Chapter 5: The Kid from Brooklyn

Bob Maynard came up another side of the mountain. He was a city boy. His parents were immigrants from the West Indies. They came to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn back when the community had so much mix that, out of necessity, his mother spoke Yiddish and his father, who operated a moving and storage business, became fluent in Italian. Bob took to writing while he was still a kid in short pants. And when he was just 16, he struck out on his own.

  When Bob left home, there was no tearful parting with parents and siblings. He ran away. It takes something extremely powerful to drive a kid out of the house at such an early age.

Religion was at the core of the dilemma. Bob was raised in a home where religion ruled. His parents belonged to a strict fundamentalist sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. His father was a leader in the faith and so much a believer that he made every restrictive tenet a law for his six children. Bob, the youngest, could participate in virtually none of the activities that teenagers find important. Radio, television and movies were banned. He couldn't go to parties or dances. He wasn't even allowed friendships outside the religious circle.

But while his father demanded total obedience to the rules of the Brethren, he also drummed into Bob the importance of developing the skills his son would need to effectively challenge nearly everything a person might encounter. Around the dinner table every night each child had to deliver a report on what happened in his or her world that day. Often those reports would turn into intense debates. The elder Maynard used them to measure the oratorical progress of his children. That's when Bob learned to assemble information and to shape and deliver an argument, right down to the decisive stroke, the coup de grace.

Even then, Bob was an extraordinary student, and as his father demanded, he took to questioning everything that came before him. Eventually, as it was bound to happen, Bob dared to question the family's religion. But in this household of healthy skepticism, religion was the one doctrine not to be questioned. Bob found the prohibition unacceptable, and it became the cornerstone in a conflict that father and son could not resolve.

Bob didn't leave home empty-handed. He had intelligence, skills and a plan. In rebellion against the rigid rules of his home, he sought as drastically different an environment as possible. He went straight to Greenwich Village. And in 1957, the curious, restless, determined kid from Brooklyn found his bohemia.

The Village then was easily the most intellectually exciting and sensuous place in New York. On social and cultural levels, it was where blacks interacted with whites and gays mixed with straights, and where music, art, literature and politics were all freely debated in coffeehouses and cafes day and night. Bob brought with him to the Village the good things he had been taught – the tools to explore, examine, read and learn. He found an apartment in a tenement famous as the one-time home of the legendary musician Charlie Parker. When James Baldwin returned from Paris with a new book, he and Bob met and became friends.

In that heady environment, Bob Maynard held his own. And he did not lose sight of his dream: to become a journalist on a daily newspaper. In the late 1950s, New York was a mecca for newspaper journalism. On any given day, a newsstand had a dozen papers available. Even though almost all of them were closed to people of color, Bob began casting about for a job. He would not allow the barrier of race to block his way. Instead, he became a freelance reporter for two weekly papers, the Brooklyn Heights Press and the black-owned New York Age. He wrote about segregation in the New York City schools. He wrote about police brutality. He would discuss with the likes of Baldwin the problem of race in America and loneliness of the black writer.

Bob refused to accept that he could not express his talent on a daily newspaper. He laid siege to the New York Post. He befriended Post columnist Murray Kempton, who admired his determination. He took other jobs to support himself, but journalism remained his goal. He sent out hundreds of resumes, using the clips of his stories published in the weeklies.

After numerous rejections, Bob connected in 1961. In his column years later, he would tell the story. "Not too long after my 20th birthday, I found myself in the electrifying atmosphere of the newsroom of the York (Pa.) Gazette. Jim Higgins (the editor) read one article I'd written, decided I had 'a fair amount of promise' and put me to work covering the police beat."

He was on his way.