Working With Bruce Catton (February/March 1979 | Volume: 30, Issue: 2)

Working With Bruce Catton

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Authors: Oliver Jensen

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February/March 1979 | Volume 30, Issue 2

Oliver Jensen, who was for many years the editor of this magazine and who worked with Bruce Catton from its first publication in 1954, has written this account of what it was like to have him as a colleague. We are pleased to run it here as a tribute to our late distinguished senior editor, together with some side comments from others who enjoyed the privilege of “working with Bruce Catton.”

“Early youth is a baffling time,” Bruce Catton wrote in a boyhood memoir published seven years ago. “The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made. In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time of waiting for a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning limited and age waits for the night train.”

Last August our good friend was spending the summer at his home in Frankfort, Michigan, very close to the junction town of his youth, when the night train came for him, at the age of seventy-eight. There had been no passenger trains for years, of course, in his part of the state—much to his sorrow—but those who loved and admired him at AMERICAN HERITAGE over the last twenty-four years can almost hear the ghostly whistle, and mourn. He had called his memoir Waiting for the Morning Train , and it is hard to get the metaphor out of one’s head.

His morning train had plucked young Bruce out of the little town of Benzonia, Michigan, in 1916, and carried him off to Oberlin College. But that experience was interrupted by World War I and another symbolic train that took him into brief service as a gunner’s mate in the Navy. Afterward he went back; he did not finish to take a bachelor’s degree. It was not a notable lack, a fact attested by his collection of honorary degrees, which numbered twenty-six when the company lost count about 1974. Catton was much too modest to volunteer any information, and the tally had to be wormed out of his secretary. Fame had come late, for his first book had not been published until he was forty-nine. In the nineteen twenties and thirties he had been a newsman—reporter, editorial writer, interviewer, book reviewer—for the Cleveland News , the Boston American , the Cleveland Plain Dealer . By 1939 he was in Washington, writing a syndicated newspaper column.

With the onset of World War II, Catton was tapped to serve the