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maroon tie and suspenders. His
daughter, a typically clothes-conscious teen-ager, tried to get him to wear a
belt. With his thin face and balding pate, the suspenders made him look like a
banker in a 1940’s Capra movie, she said. While delighted in her movie taste,
he stood firm on the suspenders. When you have a pot belly, narrow hips and no ass,
trousers tend to slip south unless anchored around the shoulders. He hoped she wouldn’t
notice the damn shoes!
    Pearsall had worked at the paper
all his professional life, starting on the night staff as a reporter writing a
blizzard of “meeting” notices churned out by Staten Island’s legions of religious,
veteran, political, social, cultural and metastasizing not-for-profit groups.
All of them got three sprightly-written paragraphs, buried inside. Pearsall and
his colleagues rarely went to any meetings; most of the stories were phoned in
by participants, usually a designated “press” person who drew the short straw.
The information was recited verbatim, and there wasn’t much room for creativity
on the part of the “reporter” taking it all down. How many ways can you say
that 35 Rotarians at the Mandalay Restaurant listened to a speech by the
Commander of the local Coast Guard base? But Pearsall did his best, even
surviving the prankster who reported that the Association of Gynecologists had
elected Dr. Seymour Vulva as its president. He was more careful after that.
     But during the same nighttime
hours when Rotarians were getting soused at local bars, other people were
occasionally getting themselves murdered, raped or trapped in fires. Those
stories weren’t phoned in. Since the paper’s “crack” police reporter at the
time, an often drunk ex-flatfoot named Padraic O’Malley, checked his ambition
at his favorite pub by 6 p.m., a night staff reporter might catch a juicy
story.
    Unlike the other night reporters, Pearsall
never ignored one of these stories, and soon his editors noted that he rarely
made factual or stylistic mistakes, or needed much rewriting. He quickly moved
up the editorial ladder, avoiding, for the most part, the petty squabbles rampant
at a small-town monopoly newspaper. He was a natural for the city editor’s job,
all he ever coveted, never aspiring to the executive editor’s position, which would
have meant getting involved in office and local politics. Moreover, while he
was fairly facile with computers and appreciated what they could do in a
newsroom, he had no desire to lead the paper into the New Age and was happy
when management brought in a young technocrat from a Silicon Valley daily as
executive editor.
    The “techie” was Beldon Popp, who
had never been a “line” editor, selected for the job because he’d been a
computer teacher at one time. But he turned out to be a decent manager and
deserved credit for revamping the Register’s award-winning computer
system and saving what circulation was left. More importantly to Pearsall, Popp
rarely interfered in the day-to-day operations of the newsroom.
    Robert Pearsall was part of a
dying breed – the crusading newspaperman. Not that he’d fallen off a turnip
truck. He knew a certain amount of corruption was inevitable in a small,
insular community where the “old boy” network was ingrained. Indeed, he was
prepared to look the other way when favors and accommodations between and among
local elected officials and judges made life easier for Staten Islanders who
were otherwise at the mercy of the larger city’s unfeeling bureaucracy.
Islanders looked after their own – and Pearsall was first and foremost an
Islander.
    But Pearsall always had his eye
out for real corruption and hypocrisy, which, while never in short supply on
Staten Island, had become bolder as the Register’s influence waned. Older
residents who remembered a less-crowded and less-corrupt small-town Staten
Island were fleeing to New Jersey and the Sun Belt, and the borough’s
burgeoning immigrant