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Dark of the Moon
© 2024 by Walter Reimer and E.O. Costello
Two
The Alpha.
Oh, my God.
John Terhune. I met him once, and only once, and he made a definite impression back then. No one really knows why the werewolf incidents in New York City dropped off the way they did after '28, but the scuttlebutt says that John and his extended family – his pack – were involved in it.
As his name implies, he’s Dutch ancestry, probably from one of the first werewolves to set foot on Manhattan way back when. Well, was.
“Are you sure?” Inspector Cunningham asked Michael.
The werewolf looked from him to me and nodded. “Y-You said a w-w-werewolf had gotten k-k-killed.” He gulped and looked at the corpse. “I – I – “
I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Calm down, Michael. It’ll be all right.” Yeah, it was probably a lie, but there wasn’t much else I could say. I eyed Cunningham. “You need him for anything else?”
Cunningham looked at Michael for a long moment before shaking his head, and I said, “Get on home. You’ll have to let ‘em know, okay?”
“Tell ‘em to don’t be stupid,” Cunningham added. “Last thing your bunch need at this point is having the cops looking around.”
Michael sniffed, nodded, and he left.
The photographer had left already, and I said to Cunningham, “I better get to the office and get this written up.”
He nodded. “Look, if you hear anything from your furry friend,” he said, “let me know, okay? Last thing we need is a war.”
“Don’t I know it.”
***
A friendly cop gave me a lift down to Barclay Street, and I spent the next hour and a half writing up the story. In the middle of it, the city editor (who'd just come on duty) called me over to his desk, and we had a talk.
There was no way we were going to break the story -- the curse of being an evening paper. Still, if we couldn't be first, we could be the best. The photographer came in with still-wet prints of what he'd shot, and the editor half-looked at them while he listened to me.
I proposed to write two stories. One was a straightforward who-what-where-when of the crime scene. That would, given the circumstances, go in the lead hole on page one, right hand side. Page five would have another article by me, with my thoughts on what had happened, including the howling I'd heard all over the city just about the time of the death.
We went back and forth over a few drafts, and even the managing editor stepped over at one point in the morning to put in his two cents' worth. After all, we were one of only two papers in the city that had a paranormal beat, and he wanted to get it right.
The city final of the Daily News was brought in. "PARK AVENUE SHOOTOUT" yelled the headline. Right above a picture of the dead werewolf's muzzle, in a pool of blood. Just the thing to see over your cereal in the morning.
The Mirror, as usual, had missed out nearly totally, putting the story on page 11. The Times and the Herald Tribune both had stories leading off their local, New York sections, but they didn't front page it. Not their style, anyway.
As the first edition rolled off the presses, I got a copy. We showed the cop in the reflection of the shattered mirror, and had a somewhat softer headline. "ELDER WEREWOLF MURDERED." Well, for value of "soft," but it would distract readers away from what was going on in Suez and Hungary, if nothing else. Local news was always a bigger draw.
Like I said, straightforward article, didn't play up any of the lurid or bloody angles. We indicated that Cunningham was on the case and left it at that. Our long-time readers knew what that meant.
The explainer on page 5 had some speculation from me. I admitted I didn't know for sure what had happened, but that given the size and evident age of the dead werewolf, plus the anguished and anxious howling that had gone on the previous night as he lay dying, it was obvious that this was a senior and respected wolf. I left it at that, too. Our long-time readers would have been able to fill in the blanks, I was sure.
A lot softer than the Daily News' coverage, but then again, we didn't treat the werewolves as freaks, like they did. Of interest to our readers, sure, but not freaks. And I will admit that's bias on my part.
The city editor sent me home around noon or so, with an admonition to get at least a few hours' shut-eye, since I was probably going to have to hit the ground running.
Yeah, I was tired, and I could use the sleep. I’d pulled all-nighters when I was in the Army, but that was more than ten years earlier. I had turned thirty-eight recently and was still spending more time awake than asleep.
There was a pretty heavy rain coming down as I left Barclay Street. I turned east, toward City Hall Park and the IRT East Side terminal to go home. I had my hat down and my collar up, so as I turned up Park Row, I didn't see anything. Wasn’t expecting anything, either.
A truck swung into an alley a few yards in front of me, and as I got closer the back doors opened. “Walshe,” a voice growled, and I stopped.
Now, I’m just short of six feet tall, but even crouched in the back of the truck I could see that this guy had a few inches on me. He was wearing trousers and a sleeveless undershirt, and as I watched he Shifted. “Someone wants to talk to you.”
“Yeah?” I squared my shoulders, and felt rainwater start to trickle down the back of my neck.
He bared his teeth in a smile. I could tell the difference. “Yeah.”
“Look, it’s been a long night,” I said, “and – “
That was about as far as I got, because I felt a pair of strong paws grab me by one shoulder and the seat of my pants, lift me off my feet, and toss me at the wolf in the truck. He caught me, the doors to the truck closed, and the werewolf who’d tossed me got behind the wheel and started backing the truck out of the alley.
I knew better than to struggle. Sure, he was a few inches taller, but werewolves are a lot stronger and more resilient than us normals.
“Sorry,” the guy driving said, “but we were told not to take ‘No’ for an answer.” He slewed the truck around in traffic, ignoring the toot of horns behind him, and he started forward.
Uptown? Toward Brooklyn? Hard to tell for sure.
But that's why the city editor got paid the big bucks: he knew I was going to be a busy boy.
I shrugged out of the wolf’s grasp, sat back against the side of the truck and made myself comfortable. Maybe I could catch a catnap before we got to wherever it was we were going.
***
The Army was where I first encountered werewolves in a serious way. You know, apart from hearing them howl every now and then, stories told around school and so on. I joined up right after Pearl Harbor, and right out of basic training they made me a driver. I didn’t know how to drive, but they gave me a jeep and said, “Learn.”
Learned how to drive, and also learned how to repair a clutch.
Now, you hear lots of stories about scientists being made riflemen, and cooks being codebreakers, and all sorts of other bureaucratic snafus. I expected to be a dogface, but someone figured that a paddy of my size might be good for watching out for werewolves, so they put me in the Sixth Special Services Brigade. That was the unit that was in charge of, and I'm not kidding, keeping our guys safe from werewolves, and keeping an eye out to make sure we knew who in our ranks were 'wolves.
Not that the Army did much of anything with the ones that we found (and the ones that volunteered). They did make very good scouts, though. Sense of smell, you see. It wasn't like the Krauts and the Reds, though. Word was that Himmler put together, and I'm not kidding, two entire S.S. divisions staffed from top to bottom with werewolves.
No one really knows what happened to them, other than there was some sort of massive fight between them, on the one hand (paw?), and a whole mess of Russian werewolves in the Ukraine in '43. Uncle Joe kept schtum, which might tell you something.
Anyway, when I got out of the Army, I did have a hell of a time landing work. Not much call for expertise on werewolves, especially since it had been pretty quiet during the War, except for a bit of trouble about meat rationing (I'll get into that, later). I was lucky that someone tipped me off about the World-Telegram.
Only one bit of trouble came up in the last bunch of years, and as it happened, I was in the middle of it.
Back in early '48, almost exactly a generation after the last round of troubles, there'd been a pretty gruesome series of killings in one three-day stretch, all along the Lower East Side. Had the whole area in a total uproar, and there was even talk of bringing in the Feds. One werewolf had supposedly been seen where the killings had happened, and he'd been fingered.
It was sort of stupid that the cops tried to hunt a werewolf through a city the size of New York, and they eventually had to corner him in a warehouse and pump it full of tear gas before they could, you'll excuse the term, collar him.
The papers were in full cry, of course. Especially the Daily News, which was making bank with a lot of lurid headlines and even more lurid photographs. The town hadn't seen the like since the old Graphic (a/k/a the Porno-Graphic) used to put "composographs" on their front page of "lupine orgies." The D.A. was ready to send the accused to the chair, and probably was also hoping to follow in Dewey's footsteps to the Governor's mansion (and beyond?) on the strength of it.
I smelled a rat, though, and I managed, barely, to convince the city editor at the World-Telegram that the wolf was being framed. It took me months, and I didn't have all the pieces together until after a jury brought back a conviction, and a date with the chair had been set, but I had more than enough to show the guy that had fingered the wolf was a religious maniac with a thing about werewolves. And there'd been a very good, and gruesome, reason that he'd been at the scene of the crime.
The Court of Appeals threw out the conviction the same day the maniac got the cuffs put on him. The maniac got life in one of the psych hospitals upstate. The wolf - or human, since his lawyer had told him not to Shift - got one last picture on the front page of the World-Telegram the day he was released from The Tombs, before he went off to richly deserved anonymity.
I might add, the Daily News was pretty snippy about the whole thing, all things considered. Supposedly, that's why we didn't get a Pulitzer for the whole story. No one wanted to show up the owner. Or, at least, show him up any more than he'd been shown up.
That's not to say I didn't get anything out of it. For one thing, Mr. Howard himself congratulated me, in person, at his office in the New York Central Building. For another, it meant my job was secure, at least for a few more years.
Which ended up being important, because in the late 40s and early 50s, the papers in town started cutting back on paranormal coverage. Some of this had to do with the state papers were in, like the crazy woman that ran the Herald Tribune, the starchy liberal dame that owned the Post, or all the problems at Hearst that axed the gigs at the Mirror and the Journal-American. The Times, which always brags that it's the paper of record in town, "temporarily" reassigned their man to cover Korea, and they still haven't either brought him back or filled the job. And then, there was the Sun, which merged with us.
But yeah, that more or less left me, and Armbruster over at the Daily News, and he'd been more or less reduced to writing columns about the "freaks" (his word) that he felt were just below the surface. Which tells you all you want to know about his views -- and how sore he was over the fiasco I'd told you about.
Me? I hadn't mentioned what I think was the most important result of my stories.
A few weeks after the whole thing had come to an end, I was walking home, taking the shortcut through Central Park toward the East Seventies. I'd been going under one of the underpasses when I saw that there were eye-shines in the dark. More than one set.
The leader of the group approached me, slowly. He must have moonlighted as a bouncer as human, because in lupine form he was a beefy, muscular guy. He didn't bare his teeth, though. He just raised one paw, fingers splayed.
"The Alpha sent us."
Even if I wasn't in any danger, that still was going to send a chill through me. The Alpha was the leader not only of the werewolves of Greater New York, but depending on who you asked, anywhere from thirty-five thousand to an even one hundred thousand werewolves. Even the low-ball figure was something to make you think.
"You gave our kind a fair shake. He recognizes that. We know you have a job to do, so you'll get some help."
He reached back - and he had a long reach, let me tell you - and grabbed a smaller wolf by the scruff, and shoved him near me.
"This one will talk to you. If you have questions for the Pack, he will bring them back, and maybe we’ll have answers."
And with that, most of the other members of the Pack moved away, swiftly and silently.
That was how I met Michael, by the way.
The truck jerked to a stop and the werewolf seated in front of me said, “We’re here.”
<PREVIOUS>
<NEXT>
<FIRST>
© 2024 by Walter Reimer and E.O. Costello
Two
The Alpha.
Oh, my God.
John Terhune. I met him once, and only once, and he made a definite impression back then. No one really knows why the werewolf incidents in New York City dropped off the way they did after '28, but the scuttlebutt says that John and his extended family – his pack – were involved in it.
As his name implies, he’s Dutch ancestry, probably from one of the first werewolves to set foot on Manhattan way back when. Well, was.
“Are you sure?” Inspector Cunningham asked Michael.
The werewolf looked from him to me and nodded. “Y-You said a w-w-werewolf had gotten k-k-killed.” He gulped and looked at the corpse. “I – I – “
I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Calm down, Michael. It’ll be all right.” Yeah, it was probably a lie, but there wasn’t much else I could say. I eyed Cunningham. “You need him for anything else?”
Cunningham looked at Michael for a long moment before shaking his head, and I said, “Get on home. You’ll have to let ‘em know, okay?”
“Tell ‘em to don’t be stupid,” Cunningham added. “Last thing your bunch need at this point is having the cops looking around.”
Michael sniffed, nodded, and he left.
The photographer had left already, and I said to Cunningham, “I better get to the office and get this written up.”
He nodded. “Look, if you hear anything from your furry friend,” he said, “let me know, okay? Last thing we need is a war.”
“Don’t I know it.”
***
A friendly cop gave me a lift down to Barclay Street, and I spent the next hour and a half writing up the story. In the middle of it, the city editor (who'd just come on duty) called me over to his desk, and we had a talk.
There was no way we were going to break the story -- the curse of being an evening paper. Still, if we couldn't be first, we could be the best. The photographer came in with still-wet prints of what he'd shot, and the editor half-looked at them while he listened to me.
I proposed to write two stories. One was a straightforward who-what-where-when of the crime scene. That would, given the circumstances, go in the lead hole on page one, right hand side. Page five would have another article by me, with my thoughts on what had happened, including the howling I'd heard all over the city just about the time of the death.
We went back and forth over a few drafts, and even the managing editor stepped over at one point in the morning to put in his two cents' worth. After all, we were one of only two papers in the city that had a paranormal beat, and he wanted to get it right.
The city final of the Daily News was brought in. "PARK AVENUE SHOOTOUT" yelled the headline. Right above a picture of the dead werewolf's muzzle, in a pool of blood. Just the thing to see over your cereal in the morning.
The Mirror, as usual, had missed out nearly totally, putting the story on page 11. The Times and the Herald Tribune both had stories leading off their local, New York sections, but they didn't front page it. Not their style, anyway.
As the first edition rolled off the presses, I got a copy. We showed the cop in the reflection of the shattered mirror, and had a somewhat softer headline. "ELDER WEREWOLF MURDERED." Well, for value of "soft," but it would distract readers away from what was going on in Suez and Hungary, if nothing else. Local news was always a bigger draw.
Like I said, straightforward article, didn't play up any of the lurid or bloody angles. We indicated that Cunningham was on the case and left it at that. Our long-time readers knew what that meant.
The explainer on page 5 had some speculation from me. I admitted I didn't know for sure what had happened, but that given the size and evident age of the dead werewolf, plus the anguished and anxious howling that had gone on the previous night as he lay dying, it was obvious that this was a senior and respected wolf. I left it at that, too. Our long-time readers would have been able to fill in the blanks, I was sure.
A lot softer than the Daily News' coverage, but then again, we didn't treat the werewolves as freaks, like they did. Of interest to our readers, sure, but not freaks. And I will admit that's bias on my part.
The city editor sent me home around noon or so, with an admonition to get at least a few hours' shut-eye, since I was probably going to have to hit the ground running.
Yeah, I was tired, and I could use the sleep. I’d pulled all-nighters when I was in the Army, but that was more than ten years earlier. I had turned thirty-eight recently and was still spending more time awake than asleep.
There was a pretty heavy rain coming down as I left Barclay Street. I turned east, toward City Hall Park and the IRT East Side terminal to go home. I had my hat down and my collar up, so as I turned up Park Row, I didn't see anything. Wasn’t expecting anything, either.
A truck swung into an alley a few yards in front of me, and as I got closer the back doors opened. “Walshe,” a voice growled, and I stopped.
Now, I’m just short of six feet tall, but even crouched in the back of the truck I could see that this guy had a few inches on me. He was wearing trousers and a sleeveless undershirt, and as I watched he Shifted. “Someone wants to talk to you.”
“Yeah?” I squared my shoulders, and felt rainwater start to trickle down the back of my neck.
He bared his teeth in a smile. I could tell the difference. “Yeah.”
“Look, it’s been a long night,” I said, “and – “
That was about as far as I got, because I felt a pair of strong paws grab me by one shoulder and the seat of my pants, lift me off my feet, and toss me at the wolf in the truck. He caught me, the doors to the truck closed, and the werewolf who’d tossed me got behind the wheel and started backing the truck out of the alley.
I knew better than to struggle. Sure, he was a few inches taller, but werewolves are a lot stronger and more resilient than us normals.
“Sorry,” the guy driving said, “but we were told not to take ‘No’ for an answer.” He slewed the truck around in traffic, ignoring the toot of horns behind him, and he started forward.
Uptown? Toward Brooklyn? Hard to tell for sure.
But that's why the city editor got paid the big bucks: he knew I was going to be a busy boy.
I shrugged out of the wolf’s grasp, sat back against the side of the truck and made myself comfortable. Maybe I could catch a catnap before we got to wherever it was we were going.
***
The Army was where I first encountered werewolves in a serious way. You know, apart from hearing them howl every now and then, stories told around school and so on. I joined up right after Pearl Harbor, and right out of basic training they made me a driver. I didn’t know how to drive, but they gave me a jeep and said, “Learn.”
Learned how to drive, and also learned how to repair a clutch.
Now, you hear lots of stories about scientists being made riflemen, and cooks being codebreakers, and all sorts of other bureaucratic snafus. I expected to be a dogface, but someone figured that a paddy of my size might be good for watching out for werewolves, so they put me in the Sixth Special Services Brigade. That was the unit that was in charge of, and I'm not kidding, keeping our guys safe from werewolves, and keeping an eye out to make sure we knew who in our ranks were 'wolves.
Not that the Army did much of anything with the ones that we found (and the ones that volunteered). They did make very good scouts, though. Sense of smell, you see. It wasn't like the Krauts and the Reds, though. Word was that Himmler put together, and I'm not kidding, two entire S.S. divisions staffed from top to bottom with werewolves.
No one really knows what happened to them, other than there was some sort of massive fight between them, on the one hand (paw?), and a whole mess of Russian werewolves in the Ukraine in '43. Uncle Joe kept schtum, which might tell you something.
Anyway, when I got out of the Army, I did have a hell of a time landing work. Not much call for expertise on werewolves, especially since it had been pretty quiet during the War, except for a bit of trouble about meat rationing (I'll get into that, later). I was lucky that someone tipped me off about the World-Telegram.
Only one bit of trouble came up in the last bunch of years, and as it happened, I was in the middle of it.
Back in early '48, almost exactly a generation after the last round of troubles, there'd been a pretty gruesome series of killings in one three-day stretch, all along the Lower East Side. Had the whole area in a total uproar, and there was even talk of bringing in the Feds. One werewolf had supposedly been seen where the killings had happened, and he'd been fingered.
It was sort of stupid that the cops tried to hunt a werewolf through a city the size of New York, and they eventually had to corner him in a warehouse and pump it full of tear gas before they could, you'll excuse the term, collar him.
The papers were in full cry, of course. Especially the Daily News, which was making bank with a lot of lurid headlines and even more lurid photographs. The town hadn't seen the like since the old Graphic (a/k/a the Porno-Graphic) used to put "composographs" on their front page of "lupine orgies." The D.A. was ready to send the accused to the chair, and probably was also hoping to follow in Dewey's footsteps to the Governor's mansion (and beyond?) on the strength of it.
I smelled a rat, though, and I managed, barely, to convince the city editor at the World-Telegram that the wolf was being framed. It took me months, and I didn't have all the pieces together until after a jury brought back a conviction, and a date with the chair had been set, but I had more than enough to show the guy that had fingered the wolf was a religious maniac with a thing about werewolves. And there'd been a very good, and gruesome, reason that he'd been at the scene of the crime.
The Court of Appeals threw out the conviction the same day the maniac got the cuffs put on him. The maniac got life in one of the psych hospitals upstate. The wolf - or human, since his lawyer had told him not to Shift - got one last picture on the front page of the World-Telegram the day he was released from The Tombs, before he went off to richly deserved anonymity.
I might add, the Daily News was pretty snippy about the whole thing, all things considered. Supposedly, that's why we didn't get a Pulitzer for the whole story. No one wanted to show up the owner. Or, at least, show him up any more than he'd been shown up.
That's not to say I didn't get anything out of it. For one thing, Mr. Howard himself congratulated me, in person, at his office in the New York Central Building. For another, it meant my job was secure, at least for a few more years.
Which ended up being important, because in the late 40s and early 50s, the papers in town started cutting back on paranormal coverage. Some of this had to do with the state papers were in, like the crazy woman that ran the Herald Tribune, the starchy liberal dame that owned the Post, or all the problems at Hearst that axed the gigs at the Mirror and the Journal-American. The Times, which always brags that it's the paper of record in town, "temporarily" reassigned their man to cover Korea, and they still haven't either brought him back or filled the job. And then, there was the Sun, which merged with us.
But yeah, that more or less left me, and Armbruster over at the Daily News, and he'd been more or less reduced to writing columns about the "freaks" (his word) that he felt were just below the surface. Which tells you all you want to know about his views -- and how sore he was over the fiasco I'd told you about.
Me? I hadn't mentioned what I think was the most important result of my stories.
A few weeks after the whole thing had come to an end, I was walking home, taking the shortcut through Central Park toward the East Seventies. I'd been going under one of the underpasses when I saw that there were eye-shines in the dark. More than one set.
The leader of the group approached me, slowly. He must have moonlighted as a bouncer as human, because in lupine form he was a beefy, muscular guy. He didn't bare his teeth, though. He just raised one paw, fingers splayed.
"The Alpha sent us."
Even if I wasn't in any danger, that still was going to send a chill through me. The Alpha was the leader not only of the werewolves of Greater New York, but depending on who you asked, anywhere from thirty-five thousand to an even one hundred thousand werewolves. Even the low-ball figure was something to make you think.
"You gave our kind a fair shake. He recognizes that. We know you have a job to do, so you'll get some help."
He reached back - and he had a long reach, let me tell you - and grabbed a smaller wolf by the scruff, and shoved him near me.
"This one will talk to you. If you have questions for the Pack, he will bring them back, and maybe we’ll have answers."
And with that, most of the other members of the Pack moved away, swiftly and silently.
That was how I met Michael, by the way.
The truck jerked to a stop and the werewolf seated in front of me said, “We’re here.”
<PREVIOUS>
<NEXT>
<FIRST>
Category Story / General Furry Art
Species Human
Size 116 x 120px
File Size 70.1 kB
Listed in Folders
Some side notes:
The morning Mirror was, as of 1956, one of the three daily tabloid newspapers in New York City, the others being the morning Daily News, owned by Tribune Company, and the evening Post, then owned by Dorothy Schiff (the "starchy liberal dame"). The Mirror was owned by the Hearst organization, and though it had a large circulation, it never really made money, and was eventually shut down in 1963. Its reputation can be divined from a New Yorker cartoon of the 1950s showing a desolate, inactive New York Times press room, with its "All The News That's Fit to Print" motto visible. One of the workers is grumbling: "I'll bet things are humming over at the Mirror!" After Hearst's death in the early 1950s, the organization had serious issues, with many papers being shut down (legend has it that mental illness in one top executive was responsible for that). The Herald Tribune was owned during this period of time by Helen Reid, who made a number of critical tactical errors (such as raising the newsstand price) that ended up crippling the paper. The nickname regarding the Graphic is accurate, as is the reference to "composographs." The Graphic would be a victim of the Depression, not that it was mourned. The "Mr. Howard" referenced is Roy Howard, the head of the Scripps-Howard organization that owned the World-Telegram & Sun.
The city final of the Daily News likely came off the press some time around 4-5 a.m.; the first edition of the World-Telegram & Sun would have likely come off the press some hours later, at 11 a.m. Hence why Walshe is doing more of a think piece.
This story takes place in the fall of 1956, after early October, so the invasion of Hungary by Warsaw Pact forces and the invasion of Suez by French, British and Israeli forces would have been big news, along with the presidential campaign.
The IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) East Side terminal for the local line (today's #6 line) is at Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall station, just east of City Hall and a short walk from 125 Barclay Street.
Walshe would have gotten his job just after the War, when the paper was still the World-Telegram. The Sun, another evening paper, wasn't purchased until early 1950.
The story about the framed werewolf has no direct historical analogue, though stories like it were the meat and drink of New York City newspapers for decades.
Those underpasses on the 72nd Street crossing through Central Park do exist, by the way; I live a few blocks from them.
Thomas Dewey, who was governor of New York during most of the 1940s and into the early 1950s, made his reputation as a racket-busting prosecutor, in particular taking down "Murder, Incorporated." A previous governor, Charles Whitman, has also made his reputation as a prosecutor, breaking the infamous Charley Becker murder ring. So an ambitious New York County D.A. is very possible.
The morning Mirror was, as of 1956, one of the three daily tabloid newspapers in New York City, the others being the morning Daily News, owned by Tribune Company, and the evening Post, then owned by Dorothy Schiff (the "starchy liberal dame"). The Mirror was owned by the Hearst organization, and though it had a large circulation, it never really made money, and was eventually shut down in 1963. Its reputation can be divined from a New Yorker cartoon of the 1950s showing a desolate, inactive New York Times press room, with its "All The News That's Fit to Print" motto visible. One of the workers is grumbling: "I'll bet things are humming over at the Mirror!" After Hearst's death in the early 1950s, the organization had serious issues, with many papers being shut down (legend has it that mental illness in one top executive was responsible for that). The Herald Tribune was owned during this period of time by Helen Reid, who made a number of critical tactical errors (such as raising the newsstand price) that ended up crippling the paper. The nickname regarding the Graphic is accurate, as is the reference to "composographs." The Graphic would be a victim of the Depression, not that it was mourned. The "Mr. Howard" referenced is Roy Howard, the head of the Scripps-Howard organization that owned the World-Telegram & Sun.
The city final of the Daily News likely came off the press some time around 4-5 a.m.; the first edition of the World-Telegram & Sun would have likely come off the press some hours later, at 11 a.m. Hence why Walshe is doing more of a think piece.
This story takes place in the fall of 1956, after early October, so the invasion of Hungary by Warsaw Pact forces and the invasion of Suez by French, British and Israeli forces would have been big news, along with the presidential campaign.
The IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) East Side terminal for the local line (today's #6 line) is at Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall station, just east of City Hall and a short walk from 125 Barclay Street.
Walshe would have gotten his job just after the War, when the paper was still the World-Telegram. The Sun, another evening paper, wasn't purchased until early 1950.
The story about the framed werewolf has no direct historical analogue, though stories like it were the meat and drink of New York City newspapers for decades.
Those underpasses on the 72nd Street crossing through Central Park do exist, by the way; I live a few blocks from them.
Thomas Dewey, who was governor of New York during most of the 1940s and into the early 1950s, made his reputation as a racket-busting prosecutor, in particular taking down "Murder, Incorporated." A previous governor, Charles Whitman, has also made his reputation as a prosecutor, breaking the infamous Charley Becker murder ring. So an ambitious New York County D.A. is very possible.
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