Archive for the ‘Newspapers’ Category

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Scary monsters

October 31, 2022

Nothing says Halloween like a plug-in plastic punkin.

I used to love Halloween. It was my favorite holiday by far. Who doesn’t want to be someone or something else for at least one day per annum?

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird … it’s a plane … no, it’s The Kid with the Giant Head!

Mom made more than a few costumes for me: Superman, Mike “Sea Hunt” Nelson, even one of my own cartoon characters, Loadedman.

I can’t remember how the hell I talked her into that one. Surely I never let her read any of the comics. They did not promise a future of fame and fortune for Your Humble Narrator.

Eventually I started cobbling together my own getups, but found my options limited by my everyday appearance, which was long on hair. The pirate thing is easy, but gets boring after a few voyages.

So I stretched myself a bit. I was Chihuahua Guevara one year, and Jesus another. The Che getup was easy — basically pirate, but with assault rifle and beret instead of cutlass and bandana — but the Prince of Peace required a little more skull sweat.

An early Eighties Halloween in Oregon

Chihuahua Guevara, Fido Castro, take your pick.

It was a combo act. A newpaper colleague and I planned to crash a divinity-school party as the Deities from New Jersey, with accents to match.

Robes and halos were a snap, and I used green trash-bag ties to fashion a crown of thorns, but we couldn’t talk anyone into joining us as the Holy Ghost. Something about “blasphemy.”

Yeah, right. Like we weren’t already going to Hell for running an afternoon newspaper.

One aspect short of a Trinity, we were forced to improvise and adapt. In short, to evolve. We bought a white helium-filled balloon and slapped a happy-face sticker on it. Hallelujah. The Lord helps those who help themselves.

At another newspaper I managed to catch the publisher napping one All Hallows’ Eve. I throttled back my prodigious beard, then braided my hair and stuffed it down the collar of a very pro dress shirt. Took out the earring, added tie, slacks, and footwear, and went to work.

Well sir, I don’t mind telling you the publisher was impressed. Shook my hand and congratulated me on finally joining the human race.

Later I left for lunch and returned clad in motorcycle-outlaw finery — all hair and earring and black boots and denim, including a vest with homemade “Hell’s Editors” colors on the back and a “No Morals” button on the front.

The publisher subsequently went dotty. I like to think I contributed in my own small way.

These days I mostly play it straight. We hang around the house and wait for all the little goblins to pop round, screeching for sugar.

If anybody asks what I’m doing for Halloween I tell them I’m going as an old white guy. I can’t imagine anything scarier.

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Posted in Celebrations, Holidays, Memories, Newspapers | 15 Comments »

Sketchy way to earn a living

July 17, 2022

Back to the ol’ drawing board? Nope.

Back in the late Seventies, when I was more yappy pup than Mad Dog, one of the editors at my second newspaper asked me why I was dead set on becoming an editorial cartoonist.

“I think you’re a better writer than you are a cartoonist,” he said.

Well. Shit. Nobody else around the newsroom seemed to think I was a fledgling Woodward N. Bernstein. Especially me.

I didn’t love reporting, which precedes writing and can be a very heavy lift indeed. When bored witless at school-board meetings I often doodled in my reporter’s notebook. As a consequence coverage could be less than comprehensive. And now here was this authority figure telling me that words, not pictures, were my forte, my future. Bad news.

This wasn’t the first “Check Fiscal Engine” light on my career dashboard, either. An adviser at my first college had told me how many editorial cartoonists were earning a living in the United States (not many then; even fewer now). Might want to cast a wider net, the adviser advised. Instead I dropped out and fished blue-collar ponds for a while.

At my second college another adviser advised that I’d never find any kind of work at a newspaper, unless maybe it was with Ed Quillen, who even then had a reputation for blazing his own trail. As it turned out, this wizard’s palantír was off by seven newspapers, and I didn’t do a lick of work for Ed until I had quit No. 7 and gone rogue. Those who can’t do, etc.

But I digress. Back to Newspaper No 2.

Your Humble Narrator at Newspaper No. 3, circa 1980.

The writing was on the wall, as it were. Happily, I could read. And even write, a little, as long as it didn’t involve first walking up to strangers like some Monty Python constable: “’Ello, ’ello, ’ello … wot’s all this then?” I didn’t care for regular haircuts or wearing a tie, and I only liked meeting strangers over drinks in some dark bar.

But a few years earlier, at Newspaper No. 1, where I was a copy boy, I got to sit in at the copy desk now and then, and I really enjoyed the work. It was why I eventually quit and went to College No. 2, the managing editor having advised that I would pretty much top out as a copy boy without a degree of some sort.

So at Newspaper No. 2, after scanning the writing on the wall for typos, grammatical errors, and AP Style violations, I petitioned to relocate from reporting to the copy desk. And I spent the next decade moving from one copy desk to another, editing other people’s stories, writing headlines and cutlines, sizing photos, laying out pages, and occasionally slipping a cartoon past an editorial-page editor.

And rarely — very rarely — I wrote something under my own byline.

Almost exactly 10 years after I read that writing on the wall, I found myself inching toward the exit at Newspaper No. 7, where I had bounced from the copy desk to the sports desk to the arts magazine to the features desk. There were no chairs left unoccupied and the music was winding down. The idea of courting Newspaper No. 8 — and then Nos. 9, 10, 11, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum —felt like a long pull into a cold headwind.

And yes, I had taken up bicycle racing a couple of years earlier.

Your Humble Narrator post-newspapering, in his second act as a pro cartoonist.

So imagine my astonishment when I stumbled across an ad in Editor & Publisher, the industry’s trade mag. Something called VeloNews wanted a managing editor. I applied. Got an interview. Didn’t get the job.

But I did get hired as a cartoonist. Finally! Pro at last, pro at last, thank God Almighty, I’m pro at last!

Cartooning for VeloNews was my first gig outside newspapering, and cartooning for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News would be my last. The Alpha and Omega of my second act, as a freelancer.

In between I did a lot of other stuff, of course. Covered races and trade shows, wrote commentary, edited copy for print and online, dabbled in video and audio. But it was cartooning that brought me in, and cartooning that saw me out.

And you know what’s really funny? I retired six months ago and haven’t drawn a line since. But I just wrote 700-some-odd words, and for free, too, simply because I love doing it.

Maybe that editor was onto something after all.

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Posted in Cartooning, Journalism, Memories, Newspapers | 36 Comments »

Ashes to ashes, dust to … eraser dust?

November 1, 2020

Tom Toles has erased himself from The Washington Post.

Well, here’s a bummer: After 50 years, Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Toles has drawn what he says is his final cartoon.

Like Toles, I started out a half-century ago, as the cartoonist for my high-school newspaper. Then I scribbled for my college papers and a couple of undergrounds before getting sidetracked into reporting and editing for a series of dailies and one small group of Denver-area weeklies.

Oh, I still contributed the occasional cartoon to the newspapers whose misfortune it was to employ me in some other capacity. Wasn’t an editor alive who would turn down free anything Back in the Day®; probably still isn’t, especially if we’re talking whiskey. But the pay, such as it was, was for pounding out the column inches or chasing commas around the copy desk.

Even then the full-time editorial cartoonist was becoming an endangered species, and I was glad that I’d followed an early adviser’s recommendation that I have some sort of a backup plan just in case I didn’t become the next Pat Oliphant, or like Toles, replace Herblock.

It wasn’t until 1989 that I started cartooning regularly again — not for The Washington Post, but for VeloNews. Next came the “Shop Talk” strip for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, in 1992.

I’ve drawn a metric shit-ton of cartoons since, but I don’t think I’ve come anywhere near 15,000 of the sonsabitches. After a job of work like that, Tom Toles deserves to get back to playing. He recently chatted with NPR about where he’s been and where he’s going.

Thanks to Kevin Drum at Mother Jones for the tip.

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Posted in Cartooning, Newspapers | 11 Comments »

Sometimes I have a great notion

September 12, 2020

No, I’m not snorting a line. Not right at that moment, anyway. …
Photo 1981 by Tom Warren | Corvallis Gazette-Times

Somehow I never thought of Oregon as a place that would burn.

I never thought it could burn.

In my mind Oregon remains a damp, dreary place where I spent a lot of time indoors, either working, hammered, or both. The only place I never owned a bicycle. Occasionally I walked, but only if I was too drunk to drive.

All my people were back in Colorado or in California, where I spent some months trapped in a Simon and Garfunkel song:

Asking only workman’s wages I come looking for a job

But I get no offers

When an offer finally came the job was in Corvallis, in Oregon’s Mid-Willamette Valley. It was good to be working again instead of sponging off friends and family, but the baggage I brought with me held more than T-shirts and jeans.

I made some friends, most of them on the job, your typical newsdog. And we had some laughs, catching Andy Irvine and Paul Brady in concert at a tiny venue downtown, or motoring to Portland to hear Johnny and the Distractions.

Occasionally I’d meet my old buddy Merrill in Seattle, a change of scenery for us both. He was trapped at a newspaper in eastern Washington, which was another sort of hell altogether.

But I spent a lot more time slouched in Squirrel’s Tavern or in my tiny apartment, huddled with my dogs next to the wood stove, or taking aimless solo drives out to the coast, places like Newport or Depoe Bay.

Mostly I remember rain, damp, the kind of cold that a Colorado winter doesn’t prepare you for, the sort that settles right down into your bones and makes itself at home. I got fat in self-defense, trying to make my bones harder to find.

If you’d told me the place would burn I’d have laughed out loud and poured another one. But I don’t drink anymore, and I’m not laughing, either.

• From Oregon Public Broadcasting: How you can help.

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Posted in Boozing, Cold, Journalism, Memories, Newspapers, Rain | 25 Comments »

All in the family

August 11, 2020

“Albuquerque Journal, mister? Fresh from Santa Fe!”

I almost missed this in the hubbub over “Nasty” Kamala joining “Sleepy” Joe atop the Communist … pardon, Democratic Party ticket.

The Albuquerque Journal and The New Mexican have announced an agreement to print their publications in Santa Fe.

Both papers are family-owned, which is an honest-to-God miracle in the modern era. And their newsrooms will remain separate and independent.

The idea, of course, is to enhance efficiency. Just ask ’em:

Robin Martin, president of The New Mexican, and William P. Lang, president of the Journal, collaborated and determined the two production facilities, just 50 miles apart, could operate more efficiently as a single operation.

They obviously didn’t collaborate with a copy editor on that paragraph. But still, the point limps across.

And you don’t have to be a president to know what the word “efficiency” means: layoffs! As in up to 70 positions in Albuquerque.

So, come mid-October, when and if the snow flies, Duke City subscribers may be draining their second cup of joe — or even on lunch break — before the blat hits the driveway. But hey, that’s efficiency for you.

Extry, extry, readallaboudit!

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Posted in Albuquerque, Journalism, Newspapers | 15 Comments »

‘You got to know the right people’

September 29, 2019

O, ’tis true, the druck traffickers are a shower of bastards.
Just say “No” to them drucks, kids. Especially in traffic.

“You got to know the right people,” indeed. Starting with a good copy editor. Or at least one who isn’t on drucks.

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Posted in Casual snark, Journalism, Just Fucking Shoot Me, Newspapers | 4 Comments »

April drool

April 2, 2019

Yesterday’s air-quality report from the City of Albuquerque.

I lay low for April Fool’s Day. It’s gotten to be kind of like the St. Patrick’s Day or New Year’s Eve of comedy — not for serious funnymen. Funnypersons? Persons of funny?

My favorite April Fool’s gag may be the time the Gazette caught the Greeley Tribune napping. It was in the late Seventies, and some wisenheimers on staff faked up a photo of an El Paso County pickle farmer inspecting a bumper crop (reporter Don Branning in a planter’s hat, examining a plump dill tied to a tree across the street from the newspaper).

We ran it on the Metro front, then put it on The Associated Press wire just for giggles. To our astonishment, the Tribune picked it up and ran the shot on its Farm page despite the photo credit, which read something like, “GT photo by Aprylle Foole.”

The desk jockey who made that call clearly was not a local boy with shitcaked bootheels. The Tribune is in Weld County, one of the richest agricultural counties east of the Rockies, the state’s top producer of grain, sugar beets and cattle.

Not pickles, though. El Paso County had all the pickle farms in Colorado.

Here in New Mexico the ash and juniper are providing all the comedy, if your idea of a good laugh involves watching some poor sod’s nose run like an irrigation ditch with a busted headgate.

I pretended to be a runner yesterday afternoon and came home with an enraged snotlocker, a condition that persists this morning. Snot funny, man.

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Posted in Albuquerque, allergies, Cheap gags, Comedy, Newspapers, Spring, Things that suck | 26 Comments »

‘The Post has been totally gutted. …’

May 7, 2018

“We need more budget cuts. Call it 10-15 percent. And a couple of bibs.”

When Lean Dean says you’ve gone too far, you’ve gone too far.

Dean Singleton, who once mused about consolidating, outsourcing and perhaps off-shoring the various MediaNews copy desks, says the owners of The Denver Post have “cut the heart out” of the once-mighty newspaper.

Undeterred by bad press, senior staff departures, and even the resignation of Lean Dean, the hyenas at Alden Global Capital continue gnawing away, taking comfort in the knowledge that there are plenty of toothsome tidbits left on the stinking carcass.

I know, I know — it’s a new world, information wants to be free, adapt or die, etc., et al., and so on and so forth. Doesn’t mean it’s pretty to watch.

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Posted in Journalism, Newspapers | 7 Comments »

Bang a gong, get it on

May 2, 2018

The stars of The Pueblo Chieftain copy desk circa 1984. Two of us are still walking the earth. Guess which ones.

The news biz is a tough racket. Yeah, I know, “stop the presses.”

Up in Colorado, The Denver Post is in a bad way, thanks to the vulture capitalists who have been treating it like an ATM at a Vegas casino. They may be wiping their overfed asses with your local daily, too.

And now The Pueblo Chieftain is said to be in the midst of a sale to … well, someone. Some thing.

I worked at The Chieftain for a spell back in the early Eighties. It’s where I met my man Hal Walter, who helped me get off the cigarettes and back onto the bike — at that point, a $320 fire-engine-red Centurion Le Mans 12.

As I wrote in my journal in 1983 — you remember journals, a sort of analog blog with a readership of one — “I can’t wait to get it and start riding all over fucking town. I may take it with me during my vacation so’s I can get some exercise between drinks.”

Yeah, I still had a ways to go. But still, baby steps, amirite?

Anyway, Hal has penned a recollection of the glory days — and some observations about The Chieftain‘s future — for Colorado Central magazine. He makes mention of Your Humble Narrator, and yes, my lawyers have been informed, so you’ll want to read the piece before HBO makes a documentary of the entire sordid mess and we’re strolling along the red carpet at Cannes giving the finger to Tarantino, the Coen brothers and del Toro.

I see T.J. Miller playing me, or perhaps Rory McCann, and probably Justin Timberlake as Hal, whom we used to call “Teen Angel,” for reasons that should be obvious. I mean, just look at that fucking picture, f’chrissakes.

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Posted in Journalism, Newspapers | 24 Comments »

From our No Shit Dept.: Hotels aren’t secure

October 4, 2017

No bag limit.

Sometimes I get the impression the fake news thinks we rubes never leave our flyover-country shacks.

Of course hotels aren’t secure. Nothing is.

Look at the pile of luggage I dragged into the Luxor for Interbike last month. I could’ve had a crazed midget with a sawed-off shotgun inside that rolling suitcase, a MAC-10 and a couple dozen extra magazines in the messenger bag, a few bricks of C4 in the backpack, a couple of Glocks with spare mags’ in the camera bag, and the boiled head of Sean Spicer in the cooler.

Nobody batted an eyelash when I hustled all this crap from the self-park up to my room. Not even The New York Times.

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Posted in Agitprop, Feckin' eejits, Journalism, Newspapers | 22 Comments »

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