The men were cooked and eaten at the tribe’s annual spring reunion at the 38,000-seat soccer stadium recently built for the Gratous by Albanian technicians. Mazundi defeated a visiting team from Rampistan following the ceremony, 3-2.
When I saw that, I knew something radical was happening at the paper. Before I got the statehouse beat, I had worked in Carley’s job, and I remembered well Fargo’s instructions for handling wire service stories.
“No freaks, no geeks,” he had said. “No cannibalism. No weird sex murders. Mr. Morgan publishes a family newspaper. He doesn’t want phone calls from ministers and little old ladies. Especially Mrs. Morgan’s friends.”
Carley, as usual, had been one of the first to arrive at the bar, and he had already explained the story’s presence in the paper to a succession of staffers. By the time I arrived, (Jarley had a good start on the night’s drinking and was some what defensive.
“Don’t blame me. I know the paper’s policy and I told Swift when he gave me the item. But he just said, ‘Bugger the policy. I’m the M.E. now and I say run it.’”
Claggett was the member of the group who had the widest experience. He had worked on papers in Minneapolis, Sioux City, and Chicago, including a couple that had gone belly up. But he was an accomplished editor and rewrite man, and like the fast short-order cook, the honest bartender, and the clever auto mechanic, he could get a job just about any place he decided to get off the bus. On matters dealing with the real world of newspapering, he was the arbiter.
“This wouldn’t be a big thing in practically any other town,” he said. “Hell, small town papers all over the place are spicing up the product, and this item really ain’t much to get excited about. I remember the time the Sioux City paper ran an AP photo of Siamese twins joined at the head. The editor spent a month going around to women’s clubs apologizing. But it sure comes as a shock to see something like this in a dull old rag like the CR&P.”
“Well, I think there’s going be more of it,” Carley said. “Swift has been reading every story on the diet doctor murder trial, and he asked me today if there had been any follow-up to a piece we ran last week about a photographer’s model being mauled by a lion during a picture-taking session for a tire commercial.”
“Here’s something else that fits in with what Shep was talking about,” Judy Teach said. “I got a memo from Swift this week asking if there had been any charges of sexual harassment of female employes at city hall,” and when I told him yesterday that there hadn’t, he said, ‘Pity.’ At least that’s what I think he said.”
Carley was so right. Th£ next day there was an item on the sports page about a zookeeper who had one of his gorillas trained to forecast football games by picking slips of paper with team names written on them out of his hand. That headline, over a picture of the gorilla, was:
APE MAKES MONKEYS OF SPORTS PUNDITS
That night at the bar, Free was cooking mad about the story. He said Swift had come over to the sports desk with the story and the photo and instructed Hank Terry to run it at the top of the page.
“That son of a bitch,” Free said. “When Terry told him after reading the story that the gorilla had a better forecasting record than we did, he said, ‘All the better, old boy. Nothing like the local angle to pull the reader in, what?’ Then as he was walking away, he said, ‘See if you can find out if the zoo in this town has a gorilla.’”
“Does it?” Claggett asked.
“Yeah,” said Free. “But all he can do is read copy and write headlines.”
The gorilla story wasn’t the only piece Swift had ordered into the paper that day. On the third page, there was a wire story from Missouri about a girlie magazine owner who was found in contempt of court for venting his feelings when he was brought before a judge and charged with distributing obscene matter.
Carley said the wire service editors had quoted the accused but had run a discretionary slug on the story, calling editors’ attention to the nature of the copy.
We usually passed up stories like that unless they were of local interest, and we always used dots or asterisks in the place of profanity. But at Swift’s order, there were the pornographer’s very words in the stodgy old CR&P: “shithead,” “asshole,” and “piss on you.”
The two-column headline, written by Swift, read:
PORN CZAR IN SLAMS FOR CUSSING JUDGE
But the prize Swift headline for that day was on the front page—over a story about dissident members of the Palestine Liberation Front defying their long-time leader:
ARABS WON’T SAY YASSER
There was another Swift special a few pages back—a story about a movement on Staten Island to secede from New York City. The headline was:
STATEN ISLE TO N.Y.—BYE BYE
“Swift explained that one to me when he brought it out,” Carley said. “He said it was a send-up, whatever the hell that is.”
“Sure,” Claggett said. “Like a spoof He was talking about the famous Daily News headline when Jerry Ford opposed the federal bailout of the city—‘Ford to New York: Drop Dead.’”
The subject seemingly exhausted, the conversation turned to the other big issue in our working lives—learning to use the computer.
That day, Gail and her two associates had explained the password system for storing our files and had told each of us to select a word of up to eight characters to use as our personal “keys” into the computer’s memory.
“The trick,” Free, the computer buff, said, “is to choose a password that you will easily remember, but isn’t your name or initials, so everybody won’t go poking around in your files. I don’t plan to file anything really confidential. I think I’ll use an easy play on my name—‘NOCHARGE.’”
“I like it,” Grace said. “I’ll use ‘PRAYER.’”
“That’s great,” I said, “but what the hell am I going to use? What would be a play on the name ‘Wartovsky’?”
“PIMPLE,” Shep Carley offered.
“Thanks a lot,” I said. “And why don’t you use ‘DOG’ for ‘Shepard’?”
“Well, you don’t have to do it that way,” Free said. “You can choose any combination of eight letters or numbers. If you don’t care about keeping your password secret, you can even use your first or last name.”
“By the way,” Grace said, “Shiu told me today that they will be putting computer terminals in the beat reporters’ pressrooms. You’ll get one at city hall, Judy, and Bob will have one at the Capitol. Those will have locks so people don’t fool around with them when you’re not there.”
Sure enough, a couple of days later, a technician showed up at the pressroom with a computer terminal. It took him about an hour to install the machine, and when he left, the card players gathered around while I showed off my new gadget.
Wes pronounced the machine useless. “Damn thing looks too delicate for me,” he said. “I like a typewriter I can pound and give a kick once in a while. And where the hell are you if a fuse blows right in the middle of writing a story? At least with a typewriter, you don’t lose everything you’ve written.”
“Besides,” Wes said with a leer, “I hear these things will fry your cojones. Doesn’t that bother you, kid?”
Like the instant expert I was, I explained to Wes that copy could be stored in the computer memory as you went along; even if the power went off you could retrieve it later. And the radiation I said, with a show of confidence not altogether felt, wasn’t any worse than you would get sitting close to a color television set.
“I was talking about sittin’ close to a woman,” Wes said, returning to the hearts game.