I’ve often said that my favorite newspaper writer of all time was Meyer Berger, a reporter, feature writer and columnist for The New York Times, who died in 1959. Berger could do many things. He was a dogged reporter, an inventive feature writer and a resourceful columnist. And while he could see it and write it straight, he also had an eye for the offbeat. I found a few examples of his work in an old anthology, “The Empire City,” a treasury of New York stories written by scribes as diverse as G.K. Chesterton, Truman Capote, Stephen Crane, O. Henry, Frank Lloyd Wright, Helen Keller, Jean-Paul Sartre and many more.
But it is Berger who wins the prize for the most offbeat story, a feature he wrote in 1942 during a brief stint at The New Yorker, titled “Sidewalk Fisherman.” Here’s the lead:
Sam Schultz has always been hydrophobic. Even as a kid, in a Central Park rowboat he would go white with fear of the water. When he grew up and friends invited him on fishing parties he’d always refuse, saying he had a tendency to seasickness. It took a vast economic disturbance, the depression, to throw him into grate fishing when all his natural instincts were against it, but today he is probably the world’s champion grate fisherman, the man who can haul up coins from subway gratings with more efficiency than anybody else in the business. Grate fishing was a primitive art when Sam became identified with it after losing his job as a truckman’s helper seven years ago. It was just something that bums worked at for beer money. Sam has made it an exact science, and he earns a living by it.
If the idea of fishing for coins sounds beyond pathetic, consider this: In 1942, if Sam Schultz snagged a quarter, that catch would be worth $3.14 in 2005 dollars. If he was lucky enough to nab paper money, say a $20 bill, his take would equal a little more than $250 in new-millennium money.
What makes this story work for me is not only its offbeat topic, but the serious way Berger writes about the angler’s method, as if the reporter were writing about a bass fisherman for Field & Stream.
Sam works with a few feet of light twine and a plummet of his own design — a piece of steel five inches long, an eighth of an inch thick, and about an inch and three quarters wide, just right to lower through the grate slot. He lets it down endways until it gets to the bottom, and then lets it fall broadside on the coin. … The flat side of the plummet is greased so that the coin sticks to it; all Sam has to do then is to haul away and he’s got the money.
Before long we are immersed not only in Sam’s special craft, but his life story as well: how he came to this, his German-American family, his public schooling, his service in World War I, his early jobs, and his hard times during the depression. All this leads back to the sociology and morality of grate fishing:
It’s a mistake, unless you’re out to bait Sam, to bring up the subject of stinkers. You wouldn’t know about them, but stinkers are the parasites of the grate-fishing industry. When they sense that Sam is having a lucky night, they run on ahead and cut in on his grates. There’s nothing you can do about it, either. Gratings are more or less public domain and anybody can fish them. What stirs Sam’s gall, though, is the utter lack of ethics (he says “ettics”) in the business. … “By me,” he’s apt to tell you with astonishing violence, “a stinker is rat poison — in spades.”
I think there’s a writing strategy hiding here: When you find a story that goes against the grain, consider writing it straight, without irony or cynicism. Think of yourself as an ethnographer or anthropologist entering another’s world, a world so different from your own that it deserves your time and hard work to come to a respectful understanding.
