Letter From America: Not Quite The London Times
...Missing from this operation were the hustles and bustles, throbbing veins, scowls, and desk thumping that were the stock-in-trade of Hollywood portrayals of the internal engines of the newspaper world. Also missing were the brilliant but drunken reporters, glamorous female reporters, and world-weary photographers, to say nothing of fast cars, crime bosses, snitches, rat finks, dying victims that wrote clues in their own blood, and crooked politicians. Still, we were only thirteen...
Ronnie Bray recalls an early venture into the enticing world of journalism.
To read more of Ronnie's superb columns please visit http://www.openwriting.com/archives/letter_from_america/
I knew what newspapers were. I had been cleaning the cutlery on them for several years and even ventured to look at the pictures, maps, and advertisements. But there was another allure that I had not internalised until my school friend Walter Fox explained the details of a scheme he had nurtured in his mind for some time.
He had an ambition to become a newspaper publisher, and invited me to come into the venture with him. He would be the editor, a position that I understood imperfectly until he began editing my contributions on, he said, ‘Grounds of good taste." On reflection he was quite right. Walter had a nose for news and my nose was invariably turned towards finding the humour in life’s dismal situations. Walter was moved by the need to succeed and I was moved by the need to survive.
The front page carried an urgent story about a character by the name of Smokey Joe that had broken free from its captors and benefactors and gone on the run. Smokey Joe was described as ‘the editor’s cat’ and got top billing in that issue.
In our defence I must explain that we did not have a newspaper office with a city desk, a news editor, a troupe of fetchers and carriers, and no one to whom copy could be handed with the command, "Stop the press and see that this gets on the front page!"
In fact there was a signal lack of drama other than when the editor was editing my work explaining the finer details of snipping, cutting, shortening, deleting, and smartening up my pencil scrawled submissions. Yet it was all in a day’s work for a newshound, and I knew that it was his project, his paper, his publishing house, and he was the editor, and having seen deferentiality in moving pictures in which butlers, menservants, and dungeoned prisoners were portrayed I managed to keep the peace, keep the editor happy, and keep my job.
Missing from this operation were the hustles and bustles, throbbing veins, scowls, and desk thumping that were the stock-in-trade of Hollywood portrayals of the internal engines of the newspaper world. Also missing were the brilliant but drunken reporters, glamorous female reporters, and world-weary photographers, to say nothing of fast cars, crime bosses, snitches, rat finks, dying victims that wrote clues in their own blood, and crooked politicians. Still, we were only thirteen.
The simple fact is that our production processes were rather slow. Just how slow is illustrated in the connection between the page one lead story and the fourth page’s main story.
It will help to know that the first issue ran to four pages, numbered one to four, each of which occupied the face of a quarto sheet of school paper folded in the middle to make a two-leafed, four-paged instrument whose banner declared it to be "The Pickwick papers." That was Walter’s idea taken from Charles Dickens’ humorous stories of the same name.
The tardiness that marked the progress of our organ and the despair into which its reception among our fellows thrust us is evident that by the time we blocked in the final page and there being no great football news from Huddersfield Town that week and the mighty men of renown in Claret and Gold at Fartown having lost, and that being such a rare and disconcerting an event that we could bring ourselves to memorialise it, the main sports news was trumpeted with the headline, "Smoky Joe the Editor’s Cat Comes back!"
Smoky Joe was the bread in our meatless sandwich, and that fare proved not to stimulate the appetites of our listless classmates that were just beginning to realise that girls were not soft boys. The publication was handed round the class from one grubby paw to another, often with derisory remarks that struck at the hearts of the entire newspaper staff.
So chilling was the rejection of our efforts to educate, inform, and amuse our peers that Walter took his quill and inkpot home and laid The Pickwick Papers in a cardboard coffin without benefit of clergy.
As far as is known to historians of British printed media, that sole copy of the sole issue of what was an enterprising if hopelessly pretentious schoolboy dream remains there at rest.
It is a blessing that the human spirit, though often defeated in the pursuit of elusive dreams, never ceases to strive for ends that seem to the mediocre to lie beyond our grasp. What is encouraging is that those inspired souls that cease not to strive for achievement often succeed in exceeding their reach and grasp what has been declared unobtainable.
© 2010 – Ronnie Bray
www.yorkshiretales.com
www.yorkshiretales.com/allaboutmormonism
