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

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.