The Wall Street crash and Crown Prince Humbert - 15 September 1989

I have never had cause to envy... Let me put it this way. I have admired, and do admire, many practitioners of my trade, but I have never had cause to envy another journalist. This week I came close to it.

An old friend and I have just emerged from two weeks' absorption with the United States Open Tennis Championships. I, as an amateur, a fan. He, as a professional sports writer who spent his whole life, 50 years anyway, since his university days, as a reporter and an historian, mainly of golf and tennis.

When we get together for dinner, we naturally start with a little small talk about one or other of the two games we share a passion for. This past week we speculated about the likely effect on women's tennis of the imminent arrival on the scene of a bounding tot, the 13-year-old Jennifer Capriati and her terrifying talent.

My friend tells me that this year she's been busy making mincemeat of the junior girls tennis players of the world, all the way up to the top girl, or seed.

All I knew about her was what I learned from her father who appeared in a television interview, a warm, affable Italian immigrant who was there to assure us that he's well aware of the fate that can overtake a child prodigy and was determined not to let it happen to his daughter.

He was going to see that she had a normal life and education and, I assumed, let her mature properly into womanhood before exposing her to the blazing, harsh world of competitive tennis. Bully for him, I thought.

However, in the next breath he said, yes, he was going to hold her back until she reached the age at which young amateurs can legally turn pro – that age is? She'll be 14 next March. "March", he said, "will be soon enough".

Once my friend and I observed this genial custom of talking first about his trade, he usually takes another swig of his drink, gives the punctuation of a cough which indicates we're about to change the subject and then performs a regular courtesy, which is to drop his expertise and turn to me as the tutor.

How about, he will say, Yasser Arafat and the Occupied Territories. Or, tell me about the president's drug plan! We then watch the news for half an hour or more and at the end of it he wonders, and I echo his wonderment, if there has ever been a time when the news of this country or affecting this country was so bristling with alarms and incurable problems.

Israel and the Palestinians. Crime, widespread across the nation. Municipal corruption. Always investigations of campaign money contributed under the counter by businessmen interested in particular legislation. A scandal in the colleges – there was a survey out this week which reported that of the students that get to college on athletic scholarships, only one in five manages to graduate.

There are bribery trials of state politicians who want to kill investigations into their own department. And always a Hollywood absurdity, like Zsa Zsa Gabor going on trial for slapping a policeman and showing up at the courthouse in a specially-designed creation whose conspicuous feature was elegant prison stripes.

Well, my friend can briefly deplore or chuckle over these things but he has more pressing things to think about. Once he's written up his piece about the tennis championships, he must buckle down to an intense stretch of work, fitting into his nights and days, the baseball games of the five or six clubs which now seem to be in the running for the play-offs in the World Series, the national baseball championship, to which most of October is dedicated.

I, on the other hand, have returned to what we now call "the real world" and all its attendant woes. You can see now why, for a guilty moment or two, I envied the cheeriness, the chronic blitheness of my old friend.

But I was yanked out of this melancholy mood by seeing, on one of those revolving picture-postcard stands at an airport, a postcard. I bought it. It's a miniature reproduction, which you can read with the aid of a magnifying glass, a miniature of the front page of a New York newspaper. The newspaper, a very good one, well and crisply written was the Brooklyn Daily Eagle – long, alas, defunct.

In the banner slot at the top, it gave the date, New York City, Thursday, October 24th 1929. The banner headline, printed in bold, black capitals, something the conservative Brooklyn Eagle rarely did, read "WALL STREET IN PANIC AS STOCKS CRASH".

It was indeed what has ever since been known as Black Thursday – as distinct from, you may recall, Black Monday, 19 October 1987. Of course nobody knew then that that Thursday would become historic or start the economic landslide into the Great Depression.

Hence, though the Eagle was certainly not playing down the story, it took up only a single column. The lead sentence was this, "Wall Street was in a panic today with no one to guide it out. Stocks crashed 10 to 50 points to outrageous levels". Imagine what sort of an apocalyptic sentence they would have written if they'd had to report that stocks had dropped 508 points.

But what interested me now, looking at that front page of 60 years ago, was the news that was written up in the other seven columns. A sub-heading, almost as prominent as the main headline read, "Attempt made to kill Italy's Crown Prince. Assassin caught in Brussels mob."

For the record, that was about a shot deflected from Crown Prince Humbert as he was about to lay a wreath on the tomb of Belgium's Unknown Warrior. That story rang the length of the left-hand column.

What else? Well, next to it, "Carnegie charge of paid athletes rouses colleges". The Carnegie Foundation, it seems, had done an investigation into the growing practice among colleges and universities of shopping among high schools for good athletes and then luring them with athletic scholarships. Never mind their intellectual ability, if any.

The foundation said the practice was rife. Columbia University and New York University hotly – it's always "hotly" – denied the practice and said that their sports were clean as a hound's tooth. Columbia admitted that four men on the varsity team had athletic scholarships, but their marks were up to scratch. Other athletic scholars had forfeited their scholarships when they failed in their studies.

The president of a small college in Pennsylvania said, "All colleges do it. They have to." , the implication being that the varsity football team would be in a sorry way if it had to depend on good students who could also play good football.

Well, well! I didn't know that the practice was so time-honoured. Today, the report I mentioned, stunningly confirms the suspicion that a first-rate college football team has to depend, in most places, on four intellectual morons out of five students.

The next column, in quite small capitals, reports, "Hoover's train halted by auto placed on rails". That Hoover was none other than President Herbert Hoover and this was, at first glance, an attempt to wreck the train he was travelling on in Indiana. He was the same president who very soon would have to confront the wreckage of the American economy.

But later two Negroes were arrested who confessed that they had put the motor car on the line in a plot to collect damages for its destruction. They weren't very good plotters. They were soon traced from the licence plates which they had neglected to remove.

And whose is the picture on the front page captioned "Joseph R Grundy". Well, he was a manufacturer who appeared before the Senate lobby committee (no such single body exists today), to admit he had raised in 1924 $700,000 for President Coolidge's presidential campaign and that most of it came from people interested in seeking from Congress higher tariffs.

Cheek by jowl with the picture of Mr Grundy is a piece about the bribery trial of a former New York state banking superintendent. The highlight of the day's testimony, it says here, was provided by Miss Margaret Kennedy, a pretty state bank examiner with flashing eyes and a musical voice. And she testified that her former boss had asked her to prepare, quietly, a passport application for him. Governor Franklin Roosevelt had ordered an inquiry into the looting of a city trust. The former boss of the lady with the flashing eyes was about to skip the country. I'm afraid that my miniature doesn't extend to the inside pages, so we'll never know if he made it.

There's a small item at the bottom of the same column which now has a quaint historical interest. Two men were arrested in Brooklyn 24 hours after they had opened a speakeasy, an alleged speakeasy, in full view of the office of the prohibition enforcement agency.

Now this, I should remind you, was at a time when most respectable families who were not teetotallers had their own perambulating bootlegger and when liquor was confidently served in restaurants and bars that had paid protection, either to shippers, ie bootleggers shake-down men, or, in many cities, to the cops themselves. Evident that the two Brooklyn boys had been derelict in their payments.

An even smaller item, one sentence long, was filed from Jerusalem. "10 Arabs were sent to life imprisonment today by the courts at Haifa for participating in the recent disorders at Safed in which many Jews were killed".

And, finally, to match, if not outstrip, the Zsa Zsa Gabor item, Mae Murray, a film star of dazzling fame in the 1920s had appeared at a motion picture theatre in New York to boost her coming movie. She slipped and hurt a bone in her foot. She was suing the Fox Theatre Corporation and its theatre circuit for injuring also, she said, her earning powers. She wanted $250,000.

What do the French say about the more things change...?

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