Copyreaders

BY WIILLIAM BOURKE

By-lines reward reporters for meritorious work, but the copyreader’s proudest efforts go unheralded. Only his fellow copyreaders appreciated the skill and wit of my former colleague, the late Max Hawkins, when he encountered a pedantic report of an educators’ symposium on the earning power of intellectuals.

First Hawkins boiled into one succinct sentence the wordy quotes which a careless rewrite man had lifted from the publicity handout. “Intellectuals can’t be so smart, they aren’t rich,” was Hawkins’ version.

This simplification enabled him to delete about half of the remaining wordage. Then he tucked his tongue firmly in his check and scrawled off the headline:

THINKERS FAILURES, PROFESSORS THINK

Names and spellings are the copyreader’s specialty. He knows that Macy’s uses the apostrophe but Gimbels doesn’t; that Procter of soap fame spells it with an e; that the British insist on calling it the Court of St. James’s; that there is a West Coast educator named KleinSchmid; and, if he is old enough, that Philadelphia once harbored a public figure named WillB Hadley —just like that.

When the copyreader is browsing through an account of the Teapot Dome scandal, he is quick to point out that the reporter erred on the name of Jess Smith’s ex-wife; she is Roxie Stinson, not Stimson.

Without batting an eye he changes a title in a United Press International dispatch to read “the Marquess of Milford Haven.” “Marquis" is a French title, he explains; the British do not use it. If there is argument, he’ll send a copyboy to the morgue for Burke’s Peerage and prove it.

It was discovered in the era of yellow journalism that big type, if it blazoned the right thing, would sell newspapers. Headlines play on human emotions, frequently the baser ones. Love and war, fire and flood, crime and violence are the stuff that circulation managers’ dreams are made on.

The first reading of a story often suggests the perfect combination of words for a headline, yet if they will not fit into the allotted space, the travail and brain sweat required to evolve the final results are known only to the copyreader and his God.

News values differ in different places. What may seem a commonplace here or in Japan may be quite unusual in France. Le Parisien Libéré gave this item a two-column play:

EVERY JAPANESE TAKES A BATH AT LEAST ONCE A DAY !

Fred Remington did a fine head for the Pittsburgh Press on the escape of a truckload of hogs:

Brakeless Truck Chutes the Shoats, Hog-Ties Rush Traffic in West End

I like the one Sam Gordon of the Washington, D. C., Daily News wrote about the butcher who cheated by having an electric fan play on his scales:

LOOK, NO HANDS!

Just before Ranger clinched the America’s Cup races in 1937, John Oliver had a dandy in the New York Post:

RACE IS ALL OVER BUT THE YACHTING

Jack Iams did a double-twister for the News about the gardener who flopped as a bank robber:

Gardener (a Green Thug) Is All Thumbs in Bank

My former colleague, Sydney Penner, dealt with the approaching fall of French Premier Pflimlin’s Cabinet:

PFLIMLIN’S CHANCES GROWING PFLIMSIER

This recalls one I did for the Philadelphia Record when Lily Pons broke down while singing an aria:

LA PONS TCHOKES ON TCHAIKOWSKY

William B. Murphy, for whom I worked, liked copyreaders, although he knew that all of them were a little touched — if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be copyreaders. He continually lamented the fact that so few young men asked him for jobs, apparently unaware that only seasoned veterans were able to meet his exacting requirements. As one of his men once put it, “What Murf is looking for is a 25-year-old copyreader with 20 years experience.”