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

The day in pictures

 

 

 

The lighter side of genocide

I've always maintained that headline writers shouldn't make fun of things like world conflagrations and genocide, but I have to admit I got a kick out of this ad for fertilizer in which a lady says she should be arrested for crimes against pottedplantkind:

 

Let me add that, genocide aside, the phrase "crimes against pottedplantkind" embodies one of my favorite headline writing techniques, the combination of all or part of two words (or in this case three, more points to ya) to create a new word. Oh, excuse me, I think I hear somebody at the door.

 

Who's there?

 

"Derecho."

 

Derecho who?

 

"Derecho get recho while depooro get pooro"



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.

  

  

 

An audio sampler

   Friends, Romans, Presidents, lend me your ears ...



Ears! Ears! I said "Lend me your EARS!"

No! No! I meant the kind of ears you listen with!

Now that's what I'm talkin' about. I've created a new sampler CD containing tracks from several of my oral history audiobooks. The audiobooks are available in my eBay store.

Click on the links below to listen to the sampler in mp3 form.

Track 1 Introduction (Aaron Elson)

Track 2 Karnig Thomasian, POW of the Japanese, from "For You the War Is Over"

Track 3 Sam Cropanese, 712th Tank Battalion, from "The Tanker Tapes"

Track 4 Ed Boccafogli, 82nd Airborne Division, from "The D-Day Tapes"

Track 5 Vern Schmidt, 90th Infantry Division, from "Kill or Be Killed"

Track 6 Bob Rossi, 712th Tank Battalion, from "Once Upon a Tank in the Bulge"

Track 7 Bob Cash, 492nd Bomb Group, ex-POW, from "March Madness"

Track 8 Russell Loop, 712th Tank Battalion, from "More Tanker Tapes"

Track 9 Jack Sheppard, from "Reflections of a Tank Company Commander"

Track 10 George Collar, 445th Bomb Group, from "The Kassel Cassettes"

Track 11 Jerome Auman, from "Four Marines"

(c) copyright 2013 Aaron Elson



Random acts of musing

   Earlier this month I went down to New York City to be a guest speaker in a fifth-grade class on alumni day at Hunter College Elementary School. HCES is housed in a complex that includes Hunter High School. I arrived early so as to avoid getting caught in rush hour traffic, and while I waited in the lobby a student entered the building with a copy of the New York Daily News.
   Here it is more than a week later and I still haven't a clue as to what the lead story was about, maybe somebody reading this will remember the headline and the story and can fill me in, but the headline kind of gave me a flashback both to a headline I've written about previously and to a discussion many years ago with my old friend (and current Facebook amiga) Joanne.
   The tabloid headline, which took up about 80 percent of the front page, was: "Dixie Heads" (all capitals, if I recollect correctly).
  As I mentioned, I had no idea what the story was about, and figured maybe I'd see something on the Internet later that would make me go "aha" but that was not to be. However, my immediate reaction to the headline was that the headline writer was making a play on the word "Dickheads," which is the word my dear friend Joanne all those many years ago used to refer to men who asked her for her phone number and then never called.
   If that were the case -- that is, if that indeed is what the headline was playing off of, it would be like a bookend to the headline "How the City Got Shafted" which I wrote about previously, and which signaled a change in editorial direction that allowed blatant euphemisms for outlawed words to be used in a tabloid head. Of course "dick" has more acceptable usages than "shafted," I mean Richard Nixon was often called Tricky Dick, and going way back a detective or a guard was called a dick, as in "The Bank Dick" (god bless you WC Fields), but there's no confusing the dick in a dickhead with a penis, if, indeed, that was the gutter in which the headline writer's mind resided.
   So that's two flashbacks for the price of one headline, not bad, eh?
   Then another headline this week triggered a flashback. This one was on ESPN.com. The flashback was to a headline that I refused to let a colleague write when I was filling in during a brief stint as the backup night sports editor at the doomed Daily News Tonight, or maybe it was the regular Daily News sports section, I forget. But the headline was about a sporting event, again, I don't even remember what kind of sporting event, maybe a boxing match or a baseball game, but it referred to the event as being similar to "World War 3."
   "You can't write that," I said.
   "Why not?" my temporary underling but most time equal said.
   "World War 3 is serious business," I said, or words to that effect. "Millions of people could get killed. This is just a sporting event."
   "It's hyperbole," my colleague said.
   "It's history," said, hitting the delete button. At least I wish I'd said that. But I overruled him anyway.
   So the flashback came a few days ago when I clicked on ESPN to see how the New York sports teams were doing, and the lead video on the home page was about how the Golden State Warriors were in the process of winning a playoff game, or maybe any game for that matter, in San Antonio for the first time in many moons (I don't think ESPN used the word moon).
   The headline said "Forget the Alamo."
   Whoa, Nellie. For any kid who grew up buying into the myth of Davey Crockett and his coonskin cap, a headline like that is anathema. Oh the sacrilege! How can anybody charged with writing headlines compare a basketball game to an epic event in American history. It would be like saying someone on a diet was fighting the Battle of the Bulge. Wait a second. I've done that. More than once. Nevertheless.
   At any rate, when I saw "Forget the Alamo," I had my flashback moment and moved on. But I'm sure I'll remember the Alamo long after I've forgotten the score of the game the headline referenced. In fact, I think the Spurs rallied to win the game anyway. No doubt inspired by someone in the second row holding up an iPad displaying the offensive headline.

OMG, there's more of this?

Although he wasn't the legendary Bigfoot, Gil Spencer was
the second best legendary editor I worked under.



See earlier posts:

Another One Bites the Dust

And Another One...And Another One

Editors Shmeditors 

 

 

   In 1984 Gil Spencer came to the Daily News as editor, with Jim Willse as his managing editor. Spencer had that old-time newspaper aura about him, and was probably second only to Paul Sann among the editors I've worked under, although I only had one face-to-face encounter with him and when he came to the Bergen Record to give a talk many years later he didn't remember who I was. C'est la vie.

   As for that encounter, I was working in the features department under a department head named Guna Bite, pronounced not like Bite Me, but with an accent aigue over the e, so her name was pronounced Bitee. Guna was of Latvian descent, tall, with relatively short blond hair.

   I can't say precisely why, but Guna had come over from the news copy desk to be head of the features copy desk, which was a promotion, but the job came with a lot of pressure, and after about a year it was more pressure than Guna could bear. So she went to Spencer and asked to be removed from the department head position and he removed her all right; he fired her.

   She was pretty broken up over that, and a couple of days later I knocked on the door of Spencer's office, he said come in, and I asked him if instead of firing her he couldn't simply reassign her to her former position on the news desk. I don't know if I had anything to do with it but that's what happened. I never said anything to anyone about having saved her job.

   A few months later I was approached by one of the managers and asked if I'd like to work on the suburban news copy desk. I said I'd think about it. The next day I was working on the suburban news copy desk. Unbeknownst to me, at the time, there was a young lady on the suburban news copy desk who previously had a reputation as being, well, maybe a little loose is the way to put it, but then she was involved in a serious auto accident and became a diehard feminist. She also either had filed or was about to file a sexual harassment charge against the head of the suburban copy desk, and the solution was to transfer her to the features department which meant sending me to the suburban copy desk, so it already was a fait accomplis when I was asked if I'd consider it.

   Not that I'm complaining. I loved working on the suburban copy desk, and later the main news copy desk.

   I'm going to backtrack a bit now, and begrudgingly admit that I may have been wrong about Spencer's managing editor, Jim Willse, who was hired at about the same time.

   I wrote a previous blog entry about the following incident so I'll keep it short. The Daily News had a company Christmas party shortly after the tandem was hired and of course they attended, or at least Willse was there.

   The News had recently published one of those screaming tabloid headlines about a gay bar called the Mine Shaft which apparently was owned by a city official and was granted tax-free status. The headline went "How the city got shafted," that may not have been the exact wording but the word "shaft" was there.

   Now euphemisms have always been one of my favorite headline writing tools, but the word "shaft" is a euphemism for fucked, no two ways about it, and this was the Daily News, which, although times have changed, at the time considered its quintessential reader to be a housewife in Queens.

   So at the Christmas party I approached Willse and asked him if he didn't think there was something wrong with using "Shafted" in a page one headline, or any other headline for that matter.

   No, he said, he thought that was a very good headline.

   I immediately formed a negative opinion of Willse, who did go on to be the editor of the Newark Star-Ledger and the paper even won a Pulitzer Prize during his tenure. So I may have been wrong about Willse; as for the headline, it nevertheless sucked.

  

(to be continued)