Theodore H. White, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (New York: Warner Books, 1978), 37-39.
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It was shameful—we, of a learned family, on home relief. With my father’s death, we were five left. And for five people the city of Boston gave eleven dollars a week. We survived on eleven dollars a week, for my grandmother, upstairs, had ceased demanding that we pay rent. But to get home relief, in those days, my mother had to take a streetcar (ten cents each way) downtown to the relief office. And there, after standing in line for hours, she would receive a five-dollar greenback and six ones. Each week she made the trip, each trip brought her home desolate. It was intolerable. My marks at school rose spectacularly in the last year of misery. If there was no father left, I had to make it on my own. If I wanted to go to college, I would have to do it by scholarship, and scholarship meant getting good marks. Given this need, my marks jumped from a sixty to a ninety average. My final College Board examinations brought marks then called “highest honors.” And immediately after graduation, there was an acceptance to Harvard. But the acceptance carried no scholarship money; no stipend, nothing but the right to enroll. And so the [start of page 38] certificate became a trophy to put away in a drawer. The problem was how to get off relief—and yet survive.
The struggle to survive spared no one. My sister, Gladys, a woman of extraordinary gifts, had to leave college after her first year to find a job as a library assistant. My two younger brothers—Robert, then nine, and Alvin, twelve—were conscripted to sell newspapers at the corners before going to school. That meant they had to be roused from bed before six each morning, and thrust out into the winter cold. And I woke at six each morning, for I had won from the local news wholesaler the right to run the streetcars on the tough ride from Franklin Park to Egleston Square, peddling papers.
On the streetcars I met the Irish as workingmen. Except for Mr. Snow—I always called him Mr. Snow—who was a motorman six days a week and taught a congregational Sunday school on the seventh day, the motormen were all Irish. Most were Galway men. They were proud of being men of Galway, and they told me why men of Galway were different from men of Cork, or Tipperary, or Dublin. It sounded very much like Jewish talk—why Pinsk Jews were different from Warsaw Jews, or Odessa Jews, or Lvov Jews. They were hard men, but once they accepted you they offered the camaraderie that makes Irish radicals die for each other. Of these men, the meanest was Motorman Conley. He was hard-faced, surly and profane. Even though I wore the nickel-plated medallion which officially entitled me to sell newspapers on the streetcars, he wanted me to “stay the hell off” his car. I had to brace him, and hopped his car one day to sell the papers; I rode three stops trying to explain to him that I had to make a living, too, for my mother and the kids, and I had the right, and I didn’t want to have a fight with him and on and on. Finally, he said, “O.K.” And then, after that, he not only gave me the key to the booth of the Franklin Park station, where there was an electric heater to warm the fingers and toes of the motormen on the early-morning run; but he also began to help me get more money from the boss. I was doing well selling papers, making between two and three dollars a day. But I could also hand in returns and get credit for the unsold papers against my account with the boss. Conley figured out for me that we could screw my boss and I could make an extra half buck a day if he picked up for me the discarded newspapers at Egleston Square, the turnaround of his trolley run. He would bring me back a batch of newspaper throwaways at ten or eleven in the morning; and if they were neatly enough cast off, I could refold them and slip them into my returns, thus making 1.3 cents on each late false return that I claimed from the [start of page 39] boss. I am sorry now that I cheated the boss by half a dollar a day, but he probably cranked it into his calculations of the net he took from the newsboys he “owned.” And since my case return to him was high, I was not challenged; he sent them back to the newspapers anyway. Conley and I became friends, in a surly way, as he helped me screw the bosses; we were both against the system.
Newspapering lasted for over a year. I would scream the headlines; and occasionally, when I saw an old Latin School friend taking the trolley in town to Boston University or Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I would scream the headlines in Latin. I could sell almost as many papers, if I put emotion into the call, by shrieking, “Quo usque, O Catilina, tandem abutere patientia nostra, quem ad finem nos eludet iste furor tuus…” as I could by shrieking anything else. But my old schoolmates of the Latin School ignored me. I was a dropout, they were college day students.
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谁能告诉我，Theodore White 小时候卖报纸时喊的拉丁文是什么意思？
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