In Praise of Stories

     In what follows, the names have been changed to protect the innocent, one of them being me. Everything else is true. These old newspaper stories are fun, I think. And at the end they may make a worthwhile point. In any case, here they are.
     I remember: Joe, who would sometimes report for work in the newsroom wearing chinos, a T-shirt and a floor-length black opera cape. (Crimson lining.  He made bold fashion statements, our Joe.)  He was a hell-raiser and an oddball and a damn good sportswriter. He could make you feel like you'd been at the game yourself.
     I remember: Jimmy, who could make a story sing, oh my.  But sometimes the words just wouldn't come, and Jimmy had a volcanic temper. Once, when his typewriter was especially balky, he opened a third-floor window and threw it into the parking lot below.
     I remember: Clarence, an affably cranky old fellow. He was a hasty, two-finger typist who chewed paper when he wrote. Sometimes his fingers and his mind operated on different pages.  Editors learned to watch his copy closely for such locutions as "sharper than the hangman's axe," and "now, the worm is on the other foot."
     I remember: Eddie, who one year was conspicuously late returning to his desk from the company's Christmas buffet. He cheerfully confessed that he had taken extra time to boff a business-office clerk on an empty board room table. Jimmy liked to write at length. Advised that a piece was too long, he would simply narrow the margins on his typewriter and turn the same thing back in. It never worked, but Jimmy never stopped trying.
     I remember: Bob, who once lost his grip in an argument with a newsroom colleague. He coated the colleague's desktop with rubber cement and set it on fire. The desk was metal, and the fire quickly burned out. But the smell was a problem for a while.
     I remember: Betty, who cheerfully believed that her little bungalow was haunted. She toppled barriers of gender and industry caste by the sheer power of her inborn talent. She wrote her way out of a proofreader's job, into newsroom work and on to publication as a novelist. Through it all she remained that rarest of creatures, a genuinely loving and generous human being.  I thought that maybe Betty wrote like an angel because she was one.
     Among such folks as these I began my newspaper career. They all had their own quirks and styles, but they had one thing in common. The stuff they put in the newspaper had warm blood in its veins. From them I learned to understand the admonition:  " A good newspaper doesn't print articles. It prints stories."
     I'm not sure when the notion got afoot that our craft would be improved if it were "professionalized." But the notion did get afoot -- and get away with us. Hiring fads favored sober-sided kids with academic pedigrees and superior attitudes. Hither and  yon, newspapers were handed over to executives who were not really newspaper editors but process managers for information and entertainment marketing.  Newspapers printed articles, and talked at their communities rather than with them.
     I suppose these observations sound like the maundering of a codger who misses the good old days. Well, they are, I am and I do. But maybe they also say something useful about the factors that made newspapers moribund.  Were powerful competitive and economic forces mounting against us? Yes. Was decline inevitable?  Probably. But I think we were culpable, too. I think we greased the skids by turning our newspapers into mere merchandise and imagining ourselves a class above and apart.  We became prissy neighbors in love with the sound of our own voices.
     That's my own take. Colleagues from yesteryear might prefer the earthier verdict of a distinguished national reporter, the late Richard Ben Cramer. In the late nineties he surveyed the landscape of American journalism and lamented that it had been "overtaken by a Biblical plague of dickheads."
    Anyhow, we did a pretty good job in our day. And I came away with a trove of stories.
     Buy me a drink and I'll tell you a few:
     -- About the young man who careened through the wee hours searching in vain for a cop to help him with the naked, love-crazed young woman clinging to the hood of his car. (In the end they were briefly jailed by baffled authorities who  couldn't figure out what else to do.)
    --About the United States senator who offered -- on Senate letterhead -- to punch me in the mouth. ( He never succeeded, but he offered more than once.)
     -- About the time in our city hall bureau when Frank lost patience with mouthy Al. Frank tied him to an overhead pipe by his necktie and left him standing tiptoe on a desktop. (Al was soon found and freed by the city manager, who left clucking and shaking his head. He never asked a thing about it.)
     Oh, my word, the stories.
     Heck, you don't even have to buy me a drink.