It began with a strike.
“We were walking the picket line through the night. I think we had nine blizzards that year,” said Daily News striker Joanna Molloy, remembering how she met John “Chick” Donohue, with whom she later wrote "The Greatest Beer Run Ever," which has since been made into a high-profile feature film.
“We would defrost [in McFadden’s] right across the street from the great Art Deco Daily News building, which has the giant globe spinning in the lobby, the basis for the Daily Planet,” she said.
The first few nights when the strikers went to pay up their tabs, the owner Pally McFadden would say, “It’s taken care of.”
The consensus was, though, “Pally’s kinda tight. There’s no way he’s treating us every night.”
So Molloy asked the tavern owner, and he pointed to a guy at the back of the bar. It was Donohue, who was a member of Sandhogs’ Local 147 in the Laborers Union, but at that moment three decades ago was doing some work with the Teamsters.
Molloy said, “He used Teamster expense money to feed all the Daily News strikers for weeks.”
She got to know his story, including about his service with the Marines, which was completed by 1964. Then the war got hot over in Vietnam and within a few years 19 guys from his neighborhood, the Manhattan Irish enclave of Inwood, had been killed there. Molloy heard, too, about Donohue’s “beer run” adventure in Vietnam, during which he found himself in the middle of the Tet Offensive in Saigon in early 1968.
Molloy’s education included her father, who subscribed to seven New York dailies at one point, making her read Pete Hamill’s columns on the bloody conflict in Southeast Asia. The war would claim her cousin Eugene O’Connell, who was an actor before being sent overseas.
School was another influence on her future career, the Sisters of St. Agnes being such sticklers for detail.
The author, magazine writer and Daily News staffer Molloy was promoted when the editor shouted to his newsroom if anyone had heard of the name John Guttfreund; he was a leading financier and there’d been an incident involving his Christmas tree, but only she knew who he was. “That’s how I got into gossip,” she said.
After a spell on New York Post’s Page Six, she was back at the News for the long run of Rush & Molloy, written with her husband George Rush.
Molloy identifies with the quote from Washington Star and later Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory: “I have always felt a little sorry for people who didn’t work for newspapers.”
The business tended to attract colorful, interesting and often action-orientated people.
The former Daily News staffer remembered, “Kerry Burke had his press pass taken away by the NYPD and they wouldn't let him pass the yellow tape, so he just climbed over a nearby house.”
Her own assistant “climbed a building in Tribeca to watch Beyonce and Jay Z get married in their apartment from a fire escape.”
There was always plenty of in-house drama.
One editor broke off her affair with a colleague, a future novelist, as she revved up her motorcycle. And when she rode away, he shouted after her, "Goodbye, forever! See ya on Monday!"
Another deployed a hot cup of coffee to maximum strategic effect against a lover, and fellow editor, when she found out he was also sleeping with her secretary.
Then there was the editor who threw a typewriter out the window. “We were on the 7th floor,” Molloy said.
In the middle of it all, Helen Kennedy, an Irish diplomat’s daughter, “always wore huge headphones to tune out the editors and they allowed it because she was so good.”
Molloy believes that good work is being done these days at CBS News, NBC News (“which has Corky Siemaszko, one the greatest writers we ever had at the Daily News”) and the New York Times. “They want real journalists, fact-checking and telling the truth, and not fake news,” she said. “So I definitely think there’s a future for the news business.”
She admires, too, folks involved with newer platforms, such as a “very enterprising kid named Andrew Muscato,” who asked permission to do a film
interviewing Donohue and his former comrades. Its online popularity was instrumental in “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” being adapted for the screen and Muscato became a producer on the film.
During the filmmaking process, Molloy learned a “tremendous amount about the difference between writing a non-fiction book and what screenwriters do and directors do.” (She also wanted it revealed for younger readers that Zac Efron, who plays Chick Donohue, “is the nicest guy in the world.”)
More generally, Molloy would like people to tell their own children their family stories.
“My grandparents could tell a story,” she said. “They cared much more about story-telling than about money.”
The story-telling process, as in journalism, should start with “who, what, when, where and why.”
And Molloy added, “Tell the kids they have to fact check their parents.”
