In 1952, when the late Gabe Pressman (dean of New York City’s local TV press corps) was a young staff writer at the New York World-Telegram & The Sun, he came across a story tipped to him by a woman from Montreal who’d taken a cab ride in midtown Manhattan. This was the human-interest feature he wrote up.
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This is the poem I wrote alluding to Pressman’s story. It was included in a collection of my “deformed sonnets,” All That Would Ever After Not Be Said (2021), and again in Shadow Words (2024).
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What Pressman didn’t know was that the cabbie didn’t want to be named because he was avoiding bill collectors at the time. I know because, as the poem says, that cabbie was my Dad.
So how could he afford to buy a Broadway ticket to “Guys and Dolls” for that grateful out-of-towner? He didn’t have to buy it. He knew all kinds of theater people, including publicists, producers, and box-office hands. He must have arranged a comp.
