Category: Newspapering

The Senator’s Proof

I can’t say much about the poison ivy email someone gave me when I was a reporter because it was just too sexually explicit.

It was a written by a young woman who couldn’t type. Back in the old days that was newspaper shorthand for an unqualified female political hire. She had been given a job at the N.C. Department of Transportation and she was writing to another young woman, obviously a confidant.

She worked here, across the street from the Capitol
She worked here, across the street from the capitol.

She told her friend how much she liked her job, how she didn’t have to do anything. And she talked about the state senator who got her the job, a senator she knew intimately. She said she had seen him a day or two before, on her way back from the beach.

The guy had a serious case of poison ivy, she said, and she described the infected area in great detail. 

I knew my newspaper, The News & Observer, wasn’t about to publish her email, not in a million years, but maybe I could get the gist of the story in the paper. Anyway, it would be interesting to see what the DOT spokesman had to say.

When I showed him the email he looked distressed but he said nothing, not a word, regardless of how I phrased my questions. And then he asked, “Can we go off the record?”

I wasn’t going to get an on the record comment, so I agreed. I was as curious as you may be — did the senator know the cat was out of the bag?

He did indeed.  The senator had heard about that email –bad news travels fast — and telephoned the DOT spokesman. 

“He asked me if I had seen it, if I had a copy,” the spokesman said.  “I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Read it to me.'”

[Yow!]

“And I did.”

And what was his reaction, I asked?

“The senator said, ‘Well, I guess that puts to rest rumors that I’m a homosexual.'”

Postscript: I did get a sanitized version of the story in the paper but, alas, not the senator’s reaction.  That was off the record.

Coming Friday: The E-Light Club

“Oh, Copyboy?”

When I first went to work for a newspaper, more than 50 years ago, newsrooms had copyboys.

They had a lot of mundane tasks but not on deadline.  On deadline they ran copy from reporters’ desks to the City Desk, where it was edited and then rushed downstairs to composing.

Reporters treated copy boys indifferently at best and rudely sometimes.  We yelled at them, especially when we were on deadline.

“Copy! Copyboy!” we would shout when we had finished another take — a “take” is a page in newspaper lingo.

I guess part of the reason we yelled at them on deadline is because it made us feel important even if our story wasn’t.  He would rush over, grab our copy, and hustle it to the City Desk.

This is not him, but this is sort of what he looked like.
This is not him, but this is what he looked like.

And then, one fine day, The Charlotte News, where I worked in the 1960s, hired a copyboy who was weightlifter.  Remember, this was back in the day when there weren’t all that many weightlifters, when most football players didn’t even lift weights.

Anyway, this copyboy looked like copyman.  He had muscles in his eyeballs.  And, overnight, the culture in the newsroom changed.

“Copyboy?” reporters would say to him, in a normal voice. “Copyboy, if you have a moment, would you mind….”

Coming Friday: I Shoulda Made Notes