Journalism Archives

June 10, 2014

Scrawls, Nixon and a Couch

I was rummaging through a box and ran across two cartoons drawn by Scrawls, the Palm Beach Post’s editorial cartoonists in the ’70s.

Sam Rawls is his real name, but we all called him Scrawls. (People who REALLY know him call him Scooter, but I never achieved that level of closeness.)

He left The Post to go to our Big Sister paper in Atlanta, where he stuck around about seven years. I lost track of where he was, and was almost afraid to Google him because I was afraid the trail would lead to an obit.

Fortunately, there’s still some ink left in his pen.

Speaking Southern

Long before Jeff Foxworthy came along with his “You might be a redneck if…” shtick, Post columnist Steve Mitchell wrote a book How to Speak Southern, illustrated by Sam. It was followed by More How to Speak Southern, followed by a combination of the two marketed as The Complete How to Speak Southern. Click on the links to order a copy from Amazon and make both Sam and me a few pennies.

Sam has always cared about the environment. He’s been drawing cartoons to support the Initiative to Protect Jekyll Island. Take a look at some of his artwork skewering developers. I’m sure he is more effective at getting the point across than a whole forest of position papers.

Getting back to the cartoons

When Sam was packing up his office to go to the Big Time, I walked in to seeing him ripping up scads of his old cartoons. “What in the world are you doing?” I cried in a horrified tone.

“They’ve already been published, and I don’t want them floating around where somebody will sell them, so I’m tearing them up.”

I managed to convince him to let me make off with these two Nixons from the Watergate era. One one he wrote a flattering message, “To Ken – The best button-pusher I know;” on the other, a more Scrawlsian “To Ken – if you sell it – make sure you get a good price.”

The story of the couch

Newspapers were a little less politically correct (and a lot more fun) in the old days. They were inhabited by misfits on their way up and on their way down, and characters were the rule instead of the exception.

The photo department had a small room we called the Wire Room. It was used for storage and housed the Associated Press wirephoto transmitter. At one time, before I was hired, it contained an old black couch with an indeterminate covering. It looked like leather, but it was probably some substance not occurring in nature.

Someone told me that a homeless hooker used to walk Dixie Highway in front of the paper, and the photographers, being tenderhearted, offered her the couch as a place to sleep. Management got wind of their largess and said the couch had to go. [Checking the definition of “largess,” I’m not sure that’s exactly the right word: “Something given to someone without expectation of a return,” but, like I said, that all happened before I got to West Palm Beach…]

The couch was exiled to Sam’s office where it was assumed nothing nefarious would ever go on, said my source.

Couch Version II

When I finally tracked Sam down this evening (he had been dodging torrential rain in Conyers, Georgia, where he lives), I had to ask him what happened to the couch. I thought I remembered management shipping it to him as a joke when he left.

“That was my couch. I bought it. I’ve never heard the hooker story.”

We were both appalled that someone made up that story to pull my leg. On the other hand, we agreed that it was too good a story to cut out. If I outlive Sam, it’ll go back to being the Hooker Couch.

What is your favorite cartoon?

As soon as I asked what Sam considered his favorite cartoon, I cringed, knowing how I feel when someone asks about my favorite photo. Sam came back with an answer that I’m liable to steal, “I hope it’s the one on my drawing board the day I die.”

Just for the record, I didn’t shoot any of these photos. They came from a box we called “Party Pix,” a collection of staff photos going back to the early or mid-60s. If you doubt my earlier statement about working with characters, you need to take a walk down memory lane with me and that box.

May 4, 2014May 4, 2014

May 4: Compare and Contrast

Mother and I were on our way to Wib’s in Jackson for my last BBQ before leaving Missouri. On the way past Jackson’s city park, a flash of glow-in-the-dark green and a small crowd caught our eye. I did a U-turn (causing Mother to gasp uncharacteristically when she thought I turned too quickly in front of an oncoming car) and headed into the park.

We drove around spotting other gaggles of kids in fancy clothes and even a horse-drawn carriage. Pulling up to the Green Gal gaggle, I rolled down the window and asked, “Wedding or prom?”

It was the Jackson High School prom.

The Green Gal Gaggle

The foursome provided names: Tessa Long and Amanda Matlock are in the front row, left to right, and their dates are Mitchell Graham and Alex Wright.

[Editor’s note: When I asked if was a wedding or a prom and was told “prom,” I joked, “Well, since you are all dressed up anyway, why don’t you go ahead and get married?” I got a call this morning that I must have had that on my mind when I was typing at 2 in the morning, because in the first posting of the story, I called Amanda Matlock “Amanda Wright.” I guess I was determined to marry her off. I have officially annulled her marriage and given her back her maiden name. Another note: the kids were home by 1 a.m. The prom ended at 11 and the stopped at Denny’s on the way home. I guess the younger Jackson generation doesn’t have the stamina that the Cape Central Class of ’65 had: our party lasted all night.]

Color coordination

Alex’s tie matches Amanda’s dress, but Amanda went him one better with her green socks and shoelaces. This is a gal who looks like she’s ready for some serious dancing.

Our May 4th memories will be different

When Tessa, Mitchell, Alex and Amanda wake up on May 4, their memories of that date are going to different than mine. They are going to remember the clothes, dancing, music and fun.

I’m going to remember four Kent State students who were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970. Former Palm Beach Post chief photographer John J. Lopinot sends me an email every year: “Never Forget.” I don’t intend to.

Another photographer and I were on our way to Marietta, Ohio, to a surplus store where we were going to pick up riot gear and head up to Kent State. We were about half-way there when a radio news bulletin reported the shootings, although the initial garbled reports had the guardsman as being the ones shot. We elected to get the gear and head back to Athens and Ohio University, because we didn’t know how our campus was going to react.

4,000 gathered on College Green

The protest movement up until that point was fairly small and made up of “radical” students. That afternoon and evening, though, as many as 4,000 students, professors, townspeople, preachers and even a congressional candidate crowded onto the College Green to listen to speeches and to figure out what was going to happen next.

The most moving moment was when a young woman who said she was a Kent State student came out of the darkness and grabbed the microphone. She said she and some of her friends had witnessed the shootings and had agreed to fan out to the other state schools to beg the students not to allow a similar bloody confrontation to happen.

“The kids at Kent are running scared,” she was quoted by Tom Price in The Athens Messenger. “Don’t bring that here. Don’t throw rocks here. You don’t know how good it is to be here tonight. Just stay this way, please. Keep cool and stay together, please – male and female – because there have been two girls killed and two guys.”

Ministers call for 24-hour memorial fast

After the young woman spoke, Rabbi Joseph Polak called for prayer, and silence fell over the 4,000 persons on the green. Each minister then offered his own short prayer.

“I’m calling you to prayer for your brothers and sisters at Kent,” the Rev. Thomas Niccolls said. “I’m calling you to prayer for your brothers and sisters in Vietnam. I’m calling you to prayer for your brothers and sisters in Cambodia.”

“As we pray for the dead and the dying,” the Rev. Robert Hughes said, “let us pray for the living and for ourselves. We have seen enough dying and enough pain for a lifetime.”

The Rev. Thomas Jackson concluded the prayer

“I’ve gotta try one more time. I just want a moratorium for one day on the terms ‘jock’ and ‘Greek’ and ‘hippie’ and all the things we use to punch each other out.”

Praying the students realize what it’s like when people who are shot and killed, the Rev. Thomas Jackson quoted a Kent State student who said he thought the National Guardsmen were firing blanks, “until I saw her head blown open.”

“It’s time to quit blowing open heads,” the Rev. Jackson said. “It’s time to quit splitting up and hating and disgusting each other. Can’t we just once do it? Just one day, that’s all I ask. Please remember that head that was blown open. Do something embarrassing tonight. Like don’t kill each other. Like touch someone. Be a fool.”

A lengthy standing ovation from the demonstrators followed Jackson’s prayer.

OU Closed on May 15

Ohio University managed to stay open until May 15, when it closed after two nights of tear gas and rioting.

Previous posts about the Kent State era

March 12, 2014March 29, 2021

Clarence Page – Hall of Famer

I got an email from an Erin Roberts, External Relations Coordinator, Scripps College of Communications, at Ohio University this week. Wow, that’s a mouthful.

Anyway, she wrote, “Andy Alexander let me know that you were a student photographer while he and Clarence Page were both writers with the Post. I am currently working on a short photo montage honoring Clarence, as he will be inducted into the Ohio Communication Hall of Fame on campus later this month. Do you have photos from that time of Clarence that might aid me in the presentation?”

I think I can come up with a few

Oh, boy do I ever. Of course, when the Hall of Fame gets wind of student reporter Clarence, they may make a last-minute shuffle in their choice. Maybe I shouldn’t bring up the story about how Clarence got the publisher of The Athens Messenger hauled out of bed in the wee hours of the morning.

Clarence and the F-word

Here’s Clarence’s version of what happened:

“Kenner Bush, [publisher of The Athens Messenger, which printed The Post] told me the typesetters woke him up in the morning, poised to walk out rather than print my uncensored reporting of the F-word that brought a student into conflict with an 1812 Athens code. OU President Vernon Alden wasn’t happy either, to say the least. As some of you will vividly recall, our generation of Posties was pushed to the brink of expulsion and gazed over the edge before we were yanked back amid a burst of national publicity.”

Clarence was born June 2, 1947, in Dayton. After his graduation from Ohio University in 1969, the Army got its mitts on him for a short period of time, then he went to work for The Chicago Tribune. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1989.

Today, a much rounder-faced Clarence shows up on political talk shows trying to bring some light to the heat.

Ohio College Newspaper Association President

The Post did quite well in Ohio College Newspaper Association competition in 1968. Clarence was elected president of the association.

When Carol Towarnicky and I got together this fall to do a presentation on the birth of the student rights movement at Ohio University, we traded “remember when?” stories. She implied that she and I engaged in some shenanigans that helped get Clarence elected president. She claims that she and I climbed on the roof of the hotel where the conference was being held and hoisted a bed sheet with a Page campaign slogan on it from the building’s flagpole.

Now, climbing on rooftops and water towers is something I did frequently, but I disavow any knowledge of such tomfoolery, even though I’m sure the statute of limitations has long expired.

Clarence Page photo gallery

This collection is primarily so Erin can get a look at a young Clarence while there may still be time to arrange a more reputable Hall of Famer, one who wasn’t the first to publish the F-word in a newspaper in Athens, Ohio. Click on any image to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery.

March 10, 2014

More Missourian Memorabilia

This email came from The Palm Beach Post this afternoon. That’s the place I worked for 35 years and the paper I still subscribe to (although I’m beginning to wonder why).

The Post was letting me know they were sorry that I might be experiencing intermittent delays across their digital products and website. They were working on fixing it, I was assured.

REAL carriers could fix their problem

Not long after getting that email, I ran across my old Missourian collection book. That gave me a quick fix to The Post’s digital delivery problems: hire a bunch of 12-year-old kids with memory sticks to go door-to-door updating “breaking news” reports, just like we used to pitch papers in puddles in the Old Days.

This was one of the earlier, and best collection books. It was made of a canvas-covered Masonite material with a heavy spring that clamped the top and bottom of the book over the sheets of yellow receipts you’d tear out and hand your customer. A later version was green and made of far lighter materials. It didn’t hold the receipts securely and would fall apart in a short period of time.

The cover has a number on it. I’m pretty sure my route number was 31 or 31A, so I’m going to guess that’s a 31, even if the number doesn’t look like it is complete.

Newspaper Boys of America, Inc.

Inside the book is a notation that “This is a special Binder No. 9807 (?). Newspaper Boys of America, Inc. Indianapolis, Indiana.”

Dad must have filled in the ID info: it’s pretty much faded away, but I recognize his distinctive handwriting (meaning that you could read it, as opposed to my pitiful scrawl) and his use of green ink.

A quick Google search indicates that the Newspaper Boys of America, Inc, is as gone as paperboys are today. One of the few references I could find was for an N.B.A. Handbook for Newspaper Boys (second edition published in 1932) that was going for $175 in “near fine” condition. I didn’t have one of those, and if I had, my destructive younger brothers would have trashed it like they did my comic books.

I ran a photo of my carrier bag a few days back. The next trick will be to do a video showing the unique way we folded newspapers in the days before rubber bands and rolling.

Category: Journalism