The New York Post would say:
“I WANT YOUR BODY”
The New York Times would say, in a headline size much more dignified than that of the Daily News and Post:
“GOD GRANTS FORGIVENESS FOR
ADULTERY FOR THOSE BORN AFTER 1945.”
Followed by these subheads, in descending type size:
“SUPREME BEING INDICATES
SIXTH COMMANDMENT PASSÉ”
“PLAYBOY’S HEFNER
ELATED AT NEWS”
“POPE STARTLED,
CANCELS TRIP”
“THOUSANDS CELEBRATE
IN TIMES SQUARE”
“WADE BOGGS GOES 5-FOR-5
IN BOSOX ROMP OVER YANKS”
So this is to be a book about newspapers, written by a man who has been both a newspaperman and a newspaper columnist, and that makes me an expert on just about everything about newspapers except how to sell advertising, how to crank the delivery trucks, and why the accounting department always questions my expense accounts. This is also going to be a book about how and why I got into the newspaper business and where it has taken me. Not all of it will be pretty. I’ll have to deal with my days as sports editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, for instance. This was the worst period of my life. I was dragged to court by one of my sportswriters, divorced by my second wife, once sat next to a man who had a rooster on his head on a Chicago Transit bus, and had to help push a friend’s car, which had a dead battery, eight blocks through the snow, quite a shock to my southern-born hatred of cold weather.
To work your tail off getting a paper out, and then be handed a first edition, which always felt warm to me somehow, like it had just been taken out of the oven, was a joy. It was instant reward. I would never have been happy in a business where it took more than forty-five minutes to see the results of my labor.
And after I got into the business, I met a thousand characters who loved newspapers as I did and didn’t really give a damn they were getting paid so poorly.
There were so many other rewards. Like knowing we got the news first and it was our job to tell everybody else. It’s an awesome responsibility, but it’s also good for the ego. I always felt a little superior to civilians.
I got my first newspaper job when I was ten. I didn’t get paid, but I did get to see my name above an article for the first time, and it was a thrill the likes of which I have not often known again.
That makes thirty-four years in the profession. I mentioned earlier that, one day, I might quit all this and open a liquor store, but I won’t.
In the immortal words of Frank Hyland, a friend and colleague, “Wouldn’t it be hell to have to go out and get a real job?”
It would.
IF IT HADN’T BEEN for my Uncle Grover, who married my mother’s sister, Aunt Jessie, I could have wound up in any number of careers other than newspapering. The fact I give my Uncle Grover credit for getting me started toward the profession I chose is a little strange when I tell you Uncle Grover, oddly enough, was illiterate.
Uncle Grover had grown up hard and poor and had gone to work in a cotton mill in Carroll County, Georgia, when he was ten, and he never really escaped.
He married my Aunt Jessie in the thirties and moved to the next county and tiny Moreland, Georgia, in the early fifties. They had four children by this time, and both worked in the Moreland Knitting Mill, which produced women’s hosiery. Aunt Jessie sat at a sewing machine ten hours a day for a pittance and Uncle Grover was in charge of keeping whatever machinery there is in a knitting mill in running order. Uncle Grover may not have been able to read or write, but he could take apart most any machine and put it back together again with all of the parts in the same position as they were when he started. This is a gift.
People came to my Uncle Grover from all over the county to have him work on their tractors, trucks, automobiles, and power lawn mowers, which is another story. I’m not sure when power lawn mowers were invented, but one didn’t appear in Moreland until the late 1950s. Boyce Kilgore ordered one from Sears and Roebuck. It had a rope crank to it and an adjustable blade (it went up and down). You still had to push it, like the mowers of old, but the engine made a nice sound and it cut more evenly than the powerless mowers and Boyce said it made cutting the grass a real pleasure.
He shouldn’t have said that, because everybody took him literally and began offering him the opportunity to cut lawns all over town.
He also inherited the grass-cutting job at both the Methodist and Baptist churches, not to mention both parsonages.
Boyce finally admitted to Loot Starkins he was, and I quote him, “goddamn tired of cutting every goddamn blade of goddamn grass in this goddamn town,” and Loot said, “Hell, Boyce, that’s what you get for thinking you’re better than everybody else and going out and buying yourself a power lawn mower.”
What all that has to do with my Uncle Grover is beyond me, except that Boyce’s power lawn mower did quit running one day, and Uncle Grover offered to fix it for him, but Boyce said, “Goddamnit, Grover, you put one hand on that goddamn power lawn mower and your ass is mine.”
Boyce never did have his power mower repaired until three or four others had popped up around town, and he could pass on his heavy grass-cutting duties to somebody else.
Uncle Grover’s mechanical sense actually came close to making him rich. I know very little about machines, so I can’t be specific here, but Uncle Grover tinkered around with one of the machines at the hosiery mill and altered it so it would do approximately twice the work it was doing before in half the time.
Before you knew it, all sorts of big businessmen and slick-talking lawyers descended upon Uncle Grover. And this confused him greatly. He’d had so little in his life, and now he was getting offers of thousands of dollars for the rights to his invention.
It was unfortunate that Uncle Grover was illiterate, because what eventually happened was he sold the rights to his invention to a big cotton man from Memphis for a check for twenty-five thousand dollars. Memphis went on to make millions from Uncle Grover’s genius.
But Uncle Grover did take some of his money and spent it on two things he wanted all his adult life—a new Pontiac and a trip to the Kentucky Derby. Nobody, not even Aunt Jessie, knew Uncle Grover cared anything for thoroughbred racing, but it turned out that he did, and he and Aunt Jessie drove the new Pontiac to Louisville for the Derby.
Uncle Grover never would say if he won any money betting at the Derby, but did tell everybody about the motel he and Aunt Jessie stayed in outside Chattanooga that had a bed that would vibrate if you put a quarter in the slot on the night table and about how smoothly the Pontiac ran.
After he returned from the Derby, Uncle Grover went back to the knitting mill and resumed his duties, making sure the machines he invented that made the guy in Memphis filthy rich
