CARL: If this scion of a poor but honest garment worker from the Bronx were to set down his damn-near half century from the police beat to the dean of editors in New York's journalistic minefield, he would tell how--
      + He skipped school one day when he was 17, went down to Times Square for a nickel and paid fifty cents to see Pat O'Brien and Adolphe Menjou in the Hecht-MacArthur "Front Page." Emerging, he decided that he would forego any further formal education and become Hildy Johnson.
      + He went to work on Cyrus H.K. Curtis's New York Evening Post as a $12-a-week copy boy in 1931 when that three-cent journal was down to its last 100,000 dying-hard Republican readers and in its death throes. Stripping $25,000 per week from the publisher's bulging Saturday Evening Post bankroll, the paper made a valiant effort to cut its losses by posting cards on the pull-cord city room lights which said PLEASE EXTINGUISH WHEN NOT IN USE. Surprisingly enough, that did not do it, so Mr. Curtis sold out to another Philadelphian, J. David Stern, who had the same abhorrence for red ink and in 1939 let the paper fall into the hands of the elegantly aristocratic Dorothy Schiff for free.
      Mrs. Schiff (henceforth Dolly because Sann was among the very few toilers in her "Liberal vineyard" permitted to address her by that name) picked up the nation's oldest continuing daily both as a plaything for the second husband in her string of four and for the purpose of preserving Franklin Delano Roosevelt's lone editorial voice in New York City. Sann, on the street then, became her Executive Editor ten years later and before fleeing in the face of the 1977 Australian invasion heard himself described in some circles as the nation's oldest continuously employed underpaid editor even though his initial $12 starting salary had improved to some degree.
      + He had quite a bit to do with the cash-poor Dolly's decision to come up with the one last money transfusion which kept The Post from folding in 1949--an item, alas, which did not use up any space at all in his good friend's authorized 1976 biography, "Men, Money and Magic." Initially flattered with a bid to write that opus himself, but more interested in books of his own choice, he elected instead to let it fall into the hands of Jeffrey Potter, observing that he himself might want to write a sequel called, "The Other Side of Dolly." This was in the publisher's own throne room and not at all well received.
      + A founding member of the American Newspaper Guild when he was still a callow youth virtually free of all vices, he later found himself functioning as the assembled publishers' ghost writer in many of the larger strikes, like that 114-day crusher in 1962-63. He shed no more tears for that elite gentry than he did for the army of unions involved. Even unto this day he believes that each side in the destructive local newspaper wars always got what they earned with their own excesses; the owners out of weakness and their own internecine struggle for the buck, and the unions out of a mix of bounds power and plain stupidity. A plague on all their houses.
      + He sat in on the wakes for more dailies--Mirror, World Telegram-Sun, Journal-American, Herald Tribune and ultimately the three-headed World Journal Tribune--than any other editor in history while The Post itself, coining nothing but money from 1949 all the way into '75, never ceased to be listed as the "marginal" gazette headed for the print shop in the sky the very next morning if not sooner.
      + He covered all the beats from New York to Washington and was into investigative reporting long before that term began to be affixed to any legman (all right, legperson) who could go and pick up a handout at a press conference. He helped turn up a straying reformed whore a Tammany Hall-drafted Manhattan D.A. wasn't hunting down too strenuously because with her in the witness chair he would have had to put a vice czar named Nick Montana behind bars. He broke a story on a Lower East Side land grab for luxury housing which impelled Fiorello LaGuardia to call up J. David Stern and demand that he be fired. He did some of the digging which produced the first full-fledged expose of racket boss Joe Adonis--and then was sent to Mr. A's Brooklyn manse to see if that gentleman wished to offer any rebuttal. He was on the Lucky Luciano story when some loudmouth told Tom Dewey that the Boss of All Bosses was dealing in flesh on the side. Two of his reporters slipped the Kefauver Committee the files that made Bill O'Dwyer sweat under the television lights in 1951. By himself, he came perilously close to putting the wrong man in the Death House once in a triple murder but, then, today's court calendars are simply jammed with libel suits stemming from the labors of the new investigative reporters.
      + Early on, he shook off two underworld figures, rather gaudily celebrated, when they offered their services to Colonel Lindbergh after his baby son was kidnapped, who offered him three times his exorbitant $45-a-week salary to come in with them and improve their public image. Looking back, career wise, that may have been a mistake.
      + He turned up in the Frank Costello contempt trial flowing from the Prime Minister of the Underworld's walkout on Mr. Kefauver facing contempt court charges himself because his gung-ho City Editor had sent a reporter to interview a juror who called in sick. Uncle Frank's defense battery wanted a mistrial; P. Sann just wanted to plead nolo contendere and get the hell out of the hot seat.
      + He took a call, as Night City Editor, from a fairly distinguished labor leader (still around, and riding the heights) threatening to hasten to his side and blow his brains out over a story The Post was printing that day. The story ran; the labor statesman never could remember that little chat on the phone.
      + He took a call, as Executive Editor, from Norman Mailer threatening to come down to The Post and beat him up over a Mailer essay on book critics which he had edited down on matters of libel and poor taste. He told the more-than-normally enraged author he had to leave at 1 p.m. that day and could not wait beyond that hour for anything as trivial as a non-title fist fight.
      + He took a call from the marrying playboy Tommy Manville saying he was suing for an even $5M over some item of trivia in Earl Wilson's column, but that was in the Stern days and the asbestos heir generously withdrew the threat when it was explained to him that the paper didn't have five million cents.
      + He took a call from District Attorney Frank Hogan, in the midst of a massive anti-gambling sweep, asking him to send over two of his own men whose names had come up on wiretaps as peddlers of quick race results from The Post's wires to a lowly bookmaker. One of those men was handling that breaking story on the copy desk at that moment while his own wife, on rewrite, was banging it out. The other, in sports, had been Sann's supervisor as a copy boy. He sent both malefactors over to Mr. Hogan and in due course fired them and had to go to arbitration with the Newspaper Guild. After all, what's wrong with the help selling your race results for a few pennies so a turf accountant could make a few bills? Sann himself had turned down $200-a-week in return for furnishing that same service to the bookie holding his own markers.
      + In another century, he broke the story of Richard Milhaus Nixon's resignation some seven hours before it happened--and never told a living soul how he got it. To get that one on the presses he had to volunteer to Dolly Schiff that if it happened to be a wrongo he would not be in the next day, kissing goodbye to some $100,000 in severance pay.
      + He was the good friend, loaded with legal wisdom, who advised Marie Torre to stand on her First Amendment rights and refuse to reveal where she got the information for the Herald Tribune television column which caused Judy Garland to sue her for a few million--and the pretty columnist wound up in jail. Her husband never forgave P. Sann; Miss Torre did.
      + He turned down a Washington call from a dear friend--ex-staffer, ex-colleague--because he was somewhat busy putting out an extra on the Puerto Rican hit squad which had just tried to assassinate Harry Truman at Blair House. He took the call when it turned out that his old buddy happened to be passing the scene of near-carnage and could furnish him, gratis, with an eyewitness account.
      + Speaking of Presidents gone, he went to press with John F. Kennedy's death some 35 minutes before Lyndon Johnson permitted it to be made official. To Sann, the words of the priest who performed the last rites figured to be at least as good as those of LBJ.
      + On Mr. Kennedy again, he offered the man a piece of advice (Dolly bought the luncheon sandwiches) the day before the first of his four debates with Richard Nixon: Let the other guy do all the talking and the election's in the bag.
      + And Mr. Nixon again: The Post shared the exclusive 1952 break on that secret "expense" fund of the barefoot boy from California--and not too long thereafter came within minutes of breaking a much larger one which might well have made the Vice Presidential candidate the new proprietor of Dolly's plaything. Because that story, alas, was a plant.
      + He was on the Crusade Special which carried Dwight D. Eisenhower into the White House--and from that train found a way to break the off-the-record story of the General's personal finances.
      + He was the first (and last) newspaperman to drop in on Mr. Nasser's Cairo with an Israeli stamp in his passport and his explosive 1955 head-to-head interview with the Egyptian strong man ("You don't know how much hatred is directed against Israel") was published worldwide and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
      + Pulitzer? Sann is the only newspaperman who blew that high distinction both as a nominee and judge--because he went rushing to his typewriter in 1966 when the Columbia University brass brought in a winner his national jury had never even been privileged to read. That incident made him an ex-judge.
      + Back to the Middle East again in '58, he got thrown out of both Lebanon and Jordan in the same night, carried on the rolls as a dangerous "Zionist" agent because of that Nasser piece. To get into another Arab country, indeed, he had to wait until 1973's Yom Kippur war and move around with the Israeli army.
      + He claims for his newspaper all the credit for exposing the Quiz Show scandals of 1959 (but so did the Journal) and a fair slice of the credit for the relentless legwork that helped wash out the trumped-up George Whitmore confession in the Career Girl murders in 1963.
      + He claims for himself the credit for keeping alive a youth in a gang of five on the way to Sing Sing's electric chair in the killing of a detective. He covered that multiple execution himself, coming away not all that shattered because the last boy to go--the actual killer, indeed--said in his farewell address that "If my name was Cohen and I had a longer nose I wouldn't be here." (The youth Sann helped was Jewish and so was the Governor who commuted his sentence.)
      + He told Bill O'Dwyer, in print and in person, that the much-heralded housing rehabilitation program fashioned for him by the sainted Robert Moses was nothing more than a $41M tax grab for the slumlords. That program wound up in the City Hall furnace and Sann won a dinner bet from the Boy from Bohola.
      + He offered John V. Lindsay some free advice after New York City's Finest let the rampaging looters run free in the big 1967 Harlem riot: Make the storekeepers up there install breakaway windows (so none of the disadvantaged suffered any cuts) and let the non-paying customers affix their names and addresses to the heavier items for the police to deliver to their homes (so they wouldn't suffer hernias).
      + He told an incoming smaller Mayor, then 67, that he could blaze all kinds of bright new trails if he confined himself to a single term and did all the things crying out to be done to restore our misnamed Fun City without having to worry about storing up votes for a reelection campaign four years later--and Abe Beame never solicited his advice and counsel again.
      + He asked Golda Meir whether a woman really ought to be Prime Minister of always-embattled Israel. "They elected me," the lady told the male chauvinist pig--later to wear that brand in public for trying to fire two female reporters out of the Friedan-Abzug-Steinem set who had refused any further "women's" assignments. Hell, that sort of thing went way back. An article of his headlined, "Paper Dolls," for the Saturday Evening Post during World War II, made him a questionable choice for Dolly Schiff's City Editor and he quit and went to Mr. Hearst's Journal rather than accept the title of Acting City Editor. Damn, he was wooed back within months (you can't win 'em all) to join The Post's Washington Bureau.
      + He covered FDR's last press conference and started thinking about what it was going to be like to cover the same man's funeral.
      + He handled his paper's staff at national conventions from 1952 into 1974 with just a few sabbaticals in between. He had a little trouble clearing the copy at one of those circuses when two of his longhairs, Murray Kempton and Max Lerner, both took to quoting Mr. de Tocqueville in their dispatches. (Is there a reward in Heaven, or maybe even a special Pulitzer, for a man who spent so much of his life's substance in the care and tending of such columnists as Kempton, Lerner, Jimmy Cannon, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Leonard Lyons and a few others, and was deemed guilty in the departure of such visiting scribblers as Mike Wallace, Jackie Robinson, Helen Gurley Brown, Marion Javits and even no less a heavy hitter than Barry Gray?)
      + He took the tear gas and police riot sticks in the blood-drenched Democratic National Convention in Mayor Daley's Chicago in 1968 because he was writing that part of the sorry saga himself.
      + He went to the Soviet Union with Mayor Lindsay in 1973 in the guise of one of Big John's "urban experts" but actually to write the story of the dissident Jews battling to get away from their keepers. He set Lindsay up for a secret session with the most prominent of the dissidents but the KGB ferrets with their shadows, bugs and rabbit ears insisted that the Mayor entertain those tortured souls in his own posh VIP quarters.
      + He went along with the Beatles on their first invasion of the United States and Canada in 1964--on his vacation by the way because the notion of his expending any of his R & R time to write books always pained Dolly. He isn't quite over that insanely wild journey yet. The Yom Kippur war was easier.
      + Trained as a reporter in the fine art of stealing things, he looted the files of the prosecutors in Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey for one of his nine books, "KILL THE DUTCHMAN! The Story of Dutch Schultz"
      + He wrote a weekly humor column for The Post while doing his hard time as Madam Schiff's editor but all the fun went out of it with the early death of his wife and in 1961 he wasn't a columnist any more.
      + He saw his own native city go from the breadlines of the Thirties to some reasonably exalted peaks to the very brink of disaster and the newly engulfing terror-in-the-streets. To put that another way, he courted his child bride in parks you can't go into now in the dark without an armed bodyguard (his own personal arsenal was lifted by a couple of visitors to his Greenwich Village floor-through while he was with the Beatles).
      + He was the spokesman for the local papers in the Fair Trial/Free Press Conference as well as the "enforcement officer" for New York's downstate region while The Post itself was taking its share of blasts over his own handling of crime stories. Item: Were we all supposed to be good little boys while a U.S. District Judge set it up for a "pretty substantial" Cosa Nostra figure to use his very own private entrance into the federal courthouse so the press wouldn't add to his travail?
      + Anyone for the sports beat? Sann wrote the main story on the DiMaggio vs. the Philadelphia Whiz Kids World Series in 1950 and took a terrible hazing from his baseball writers. He broke the story of Mr. DiMaggio's retirement. He covered a few of the Boston Celtics' NBA championship games because he was a basketball addict and also the [first] biographer of Red Auerbach. When Dave Cowens walked out on that team in '77 Red brought him to New York to have a talk with Sann. It was 5-8 vs. 6-8 but the fiery redhead put the Celtic green back on.
      + When Sann was a small boy moonlighting on the Daily Mirror at night he enjoyed the high privilege of bringing Walter Winchell his hot soup. Some twenty years later, a Post series left the Winchell legend in tatters with Sann himself pitching in on much of the legwork and writing the roughest segments. Upon reflection, a man has to feel bad about that sort of thing--or does he?
      Finally, there is but one illustration available for this projected half-century tour of New York and some other places. It is a framed memo from Dolly Schiff that says, "Paul, you were right again." The trouble is that the author can't remember what he was right about in his twenty-seven years as the Gray Lady's editorial Sergeant-at-Arms, and he has the scars to prove it. Still, he put in his appointed time with no more than four or five resignations and took early parole when Rupert Murdoch wrote that $31M check and became the proprietor of the old tabloid down by the fish market on South Street. All the reformed editor left behind were two libel suits for $25M each, but those trifling items never added a penny to the Press Baron's losses. Paul Sann's own slate, if not his mind, is clear. In his time in the salt mine called The New York Post he saw the sales go from 100,000 to 700,000 daily to top the entire nation's evening field for a while in the Seventies. He never said he did it all by himself and some people said he had hardly anything to do with it at all. Oh, well, as Mr. Auerbach said once when his club opened a season with eighteen straight wins and finally got beaten: "Win one, lose one." If he had it all to do over again he would say, with William Faulkner, that he would try to do it better--maybe even right.