Mr. Helpline

Mr. Helpline is the advice column of The Baltimore Star, a consumer-complaint feature that becomes the unlikely launching point for Maddie Schwartz's reinvention as a journalist. Run by the skeptical, self-deprecating Don Heath, the column is one of only two things in the papers that actually tries to help people, and it is where Maddie, after her scoop on the Tessie Fine case, is assigned as an assistant, transforming the humble mail-screening job into a stepping stone toward the real newsroom.

The Column and Its Keeper

Mr. Helpline is the creation of Don Heath, a fifty-eight-year-old reporter who was eased out of his previous column and given the "Helpline" job four years earlier after a series of mistakes. Heath's troubles began when he confused a local banker's alma mater, saying the man had gone to Crown University in Long Island when in fact it was Brown University in Rhode Island. The error was caught before it went into the paper, but Heath, who had not actually been drinking that day, claimed he had had a couple of drinks at lunch to explain the lapse. The editors bought the excuse and moved him to the advice column, where they took surreptitious sniffs at his breath from time to time. Heath describes the column as "the stupidest column in the paper," yet also the most popular, generating a flood of mail that he admits he was not fully keeping up with. He needs at least twelve good questions a week to fill four columns, and they must be consumer complaints he can actually do something about, not the kind of personal advice a Dear Abby would dispense. He has a system for culling the mail: typewritten over handwritten, masculine handwriting over feminine, cursive only, and no jailbirds, even if they claim to have photographic evidence of the cops framing them. His job, as he sees it, is to fix traffic lights and resolve disputes like whether Hutzler's must take back a pair of shearling gloves with the tags still attached, which the store eventually agreed to do for store credit, suspecting they were shoplifted.

Maddie's Arrival and the Assistant's Rise

When Maddie Schwartz is assigned as Heath's assistant after her scoop on the Tessie Fine case, Heath is highly skeptical, fretting that he never asked for an assistant and wondering why the paper suddenly thinks he needs one. He puts her in a corner of the office, irritated at losing his privacy, and sends her to fetch coffee, which occupies perhaps ten minutes a day. Eventually he turns the mail over to her, telling her to screen it, joking that this will give him more time to work on his "immortal prose." She laughs at his jokes even when they are not funny, the kind of woman who laughs at men's jokes as a matter of course. To his surprise, she does a good job, perhaps too good. She catches on quickly, learning what makes a good question and recognizing the duds. She works the phones before showing him the letters, making sure there are answers, and creates a whole new category: easy problems that do not rate a column mention but can be addressed by a quick phone call. Heath resists this at first, then decides why not, since he still follows up and writes the column, and it is his style that makes it popular. Maddie, for her part, sees the job as a beginning. As she slices open the daily envelopes, a Sisyphean array of petty complaints, she imagines a future self explaining to someone young and worshipful how it all began, perhaps to her son Seth or a roomful of college girls, telling them that her journey of not even fifty steps from the "Helpline" desk to the real newsroom began with a thousand paper cuts. At night, her lover Ferdie Platt rubs cream into her hands and worries over the damage she is doing to her lovely nails, and she tells him with a confidence that feels different from her old confidence that she will not be opening the mail forever.

The Column's Place in the Newsroom and the City

Heath reflects that the "Helpline" column is one of only two things in the papers that is actually trying to help people, the other being obituaries. He will not say this around the newsroom, but he believes people are right that newspapers prefer bad news to good most of the time, because bad news sells papers. There is no Happy Valley Gazette. The column's popularity rests on Heath's style and its genuine utility, even as he privately confesses that he has the stupidest column in the paper. His philosophy of life is shaped by disappointment: he does not think anyone lives long enough to imagine his next decade accurately, noting that at thirty one thinks one knows what forty will be like, but does not, and then comes fifty and forty looks good. At fifty-eight, he does not pretend to have a clue what his seventh decade will bring, other than disappointment, because every decade so far has been less than he hoped. This weary, self-aware pessimism colors his view of the column and of Maddie's eager ambition, even as he comes to appreciate her competence.

Significance: A Stepping Stone and a Mirror of the Times

The "Helpline" column matters less for its own content than for what it represents in Maddie's trajectory and in the social landscape of 1966 Baltimore. For Maddie, it is the first rung of a ladder she is determined to climb, a place where her talent for understanding people and solving problems can be exercised and noticed. The column also exposes the gendered and racial realities of the era: Maddie's earlier realization that she does better with men than with women, and Ferdie's blunt explanation that Cleo Sherwood's disappearance was not a big deal because she was a Negro woman, frame the limits within which a woman like Maddie must operate. The column's very existence, a consumer-complaint feature that actually helps people, stands in quiet contrast to a newsroom and a city where a murdered Black woman could be dismissed as unimportant, where men felt entitled to kill women who did not return their affections, and where a woman's value was measured by the man at her side. Maddie's thousand paper cuts are the small, inglorious price of entry into a world that will eventually let her tell the stories that matter, even as she learns, in hindsight, how little Cleo Sherwood ever mattered to the men who ran that world.