Ellis had known well enough to stay quiet, but his curious nature won out. Pop, who were those kids? His father’s gaze had remained on the road, his answer grim and barely audible. Breaker boys, he’d said, a clear end to the conversation.
In time, Ellis learned more about the children, as young as six, used for sorting coal. Ten hours a day they’d labor over chutes and conveyor belts in a breaker, enduring cuts from slate and burns from acid. Losing fingers and limbs in the gears. Developing asthma and black lung. Some were even smothered by the coal itself.
Today, breaker boys were a thing of the past. Now there were machines that could do the job, but also laws regulating child labor. Laws that would never have been written, let alone enforced, without strong public support. How did that largely come about? Journalists.
The revelation had hit Ellis soon after that day at the mine. He was sipping a malt at the drugstore counter as his mother shopped for goods. A female customer was speaking to the owner, outraged over an article involving another breaker boy being maimed. She commended the “brave newsmen” for reporting such things—atrocities, she said—that the big coal companies wished would pass quiet as a whisper.
Typical of an only child, Ellis was always an avid reader. But from that day on, newspapers became his read of choice. When his mother attempted to sway him to the classics, worrying that local accounts of murders and corruption were inappropriate for a child, he took to sneaking articles under the covers after bedtime.
One day he, too, would become a brave newsman, he’d vowed. He would do the exact opposite of the lowly muckrakers that his father griped about—“vultures,” he called them. In Jim Reed’s world, a man of real value created something tangible and useful to society, practical items that could last. And that didn’t include scandals and gossip in daily papers that amounted to “ink-stained kindling,” worth a penny and discarded the next day. No, Ellis would do more than that. His stories would make folks sit up and listen. Impart knowledge that actually made a difference.
Nobody believed he’d see it through, however, this big dream of his. Except for his mother. In Allentown—where his family settled years ago, after his father was hired by Bethlehem Steel—you got your diploma, then you worked at a factory, producing cars or trucks, pounding metal for the navy. And forget about college. Those money-grubbing institutions were meant for pampered Rockefeller types who’d never known a real day’s work. Or so it was said.
For a while, Ellis followed the crowd. He even dated on occasion until realizing it wasn’t fair to the girls, whose singular goal was to land a husband and start a family. He couldn’t risk being tied down for fear he’d never leave. Every week for more than a year, he just slung on his boots and gloves and ground away at a battery plant. But he did so merely to save up for his move to Philly and to buy engine parts for his junkyard find. To chase down the biggest stories, a reporter needed to get around.
His mother understood this, even when he quit his solid job at the plant to file newspapers for lower pay, only then to write drivel for the women’s pages. He never had to explain to her how each step led closer to his goal.
His father, on the other hand, failed to share their outlook and had no qualms about saying so—which would make supper at their home tonight all the more gratifying.
Although Ellis had sent his mother clippings of his first three features, earning her praise over the phone, this would be the first time he’d see his parents since the pieces went to press. At long last, his father would have to admit that Ellis’s career choices weren’t foolish after all. He would see that his son’s work held meaning, if at no other time than when Ellis shared his forthcoming feature about the mine.
It was just a matter of choosing the right moment.
• • •
“More pot roast, sweetheart?” his mother asked, seated to Ellis’s right at the dinner table. Her chair was always the closest to the kitchen.
“I’ve had plenty. Thanks, Ma.”
“How about some bread?” She reached for the crescents, heaped in a milk-glass bowl she’d owned since he was born. It was charmingly simple, yet purposeful and unchanging. Same as everything about his parents’ two-story bungalow home.