Newspaper Stories

I was lucky enough to start work at a newspaper when messages were sent via a system of pneumatic tubes, there were still Linotype machines, and smoking was allowed. No one chewed tobacco--it wasn't that long ago!--so there no spittoons, but a few smokers eschewed the ashtrays to ground out butts on the floor.

When I told that to someone once, he said, "Now that's a real newsroom!"

I began as a copy-boy (actually, we were called copy-aides because so many were female, and all of us were over 18), working from 7 p.m. to 3 in the morning. Late at night, after the dayside editors and reporters had gone, and the composing room was sending plates for the final edition to the presses, some of the men who'd worked at the paper for years would tell stories.

The head nightside copy-aide, a man nicknamed Noodle (for reasons I never learned), had lots of stories. One of the best one was about a summer intern who couldn't seem to do anything right. After reading his copy one afternoon, his editor stalked over and threw the pages on his typewriter.

"I don't know why they even bothered to hire you," the editor bellowed. "You'll never make a good reporter. You can't write. You can't spell. Look at this story. It's got holes big enough to drive a truck through. You don't know the first goddamn thing about going out and getting a story."

The editor stalked off, and the intern turned quaking to the old reporter whose desk sat beside his.

"Did you hear?," he stammered. "Did you hear what he said to me?"

And, the old reporter said, "You? I thought he was talking to me."

I've forgotten the name of the old reporter, but perhaps it was the same one who, sick of driving to College Park to cover Maryland football, decided to go to the bar across the street and watch the game on television. He might have gotten away with it too, except for not being able to go to the locker room to get quotes from the coach and players.

And perhaps he was the same sports reporter who took his editor's hat, stuffed it into a plastic capsule, and sent it to the composing room in the pneumatic tube system with a note reading (in its entirety) "HTK," newspaperese for head[line] to come.

I must have heard dozens of those stories over the 15 or so years I worked at the paper as copy boy, editor, and writer. Like baseball, journalism is full of characters, or used to be before editors and writers had to worry about seven-figure mortgages in Cleveland Park or Chevy Chase and private school tuition. And, while a newsroom on deadline is filled with furious concentration, after the paper's been put to bed, newsmen (women too) relaxed by telling stories as they had a few at the bar downstairs.

At least, they used to.

Sadly, Noodle died of cancer a few years ago and, at the memorial for him at the paper, I learned that while he was full of good stories, he was also the subject of a few.

The funniest didn't take place at the paper, though. It happened when two guys with guns walked into the house he shared near Du Pont Circle, years before the area's gentrification.

They made everybody sit in the living room while they gathered wallets and valuables. Noodle, being Noodle, was unable to resist making wisecracks. Finally, one of the gunmen said, "If you don't shut up, I'm going to shoot your friend."

To which Noodle, even then a budding editor, replied, "What makes you think he's my friend?"

And The Rain Came Down

About 3 a.m. on what would have been our third day camping on Assateague Island, I woke up to the sound of frozen peas hitting the tent's rain fly. Seconds later, thunder and a flash of lightning told me the twenty-somethings in the campsite next door weren't pelting us with vegetables because I'd gone over to ask them to be quiet so my son and I could sleep.

After 10 minutes or so, it quit raining, and I went out to find the friend I'd gone with taking his daughter to the bathroom. There was another scary flash of lightning before they came back, so I went to their tent, woke up his son, and told him we were going to the car.

The five of us woke up three or four hours later to gray skies, soaked clothing, and a drenched campsite. I hadn't known it was going to rain, so I hadn't even thought about putting away the stove or covering the food and supplies with a tarp.

Since the forecast called for a 100 percent chance of rain, it seemed like a good idea to forget about that last night of camping

Still, it was great till the rains came. The children had fun playing on the beach. We all went canoeing. And, as you can see from the picture, once again Assateague proved to be the only place where I can get a kite into the air.

If we go again next year, I'm bringing a tarp to cover everything that doesn't go in the tent.

Heard on the Street. . .

My wife took the car to go to a picnic at a co-worker's house this morning, so my son and I caught the bus to the mall. He needed to buy a birthday present at the Lego store, and I thought I'd treat him to lunch and a movie.

Getting the bus turned out to be less hassle than I'd expected. WMATA, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, has GPS-equipped buses, so we were able to log on, find the time the bus was expected at our stop, then leave the house a few minutes before that.

The driver was a man in his 30s with near waist-length dreadlocks. Most of the people said hello to him when they got on, and thanks when they got off. The mall was at the end of the line, and when we got off, I overheard him tell a woman her hair looked nice. She told him thank you.

Seems like you must know most of these folks, I said to him.

See 'em every Saturday, the driver replied. These are my people.

Later, waiting to get popcorn at the movies, I heard an older woman ask a younger woman (her daughter?) if she was planning to go out tonight and what time she'd be back.

I don't know if I wanna go out with him tonight, she replied. Not if we're just gonna break up. I'd feel too sad.

So why not just spend the night with him at his place, the older woman said, and then break up in the morning?

So Many [Fill in the Blank]; So Little Time

Even if I only owned 600 CDs, 300 LPs, 100 DVDs and VHS tapes, and 100 cassette tapes), I suspect I'd still feel overwhelmed by my entertainment options.

But I've also got months of MP3 files on my computers for my five (working) MP3 players, Slacker and Pandora accounts, and several hours of movies purchased from iTunes, mostly to entertain my 9-year-old on long car trips.

Then there's Netflix.

For a while, the offer--watch as many movies as you want for $17 a month--seemed too good to be true, but I gave up my Blockbuster card once I did the math. I was getting about eight movies a month, which cost about the same as a Netflix subscription. And I didn't have to worry about surly clerks and driving to the store.

Things got even better when Netflix began to offer movies on demand. It took some experimenting, but after a while I was able to do it with an old laptop hooked up to the TV via the VHS player and a cobbled-together array of cables.

It was just enough of a hassle--dragging out the laptop, finding the cables, connecting them in the right order, waiting for the computer to boot, realizing it wasn't configured for dual displays, rebooting again--so that we mostly did it only when I'd forgotten to queue up a kid-friendly picture for Family Movie Night.

I suppose we could have just gotten a new DVD player or some other device that connected to the Internet, but we were too cheap. And then Netflix announced that it was offering streaming video on the Nintendo Wii. Suddenly, watching movies on-line became a lot easier.

So, here I am now with nearly 150 movies in my regular Netflix queue, about 82 in the Watch Instantly queue, and 23 (release date unknown) in the Saved queue.

I don't know how those numbers compare to other Netflix customers. I do know that, sometimes, contemplating my queue, I start to feel a little guilty. I really should organize it, deleting the movies I'll never watch (even though I know they'd be good for me), and arranging what's left so all the musicals, film noir, and Hollywood blockbusters aren't clumped together.

I might, one day, just like I might actually sit through Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Meanwhile, I'm thinking of a Qwest commercial from the days when the company's catchphrase was "ride the light." In it, a man checking into a seedy motel asks if there's any entertainment. The clerk tells him they've got "every movie ever made in every language, anytime, day or night."



I couldn't find the time now to watch just the ones in English, but maybe in 20 or 30 years, when I'm old. . . If I can still lift a remote.

New Wheels (Part Two)

I didn't know it then, but while I was signing the credit card slip for my new Cannondale bike, I was coming down with bronchitis. And then, a few weeks later, when I was finally feeling better, I had minor surgery on my ankle. The result was that the new bike sat in the basement for about six weeks before the orthopedist gave me the okay to ride it.

The temperature's been in the 90s, but after it had cooled down Thursday evening, I went out with a friend. We rode to Reston and back on the W&OD Trail, about 13 miles. And yes, the bike was as comfortable and as much fun to ride as it was the first time I got on it.

Smart People (Part Two)

So, after I wrote about how more and more it's begun to seem to me that Americans mistrust intelligence, Judith Warner writes about the same thing here in the New York Times Magazine.

She begins by observing that U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was probably downplaying her intelligence during her recent confirmation hearings because "[a]ny hint of an I’m-better-than-you sentiment, especially if that sense of superiority is based on intellect or fancy speech or having attended an Ivy League school, can go over very badly in America today, where 'elite' has gone from being a word of admiration to one of insult."

Given how prevalent this anti-intellectual bias seems, I'd been thinking that it wasn't a new phenomenon. I'm probably right. Warner goes on to quote from Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. (It won the Pulitzer in 1964.) This one sentence sent me to Amazon.com in search of the book: "[Intellect] is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism."

Warner also quotes Susan Jacoby, whose The Age of Unreason contains frightening examples of what Americans don't know.

According to a survey Jacoby cites, American 15-year-olds rank near the bottom in math literacy when compared to students in 28 other countries. Two thirds of us don't know the three branches that make up our government and an equal number can't name one Supreme Court Justice.

Now, just one more set of numbers, these from a column by the Times' David Brooks: "In their book, The Narcissism Epidemic, Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell cite data to suggest that at least since the 1970s, we have suffered from national self-esteem inflation. . . . In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an 'important person.' Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes."

But the View was Great!

Somewhere on the hike (three miles? Five?) to Jump Rock, at Goshen Scout Reservation last month. I'd had minor ankle surgery a few weeks before, so I was surprised to be able to make it up and back. The view from Viewing Rock (about two-thirds of the way up) really was great, though.