Agate's a small thing, but it can mean a great deal
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- December 18, 2021
- 581
Thrice.
That’s the unwritten — but largely adhered to — journalistic axiom as to the absolute minimum number of times a person’s name will appear in the newspaper over the course of a lifetime.
Those include, of course, on the occasion of his or her birth, marriage and death: Good morning, good afternoon, good night.
I suppose an argument could be made not everyone takes a spouse — or does so more than once — which could alter the basic arithmetic of the equation, but the number three has a nice ring to it.
See what I did there, using the word “ring” in an oblique reference to weddings?
Pretty sweet turn of the phrase, don’t you think?
That’s what more than 40 years in the newspaper biz does to someone like me, an ink-stained wretch who’s still got clippings from his halcyon Little League days tucked away somewhere.
And I know I’m not alone.
There’s something fundamentally human about getting a kick out of seeing your name in print, a thrill I experienced when I was not yet 8 years old. The local playground organizers held a costume contest, and I was judged, rather amusingly, the happiest clown.
Later that same summer, I saw the baseball team on which I played — the Jetsons, named after a TV cartoon show of the day — had won three of its first five games and was in second place.
My name wasn’t included, but my team’s was, and seeing the standings, that one-inch block of print, put a smile on my face.
So when, in the course of things, I became sports editor of my hometown paper, I knew only two truths: The more names you can include the better and, well, never pick a fight with soccer zealots.
They are a tenacious breed, and the more leash you give them, the more likely they are to snap and bite the very hand that feeds.
See what I did there, using “breed,” “leash” and “bite?”
Pretty doggone good, no?
Had it not been for my town’s blossoming interest in soccer, though, I might never have met my wife. She came breezing through the office door one morning in the spring, all tall and slim and wearing a green-and-pink pastel dress, along with a pair of white sling-back heels that showed off her legs to great advantage.
I swear I’d have run cockfighting results in the paper had that been what she was after, but she was a soccer mom before it was a thing, and all she wanted was to publicize her league’s sign-up period.
That’s what life was like in my little town: Everyone knew everyone else, and if they didn’t already, they soon would.
This was a blessing but also a curse, which is the way it always goes in the newspaper game. Some days you were a hero; other nights you were answering the phone in your apartment, trying to placate a duffer who didn’t see his hole-in-one in that day’s paper.
“Are you sure your league secretary turned it in?” I asked, keeping an eye on my Trinitron where the Tribe was playing my Yankees.
“Well, no,” he said, and I could hear the fight drain from his voice, “not really, but it was my first one, and I’ll never do it again.”
I cut him off before he started going all Willy Loman on me.
“Listen,” I said. “I know the guy. I’ll give him a call, OK?”
“That’d be great,” he said, and that was the end of that.
Sometimes, all it takes to defuse a potentially hostile situation is to get a grip on things, see your target and give it your best shot.
See what I did there, using “grip,” “target” and “shot?”
They don’t teach that kind of stuff in any J-school.
But that was the whole key to small-town journalism: You had to rely on the cooperation of folks who understood that without their vigilant efforts collating and collecting stats and results and standings, names wouldn’t just magically appear in the paper.
Fortunately, I inherited a system that was humming right along so that not only golfers but bowlers, YMCA basketball players, Little Leaguers and Pony Leaguers, not to mention 5k runners, beer league bashers and, yes, soccer stars, got to see their names in print.
Faithful readers might recall I had the good fortune to play first base for a very talented Church League team for 23 summers, many of those when I was sports editor, quite the public position.
I mean my name or my photo popped up nearly every day.
More than once, I got to chat with guys who had reached first on a blooper or a bleeder or a swinging bunt, and they’d sheepishly mutter something like, “Geez, not much of a hit, was it?”
And I’d say, “It’ll look like a line drive in the paper tomorrow.”