A slow news day in the neighborhood

   In the world today, an epic battle that already is being compared to Stalingrad and Bastogne was in its fortysomethingth day on the border between Syria and Turkey, U.S. military troops were being quarantined after helping out in Ebola-stricken countries, Pentagon workers were being warned they might be targeted for lone-wolf terror attacks, and the Fed was ending quantitative easing.
   So what did I see as I passed the newspaper stand in the supermarket this morning?
   A blaring headline in the New York Post that said "Fiddler on the roof" about a fellow jerking off in his window who was photographed by a popoffrazzi. And a blaring headline in the New York Daily News about a guy somewhere who some court said could marry his niece. Naturally, the headline was "Speak now or forever hold your niece."
   Here's a headline for you: "Vinnie Musetto turns in grave." (Poor Vinnie, who died last year, was the Post copy editor who wrote "Headless body in topless bar.")
   "Pervy peeper plays his pickle." I wonder if Rupert Murdoch wrote that one himself. Now, WTF is quantitative easing? Or is it qualitative easing? Whatever.

The unknown soldier

From left, Bob Anderson, John Owen, Rollie Ackermann, Ted Duskin

   On NPR today there was a blurb for a program on things people learned at their first job. I got a phone call today that reminded me of a lesson I learned not at my first job, but at my first job in the newspaper industry that I've never forgotten, even though I ignored that lesson in the publication of a recent book.
   I was a clerk in the sports department of the New York Post when some team -- I forget which league and I even forget which sport even, this was a long time ago -- exercised a fairly high draft pick to acquire a player nobody, at least nobody in the sports department of the New York Post, had ever heard of.
   I don't know if I wrote the headline or somebody else wrote it, or if it even made it into the paper, and I'm not sure even if it was in the headline or the lead of the story. What I do know is that the player who was drafted was referred to as an unknown.
   Nor do I remember if it was me who was admonished or somebody else. But the night sports editor said "He's not unknown to his family or his loved ones." Of course I'm not quoting exactly, but the point was made. He was not an unknown player, he was a little known player, or a relatively unknown player except by his relatives."
   So today the phone rings. "Is this Chi Chi Press?"
   "Yes, this is Chi Chi Press."
   A word of explanation. When I self-published my first book, "Tanks for the Memories," I didn't want it to appear self-published, so I made up the name of a publishing company. My mother and father used to call each other Chi Chi, although it was pronounced kind of like Chitchy or Chitch. Either way it was short for Cicciolino or cicciolina, which is Italian for dumpling. After two or three books I incorporated Chi Chi Press, although after five or six books I dissolved the corporation because of the high corporation fees. Chi Chi Press is still my imprint, and I use it on the books that I publish through Amazon for the Kindle and Create Space programs.
   "I'm calling about the picture that's on the cover of the book "Big Andy," the one which shows Bob "Big Andy" Anderson  butchering a cow that had to be put down because it had a broken leg ("That cow's leg was no more broken than yours or mine," Andy said in the interview. Still, it's a pretty well-known picture in the annals of the 712th Tank Battalion from World War II.
   "On the inside of the book you identify the people in the picture as "Bob Anderson, John Owen, Unknown and Ted Duskin," the caller said.
   "Are you related to one of them?" I asked, or words to that effect.
   "The one you identify as unknown," the caller said, "he was my father."
   Kaye Ackermann, who said the unknown tanker was Rolland "Rollie" Ackermann, and I spoke for about half an hour. She said her father died in 1971, and that he never talked about the war, and her mother never allowed her and her sister to ask about it. But that once when she was young her father was kind of dozing in a chair and he opened his eyes and saw her and said, rather softly, "The only mass grave I saw had 250 bodies in it."
   She said her dad was buddies with Big Andy, but that he never went to a reunion. The battalion didn't really start having reunions until, well, I'm not sure, it might have been the mid to late 1970s, it might have been later. There were a couple of smaller reunions before they became a battalion-wide thing.
   Rollie Ackermann was a tank commander and he was wounded, she said, on Feb. 6, 1944, which likely would have been at a place called Branscheid in Germany, in the heart of the Siegfried Line. She also said they gave him "blue" somethingorothers, the term I'd heard was "blue 88s," the term was different but I'm sure the pill was the same. She said she thought it was sodium pentathol.
   The great thing about print on demand and e-books is it doesn't take a lot of time or money to make a correction, so I went in and revised to publications to add Kaye's father's name. And I remembered that lesson of so many years ago.

Woe is me, I've got to work a holiday

Aaron's eBay store

   A distinguished former colleague recently took Walmart and other big box, little box, Jack in the Box and Taco Bell employees to task in his blog for lamenting the fact that they had to work on Thanksgiving when they could be spending time with their families. And then said former colleague went on to point out that in the journalism trade, one was expected to work holidays.

   Even though I've worked more Thanksgivings than you could shake a drumstick at, I have to differ with my distinguished former colleague, although I agree with him on many other points he's made in his blog.

   Reason one is an anecdote. During the Great New York Newspaper Strike of 1978, I think it lasted 77 days or so, I worked in the sports department of one of the three "interim" dailies, a mock Daily News lookalike called the Daily Press, run by a couple of brothers from the Midwest looking to make a quick buck. The temporary newspaper offices were in a downtown office building, and heck, I have no idea where they got the computer terminals and other equipment from, probably Rent-a-Center. One day I was riding up in the elevator with some secretaries and receptionists and one of them asked if I worked for the newspaper. I responded in the affirmative, and she said I was lucky to have such an exciting job.

   These are the people who deserve to spend time with their families on Thanksgiving. You want to be a reporter, a police officer, a firefighter, a nurse, it goes with the territory, you work nights, weekends, holidays, and usually you get extra pay for doing so (although that is no longer the case in much of the newspaper industry). DFC was, of course, saying it goes with the territory, but a little compassion is in order here for people whose jobs are not as exciting and fulfilling as ours.

   And reason two: All the holidays I've worked, the newsroom has been all but deserted. Management types, fuhgeddabouddit except maybe one poor shmuck who's at the bottom of the managerial pecking order and has to supervise the skeleton crew in the newsroom. That's right, skeleton crew, DFC and I both should be namned Armbone or Legbone we've been on so many holiday skeleton crews in forty plus years in the newspaper business. So let's say 80 percent of newspaper people actually do get holidays off -- even Columbus Day at the New Britain Herald -- whereas 100 percent of Walmart and Taco Bell and Best Buy workers not only have to work but don't get any holiday premium in their paycheck. Still, no time card to punch in and punch out to make sure we're not paid any more than our minimum wage.

   Usually there isn't much news on a holiday, and the skeleton staff would get a pretty healthy "slide," or the opportunity to go home early, say on Thanksgiving, work a four or five hour shift, get your full seven or eight hours pay and the holiday premium as well (in the good old days that was time and a half plus a day of comp time, boy, although both of those perks got whacked as the industry nosedived). No such perks for your big box or fast food worker. There was one New Year's Eve 30 or 35 years ago where a bomb blew up in Times Square and there was quite a bit of scrambling on the news desk, but such holiday occurrences are few and far between.

   Thanksgiving is a time for family, perhaps moreso than any other holiday. My own family is scattered across the country, Boston, New York, Ohio, Florida, California, so I kind of relish working on Thanksgiving because I'm with colleagues. I have a lot to be thankful for, even when I was out of work and sleeping in my car I had a lot to be thankful for (that my car was insured, ran and had gas, for one thing, or is that three things?).

   I personally am thankful that stores are open on Thanksgiving, because I've already scored two bargains online, but I feel for the employees who have to handle the mobs of shoppers. As far back as the first Black Friday -- I don't remember when that was but I know I was in the newsroom the day it happened, and even then Black Friday was on a Friday, this year Black Friday began Monday online, and it begins at 6 p.m. Thursday evening at Walmart and Best Buy -- I could see the beginning of a now long established tradition, the annual social phenomenon of overflowing the mall parking lots and the stampede mentality of mobbing the stores. I don't begrudge the employees the desire to be with their families, although I suppose a good investigative reporter would discover that if Walmart closed on Thanksgiving Day and Best Buy opened, a small percentage of the Thursday night throngs at Best Buy would be composed of Walmart workers. But that's their prerogative.

   DFC noted that the one holiday, for him, that was sacrosanct was Opening Day. He's a baseball fan, and working all those other holidays got him sufficient leverage to get the night off, even in a downsized newsroom. Opening Day is just another day at the office for me, but I had my special days, too, I'd cash in my chips for the annual reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion, with which my father served and which turned me into an oral historian when I'm not writing headlines.

   A couple of times I've been on road trips over the Holidays. Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, try and find a cup of coffee on an interstate when every McDonald's and Burger King is closed. Then one New Year's Eve somewhere in North or South Carolina I pulled off the highway and saw the bright lights of a Waffle House. Whereas usually there would be three to five employees slinging hash browns and pouring batter onto waffle irons, there must have been a dozen workers, all in festive hats, you'd think they were having a party. Apparently they not only had to work New Year's Eve, they seemed to relish the fact, possibly because they were being paid time and a half, or maybe it was just a tradition for them, like Black Friday is for shoppers. But that's the image that comes to mind first when I think of having to work on a holiday. When life hands you lemons, make key lime pie. Use evaporated milk and graham cracker crust, and no one will know the difference.

 - - -

'Headless' headline writer axed

The headless newspaper delivery person of Sleepy Hackensack

   It was big news recently when the fellow who wrote "Headless Body in Topless Bar" was let go after 40 years with the New York Post. Actually, he'd been writing movie reviews on a freelance basis for the Post, so he was probably either bought out or laid off a couple of years ago, and some bean counter likely said, "Why do we need to pay for freelance movie reviews anymore?"
  The firing of Vinnie Musetto went viral, with NPR saying many people consider that the greatest tabloid headline ever written. Not me. First, note how NPR qualified it with "tabloid," as if the New York Times or Washington Post never would let a headline like that grace its pages, which they wouldn't. It's probably taught in journalism school as the ne plus ultra of tabloid headlines.
   If I had the final say, I'd have let the headline through, I may be critical but I'm not a fool.
   I suppose, though, it was a watershed event in tabloid journalism and if it has inspired legions of journalism students to think creatively, so be it.
   There's another headline, though, that I think of as far better as pure headlines go, and it doesn't make fun of gruesome murders or strip clubs.
   It was written by my former colleague Ed Reiter, and won a New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists award, for which it hung for several years on a bulletin board near the copy desk. It's probably still hanging there, although the newsroom has long since been deserted and the staff moved to less valuable real estate.
   The headline was above a gardening story, that's right, a gardening story, about an invasion of slimy pests that were giving people grief. The more I looked at that headline from my seat on the copy desk, or as I passed the bulletin board on my way to the cafeteria, the more it grew on me.
   The headline was "Slugfest in the Garden." To me, looking at that headline on the bulletin board was like looking at a work of art in a museum. It was a double double entendre deal, with slugs being the slippery slimy creatures and the left and right hooks and body blows and haymakers and garden conjuring imagery of both that place the slippery slimies were invading and Madison Square Garden, once the mecca of the so-called "sport of kings."
   So here's to you, Ed Reiter, award winning headline writer and world famous numismatologist (he's also an expert on coin collecting).

- - -

  

Longshot Larry and Lucky Hal

 

   One of the World War II veterans I interviewed spoke about what a character his mother was, and how she was so supportive of everything he did. When he made the football team in high school, she came to his games, and one time, when he scored a touchdown, she proudly told everyone within hearing distance in the stands that her son just hit a home run.
   I, too, had a mother who was very supportive. Her son wasn't an agate clerk in the sports department of the New York Post. He was the sports editor of the New York Post, never mind that in its pre-Rupert Murdoch heyday being the sports editor of the Post was only one or two steps removed from being king of New York.
   At the time, the Post had a prestigious horseracing section. With a bunch of charts and all, it was kind of a poor man's Racing Form. And you can't have a horseracing section without handicappers.
   The post had one professional handicapper, Jerry DeNonno, and it had a couple of amateurs who would send in their picks, and Mr. Agate Clerk, aka me, would arrange their three picks per race neatly in a box that appeared on one of the three or four racing pages. There was, however, one handicapper out of the five in the box, his name was Trackman, who may have at one time existed, but he didn't exist when I was there.
   Here's what you do, I was told. You take Jerry DeNonno's three selections and jumble them up, and that's Trackman. Sometimes you mix in a jumbled trio of one of the other handicapper's selections to throw off any conspiracy theorists who might latch onto the formula. It may not be in a league with Edward Snowden, but I often thought one day somebody is going to expose this racket, except that in the horseracing world those three jumbled selections had about as good a chance of winning as the professional handicappers' picks. Kind of like the stock market.
   The night sports editor at the time was Vic Ziegel, who was a legend among sportswriters. Vic died a couple of years ago of lung cancer, and he didn't smoke, but he used to cover boxing in the days when Madison Square Garden was one big cloud of cigar smoke during a match, and newsrooms weren't smoke free either. Vic's job was extremely stressful thanks to ever-earlier deadlines and ever-later games, but he found a way to handle the stress. However difficult a night it was, come about four or four-thirty in the morning Vic would stop everything, he'd lean back in his chair with, I guess it was the Racing Form since he knew how we handicapped our own paper, and he would pick a longshot at Aqueduct or Belmont, and there'd be a little box on the racing page, one day it would be "Longshot Larry" and the next day it would be "Lucky Hal." Most days Longshot Larry or Lucky Hal was actually Vic Ziegel.
   When Vic was off, sometimes Longshot Larry or Lucky Hal would be ... you guessed it. And my mother would always ask me for recommendations when one of her poker playing buddies was going to the track.
   At any rate, Longshot Larry and Lucky Hal went a long way toward alleviating the stress on poor Vic.
   There was a story Vic may or may not have told, I lost touch with him and only saw him once after I left the Post in 1978, but he was a great storyteller and I was there when this story happened, so I assumed he would add it to his repertoire, although it's possible he told it a couple of times and then it slipped into the recesses. Like during the great Newspaper Strike of 1988 when there were three "interim" newspapers and the strike lasted 78 days and the new Pope died suddenly and one of the interim papers ran a headline on the top of its front page that said "Pope dies -- see tomorrow's paper for details." And it seemed like everybody who worked for one of the interim newspapers was going to write a book about it and no one ever did.
   In this particular story, however, Longshot Larry made his selection for the night. An hour or two later the paper was finished. Vic probably went out and had some breakfast, then hopped on the subway and got to Aqueduct, or maybe it was Belmont, in time for the first race.
   Longshot Larry picked a horse named TV Rerun that day. I don't know which race it was in, but I'll wager that Vic plunked ten or twenty bucks on its nose. The bugle signaled that the race was about to begin, the starting gate was lifted, TV Rerun bolted from the gate and soon was in the middle of the pack. The horse was acquitting itself well and entered the stretch in second place, but didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. Suddenly the jockey on the favorite horse raised his right hand, or maybe it was his left hand, to give his horse a gentle little thwack with the whip and, lo and behold, the whip fell out of his hand, the favorite switched gears from Express Train to Laid Back Surfer Dude, and TV Rerun passed him just before the wire, returning a handsome sum to all the Longshot Larry devotees who wagered two or four dollars on him.
   That night Vic came in to work in a very good mood and was telling the story to anyone who'd listen, and then he got down to the stressful work of the night.
   Around seven or eight in the morning the phone rang and it was Ike Gellis, the sports editor of the Post, calling, as he usually did, to see how things went during the night. Now Ike, too, liked to play the ponies, only whereas Vic bet ten or twenty dollars on a horse, Ike would bet several hundred, if not more. And there was Vic, a few feet from me, on the phone relating the story about TV rerun and the favorite's jockey dropping the whip when all of a sudden there was a prolonged silence, and Vic's face turned ashen.
   "What did he say?" someone asked.
   I could see Vic was trying to maintain his composure. Then he said that Ike, the sports editor, said, in what was probably a terse near whisper, "That was my whip the jockey dropped."
   Nothing more was said, but man, what a great story Vic had to tell, I thought. Whether he ever told it I don't know.
  

- - -

High Anxiety

Boomer says "But why do you want to put plants here? It's my anti-puppy fortress!"

   A Facebook friend recently posted a picture of her cat named Boomer, which reminded me of a story.
   In my job at the New Britain Herald/Bristol Press, my fellow copy editors are mid to late twentysomethings, maybe fast approaching the big 3-0, which, considering I'm in my 63rd year on this planet, makes them less than half my age. However, by the time I'm eligible for Medicaid they'll be at least half if not more than half my age, by the time I'm bent over and walking with a cane they might be three-quarters of my age, and by the time they're selling beachfront property on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan they should be a couple of years older than me. Who said I was never good at math? I think I said that, but in my youth I could count units in a headline like nobody's business.
   Sometimes, sitting at my desk, I'll overhear a conversation among my younger colleagues about what might be called anxiety dreams. One of them will have had a dream, for instance, in which it's ten minutes past deadline and no one is answering the phone in the plate room, or the pdf of a page reveals white space where a story is supposed to be, nothing spectacular but enough to give the best of copy editors a severe case of agita.
   I used to have dreams like that, except that it was in the era of hot type. I would dream that it was seven in the morning -- the New York Post was an afternoon paper then, and the "wood," or the front page, had to go to the plate room around 7:15, so all the other pages had to be finished well before that -- and I would walk into the composing room and there would be a row of sports pages (I used to fill in as the night sports editor) which should have been filled with stories about the Yankees and Mets and the Giants and Jets and the etc. and the etc. and there the pages would be -- empty, hollowed out forms with less lead in them than a Bushmaster clip. Then I would wake up, not screaming, not pounding the bed, not on the floor, like many of the PTSD-afflicted World War II veterans I've interviewed, but confused at first, then terribly relieved when I realized it was a dream.
   The few months I filled in sporadically as the night sports editor were filled with the kind of anxiety that triggered such dreams. As the person in charge of the section, I will say I was fairly adept; I had a good handle on copy flow and the staff was very professional. For economic and competitive reasons, however, the deadlines kept getting earlier and earlier, and some things were simply beyond my control, such as when the Yankees or Mets had a night game on the West Coast which would require the sportswriter covering the team to get his copy in often moments after the game ended.
   The year was 1977. That was a year after Rupert Murdoch bought the Post. The New York Yankees were playing on the West Coast, I'm not even sure which team they were playing. The sportswriter covering the game was a fellow named Henry Hecht, with whom I'd clerked a few years before and then watched as he became one of the paper's better sportswriters and I became a copy editor.
   Henry lived by himself on Lafayette Street in Manhattan, which is a little north and east of Greenwich Village, maybe it's even included in the Village. And he had a cat.
   While the game on the West Coast was in the later innings, the Sports Department phone rang. One of my colleagues answered it and handed the receiver to me.
   "It's a woman with a foreign accent," my colleague said, "and she wants to talk to Henry."
   I took the phone and explained that Henry was out of town. She knew that already, because she was a neighbor of Henry's and had agreed to watch his cat. She proceeded to say, in a panicked voice with a foreign accent, that Henry's cat fell out the window and was dead.
   This was before the days of text messaging, when she simply could have texted Henry "yr ct fell out wndw," so she was trying to reach him on the telephone. On D-Day in World War II, as the troops were getting slaughtered on Omaha Beach, General Eisenhower had to make a choice: Call off the invasion or not call it off. He didn't call it off and the rest is history. The decision I had to make was not in the same league as that; nevertheless it was fraught with anxiety: Do I tell Henry his cat fell out the window and risk him having a meltdown, blowing deadline, and my ass gets called on the carpet? Or do I not tell Henry until after he filed his story, and risk having a sportswriter I considered my friend hate me for the rest of his life? What would I say, "Thanks for getting your story in on time, by the way your cat fell out the window"?
   Then the phone rang. It was Henry.
   I'm guessing it was the seventh-inning stretch. Before I could say anything, Henry wanted to know if, in addition to his game story, he could write a sidebar. Then he said:
   "Dave Kingman brought his dog Boomer to the ballpark. I think it would make a good human interest story."
   Oh ... my ... god.
   Well, sometimes you have to make a decision that can affect the rest of your life very quickly.
   "Henry," I said. "I have to tell you something."
   After I told him, there was silence. The game still had an inning or two to go. I don't remember whether Henry wrote the sidebar about Dave Kingman's dog Boomer, but he told me later that after I told him about the cat, he cried, then he wrote his game story. It was clean, professional, and filed ahead of deadline.
   Had I made the right decision? I think so. In the best of all possible worlds, I never would have had another anxiety dream, but in the newspaper business there's always another day and another deadline. One day at Murdoch's daily meeting my supervisor threw me under the bus over a blown deadline, and my career at the New York Post was over. Luckily, I was able to land a job at the New York Daily News, where I worked for the next ten years. But that's another story for another day.

 

- - -

  
A related story, from my former colleague Steve Bromberg

Miles to go before I get pulled over



You are now entering ... Aaron's blog





   I've been fired, I've quit, I've been downsized, restructured, laid off, yelled at, cursed, thanked, congratulated, transferred sideways so many times you'd think I was on a merry go round. In 46 years in the newspaper business since I landed a part time job as a copyboy at the New York Post when I was 17 years old and a freshman at the City College of New York, I've sharpened pencils, made coffee, distributed galley proofs, read upside down, written headlines, corrected grammar, saved countless reporters from getting their pants sued off, gotten one newspaper's pants sued off (they should have fought but it was cheaper to settle), hell, it's like preventing terrorism, only the ones that slip through the security measures get noticed. I've Hemingwayed a thousand run-on sentences, called hundreds of reporters in the middle of the night to tell them there's a hole in their story big enough to bounce a beachball through. Did I mention I've made up a verb or two along the way and mangled the English language in a thousand different headlines? There's one thing I've never done until this week ... retired.

   Make that semi-retired. That's the way I see it. Bad financial judgment over the years led me to put in for early Social Security at the age of 63 and for every buck I earn above a certain amount I have to pay a penalty, so I decided to cut back on my hours. I was sure the publisher of the newspaper I work for would take it hard, since I did everything I could the last two and a half years to make myself indispensible, but when I asked to cut back on my hours his eyes lit up. The paper isn't going to replace me, will no longer be saddled with the cost of my health insurance, and my colleagues will have to pick up the slack, so why shouldn't he be happy.

   He's happy. I'm happy. If a day or two of overtime gets thrown into the mix my colleagues will be happy. What's wrong with this picture? I'll tell you what's wrong. If I don't do something to head it off at the pass, my friend Victor is going to send me a comment saying "Congratulations on your retirement." And I'm going to have to correct him and say "Semi-retirement."

   The fact is, it's time to devote more time to my second career as the second coming of Studs Turkel. And to collect my thoughts on the fine art of writing headlines and finish that semi instructional, semi autobiographical book I always wanted to write under the title of this blog. Uh oh. I think I hear the dinner bell tolling. It's tolling for me. I toll you so.

   Toity.

  

  

 

Editors shmeditors Part 3

This is Buddy Martin, the
first of many editors who
would have fired me if
he could.

  

   It all seems kind of a blur as I approach the age of 64 but some things pop out of the fog.

   Like the time the New York Post moved from its plant on West Street in lower Manhattan to the Journal American Building on the East Side of Manhattan. I had a little difficulty finding the new building, so after disembarking from the Number 6 train at the City Hall station, I hailed a cab and asked the driver if he knew where the Journal American Building was. The Post bought the building because the Journal American went out of business in 1966 (thank you, Wikipedia)  and the building had a better printing press than the Post building on West Street.

   "You mean the American Building," the cabbie said. God bless the quintessential New York cabbie, those, too, have gone the way of the World Journal Herald Telegraph Mirror Tribune Sun.

   It was the American building before it was combined with the Journal.

   I loved that building. I could drive down from the upper West Side, park below the East Side Drive for free in an area that must have been the scene of a dozen crimes in "Law and Order," bodies pulled from the river, burned out cars with bodies in the trunk flush up against a pillar holding up the East Side Drive, today it probably costs $24.95 for the first half hour to park there with a short walk south to the South Street Seaport or east to Chinatown. After I got out of work, say, at three or four in the morning I could walk down to the Fulton Fish Market which was thriving at that hour and buy a five pound box of fillets.

   I left that building a few years later to go to the Daily News, which had its own iconic building with an Art Deco lobby. In the middle of the lobby was a giant globe. One of my fellow copy editors in the sports department of the Daily News, Eddie Coyle, was a recovering alcoholic and currently addicted marathon runner who loved to tell the story of the time he came in to work inebriated, climbed on top of the globe in the middle of the lobby and began singing "I'm sitting on top of the world."

   Not long after I went to the Daily News the company launched an advertising campaign that went "Imagine how much fun it must be to work at the Daily News." Not as much fun, I imagine, as those copy editors putting out the Orange County Register from desks on the beach, as depicted on the covers of a thousand editions of Editor and Publisher, but it was fun for a while. That didn't last long, however.

   Newspapers across the country were thriving except in big cities. There was a death watch going on as the circulation of the Daily News declined and the circulation of the Post under Rupert Murdoch crept upward but the paper still bled cash and people were waiting, speculating, to see which paper would succumb first, while Newsday on Long Island was basking in the demise of the Long Island Press and hovering like a vulture to snap up the market share of the Daily News or the Post, whichever went under first.

   Neither of them did go under, and they even both survived the 78-day newspaper strike of 1978, which occurred in my first year at the Daily News.

   A few years later the Daily News, hoping to hasten, I surmise, the seemingly always  imminent demise of the Post, launched an afternoon edition called Daily News Tonight.

   That led to my second and last encounter with Bill Brink, the editor who interviewed me when I was hired.

   The Daily News Tonight was a disaster -- a high-quality disaster, mind you -- from the day it was launched. They hired a bunch of people and poured money into it, but the circulation wasn't there.

   At some point they hired a new sports editor named Buddy Martin -- I was still in the sports department at the time, and I'm not even sure who he replaced, although it must have been Dick Young -- I just found Young's obituary online, and it said he was sports editor of the Daily News until 1982 when he went to the Post, so that would have been when Buddy Martin was brought in from outside as the sports editor.

   When the Daily News Tonight was launched the News hired a deputy sports editor named John Clendenon. This Clendenon fellow was, well, he must have had some redeeming qualities.

   The Daily News Tonight lasted only a few months if I remember correct. When rumors were flying about its impending demise, with the attendant layoffs, Bill Brink made a tour of the newsroom, giving pep talks from department to department.

   After his pep talk in the sports department, he asked if there were any questions.

   I raised my hand.

   Yes?

   "Why is it that we're no longer allowed to use Chisox or Bosox in headlines?" I asked.

   "I didn't know you couldn't," Brink said.

   "Because those are cliches, and we don't use cliche headlines," chimed in Clendenon, who had outlawed their use. Such cliche headlines, in 120 point type, were practically the trademark of the Daily News back page. CHISOX TOP YANKS, YANKS BELT BOSOX, etc., etc.
   Just as an aside, one of my all-time favorite headlines was written by a crusty elderly sports copy editor named Lester Rose early in my tenure at the Daily News. It went: MILWAUKEE WISCS YANKS. Try writing a headline like that today!

   Ironically, Clendenon was right that Chisox and Bosox were cliches, he was only wrong to outlaw their use.

   The next day, or maybe a day or two after that, Clendenon was fired.

   He wasn't fired because I asked that question, or so I was assured, that was simply the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

   Unbeknownst to me, when the News was looking for a sports editor to replace Dick Young, it was Clendenon who saw the listing, I imagine in Editor and Publisher, and told his buddy Buddy. In other words, Buddy owed his buddy bigtime, and when Buddy's buddy got canned, ostensibly because I laid that straw on that proverbial camel's back, I was about to discover that Buddy was no buddy of mine.

   It might have been the day after Clendenon was dismissed, it might have been a day and several hours, but I got called into Buddy's office, and he would have fired me were I not protected by the Newspaper Guild. God bless the Newspaper Guild. When he realized he couldn't fire me, he told me I could resign or be transferred to another department. I opted for the latter, and although the circumstances might be described as having been under duress, it was the best career move I ever made, at least in my newspaper career.

   I wound up on the features copy desk, thanks to my job protection under the union contract, and Buddy Martin himself wound up fired a few months later.

  

(to be continued)

  

And another one...and another one...

An Africanized honey bee thinks about who to kill next.

(See earlier post: Another One Bites the Dust)

  

  Over the next few centuries I imagine a couple of books will be written about Rupert Murdoch, but I doubt that either of them will mention a clipping that was posted on the bulletin board of the sports department of the New York Post in 1977. The clipping was from the San Antonio Express -- I don't imagine it was the original article but probably was a photocopy -- the Express was the first newspaper in America that Murdoch bought, and Murdoch had recently purchased the Post -- the headline from the San Antonio newspaper blared something to the effect, and I forget the exact wording, about killer bees making their way to America from South America.

   Everybody laughed, this is our new boss? I will say it took ten years or so, but since then Africanized honey bees have claimed their fair share of fatalities north of the border. Thwap! Whew, that was close. I don't know if that sucker was africanized or not, but I didn't want to find out.

   Killer bees aside, I witnessed another what now is probably considered at best a minuscule moment of Murdoch history when one morning in 1978 the "wood" was wheeled through the sports department on its way to the newsroom; "wood" was the term used for front page headlines that were too big to make on a linotype machine so they were engraved in wood, don't ask me, I don't know how the process worked, but this particular wood, in maybe 300 point type, the kind used for Pearl Harbor Bombed or Twin Towers Collapse, announced "Baby Born Without Mother." Wow. This new boss of ours is totally bonkers. Didn't we used to be a newspaper. I'm not quoting exactly, these were just some of the thoughts that were drifting through the sports department. What had happened was that someone had given Murdoch an advance copy of a book about cloning. This was 1978, mind you, maybe even 1977, Dolly the Sheep wasn't even a rung in the ladder of her father's DNA.

   Ironically, while it still hasn't happened and it doesn't justify Murdoch's mangling of journalistic ethics, cloning has come a long way since then.

   Now, back to all the editors and managing editors and executive editors I've worked for over the years. After Paul Sann retired from the New York Post, I have no idea who took his place, since I was blissfully ensconced on the night desk of the sports department and had practically nothing to do with the dayside doings at the Post. I looked it up on the Internet and apparently it was some guy named McKenzie. I'll leave it at that.

   Initially after Murdoch bought the post there was an exodus of talent, including Chuck Slater, I'm not quite sure what his title was but he was probably the night sports editor at the Post since he was my supervisor. After he left, I was awarded the privilege of filling in in the "slot" which was one of the most stressful jobs I've ever tackled; I won't at this point go into the reasons for this. I don't know the exact sequence or the dates, but Ike Gellis retired as the longtime sports editor and was replaced by a Murdoch stooge named Jerry Lisker, actually I kind of liked the guy, and Greg Gallo, the son of the legendary Daily News sports cartoonist Bill Gallo, was brought over from Murdoch's Star to be the assistant sports editor.

   About a year after the initial exodus, when I was training new sports copy editors to back me up in the "slot" and then seeing them promoted ahead of me, I began to wonder what was going on. Then one day Greg Gallo said to me that he wasn't supposed to tell me this, but at a news meeting one morning, Murdoch blew his stack because the sports department missed deadline, and somebody said to him that it was my fault. End of career. That day I called Chuck Slater and asked him if there were any openings at the Daily News. I don't know whether it was a week or two weeks later, but I left the Post and went to work on the sports copy desk at the Daily News.

   This time, however, I did have to go through the application and interview process.

   The person I interviewed with was Bill Brink. I looked him up online the other day and found his obituary from a few years ago and it noted that he was in the Army Air Corps in Italy during World War II. I was like damn, I wish I'd known that, but at the time I wasn't nearly as interested in the history of World War II as I since have become.

   The one thing I remember from the interview is that I told Brink that I loved writing headlines, and that I always admired the headline in the Daily News that said "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

   "I wrote that," he said.

   Damn, I thought, I really wasn't trying to butter the guy up, I had no idea. Anyway, I got the job.

(to be continued)

Another one bites the dust

   I arrived at work yesterday to find my managing editor outside having a cigarette. As I opened the door to enter the building's relatively small lobby -- somewhat proportionally re the size of the paper to the grand Art Deco lobby of the New York Daily News where I used to work -- he asked me if I'd heard the news, as if I even know how to open my company email from my home computer, heck, I've only been there two and a half years.

   No, I said. What news? I assumed immediately that the Turk -- as Norm Miller, a sportswriter at the Daily News many moons ago used to refer to the ax that fell on professional football squads at certain points in the pre-season; I imagine today the Turk would proverbially chop off Norm's proverbial head if he used that expression in a story since one doesn't want to give the impression anymore that Turkish people go around chopping off people's heads, that's not very politically correct, now, is it? Maybe the Taliban is visiting NFL training rooms these days. At any rate, just about the only news in the newsroom these days, other than another delay in going live with the new bells-and-whistles rich web site, is that somebody has been fired.

   "Jack's no longer here," the managing editor said. Jack K-----, the person to whom he referred, was the executive editor, which makes three executive editors who've come and gone since I was hired that seemingly short time ago. Well, not exactly come and gone, two came and three went, since the first one was within weeks of retiring when I was hired.

   There was a great deal of speculation in the newsroom yesterday but nothing concrete. I suppose if the publisher were listening, he would have picked up what Homeland Security calls a great deal of chatter. He did call a couple of my colleagues into his office to ask them what the mood of the newsroom was. He didn't call me in, but I'd have readily given him my opinion, which was that the executive editor was a nice guy, everybody liked him, but that he never quite got the chance to assert his authority. He tried a little too hard to be perceived as a "good guy" and to plug some of the newsroom's many holes; for instance he took cell phone pictures of the Christmas tree lighting ceremony across the street last year when no photographer was available, never mind that they were blurry and really lousy quality; he rewrote press releases and edited stories, but didn't edit them nearly as well as a copy editor might have edited them, if all the copy editors weren't so overworked and stressed out. And he loved to write weather stories.

   All of this got me to thinking about all the managing and executive editors -- mind you, I never quite understood the difference between the two, although I suppose in some table of organization there is one -- I've seen visited by the so-called Turk in the 46 or so years since I first sharpened two or three dozen No. 2 pencils a night, made coffee in an urn with flies on the bottom and was sent to buy cigarettes for Pete Hamill (two packs of Camels).

   There have been a lot, but none ever came close to the standard set by my first managing (executive?) editor, Paul Sann, whom I never had a conversation with -- he didn't interview me because I started at age 17 as a part-time copyboy on the midnight to 8 a.m. shift -- and I certainly wasn't recruited, but Paul Sann circled a headline on a galley proof and sent it to the sports editor, Ike Gellis, with the note "good headline," or maybe it was just "good head," or maybe even simply "good," and it was like somebody slapped a ball and chain to my ankle and wrapped the ball a few times around the base of the copy desk. Not that that was a bad thing, there were times in my alleged career that I loved being a copy editor, but the fact is that copy editors are the Rodney Dangerfields of the newspaper industry.

   In one of my earliest blog posts -- so early that it was in a roll your own iteration of the blog sprouting from one of my web sites and isn't included in this blog, so here's a link -- Aaron's early attempt at blogging -- I gave more of a description of the circumstances surrounding that circled headline, and I spoke of the friction between Sann and the Post's new owner, circa 1978, Rupert Murdoch, and I had a couple of the facts wrong, which I can thank Sann's son Howard for correcting. I didn't know it then, but I've worked under some good and some poor excuses for managing and executive editors but Sann set a standard that's been approached but never equaled.

(more)

 

(Wow, am I so old that I can remember when "more" was at the bottom of a page of copy? Excuse me while I catapult myself into the 21st century...)

 

(to be continued)

Your paper could die without a sense of humor

An article in the April 7, 1944 edition of the Berkshire Eagle

 

 

   I just read in my friend Victor's "Eye on the Record" blog of a further round of cutbacks and prospective layoffs at a newspaper where I used to work, and thought the above article, which one of my World War II interviewees had in a scrapbook, might provide a little comic relief.

   When I worked at the New York Daily News, I learned a very important lesson: that a newspaper department, or even a newspaper itself, reflects the personality of its department head, or in the latter case, its publisher; look at how the New York Post, and more recently the Wall Street Journal, reflects the personality, especially the politics, of Rupert Murdoch.

   But it was really on a more microcosmal basis that this point was driven home; for instance, the food section of the Daily News when I was there reflected the personality of Arthur Schwartz, the great food writer who was the head of its department; the New York Post sports department back in the 1970s reflected the personality of Ike Gellis, and even though I'm not a big sports fan that probably was one of the great sports departments of all time. Again on a microcosmic level the sports copy desk on which I cut my teeth reflected the personality of its night slot editor, the late Vic Ziegel. And what a personality that was. Even today when I look at a certain type of humor I think, that's the type of thing Vic Ziegel might have written, and that personality permeated to the people working around him.

   The areas of the newspaper where I spent 20 years trying to do the best job that I could under trying circumstances also reflected the personality of the person in charge. The managers under whom I fared best generally had a good sense of humor. Vic Ziegel when he was at the New York Post, before going to the Daily News, for instance, was under such pressure to meet deadlines that he devised a little scheme to relieve the pressure. On Saturday nights, when the paper compiled, with the help of the Associated Press, the score of just about every college football game in America, Vic would stop everything, and take a few minutes to peruse the seemingly mile long agate list of college football scores, and then at the very bottom, with its own headline, he would choose one score and call it "In the Big One." And that would be the most eye catching name of two college opponents, like Slippery Rock State 21, Columbia School of Journalism 6 (who knew they had a football team, okay, I made that up, sue me ... wait, I forgot about that non disclosure agreement).

   I spent a few years in the business department of the former employer that is likely to lay off several more employees, and the business editor's position was like a revolving door. But for a while the editor had a sense of humor -- which, IMHO, was a rarity at that establishment, and the bottom right hand corner of the front page of the business section had a daily feature displaying a story like the one at the top of this entry. The stories were short, lively and above all, funny, and produced what I consider to have been some of my best headlines. With a change of business editors, that feature disappeared.

   More recently, the newspaper seems to reflect the personality of its publisher, which to get a better idea of I recommend Victor Sasson's blog. I will say, however, that a good newspaper should have the ability to laugh at itself once in a while, as the Berkshire Eagle did in 1944 -- the rest of that front page was filled with news about World War II. I no longer read the newspaper where I spent 20 years on various copy desks, but from following Victor's blog, it would seem that the newspaper has lost any semblance of a sense of humor. Which is a shame.

Mandatory retirement and me

As I await the arrival of my first piddling pension check, with my checking account overdrawn and my credit cards maxed out thanks to two years and three months without a job in the newspaper industry, a couple of items, one from the Paleozoic Era of Journalism, the other a Facebook post, come to mind.

This will be a lengthy post, so if you're on deadline, Hasta la vista Mista, or Ms (you were expecting maybe Miss from a dinosaur like moi? Why, I'm so up to date I was going to tweet this blog post only it's about 276,000 characters too long. Of course, I could tweet it in installments, a la the New Yorker's long-ago capsule review of "The Fantasticks," which was in the form of another sentence, or part of a sentence, or part of a participle, from "Finnegan's Wake" each week until either the Fantasticks finally closed or James Joyce's estate ordered it to cease and desist.) But I desist, I mean digress.

Ironically, the two incidents are related. So called ink stained wretches the nation over are boo-hooing the demise of the newspaper industry but the newspapers I worked for were demising as far back as I can remember, which is roughly 42 years. New York City once had an astounding number of competing newspapers, morning newspapers, afternoon newspapers, evening newspapers, and all of those newspapers had several editions, bulldog editions, late sports editions, early sports editions, 2 o'clock cup of coffee editions. There was a World and a Tribune and a Sun and a Journal and a Herald and a Telegram and the Post and the Daily News and probably a couple of others I'm forgetting (like the New York Times!), and none of them were owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

The first night I went to work at the old Journal-American building which the New York Post had bought I took a taxi from the subway. When I asked the cabbie if he knew where the Journal-American building was he said, "You mean the Journal building?" He knew it from before it merged with the American. Newspapers in New York City in the first half of the 20th century did more folding than an old lady in a Chinese laundry.

When I left the Post to work at the Daily News, my new colleagues on the copy desk were making jokes about the small size of their Christmas bonuses. I had never even heard the word "bonus" at the Post. And my new News colleagues were lamenting the days, not long past, when if a staffer even thought he or she might have to call in sick, he or she would call ahead and the paper would call in an extra "just in case."

When I left the Daily News and arrived at the Bergen Record it was only a matter of time before profit-sharing, a term I had never heard used at the Daily News or the Post, was discontinued, and there was even a round of layoffs about 15 years ago. At the time the newspaper industry was healthy by today's standards, so I thought there must be a black cloud following me around, sort of like Linus in the "Peanuts" comic strip. I'm sure some of my former supervisors at the Record would agree, as they have clutched at every straw in the book, if you'll pardon the mangled metaphor, to explain the paper's financial difficulties.

Which brings me, by way of a poor transition, to my former colleague's Facebook post of a couple of days ago. He posted a link to an article about the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he used to work. The Inquirer is in bankruptcy court, and a deal to sell it to its creditors was torpedoed because the Teamsters Union, which represents the drivers, refused to void the paper's contractual obligation to pay into a pension fund and create 401(k)s instead.

A commenter on the Facebook page wrote "We'll survive no matter what," and my former colleague wrote "You damn well better."

I applaud the Teamsters for taking a stand. The bankruptcy court will tear up the contract anyway. I didn't dare make such a comment on Facebook as I would hate for him to think I'm rooting for all those "Inky" staffers to wind up in the same boat as me, which I'm not. But the action of the Teamsters, and the pending arrival of that piddling pension check, a double dose of dreaded "R" words -- recession and retirement -- made me think of the time about forty years ago, I can't recall the precise year, when the picket lines were up outside the New York Post, owner Dorothy Schiff was threatening to close the paper if the unions struck, and only two items remained on the table: mandatory retirement and me.

First, mandatory retirement. Even then, most people couldn't afford to retire. There was one writer at the Post, Archer Winston, who was 92 if he was a day and he still wrote a skiing column. Okay, maybe he was only 78 but he sure looked 92. But there were many workers who would be out of a job, for whatever reasons they were still working, whether it was due to a lack of funds to retire or because it kept them from being henpecked 24 hours of the day, if mandatory retirement were accepted. (One of my all time favorite Daily News headlines, "YANKS WISC. MILWAUKEE," was written by a copy editor who should have retired years earlier but couldn't stand spending that much time with his wife).

I forget what the proposed mandatory retirement age was, maybe 62, maybe 65. As newspaper work is for the most part cerebral if Damon Runyon were still alive he'd probably still be writing for a newspaper. Even back then, this was a marvelous ploy to get rid of longtime workers with high salaries and lots of vacation and replace them with younger, lower-paid workers.

And now for "and me." Circa  1969 I was working as a clerk in the sports department of the Post. That department was legendary, probably the best in the nation, with writers like Jimmy Cannon and Milt Gross and Larry Merchant and Vic Ziegel, who still writes a column for the Daily News and is as sharp as ever. The writers would cover their games and file their stories with Western Union, which sent the stories over a teletype machine. But that ol' divvel economy was nipping at the heels of Western Union -- oops, another mangled metaphor, if I were paying me to write this blog I'd give me a virtual rap on the knuckles -- and it eliminated the "night press rate." Overnight the cost of filing the stories with Western Union increased sevenfold. Whether it went from $1 a page to $7 a page or 2 cents a word to 14 cents a word I couldn't tell you, all I know is "sevenfold."

Step back a little further in time with me to seventh grade at Joan of Arc Junior High School when for one period a day my class took typing. Little did I know how that would influence my life. Okay, fast forward to 1969, zzzzzzziippp. The Post bought two reel to reel tape recorders, and soon I was recording one sportswriter while transcribing another. I would arrive at 8 p.m., and it was not unusual, before the first fax machine was invented, for me to type up 21 stories in the course of a shift, which often lasted until 5 a.m. And if you thought those early fax machines were a time saver, fuhgeddabouddit, the print quality on the thermal paper was so poor that I had to strain my eyes and type them over anyway.

The Post was a union shop then, and jobs were classified as Group this and Group that. A copy person, for instance, the lowest rung on the totem pole, was Group 1. A copy editor, the highest rung on the totem pole below management, was Group 10. I was Group 4.

The record/transcribe setup, I'm sure, saved the paper a bundle of money. So much so that the news desk on occasion asked if we could handle a couple of stories for them. Not a problem, especially since it was compensated with a bit of overtime.

Soon, however, the news desk created a position similar to mine to handle the three to five stories a night that news reporters phoned in. That position, which entailed a fraction of the transcribing that I was doing, was created at Group 5. I filed a grievance with the union.

The grievance was never quite resolved, and wound up as a contract issue in a protracted round of labor negotiations. The union assured me I had an airtight case, although I was sure I would make a pretty good bargaining chip for some other hard-to-resolve issue.

I don't remember the date, but the contract went down to the wire, and talks were extended. They weren't going well, and the picket lines went up, although the workers were not yet officially on strike. At this point, two issues remained unresolved: Mandatory retirement and Aaron Elson, which is how my case was referred.

Finally, Dorothy Schiff relented on mandatory retirement, an issue worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. The union negotiators said, "How about Aaron Elson," an issue worth maybe fifty dollars a week. Dorothy refused to budge. The union, god bless 'em, budged. I don't begrudge them that.

A few weeks later I was given a tryout as a copy editor, so the issue was essentially  moot.

The contract negotiations were in September, and by the holiday season I was editing copy instead of typing, Group 10, pretty good money. Dorothy Schiff, who would soon sell the Post to Rupert Murdoch, made an appearance at the Christmas party. My editor, Ike Gellis, asked if I would like to meet her.

He brought me over and introduced me. "This is Aaron Elson," he said.

Dorothy Schiff, without saying a word, promptly turned and walked away.

Without unions like the Teamsters, newspapers have long since replaced mandatory retirement with age discrimination. Do the math. Fifty-eight years old plus five weeks' vacation equals ten-four, out the door, or so it was in my case.

The Philly Inquirer is a wonderful newspaper. I hope it survives. From time to time I hear about former colleagues who are still employed by the newspaper that laid me off. Their salaries have been slashed, their workloads increased, and their morale has never been lower. They have been warned that posting on certain blogs critical of the newspaper is a fireable offense.

That's why I applaud the Teamsters. Sometimes you have to take a stand, whatever the cost.

Toity

My entry into the newspaper business came with a question on a copy editing test at my college paper, The Campus, some 43 years ago.

The question: What is bfulc?

My answer: Those were the glasses Ben Franklin invented.

My exit from the newspaper business came with an email from the editor of a midsize newspaper: "Thank you very much for your interest in our page design/copy editing position. We had a flood of 80 applicants including many who were highly qualified and it was a very difficult choice, but we have filled the position."

That's it for me. Ten four, out the door. I used to tell kids if they could write a good headline, they could always get a job in this business. That advice is now as useless as this blog, although some copy editors might still learn something from my occasional entries.

My former newspaper, the Bergen Record, would like to consider me retired, but I'm not. I'm just beginning my second career, reinventing myself as it were, as an oral historian. It's an uphill climb, but I need the exercise.

When I started in the newspaper business, as a cub reporter at my college paper, there was a tradition when seniors graduated, or even if they didn't graduate but finally moved on to a real newspaper after six or seven years dodging classes in the school paper office, a little hole in the wall, capacity about eight with a couple of desks and a few typewriters and paper all over the place, look at this, a run-on sentence, tsk, tsk, I must be getting copyheimer's disease, but anyway, they got to write what was known as a "Thirty" column. I wrote one in my fifth year when I finally negotiated my way into a degree, trading all my "incompletes" for F's and emerging with a 2.1 grade point average, a smidgin above the requirement to graduate. I forget what I said in my Thirty column.

By the time I graduated I was already working full-time, at the New York Post, where I started as a copyboy in the summer of my freshman year.

In real businesses -- newspapers, after all, were never real businesses, still aren't, although they've come to think they are -- people get a gold watch after 25 years. In newspapers, whatever the number of years, they got something much more personal. The cartoonist would do a big drawing and everybody would sign it. When I was at the Daily News there was one fellow who up and went to Hollywood because an old friend of his was now a famous screenwriter and was going to help him get started. The staff held a party for him and the artist, I think it was my alltime favorite newspaper artist, Jerry Schlamp, did a big caricature of him lying in a king-size bed with a horse's head sticking out from under the sheets, two empty bottles of booze with three x's rising from the top of each, and a nurse wearing nothing but panties with a red cross on them and a bra and saying "Now about that screen test ..." I got to sign that along with everybody else, although I suppose if he were to look at that today, he wouldn't know who the heck I was.

That's what I aspired to in the newspaper business, but it never came to pass. I left the Post in the exodus that followed Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the paper, and went to the New York Daily News. Ten years later I left the Daily News in a mass downsizing and wound up at the Bergen Record. I left the Record twenty years later in a "restructuring," please step into my office, you're not being offered a job, goodbye, a few days later some of my copy desk colleagues took me and another laid off copy editor to a diner and that was it, no cartoon. They did get me some kind of Hallmark card and signed it, but that's not the same.

"Thirty," in the Pleistocene Era of Journalism, is what reporters would put at the end of their story so that the people working the linotype machines would know that it was finished.

Oh, and bfulc stood for bold face, upper lower case.