The Other Side of Fargo
Posted by: Scott W. Graves | 07/31/2007 10:10 PM
By James Lileks
Hugh is very kind, but take his words with a pound of salt; his postman is often seen on Hugh's stoop, nodding politely, while Hugh wraps up a 14,500 word description of how today's mail was perfectly stuffed into the box. His generosity shames his friends and chastens his enemies. Now that he has sold me as the second coming of Twain, Benchley, Mencken and Thurber, let me gently deflate his expectations with this inaugural introduction.
On his radio show he used to introduce me as a newspaper columnist, and I always liked the sound of that. It put me in the tradition of savvy, hard-boiled men who screwed Lucky in their mouths and banged out copy from a table in the corner of "21" Club, stoking outrage over the actions of the Cellophane Trust, shaping national policy, giving a starlet a leg up with a well-placed mention, casually ruining a career with an offhand allusion. Which upstate Congressman known for red hair and redder ideas was seen hi-de-hoing in a Harlem love nest with a uni-browed Communist painter? Columnists are still around, of course, but those of us who cluttered up the second-tier papers with genial palaver might as well be semaphore-flag salesmen, or whale-oil distributors. The glory days are gone for good. By the time a columnist totters down from the mount, tablets in hand, five-dozen bloggers have bled the subject dry and moved on.
In a way, I'm glad I'm not a columnist anymore. And by "glad" I mean "lying, completely". I only wanted a life in newspapers. In the old days they said a good newsman had "printer's ink in his veins", partly as a metaphor, and partly as an indication of lax environmental laws. Me, I had printer's ink on the elbows. I grew up reading the Fargo Forum, stretched out on the floor, elbows on the paper, and the fresh ink left black smudges on the skin. My mother always told me to wash up after I'd read the paper, as if the world had left its stain on my innocent flesh. I took the dirty elbows as a badge of learning. If the paper could be trusted--and why wouldn't it be?-- something was always happening somewhere, and the paper was a door into the Somewhere on the other side of Fargo.
Naturally, I got into the business as soon as I could, and signed up as a paper boy as soon as I was of age. The papers were dumped on a corner, cinched with a taut metal band; you snipped the wire, leaning back so it didn't fly up and take out a cornea. The papers went in the big canvas bag, folded edge up, so you could tell by running your fingers along the rill how many soldiers you had left. It was a fine way to enter the trade. I hated it. For one thing, I had to knock on people's doors and ask them for the subscription money--something today's editors and publishers would be wise to try. Of course, they sent out the young boys, because no one would yell at a kid if the paper endorsed Nixon again. But it was still embarrassing. Other people's houses smelled funny. Cigarettes and cats, beer and burned meat, old-lady drugstore perfume and unflushed toilets. It was a relief to be done with it. Saturday we turned in the money at the paper to our boss: a short man in a white shirt and narrow black tie, he looked like a hybrid of Maxwell Smart and Joe Friday, and he ran the paper boys like a buzz-cut Fagin.
One year as a reward for selling new subscriptions, Max Fagin treated us to a trip to Winnipeg, the Minneapolis of Manitoba! These were the carefree, simple seventies, when a fellow could call up parents and propose taking a busload of their 13-year-old sons out of the country for a while. I'll never forget crossing the border with my fellow newspaper carriers, on the edge of a great adventure.
It was the last moment of solidarity I'd ever experience in the newspaper business.
Well, no. That's not entirely true. At the college paper, it was Us against the Dark Forces at the legislature, who were hell-bent on making us pay for our education. At my first real daily job, it was Us against the Bigger Paper across the river, and in my last daily job, it was Us against Inexorable Market Forces, And Also the Internet. We fought the law of diminishing returns, as the song says, and the law won. Now it's the great chattering empyrean realm of the Internet for me. But I've been here since the beta version of Netscape. It's home. I don't expect newspapers to go away, anymore than I think the internet will eliminate the pleasures of a well-made magazine. There's room for all. On the other hand, I never thought the paper boy would be replaced by adults who drive from house to house in the pre-dawn hours, heaving pre-wrapped papers from the sidewalk. At least "21" is still around.
In a few years they'll probably have wi-fi, so you can blog from the corner table. Fine by me.
Hugh is very kind, but take his words with a pound of salt; his postman is often seen on Hugh's stoop, nodding politely, while Hugh wraps up a 14,500 word description of how today's mail was perfectly stuffed into the box. His generosity shames his friends and chastens his enemies. Now that he has sold me as the second coming of Twain, Benchley, Mencken and Thurber, let me gently deflate his expectations with this inaugural introduction.
On his radio show he used to introduce me as a newspaper columnist, and I always liked the sound of that. It put me in the tradition of savvy, hard-boiled men who screwed Lucky in their mouths and banged out copy from a table in the corner of "21" Club, stoking outrage over the actions of the Cellophane Trust, shaping national policy, giving a starlet a leg up with a well-placed mention, casually ruining a career with an offhand allusion. Which upstate Congressman known for red hair and redder ideas was seen hi-de-hoing in a Harlem love nest with a uni-browed Communist painter? Columnists are still around, of course, but those of us who cluttered up the second-tier papers with genial palaver might as well be semaphore-flag salesmen, or whale-oil distributors. The glory days are gone for good. By the time a columnist totters down from the mount, tablets in hand, five-dozen bloggers have bled the subject dry and moved on.
In a way, I'm glad I'm not a columnist anymore. And by "glad" I mean "lying, completely". I only wanted a life in newspapers. In the old days they said a good newsman had "printer's ink in his veins", partly as a metaphor, and partly as an indication of lax environmental laws. Me, I had printer's ink on the elbows. I grew up reading the Fargo Forum, stretched out on the floor, elbows on the paper, and the fresh ink left black smudges on the skin. My mother always told me to wash up after I'd read the paper, as if the world had left its stain on my innocent flesh. I took the dirty elbows as a badge of learning. If the paper could be trusted--and why wouldn't it be?-- something was always happening somewhere, and the paper was a door into the Somewhere on the other side of Fargo.
Naturally, I got into the business as soon as I could, and signed up as a paper boy as soon as I was of age. The papers were dumped on a corner, cinched with a taut metal band; you snipped the wire, leaning back so it didn't fly up and take out a cornea. The papers went in the big canvas bag, folded edge up, so you could tell by running your fingers along the rill how many soldiers you had left. It was a fine way to enter the trade. I hated it. For one thing, I had to knock on people's doors and ask them for the subscription money--something today's editors and publishers would be wise to try. Of course, they sent out the young boys, because no one would yell at a kid if the paper endorsed Nixon again. But it was still embarrassing. Other people's houses smelled funny. Cigarettes and cats, beer and burned meat, old-lady drugstore perfume and unflushed toilets. It was a relief to be done with it. Saturday we turned in the money at the paper to our boss: a short man in a white shirt and narrow black tie, he looked like a hybrid of Maxwell Smart and Joe Friday, and he ran the paper boys like a buzz-cut Fagin.
One year as a reward for selling new subscriptions, Max Fagin treated us to a trip to Winnipeg, the Minneapolis of Manitoba! These were the carefree, simple seventies, when a fellow could call up parents and propose taking a busload of their 13-year-old sons out of the country for a while. I'll never forget crossing the border with my fellow newspaper carriers, on the edge of a great adventure.
It was the last moment of solidarity I'd ever experience in the newspaper business.
Well, no. That's not entirely true. At the college paper, it was Us against the Dark Forces at the legislature, who were hell-bent on making us pay for our education. At my first real daily job, it was Us against the Bigger Paper across the river, and in my last daily job, it was Us against Inexorable Market Forces, And Also the Internet. We fought the law of diminishing returns, as the song says, and the law won. Now it's the great chattering empyrean realm of the Internet for me. But I've been here since the beta version of Netscape. It's home. I don't expect newspapers to go away, anymore than I think the internet will eliminate the pleasures of a well-made magazine. There's room for all. On the other hand, I never thought the paper boy would be replaced by adults who drive from house to house in the pre-dawn hours, heaving pre-wrapped papers from the sidewalk. At least "21" is still around.
In a few years they'll probably have wi-fi, so you can blog from the corner table. Fine by me.
