Chapter 2: I Started Writing
[Pare Lorentz:] Well, I started writing, the only income I had was to write. And I had no absolute blood kin, no soul in New York. I actually went into training.
I got on a swimming team over at the Lamp Company and I ran at night and regard[ed] the city. I used to take advantage of everything that was there, long since gone, but the symphony concerts up at the stadium at City College, great old Minnie Guggenheim would put on for free. I tried to find out where the ocean was and took trips out to the country-side, but it was an exploration where I tried writing. I did sell, that very first summer, a few bits of buffoonery to a new magazine called The New Yorker and to an old magazine called Judge.
Anyway, when I went to work for Judge, there was a wonderful, kind, gentle, experienced journalist named William Morris Houghton who wrote the editorial page, and idly at times, reported on movies. He had been the editor of Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly in the First World War. He had been on the old Daily Mail before then, been a war correspondent in the First World War, a gentle, kind, good man. And he was against the Ku Klux Klan and for the repeal of prohibition. And one of the many banks that owned hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of notes on this old magazine, humorous or not, informed the editor, Norman Anthony, that Mr. Houghton was fired by order of the bank, because we were losing circulation in the southern United States by being against the Ku Klux Klan and against prohibition. So in a rage, when this happened, Norman Anthony appointed me movie critic of Judge magazine in the summer of 1926.