Bear with me a bit while I wander down memory’s lane and reminisce about those days when lawyers, politicians, plumbers and, yes, journalists and bankers were looked upon much more kindly than today.
Certainly the people who currently write and edit newspapers display increasing contrast to their predecessors; maybe it’s fortunate, maybe not.
The late C. Owsley Shepherd, whose nasty disposition among his Chicago peers was legendary, is a case in point. Known as “The Wrangler” while employed by the long-defunct Chicago American, Owsley was an absolute stick-out in a city room hardly short of strange and wondrous characters. More than 50 years later, many of those who were dazzled by his abruptness continue to feel The Wrangler’s biggest problem was never having overcome his Texas origins. Once, having denigrated with little civility a story turned in by a young reporter, he observed, “I could piss a better story in the snow.”
The late Gary Cummings, who eventually became general manager of CBS’ WBBM-TV, early in his career had the misfortune of being on the city desk when Owsley approached. As Cummings awaited the inevitable onslaught, he rolled his eyes, an act that aroused the irascible Wrangler.
“Don’t yo roll yo goddam eyes at me, Buddy Boy,” Shep snarled.
“Um, I wasn’t rolling my eyes at you, Shep. I was, um, checking to see what time it is,” Cummings lied.
“Well,” Shep drawled. “If yo weren’t rollin’ yo goddam eyes, that makes yo a clock watcha.”
Possessed of unique driving skills, Owsley once made a wrong turn and broadsided a City of Chicago fire boat moored against a dock. Thanks to that misadventure, a concrete barrier was erected thus ensuring Owsley’s place in history as the only motorist who ever ran his car into a fire boat in the Chicago River.
A decided contrast to Owsley was Doug Moore whom I met at the Lorain (Ohio) Journal where he was the chief photographer and I the wire editor. Very low-keyed (some felt he worked in a semi-comatose condition), he had the misfortune to have a female assistant with a severe drinking problem.
“Eddie” (first name Edna) made a highly stylized debut at the paper when she appeared the day after being hired by Mal Hartley, the editor who also had attended Ohio University’s School of Journalism. Entering the newsroom, she made her way to city editor Jim Mahoney’s desk as though she were imitating a West Point plebe which is what drunks often do when asked by a cop to pass a sobriety test. Reaching Mahoney, the less than five-foot Eddie hoisted herself onto his desk and, in an obvious attempt to impersonate Rosalind Russell, asked in His Girl Friday fashion, “O.K. Who’s the sob sister around here?”
Recently divorced for the eighth time, Eddie had a habit of hiding her vodka bottles in the dark room. Doug, the original nice guy, paid little attention to her peccadilloes until he covered a fatal car accident in adjacent Elyria. A body had landed in a graveyard face up in perfect alignment with a tombstone. Moore took what he believed would be a Life magazine Picture of the Week, an accomplishment sought in those days by every pro snapper in the news business.
Racing back to the paper, he zipped into the darkroom, grabbed what he thought was a bottle of developing fluid and proceeded to obliterate his work. In his haste, Moore had used Eddie’s vodka. Eddie later died in a fire caused by a cigarette--hers.
Then, there was the remarkable Byron “Shorty” Filkins of the Cleveland Press whom I encountered in the early 50s. Quite short of stature (he bought all his clothes in the children’s department of such stores as Higbee’s and Taylor’s), Filkins was a photographer inclined to take a nip or two. One late afternoon, having had at least one too many, he drove his car into the rear end of an east bound Euclid Ave. streetcar. Sizing up his peril, Filkins set out on an escape path that included one left hand turn followed by two rights. That last turn plunged him into the cowcatcher of the same streetcar struck some three minutes earlier.
Today’s gatherers of news are better educated--at least on paper--infinitely more sober, likely less mannerly, dull by comparison to their forebears, and much more concerned about losing jobs. Major market editors, often inclined to buy into marketing concepts, suburban demographics and stultifying synergy where it exists, often resist a good inner-city story. Also, they are inclined to live in the far reaches of the suburbs--a deadly and sure-fire way of losing touch with the city.
Even the sounds of newsrooms have changed. The banging of typewriters, the pandemonium created by a major breaking story, the camaraderie and sheer joy people had while they labored and the insistent ringing of a five-bell story on one of the wire service teletypes--all that is gone.
Conversations today among news gathering print stiffs seldom happen while socializing after work. Probably gone is Chicago journalism’s Bermuda Triangle consisting of three bars of particular appeal to those inclined to carouse. In slightly more than 100 years, journalism has “progressed” from gun-toting editors to gin bottles in newsroom desks to today’s fear-ridden business whose denizens understandably spend much too much time wondering if the distant corporate entity that owns the paper is going to fire another 10 per cent of editorial staffers. At the risk of being accused of piling on, I’ll refrain from observations about journalism’s abject failure to make our country aware of what was going on in the run-up to the Iraq War.
It used to be such fun.
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