Here’s some valuable advice from the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, an outfit in London that describes itself as a “professional organisation based in the UK for editors and proofreaders – the people who strive to make text accurate and readable.”
USA Today takes honors for yesterday’s gem from its purple “Life” section, the hedder on a profile of musician Yo-Yo Ma:
“Yo-Yo Ma’s message: There’s always room for cello”
GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain has had a difficult week, as he has fielded accusations of harassment of women.
TIME’s blog Swampland covers politics in DC and beyond. Regardless of your politics, you have to tip your hat to the headline writer who coined the hedder for this piece mulling whether Cain’s campaign can survive the harassment claims:
“Cain Unable”
In honor of National Newspaper Week, I want to share a story from the backrooms of the newspaper business.
There are reporters with byline fever. There are editors who crusade. There are photographers who freeze moments of history. And then there are people who make sure the newspaper goes out every day or every week. This one’s for them.
My grandfather, Paul Edwin Fletcher (he went by Edwin), spent his entire working life at the Middlesboro Daily News in Middlesboro, Ky. He started there as a boy of 15 in 1929, and he retired 53 years later, in 1982.
Granddad was “a make-up man” – that’s a job title you don’t hear any more, except maybe on a movie set. He worked with lead type, making up the pages of the paper and preparing them for the press.
I got my first view of the newspaper world when I was about five. On a family trip into Middlesboro, my dad (Paul Edwin Fletcher Jr. – he went by Paul) took me to see Granddad at work.
Mostly I remember a lot of noise. The presses were loud and clanging. And I recall Granddad working at a table, putting in type that looked funny – the little letters were backward. He put them into a big metal frame as they became words, sentences, paragraphs, then a page. Granddad’s hands were covered in black, gloppy ink; it stayed under his fingernails no matter how much Lava soap he used.
Granddad was on the small side – I don’t think he ever topped 5’9” – but he had muscular shoulders and thick brawny forearms, the result of a daily workout of lifting those heavy frames of type and carrying them to pre-press.
He wasn’t a man who talked a lot. He didn’t discuss work at home, although my dad told me how once Granddad had to work late, then rushed home excited with the special edition carrying a one-word headline: “WAR!”
But from five, I remember his quiet kindness. He gave my sister, my brother and me each a special gift that trip – our names, spelled out in backwards lead-type. It showed us what he did, and who he was. I still have mine, a small lump of metal that says Paul in 48-point type.
When I was a kid, my family kept moving farther away from Middlesboro – from North Carolina to Atlanta to South Florida. Visits to Kentucky became less frequent. But with each trip I was getting older and better able to understand Granddad’s world.
Middlesboro is just past the Cumberland Gap, where Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky met and dipped their mountains to provide passage for pioneers headed west. Some people kept going, seeking a better life in Indiana, Missouri and other western states. Some made it just past the gap and decided to stay. The city proudly supports the nearby coal mines, and many miners live in the area.
The east end of Middlesboro, where my grandfather lived, was not tony; many of the frame houses were small. Here or there, you might find a rusted car gradually disappearing into weeds. At most of the homes, though, people tried.
The second time I visited Granddad at work, in 1974, I was a high school senior getting ready for a year as editor of the student paper. By then the make-up process had changed. Granddad still laid out the pages, but he would run printed columns of type with the day’s stories through a waxer, then position them on the pages. The pre-press team then burned a plate that went on the press.
I spent an entire day at the Daily News, helping him lay out the paper. With sure hands and a practiced eye, Granddad methodically measured and sized the columns of type and laid them on the page so straight that you wouldn’t need a level to tell you how true they were. He positioned the headlines, photos and ads. And with his typical quiet kindness, he patiently showed me where my pages were crooked and how to fix them.
Granddad became the first Daily News employee to log 50 years with the paper in 1979; he retired a few years later. He had seen newspaper production go through generations of changes. He missed the next innovation: Computerized layout, just around the corner, put all that valuable make-up work inside a box and on a screen.
Years of working near the noisy presses did some damage. Granddad was nearly deaf, and he refused to get a hearing aid. In later visits, this sometimes made conversation difficult. Usually we would sit on the high porch of his house overlooking the town, communing in a warm silence. I know he was happy when I joined Virginia Lawyers Weekly. He liked the idea of another newspaperman in the family.
I last saw him in 2000, in a grim nursing home – he had fallen and shattered a knee, putting him in a wheelchair. At 86, his body was failing, his mind was mostly gone and his speech was slurred. My sister and I tried to connect with the man we knew. I reached into the darkness, if just for a moment, when I showed him a picture of my son. His face brightened and he said clearly, “I’ve got one of those at home.” He died three months later.
Granddad was a lifelong newspaperman who liked what he did. He knew his role and he played it well for 53 years. Thanks to him, the Daily News went out every day. The people in and around Middlesboro got their paper and the news they needed. He never got a lot of glory, but he served his paper and his community well. He never got a byline.
Actually, that’s not true. He gets one every time I sign my name to an article I’ve written.
— Paul Fletcher
The Elton John AIDS Foundation, a charitable organization run by the singer, is planning to auction off six pieces of contemporary art next month at Sotheby’s in London. The art is expected to bring in about $750K, with all proceeds going to the foundation.
The Wall Street Journal had the musical headline for the story this morning:
“Don’t go breaking my art”
Kiki Dee could not be reached for comment.
Here’s a good one to start your day (courtesy of my son’s girlfriend):
“Past, Present and Future walk into a bar. It was tense…”
That boy has good taste.
Credit goes to the Wall Street Journal once again.
Today they have an editorial assessing the Republican presidential race after the weekend. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., took the Iowa straw poll and Texas Gov. Rick Perry officially entered the race. Consider the contest as moving into high gear, hence the Journal’s headline:
Bachmann-Perry Overdrive
I’d say it’s fair to say you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors voted this week to demolish the Goose Creek Bridge, erected in 1932.
The board voted 8-1 to tear down the metal span after determining it lacked enough historical value to preserve. Vehicular traffic over the bridge stopped in the 1980s when a different, bigger bridge was built.
The Loudoun Times wins Headline of the Day honors for their head on the story: “Loudoun bridge is falling down”
Trend Alert: Judges increasingly are resorting to humor, pop culture references and rhymes in their opinions.
The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that judges across the country are more frequently using these devices to spice up otherwise drab legal discussions in their opinions.
The Journal cites a federal judge from Texas, Fred Biery, who recently wrote in a decision about cars that sit idling. These vehicles leave “automobile droppings” on the road, wrote Biery, “which the court calls Petro Poop.”
They probably know more about petro poop in Texas than we do here in Virginia. But we have had judges who heard a similar muse. At least one decision has been handed down in rhyme: Back in the early 1990s, Judge J. Robert Stump issued a letter opinion as a long poem. And retired U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Hal J. Bonney Jr. of Norfolk was famous r his humorous, and occasionally off-the-wall, opinions.
More recently, U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser used a footnote for a pop-cult reference: He discussed “The Shaggy Defense.” What’s that, you ask? In a 2000 song, R&B singer Shaggy counseled a friend to deny everything and to claim “it wasn’t me” when caught red-handed.
One observer, Prof. Andrew McClurg, says judges do this to break the monotony of their work and perhaps to get a little extra attention. McClurg keeps track of such developments at his website, www.lawhaha.com
Some lawyers and judges like the trend, others not so much. We’ll see how long a run this development has.
I’ll close with an example, proof that everyone wants in on the act.
Call this one Law Noir. A jurist recently wrote, “North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three-dollar steak.”
The author: U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, in his dissent in Pennsylvania v. Dunlap (2008).
Richmond lawyer Craig T. Merritt (right) received the George Mason Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, Virginia Pro chapter last night.
The annual award recognizes an individual for his or her contributions to Virginia journalism.
Merritt, a partner at Christian & Barton, has been involved in a number of First Amendment and government access cases over the years.
He has often provided his counsel pro bono to groups that don’t have the resources to mount a fight.
Accepting the award at the SPJ reception at the 2300 Club in Richmond’s Church Hill, Merritt cited Mason’s willingness to fight the fights worth fighting for. For example, Mason originally opposed Virginia’s ratification of the Constitution, because it lacked a Bill of Rights.
Those rights, trumpeted by Mason himself in earlier writings, made their way into the Constitution in the first 10 amendments.
