s colonels came away from a conversation with Rooney convinced that the youngster was a Communist—or at least a serious subversive.
H AL B OYLE , R OONEY’S FUTURE F IRST Army jeep companion, was rebellious in his own way, too. His middle name, Vercingetorix, conveyed defiance: It came from a Gaul chieftain who gave the Roman Empire everything it could handle in 45 BC. Boyle eventually shortened the moniker to “Vincent.” Even while covering a world war Boyle exhibited “Boston tea party tendencies,” his great AP friend and editor Wes Gallagher wrote in 1944. 29
But Boyle had reporting in his blood; as a student at Central High School in Kansas City, Missouri, he finagled a job as a copyboy at the local Associated Press office. More than four decades later he was still working for the same wire service. But instead of sharpening pencils he was penning a nationally acclaimed column—and had been for thirty years. His first real reporting assignment in Kansas City came in 1928 when AP sent him to cover a triple hanging. 30
Boyle’s old man was an Irish immigrant, one of seventeen kids from a hardscrabble coal-mining family. “Every Irish family is a staircase to heaven,” Boyle was fond of writing. 31 In the case of the Kansas City Boyles of the 1920s and ’30s, the stairwell was cluttered. His hard-drinking pop disliked imposing discipline over Boyle and his three male siblings. “He thought boys had to get a few bumps in the process of learning to pit their strength against life,” Boyle wrote, “and he didn’t think it paid to interfere or protect them too much.” 32
Hal’s father was an ardent Democrat, a proud foot soldier for “Boss Tom” Pendergast, Kansas City’s notorious political strongman. 33 Hal inherited much from his old man, including feistiness and a fondness for drink.
Boyle’s mother was off the boat from County Mayo, a tart-tongued farm girl who provided her son with fodder for dozens of columns. She never got Mayo out of her blood; although
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