My back pages: Reflections of a former journalist

Back in my newspaper days, I spent some time as City Editor of the Hagerstown Morning Herald. Part of my job was reading and editing stories written by the staff of five “city side” reporters. It was a job that yielded lots of good stories, and I don’t mean just the ones that actually made it into the paper.

Thinking back on those days, I remember headlines I wrote, paragraphs I edited and stories I shepherded into print. I thought I might share a few in this space, at least the way I remember them. Maybe some of my Herald-Mail friends will have different recollections, but these are my stories and I’m sticking to them.

First up, Jim’s what?

Jim’s Always was a Hagerstown landmark. It was an all-night restaurant/diner out on the Dual Highway that was open around the clock. Lots of shift workers, interstate travelers, late night revelers and, yes, night shift newspaper reporters would show up there for breakfast at really odd times of the morning.

One day, we learned that Jim’s Always had been sold to a new owner whose name wasn’t Jim. He was keeping the name “Always Restaurant,” but planned to close the establishment for a few hours every day. The lead on the story in the next day’s paper read as follows:

Jim’s Always isn’t Jim’s any more, it’s just Always. And it isn’t even always, it’s just sometimes.

Wings and breasts and thighs, oh my!

I can’t claim this one, but it’s one my favorite headlines of all time. In the early 1980s, Colonel Sanders opened a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Hagerstown that featured eat-in service and a drive-up window. On its grand opening, the establishment broke KFC’s all-time record for most chicken sold in a single day.

Jim Thomas, my predecessor as City Editor, wrote the classic headline, Poultry in Motion. Headline writing doesn’t get any better than that.

Rolling thunder

During my tenure at the Herald, the Baltimore Colts football team famously (or infamously) pulled up stakes in Baltimore and moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, in the dead of night. As told by Wikipedia, “The Colts' move was completely unannounced [by team owner Robert Irsay] and occurred in the early hours of March 29, 1984. Irsay made the move after years of lobbying for a new stadium to replace Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium, which he called ‘inadequate.’ ”

One of my reporters got a tip (which proved to be accurate) that the caravan carrying the Colts' equipment had stopped at a Hagerstown hotel for a few hours before moving on. My headline, placed inside an elongated graphic of a tractor-trailer, read, “The truck stops here.”

Well, duh…

One time a small-town policeman got in trouble for shooting a gun in a public park where small children were playing. A reporter wrote the story but failed to get a comment from the policeman himself. We couldn’t run the story without giving him a chance to respond, but the reporter swore he couldn’t find him. “He won’t answer his phone,” he told me.

It seemed obvious that he wasn’t home, so I wondered where he was likely to go. I called the police station in his home town and asked the cop who answered if he could help me find the guy. “He’s sitting right here beside me,” the policeman said. “Would you like to speak with him?”

I did...and I did.

And finally…the storm went where?

This one was on me. One of the first rules for journalists who move to a new town is to familiarize themselves with the area. What are the names of the towns? How do you spell them? How do you pronounce them? Where are they located and what do people do there? I call it the “Where Am I?” rule. You get the idea.

On one occasion, a severe thunderstorm rolled through the area and an intern was assigned to make the myriad phone calls and write the dreaded “weather story” that all reporters hate. Not being familiar with the area, the intern reported on the path of the storm as something along the lines of "Boonsboro through Clear Spring to Funkstown, then around Williamsport and Waynesboro and down to Frederick and Hancock before moving on to Thurmont..." or something equally (and geographically) ridiculous.

As editor, what did I do to fix the story? Nothing.

Afterward, I was unceremoniously informed by a meteorologist that such a storm track was impossible and that the local newspaper should be ashamed of itself for not knowing better...and that was nothing compared to the ass-kicking I took from my boss, the editor-in-chief, who reminded me in no uncertain terms about that “Where Am I?” rule.

This was the same editor-in-chief, by the way, who became a legend for throwing the advertising manager out of the newsroom. The ad guy had made the mistake of demanding that a story be written to promote one of his advertisers – an absolute no-no back in the day. The editor told him, basically, to GTFO, and said he’d kick his ass if he ever came back to our side of the building.

I never saw the guy over there again.