Here’s a story about where a single memory can take you.
I was playing radio roulette and I hit the country station in the middle of SHeDaisy’s “Little Goodbyes.” In the song, the clearly disgruntled girlfriend brags that she “left the litter and took the cat.” This actually happened to someone I know, at least 15 years before this song was on the radio. His wife called him at work and told him to come to the airport if he wanted to dissuade her from leaving. He headed to the airport. She, meanwhile, was at their home, plundering it with her new boyfriend, who was always described as “an elderly cab driver.” (Given our ages at the time, the cabdriver was probably all of 40.) They also took the stove. Months later, I went over to feed the (new) cat and saw the forlorn gas connection, sort of like the stalk of a dead bouquet that someone couldn’t bear to throw out.
This happened to a colleague on the night crew of the San Antonio Light, the year I worked as rewrite. In the lull after hitting my first deadline, I would write a serial novel about my co-worker’s attempt to right the wrongs done to him. This rather raggedy tale, which included such characters as the Man Who Would Eat No Cheese (and Keep No Dimes), the Colonel and Pointy-Nosed Gus, made him laugh. He was really the most satisfactory reader, slapping the flat of his palm against the desk as he read the evening’s take. When I didn’t know how to move the story forward, I blew something up.
You would be justified in asking: Um, Laura, was this a fair use of work time? As I said, it was done in the lull after hitting deadline. I was, in fact, a terrific rewrite because the only skill that can truly be taught in the hothouse atmosphere of journalism school is speed. I still remember banging away at the (often broken) manual typewriters in Fiske Hall, Room 317. They couldn’t make you write better or smarter, but by God they could make you write fast.
Besides, newspapers used to have an amazing tolerance for tomfoolery. Computers helped change that, as jokes became more costly. My father remembers working the old-fashioned U-shaped copy desk, where editors scrawled funny headlines on scraps of paper and then threw them away. Do that on a computer and, well — More Mush From the Wimp, anyone? This was the fake headline that a Boston Globe copy-editor put on a Jimmy Carter speech, and it ended up in the paper. As my father loved to point out, the writer was promoted.
I adored rewrite. Although I can’t find the photo, I can see me in a b-and-w shot by a staff photographer — I’m wearing a straw cowboy hat, one of those then-ubiquitous oversized Adrienne Vittadini sweaters, and holding a bottle of over-the-counter painkillers in my hand. I was smiling broadly. The job fit me so well, far better than that sweater. I was speedy and a clean, decent writer, who could see the holes in others’ stories better than I could see my own.
The classic rewrite takes dispatches from the field and writes the story from scratch. Computers began to kill that process, especially on papers with evening deadlines, but we still had situations were someone had to call in notes. I remember a murder-suicide. Two brothers, playing with a gun. One shot the other by accident, then killed himself out of despair. I remember how I fought with Ben Siegal, my first true mentor, about the order in the lede. He said it must be chronological, while I believed that what made it news was the secondary fact — the suicide after the accidental killing.
The reporter on the scene was Javier Rodriguez. He did a good job, gathering quite a bit of detail. He told me the brothers had been eating canned spaghetti.
“Canned spaghetti?” I said. “Great.”
The “great” echoed back in my headset, my fingers stilled for a moment.
It wasn’t long after this that I asked to leave the rewrite shift, deciding that I was, perhaps, a little too good at it.
So — has a song every catapulted you into a surprising corner of the past?
Laura. You’ll see. There comes a point where many songs from childhood on will suddenly take you somewhere you haven’t been for a long, long time. J
Songs will come later but reading this my brain supplied a factoid of uselessness and one has to comment (one does? who is this one?) with puzzlement, “your first mentor was Bugsy Siegel?”
Ben was said gangster’s true first name as I recall. What an image.
And now back to sleep-deprivation Tuesday. I’ll ponder the question though.
Andi, who’s got to be the only one here who actually owns two SheDaisy cd’s. I LOVE SheDaisy!
Not that Siegel.
But just as fierce.
It’s a shame it’s too late for <a href=”http://imdb.com/name/nm0000795/” target=”_new”>Jean Arthur</a> to play you in the movie version of GET ME REWRITE!
Jean Arthur! I couldn’t be more flattered.
The night shift had such a wonderful camaraderie; why do we struggle so to leave it behind? Rhetorical question. Ambition, middle age, what newspapers value — all those things pull us away from the night shift. But it had its charms.
I’ve always associated the different stages of my life with the kind of music I listened to at the time. I can’t hear a song from “back in the day” without it evoking memories or feelings from a certain period of my life.
The man who would eat no cheese. He stares at me every morning in the mirror. As for music I began my 45 collection in 1949/ I haven’t stopped/
On May 4, chez Hedgehog blog, I posted the lyrics to Neil Young’s “Ohio” which is still velcro in my brain and which spins me back 35 years. i can spin back to my high school days hearing the first few bars of a number of songs – I’ve got that sort of brain. Music STAYS. Eric Clapton’s entry to “Layla”, for some of us I bet, the most recognizable guitar riff ever. Or (eek, she’s old!) The beginning of Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida.
Nancy Griffith’s “Once In a Very Blue Moon” – I know WHERE I was and what i was thinking when I heard that for the first time. Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” reminds me of a certain someone on a certain DAY. And Connie Kaldor’s “Wanderlust” was my “leaving California” anthem.
Nanci Griffith brings me back to the smoky, beer-soaked Bottom Line in the Village in the early 1980s, where she would come on every tour and we’d go see her. I think I was a little in love with her back then, looking up at her from a table in the front.
It was after one of those shows, I believe, that a friend and I got on the uptown bus on University Place and 12th Street and then rode it all the way home, to 91st Street, without stopping once. No one got on, no one got off, and every light turned green before us.
Of such things is city bliss made.
I see a combination of Jean Arthur and Rosalind Russell from HIS GIRL FRIDAY…a little more steel than Arthur usually had, along with the adorable spunk. Quick quick quick on the response, and able to stand up to a Walter Burns. “Gentlemen of the press….”
(Nothing like speculating on who will play a friend in a movie, with the friend listening!)
Did you know that Jean Arthur was in Buster Keaton’s SEVEN CHANCES, one of the greatest comedies ever made? Of course, it was silent, so you couldn’t hear her unique voice….she was heartbreakingly young and pretty. And she was past thirty-five when she became a star–these days, most actresses are begging for roles when they get that “old.”
Meanwhile, “Hey Jude” reminds me of Hebrew School, circa 1968. Riding to Temple Beth-Elohim in Park Slope one Sunday morning, my friend’s dad listening to the song for a few moments on the car radio and then turning it off. “That song’s pretty enough in the beginning,” he says. “Why’d they have to louse it up with all that noise at the end?”
Back to topic. (By the way, Laura, I’ll be thinking a lot about your blog entry, and what it means for my own facile fingers.)
During my brief guise as a travel writer in the 1980s, I got to go on one press junket: to Papua New Guinea. The last song I heard in the airport in Cairns, Australia, as we headed to PNG, was Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life.” The song bounced around my head throughout the trip, providing odd musical accompaniment to visits to villages that had been contacted by the outside world only a few years before, expeditions to rumbling volcanic islands, views of birds of paradise and other almost incomprehensible creatures. Then the first song I heard when we flew back to Los Angeles was “Walk of Life.”
When I hear the song now, it brings back lots of odd, but very evocative, memories.
One more thing:
Sophomore year in college, 1976, I lived in a small off-campus house that we proclaimed the “Journalism House.” (By giving it a name, and promising to bring relevant guests to speak on campus, we got to live there.)
One of the experts we brought was a man who worked on headlines for the New York Daily News. This was at the era when New York City was collapsing, defaulting on loans, and President Ford had just announced that it would be fine with him if the city went bankrupt.
“We were sitting there late at night, and someone made up a mock headline that read, ‘FORD TO CITY: F*** YOU,’” the man told us. “We looked at it, then we looked at each other, and then we had the next day’s real head.”
It was “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” which became one of the most famous news headlines of all time and a rallying cry for New York City’s revival a few years later. No one out there in the big country cared a bit about us. We had to do it ourselves.
No songs come to mind, but your post brought back myriad memories. How my ex-boyfriend took my cat hostage as I was moving out. My favorite newspaper job: night metro editor, when reporters would call me after night meetings and I’d have to make sense of their dictations and stories, carefully explaining that newspaper reporters simply cannot get writer’s block. The book I wrote with our slot guy at midnight while we were waiting for papers to proof.
“Bridge Over Troubled Water” = Crossing into Canada, at sunset, with 3 draft-age men the spring that the Cambodia bombing brought our college campus to its knees.
On a lighter note, completing the circle, the only newspaper editor I ever knew (of the Watsonville Register Pajaronian) owned a cat named Hildy.