In the ‘60s, the NY Times newsroom was a den of vice

It’s likely the smell of pot wafting through The New York Times newsroom in any era would catch the editors off guard, but in the 1960s, the sound of money changing hands was a different story.

According to an obituary for former Times reporter McCandlish Phillips, a highly skilled journalist and famous teetotaler who died on Tuesday, gambling was a lucrative side business for a couple of newsmen in the ’60s.

“He did not smoke, drink, curse or gamble, each of which had been refined to a high, exuberant art in the Times newsroom—the last of these to such a degree that at midcentury the newspaper employed two bookmakers-in-residence, nominally on the payroll as news clerks.”