Frank Stocker felt invisible working in the morgue of the Philadelphia Evening Star, far from the action of the newsroom, the news happening in the city’s streets and alleys. He daydreamed every waking hour of covering the top stories on Page One--not just filing them. Stocker wanted to be part of it all: he had ink in his blood. Maybe too much for his own good.
Stocker’s obsession of ever becoming a reporter at The Evening Star was reduced to being a glorified file clerk in the newspaper’s library–the “morgue” to newspaper people.
If he spent the rest of his life in the windowless morgue like all the older employees there, would his life’s work be worth nothing more than countless faded news clippings? The Star’s new stories were read by over two million people in the city and suburbs, but not one damn word was written by Stocker. NOT ONE MEASLY WORD! he felt like shouting to everyone’s surprise in the morgue.
It was the crazy and crisis-ridden Sixties. The Evening Star’s headlines every day echoed the turbulent times--and Stocker craved to report them. The city was crumbling apart as much as the nation.
The Vietnam War and the draft were taking their toll on the city’s young men as well as youth gangs roaming the streets. Hardly a day went by without anti-war demonstrations and draft-card burnings by college students.
Racial tensions soared after the assassination of The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in the spring of 1968, sparking riots by blacks nationwide. Several months later, presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in L.A. Assassination was becoming a strange household word only five years after President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas.
Mayor James Tate banned assembly of 12 or more persons after racial conflicts at a South Philly public housing project and playground.
The city’s murder count was about 350 in the late Sixties--nearly one a day. To further tarnish the city’s image, the city’s population dipped below the two million mark set in 1960.
Standing near the newsroom entrance to the morgue, Stocker was intrigued by the constant click-clacking on manual typewriter keys by rewritemen and reporters on deadline. Their desk phones rang continually and back-to-back rows of AP and UPI teletype machines clattered endlessly, spitting out national and world news line-by-line.
All this and other myriad mechanical functions involved over 2,000 employees from copyboys to pressmen to produce each day’s edition of the paper. Delivered to more than two million readers by over 9,000 paperboys. All this for only one thin dime.
In the newsroom, rows of jittery rewritemen in a sea of rolled-up white shirts and headset phones endured seven daily deadlines until the final four-star edition. They banged out carbon-papered “takes,” continuously updating sections of news stories only three-four paragraphs long. Some chain-smoked cigarettes, puffed on pipes or chewed tobacco or gum. Finishing each take, they impatiently yelled “BOY! COPY!” to the copyboys lounging nearby. On the floor below in the composing room, Linotype operators banged out narrow trays of fresh lead type.
Stocker’s heart started pounding on a tour of The Star as a high school newspaper editor upon hearing the continuous roar of the huge ink-spitting presses.
His craving to be a reporter intensified even more when he came upon a fascinating crime story, breaking up his monotonous filing. Stocker pondered whether a long unsolved murder was possibly the perfect crime due to its randomness.
The lanky, six-foot-tall, 28-year-old file clerk felt trapped in the windowless morgue. Rows of dull green file cabinets confined him in the tedious task of filing news clips and photos that never stopped piling up. The morgue had no views like the newsroom of the Schuylkill Expressway and the old Pennsylvania Railroad’s majestic 30th Street Station with its 20 towering Grecian columns.
The morgue amassed the flotsam and jetsam of the city. Politicians, punks and mobsters. Killers, psychos and perverts.
Crime stories to Stocker were bonafide news, not like that Society Page crap. As sordid as crime stories were, they often left out the lurid, graphic details. The Star prided itself in being a family newspaper, not a flashy tabloid. You would never read about all the grisly details of the infamous rape-murder of 16-year-old Girl Scout Maryann Mitchell by handyman Elmo Lee Smith, but you might learn them from cops and reporters on the street.
Still in high school then, Stocker barely remembered how the Manayunk girl was murdered one late December night in 1959, sending shock waves through two counties. Stocker couldn’t forget the fact that her killer Elmo Smith, the handyman from Bridgeport, was the last man—the 350th criminal--to be executed in the electric chair in Pennsylvania. Smith, 39, was arrested a few days later at the motel he worked at as a handyman and turned over to Montgomery County authorities.
At the end of an eight and a half-hour day, the tired library assistant took the Market-Frankford Subway-Elevated train to his home in feisty, blue-collar Kensington.
Stocker squeezed on to the “B” rush-hour train home like a varsity lineman. Getting off at the grimy Somerset Street El stop next to the run-down Cambria A.C. boxing club, “The Blood Pit,” he sidestepped the vomit and piss from the bums who hung on the stairways at night.
Frank Stocker would give them more than something to read--he would know the Big Murder Story inside out. Every minute detail--like no damn, big-headed police reporter like Charlie Murray ever could. Some day I’ll show up Murray, I’ll show them all, Stocker vowed.
He wouldn’t be some goddamn editor’s or rewriteman’s errand boy anymore--nameless fucking flunky: “Boy!”
He would call the shots from now on. He would be in total control of the day’s hot news story from here on. He would know every intimate grisly detail between the lines. Only he.
And his dying victim.