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)

Ripped From the Headlines

Elian Gonzalez is taken from his protectors so he can be returned to Cuba.

   One of the stops on the Yahoo carousel -- that series of news pictures that cross your computer screen, stopping barely long enough to hook you into reading the story before moving on to the next news story, so that you become conditioned to slamming your hand down on the keyboard like a contestant in a game show, but I digress -- there was a news story related in an odd sort of way to one of the main story lines in my new book "The Armored Fist."
   The story was about some drug addled couple who lost their two little boys to the wife's parents in a custody battle, funny the news media should use the word battle because it doesn't sound like much of a fight, the kids were simply taken away and placed with the grandparents instead of foster care. But anyway, this father with a couple of drug related convictions ties up his in-laws, kidnaps his own kids, and flees with his wife and the two little boys via boat to Cuba, which agrees to send the reprobates -- that term applies only to the parents, not the little boys, although they were included in the deal -- back to the United States.
   End of story. Not. I rarely use the word "lunkhead" but I feel obligated to apply it to the alleged journalist who compared this situation to that of little Elian Gonzalez, who survived a disastrous boat trip which claimed the life of his mother and wound up in Miami and in the center of a political firestorm.
   Now Elian's mother was not some drug addled good for nothing, all she wanted was freedom and a better life for herself, I guess she had a boyfriend too, and her son, and she headed toward America on an overcrowded, rickety boat with more leaks than the CIA, while the couple that fled to Cuba with their kids had a decent, uncrowded boat, even if the father didn't have both oars in the water. This the Yahoo correspondent called a "reverse Elian Gonzalez," like it was some kind of football play, although I suppose it does have a bit of legitimacy since purely in terms of the voyage it was like Elian's journey in reverse.
   By now, you are no doubt asking yoursef, what on earth does all this blabbering have to do with Aaron's new book, "The Armored Fist."
   Which brings me to the diary entry of the Rev. Edmund Randolph Laine of Stockbridge, Mass., for April 3, 1945.

   The diary entry begins with a thick black cross, which actually in this case is both a cross and a symbol referring to a footnote. The day begins cool and gray, with some sun in the afternoon. It was Easter Tuesday, and Reverend Laine notes that he is "not feeling too well." The diary entry ends with the footnote, or actually it was simply a late addition, underlined, "Eddie killed this day in action in Germany, at about 12 p.m. our time." I say it was a late addition because in the pre-Twitter era, it would be 13 days before a telegram arrived informing Reverend Laine that Lieutenant Edward L. Forrest was killed.
   When I first attended a reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion, in 1987, Ed Forrest was the only name from my father's stories that I remembered, which is why I took a special interest in his life.
   So wait, what about Cuba and Elian Gonzalez and the drug addled reprobate kidnapper of his own two kids, you might ask.
   For this you have to glance once again at the diary entry, and back up just a smidgin from the late addition. At 11 p.m., Reverend Laine listened to the news on the radio, which included commentary by Fred Vandeventer.
   I'll be damned. Forgive me while I digress again. It never occurred to me to look up Fred Vandeventer, but I just did, and according to imdb, Vandeventer was the "Mutual Broadcasting System radio newsman and columnist who originated the game "Twenty Questions" for radio and, later, television. Based on the "Animal, Vegetable or Mineral" parlor game, it was one of the first shows to transcend radio into the new medium of television, and was extremely popular. He was a "printer's devil" for his high school newspaper ..."
    So that's who Fred Vandeventer was, and that's who Reverend Laine was listening to on the radio at 11 p.m. on April 3, 1945. Now, back to Cuba.
    Right after listening to the news, Reverend Laine notes in his journal, immediately prior to the footnote, that he finished reading "When the French Were Here."
"When the French Were Here" was a book by historian and diplomat Stephen Bonsal about the role of the French in the American Revolution. It was the middle of 1781 and George Washington's proverbial credit cards were maxed out. His troops were like "What MREs again?" and ready to pack it in if they didn't get paid.
   Enter the "Ladies of Havana," who, according to Bonsal, responded to a plea from a French admiral with jewels and furs and cash worth about 1.2 million pounds, which financial analysts might tell you would be worth $28 million today. George Washington was overjoyed, the troops got paid, and the rest is history. American history.
   When Elian Gonzalez was unceremoniously returned to Cuba, the Latino press was all over it. I looked this up years ago when I first started researching the material in Reverend Laine's diary, and I've been unable to find it again, but a columnist in the Miami Herald wrote "...and this is how we pay them [the Ladies of Havana] back."
One of these days I'm going to transcribe more of Reverend Laine's diary, which is filled with cultural references of the day, often shortened due to a lack of space, like "Air mail letter from E. in p.m. mail. Walked around back lawn." Come to think of it, you might say he was born to tweet.

- - -

Priceless. (Well, actually it's $17.69 at amazon)

Aaron Elson Interviews Himself

Now that my new book is available (official release date, April 16), I thought it would be way cool to do one of those blog tours. Then I discovered that there's like this blog tour circuit, and there are blog tour brokers and bloggers who charge money, albeit not a heck of a lot, for you to fill out a boilerplate interview template. So I decided phooey, I can just as easily interview myself. At least I read the book.

Q. Good afternoon. Thank you for stopping by.

A. What do you mean? I live here.

Q. In that case, I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee.

A. I only serve tea.

Q. That's right. Your book is being published in England.

A. Yes. Would like a crumpet with that?

Q. Thank you. State your name for the record, please.

A. Aaron Elson

Q. No middle initial?

A. C for Charles. That was one of my great-grandfathers. Aaron was another. Aaron was also my grandfather’s middle name, Milton Aaron Reder. He wasn’t a very good grandfather, but he was a doctor who was much-loved by his patients.

Q. Why do you say that?

A. He was in his office seven days a week, twelve hours a day and six hours each on Saturday and Sunday. He outlived all three of his children and was 92 when he died.

Q. Was he a veteran?

A. He was a doctor in World War II. It’s one of my great failures as an oral historian that I never got him to tell me about his experiences except for one story. He was on a beach treating a soldier who had an injured leg when some dirt came flying into the foxhole or wherever he was doing the treating. He said he shouted for the person to quit throwing dirt on his patient, and the person he yelled at turned out to be General Patton. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but knowing my grandfather it probably was. He may have been traumatized by the war, because he lost his voice – it was a psychological thing, there was nothing wrong with his vocal chords – and could only speak in a hoarse whisper.

Q. Was your father a veteran?

A. Yes, he was. That’s what got me started doing oral history. He was a wonderful storyteller, but he was in and out of hospitals the last few years of his life – gout, prostate problems, heart attacks, a quadruple bypass. He had a heart attack when I was 30 years old, and I realized I’d forgotten most of the stories he told about World War II. So I bought a little Sony recording Walkman and was going to take it with me when I went to visit him in the hospital. I forgot the tape recorder, he got out of the hospital, and died two weeks later. That was in 1980. Seven years later I discovered a newsletter addressed to him from the 712^th Tank Battalion Association – that’s the outfit my new book is about.

Q. What did you do with the newsletter?

A. I wrote to its editor, and asked him to put a notice in the next issue saying if anybody remembered a Lieutenant Elson, would they get in touch with me?

Q. And what happened?

A. Almost by return mail I got a letter from Sam MacFarland. He said, “I didn’t know your father, but the battalion is having a reunion. It’s too late for the next newsletter, but if you come to the reunion, I’ll take you around and we’ll see if we can find anyone who remembers your dad.”

Q. Did you go?

A. Yes I did.

Q. And what happened?

A. Sam and I found three veterans who remembered my dad. I explained that I remembered very little from his stories – the name of a fellow lieutenant, Ed Forrest, who was killed, and that my dad said there was something about Ed that gave him the impression Ed either didn’t want or didn’t expect to come home. His evidence was that Ed readily volunteered for an exceptionally dangerous mission in Normandy. He speculated that Ed’s father may have been a minister who didn’t approve of him going off to war.

Q. Was that the case?

A. Actually, no. Years later I would learn that Ed’s father was an alcoholic, his mother committed suicide, he fought with his father and a minister took him in when he was 14 and raised him like a son. The minister, it turns out, was a chaplain in World War I and couldn’t have been prouder of Ed when he became a lieutenant.

Q. My goodness. How did you learn all that?

A. I interviewed Ed’s brother, as well as the woman he likely would have married if he came back. I read an unpublished memoir written by his sister, and a diary left by the priest.

Q. What else did you know about your father’s experiences?

A. He said he replaced the first lieutenant in the battalion to be killed. He was wounded in Normandy and again in December. The December wound was in a place called Dillingen. Almost everybody at that reunion had a story about Dillingen. I was like Wow.

Q. What led you to morph from reconstructing your father’s experiences to learning about the other veterans’ experiences.

A. Morph, that’s a good word. Some of the veterans asked if I’d like to go to lunch with them. One of them was telling a story on the way to the parking lot, and when we got to his car, he opened the door, but it was about five minutes before anybody got in because he had to finish the story. I entered the hospitality room in the middle of another veteran telling a story and listened to the end, kind of like when you go late to a movie and miss the beginning but still get caught up in the action. Later I asked the veteran to tell me the story from the start.

Q. Why did you write “The Armored Fist”?

A. When I began recording the veterans’ stories, I didn’t know squat. I thought the Battle of the Bulge was an American offensive (it wasn’t. It was a German counteroffensive). I looked at the battalion’s record –1,165 men, 3 Distinguished Service Crosses, 56 Silver Stars, 465 Bronze Stars, 498 Purple Hearts, three Presidential Unit Citations – and the only thing I recognized was the Purple Hearts, because my father got two of them. As I recorded the stories of its veterans, I began to realize, this outfit deserves its place in history.

Q. What makes your book different from many other books of military history.

A. You should say “many other great books of military history.” There are more great books of military history than you can shake a stick at. But I believe my book is, in some ways, unusual. When I was writing my first book, I called the Military Book Club, and the person I spoke to said there were two things readers of military history wanted: maps and pictures. So I put a couple of maps and a bunch of pictures in my first book, “Tanks for the Memories,” which I self-published. But the truth is, I couldn’t read a map if it led to a pot of gold. I’ve been lost in almost every state in the nation. There are no maps in “The Armored Fist.” There are a lot of pictures, but the pictures aren’t so big that they dwarf the text.

Q. You’ve said “This isn’t your father’s military history.”Is that because it’s your father’s story?

A. No. I say that because it has some unusual sources. Many books about World War II draw on morning reports, after action reports, oral history interviews, previously published books, etc., etc. I have some of that in “The Armored Fist,” but I also have excerpts from the diary of the priest who raised Ed Forrest. I draw on letters and high school essays of a young replacement who was killed. I quote from a memoir written by the sister of a soldier. I’ve tried to show a deeply human side of the war.

Q. What do you plan to do next?

A. My publisher wants me to write a book about the Kassel Mission, one of the most spectacular air battles of World War II. It’s also one of the great little known stories of the war.

Q. Well, that about wraps it up. Is there anything I’m forgetting to ask.

A. Yes. Now that “The Armored Fist” is out, you could ask your readers to consider donating to my Indiegogo campaign, so that I can launch the “Yanks in Tanks Tour.”

Q. I certainly will. Please check out Aaron Elson's Oral History Audiobooks Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign.

A. And if there are any other authors reading this who'd like to interview themselves, email me and I'll be happy to post your interview on my blog.

Q. One more thing. Is there an excerpt from "The Armored Fist" available?

A. There'll be one in my next blog post. Oh, one more thing.

Q. What's that?

A. I'd like to recite a little poem:
At the bottom of this page
       You'll see some
little icons
Hit the Share button
Hit the Tweet thingie
Inform your Facebook buddies
     Thank you

Q. That doesn't rhyme.

A. It's free verse.

Q. It is?

A. It didn't cost anything, did it?

- - -

Eftsoons the twain shall meet

Heimboldshausen, Germany, April 3, 1945

   For the past two decades I've led a fairly productive double life as a headline writer and an oral historian. Rarely have the twain met, except on twacks like the ones above. But just the other day they collided again.
   I was thinking how sometimes, when I corner a listener and start relating the stories of the 712th Tank Battalion as they were told to me by veterans who have since passed away, I'm a little like the Ancient Mariner cornering the poor wedding guest. So on a whim, I googled the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which I hadn't read since high school (Mr. Jennings' class at Stuyvesant H.S. if I remember correctly), and I was amazed -- stunned, floored, wowed, thank you Mister Roget -- at how many headlines I've written over the years owe their origin to the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.
   My goodness, every time the Weather Channel sends a few drops of rain my newspaper's way, I think I've written a headline that said "Water Water Everywhere."
   I knew that came from the Ancient Mariner, but look at all these other great lines:
   "Alone, alone, all all alone..."
   "Oh sleep it is a gentle thing"
   As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean"
   A sadder and a wiser man he woke the morrow morn."

   I mean, that's four lines of poetry that have launched a thousand headlines, sorry about that Helen, and after reading and re-reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I have but one regret: that had I known the newspaper I used to edit copy and write clever headlines for would throw me away like yesterday's fish wrap, I would have tried harder to sneak a headline past the slot employing the word "Eftsoons."

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.

Kudos all around to my colleagues

   A little more than four years after being unceremoniously (acrimoniously might be a better word) dumped by my employer of 20 years, the newspaper that rescued me from the discard bin of long term unemployment, the Bristol Press, was named Newspaper of the Year in its circulation category for 2012 by the New England Newspaper and Press Association. Its circulation may be smaller than that of my previous employer, but its staff is way more enthusiastic and talented, its management much more concerned with putting out a good product than the vast array of deadwood at the paper where I used to work.

   My contribution to the award winning product was marginal, a few headlines here and some page layouts there, dividing my time between the Press and its sister paper, the New Britain Herald, but I'm proud to have contributed even in some small way to the paper's achievement.

What copy editors have in common with tuna fish

   In the year and a half since I was rescued from the discard heap of unemployment by the New Britain Herald, I've noticed that some of my colleagues who are half my age (but they're catching up ... in twelve years they'll be three quarters of my age, but don't quote me on that, I was never good at math), and even some of my contemporaries, have just a little bit of difficulty in the placement of commas. For those more advanced in years it's a little late to try and effect a change since, like me, they'll be voluntarily out to pasture in the next few years, and with the younger crew, there's no one there to correct the results of their college professors' neglect.
   That said, I've been noticing more and more simple grammatical errors on the Internet, where you'd think that the people posting the news would at least have a college education.
   Cut to the chase: The following paragraph was on the Yahoo main news page, and is likely a transcript of a video of Christiane Amanpour bemoaning the inevitable demise of the world's tuna population because we eat too much sushi.

      "Sushi: The Global Catch, a new film from documentarian Mark Hall takes an in depth look at how the growth of the international sushi industry, which exploded in America in the 1980's, has lead to a dramatic depletion of our oceans fish supply. Hall was inspired to make the film when he witnessed the popularity of Sushi in Eastern Europe during a trip to Warsaw, Poland, and was amazed at how fast sushi's popularity has spread."

   The above paragraph is missing a comma, misspells "led" and neglects to make "oceans" possessive, although they're not going to possess much anyway if we keep eating sushi. And perhaps I'm rushing to judgment in concluding that the craft of copy editing is headed in the same direction as the world's supply of tuna ... Hello? My order from Sushi Heaven is here? Thank you, I'll be right down ... Excuse me. After all, I might be overlooking the possibility that the transcription of Ms. Amanpour's video might have been done by voice recognition software, in which case, not bad at all. ... Hello, Sushi Heaven? You forgot to send an eggroll with my bluefin tuna and wild sockeye salmon platter ... What? You don't make eggrolls, but you'll be happy to send a miso soup? Put a sockeye in it.