Monday, August 30, 2004
This month's post is from frequent contributor Kit Kiefer. You got a problem with that?
O'Strowsky's kind of an angel for guys think they're writers
by Kit Kiefer
Say what you want about O'Strowsky; he's a charitable guy when it
comes to writers.
Maybe it's because he's Polish-Irish, even though he's just Polish-Irish by name, not because of what's inside. He comes by the Polish-Irish name because his dad was assemblyman from Custer for many years and changed it with the apostrophe when he was just nothing more than the county treasurer trying to lock up all the Catholic vote in the county, Polish and Irish. He needn't have worried - this was Stevens Point, after all, and he was a Democrat and that was the Catholic vote right there - but O'Strowsky's dad was the kind what never messed around any with chance, and that never bothered to rub off on O'Strowsky Junior.
Maybe the charity also comes from the years O'Strowsky spent editing the papers about paper money and Chinese coins. You edit that stuff for a while and run smack-dab into those five-thousand-word stories about the shinplasters of Shanghai, and after a while anything else of a sort that has sentences shorter than a hundred words and paragraphs shorter than a half-dozen of those sentences starts looking publishable.
Ask O'Strowsky and he'll say - and this comes from having a dad in politics - that what the rest of us call charity towards writers is nothing more than his belief in the unalienable right of anyone who strings letters into words and words into sentences to make a fool of himself in print, and he's just there to help things along. He prints stories on dares and bets, he prints stories that no one else would touch, stories from eight-year-olds and people who write on paper bags and the back sides of envelopes, and the thing is when he's done with them and they're all laid out with the pictures and the big headline type they don't read half bad.
O'Strowsky does something to them in the meantime, which is not altogether good for the people that wrote the stories to start with. A good writer can tell when he's been edited - good editor or bad, it doesn't matter. After a bad writer's been edited by a good editor he thinks he puts the words there to start with and there's no stopping him. All of the rest of us editors may be doing bad writers a service by sending their stuff back with no-thanks notes pinned to them; O'Strowsky may really be the mean one. But he thinks it's charity, and some of the smart ones do come around after a time, so he might be right.
Like I said, O'Strowsky spent a few too many years on the bank-note and cowrie-shell beats, so he has a real soft spot for people who know everything about nothing. The way he explains his theory of knowledge is that everybody knows the minimum about the things they have to know about to live. That's the foundation. From there people build their buildings of knowledge. Some build sprawling one-story complexes - they're the ones who know a little about a lot. The good ones go on quiz shows; the mediocre ones spend too much time in bars and get frustrated by life. Then there's the people who build four or five stories over half a city block. Big square buildings; solid. Hold Kiwanis meetings in the second-floor lunchroom. They know quite a bit about five or six things. They're insurance agents and engineers, mostly. IT guys nowadays.
The ones O'Strowsky gets excited about are the ones who build Space Needles and CN Towers with their knowledge - straight up, just a few square feet of base and then into the stratosphere a mile and a half. He says anyone can make someone with a little style and rough command of a couple of facts look good. The real test is what you can do with the guy who knows everything about something no one else cares about and writes like he's writing for people who get as worked up over this stuff as he does, only people like that don't exist. It's a challenge, even for guys like O'Strowsky who do charity towards writers.
It's about two o'clock on a Tuesday, the time of day when you do layout because staring at the green words on the black VDT makes you sleepy, when O'Strowsky comes by with one of his space needles.
"You won't believe this one, guys," he says. We never believe any of the ones he brings by so we don't know why we would believe this one, only they're always true so we believe. It's that disbelieving-belief sensation you get after editing these magazines we do, makes you wonder why you do it if this is who you're doing it for.
"I mean, I thought I'd seen everything with the guy who did the divots of Hall-of-Famers, the guy who follows around old players when they're playing golf and takes up the dirt and grass they dig up - and then tries to have them autograph it. Remember that one? This one's better. This one's far better.
"When you say better, what do you mean by that?" asks Mort, who doesn't get in many but is so sly and deadpan with the ones he gets.
"Okay, it's not better-written," O'Strowsky says. "Not better-written at all. Hey, but writing isn't everything - you know that, Mort." Mort smiles a little, but not too much. "But in every way else it's better. I mean, this guy's so goldarn honest about what he's doing that you gotta want to put him in print. You just gotta."
"So what is it that you just want to gotta put him in print about?", says Donnie B from over in the corner. "Has he got a collection of famous women athletes' underwear - or women athletes' famous underwear? Huh? Has he?"
"Better than that - okay, well maybe not better than that, but pretty darn good. He's got - get this - a collection of beer cups from every Green Bay Packer game since 1954. Gone to every Packer home game for almost 40 years, had a beer at the game and kept the cup from each one."
"And he's still alive? Sheesh," says Donnie B.
"Still alive and still drinking beer at the Packer games, and he's written his story and sent it to me. Can you believe it?"
"Aren't the cups kinda, you know, stinky?", comes in from Homer, who sits across from Donnie B and shares a VDT.
"Could be - prob'ly were at one point, but he washes out the cup when he gets home, writes the date - date of the game -- and the who the game was against on the bottom and he puts it on a shelf - here, here's a picture - so they're all organized. He can show you the cup he drank out of at the Ice Bowl, show you the variation from the Bears game with the Magic man, anything. He says he even knows when things started to get real commercial."
"When they started charging more than two bucks for a beer?", Donnie B. asks without even looking up from his terminal.
"Well, when they started looking for advertisers and it mattered what kind of beer was in the cup, when they started to get real picky about their logo and how you use it, stuff like that," O'Strowsky says. "And he's right - you can see it. Looks like a buncha beer cups, sure, but you start looking at the buncha beer cups and pretty soon you start seeing different things. Start seeing the march of time, the whole progress of the commercialization of the National Football League. Gets pretty interesting after a while.
"Didn't he ever miss a game?," asks Homer, who also wonders why none of this cool stuff ever comes his way, only it does and he can't see how cool it is.
"Oh yeah - he missed one," says O'Strowsky, in a way that you can tell he's still kinda awed by the whole thing. "Missed one game, on account of his daughter's wedding, but even there he had guy next to him drink a beer for him and save him the cup. Says his record's tainted, but he doesn't know anyone else who's been drinking as many beers for as long at Packer games as he has - and when you think about it, that's a real record."
"So is he trying to sell it or anything?," Homer asks.
"Oh, I guess he is. You know, you're always trying to sell something you're collecting, you get extras or what have you, you try to trade - but who's he going to trade with? But like he writes here - let me get down to it - "the thrill of assembling a once-in-a-lifetime collection like this is more valuable that anything I might realize in selling all or part of my collection."
"Needs some work, huh?," says Donnie B.
"Needs some work," says O'Strowsky. "But we'll get 'er into shape and put her in the magazine, make him famous. 'The guy with 40 years of Packer beer cups.' It'll be everywhere."
About this time Mort, who's been saying nothing through all this, which is just the way Mort is, comes over, picks up the picture and starts looking at it hard. Lifts up his glasses to get a better look, then hands it O'Strowsky and says, "Don't think you should print the story."
O'Strowsky likes being an angel and defends his minions, also doesn't like having his editorial judgment questioned, so he pulls himself up and makes his voice hard and says, "Okay - why's that?"
"Cup's a fake," Mort says. "That one right there" - and he points to a reddish one over in the right-hand corner. NFL championship cup, 1968.
"I't's a fake. Seen 'em before at shows. Cup company printed up a bunch as samples, kept 'em in a warehouse for 20 years. Some bright collector-seller was cleaning the warehouse, found the cups, started dishin' 'em out here and there at shows. You can get a hundred of 'em for fifteen bucks. You can't print the story. Collector types would pin you to the wall" - and since collector types are about the only types that read the words between the ads in O'Strowsky's magazine, O'Strowsky knows that Mort's right. He can't print it. The angel just lost a soul.
The rest of the guys chime in now, because they've all been in a position when they get taken on something someone swears is real, and it's very uncomfortable, since people are depending on you to know everything - which is impossible, but that's the way readers are.
Naturally O'Strowsky takes it kind of hard the rest of the afternoon - even takes an afternoon break, which is kind of unusual for O'Strowsky.
When he's gone I ask Mort, who doesn't usually go to shows or pipe up on these arguments, how and where he got the scuttlebutt on the fake cups.
"Oh heck, I don't know if that cup's fake or real or anything in between," he says. "I just get so damn tired of him making a Broadway production out of these collectors and their collections that only himself and four of his buddies give a crap about I had to do something. Plus, I want to hear him get on the phone with this guy and tell him he's got a fake cup."
Then I understand, and it actually makes some pretty good sense. Some people might think Mort's being cruel but Mort's a humane and charitable guy when it comes to writers, too. Just the editors give him trouble sometimes.
O'Strowsky's kind of an angel for guys think they're writers
by Kit Kiefer
Say what you want about O'Strowsky; he's a charitable guy when it
comes to writers.
Maybe it's because he's Polish-Irish, even though he's just Polish-Irish by name, not because of what's inside. He comes by the Polish-Irish name because his dad was assemblyman from Custer for many years and changed it with the apostrophe when he was just nothing more than the county treasurer trying to lock up all the Catholic vote in the county, Polish and Irish. He needn't have worried - this was Stevens Point, after all, and he was a Democrat and that was the Catholic vote right there - but O'Strowsky's dad was the kind what never messed around any with chance, and that never bothered to rub off on O'Strowsky Junior.
Maybe the charity also comes from the years O'Strowsky spent editing the papers about paper money and Chinese coins. You edit that stuff for a while and run smack-dab into those five-thousand-word stories about the shinplasters of Shanghai, and after a while anything else of a sort that has sentences shorter than a hundred words and paragraphs shorter than a half-dozen of those sentences starts looking publishable.
Ask O'Strowsky and he'll say - and this comes from having a dad in politics - that what the rest of us call charity towards writers is nothing more than his belief in the unalienable right of anyone who strings letters into words and words into sentences to make a fool of himself in print, and he's just there to help things along. He prints stories on dares and bets, he prints stories that no one else would touch, stories from eight-year-olds and people who write on paper bags and the back sides of envelopes, and the thing is when he's done with them and they're all laid out with the pictures and the big headline type they don't read half bad.
O'Strowsky does something to them in the meantime, which is not altogether good for the people that wrote the stories to start with. A good writer can tell when he's been edited - good editor or bad, it doesn't matter. After a bad writer's been edited by a good editor he thinks he puts the words there to start with and there's no stopping him. All of the rest of us editors may be doing bad writers a service by sending their stuff back with no-thanks notes pinned to them; O'Strowsky may really be the mean one. But he thinks it's charity, and some of the smart ones do come around after a time, so he might be right.
Like I said, O'Strowsky spent a few too many years on the bank-note and cowrie-shell beats, so he has a real soft spot for people who know everything about nothing. The way he explains his theory of knowledge is that everybody knows the minimum about the things they have to know about to live. That's the foundation. From there people build their buildings of knowledge. Some build sprawling one-story complexes - they're the ones who know a little about a lot. The good ones go on quiz shows; the mediocre ones spend too much time in bars and get frustrated by life. Then there's the people who build four or five stories over half a city block. Big square buildings; solid. Hold Kiwanis meetings in the second-floor lunchroom. They know quite a bit about five or six things. They're insurance agents and engineers, mostly. IT guys nowadays.
The ones O'Strowsky gets excited about are the ones who build Space Needles and CN Towers with their knowledge - straight up, just a few square feet of base and then into the stratosphere a mile and a half. He says anyone can make someone with a little style and rough command of a couple of facts look good. The real test is what you can do with the guy who knows everything about something no one else cares about and writes like he's writing for people who get as worked up over this stuff as he does, only people like that don't exist. It's a challenge, even for guys like O'Strowsky who do charity towards writers.
It's about two o'clock on a Tuesday, the time of day when you do layout because staring at the green words on the black VDT makes you sleepy, when O'Strowsky comes by with one of his space needles.
"You won't believe this one, guys," he says. We never believe any of the ones he brings by so we don't know why we would believe this one, only they're always true so we believe. It's that disbelieving-belief sensation you get after editing these magazines we do, makes you wonder why you do it if this is who you're doing it for.
"I mean, I thought I'd seen everything with the guy who did the divots of Hall-of-Famers, the guy who follows around old players when they're playing golf and takes up the dirt and grass they dig up - and then tries to have them autograph it. Remember that one? This one's better. This one's far better.
"When you say better, what do you mean by that?" asks Mort, who doesn't get in many but is so sly and deadpan with the ones he gets.
"Okay, it's not better-written," O'Strowsky says. "Not better-written at all. Hey, but writing isn't everything - you know that, Mort." Mort smiles a little, but not too much. "But in every way else it's better. I mean, this guy's so goldarn honest about what he's doing that you gotta want to put him in print. You just gotta."
"So what is it that you just want to gotta put him in print about?", says Donnie B from over in the corner. "Has he got a collection of famous women athletes' underwear - or women athletes' famous underwear? Huh? Has he?"
"Better than that - okay, well maybe not better than that, but pretty darn good. He's got - get this - a collection of beer cups from every Green Bay Packer game since 1954. Gone to every Packer home game for almost 40 years, had a beer at the game and kept the cup from each one."
"And he's still alive? Sheesh," says Donnie B.
"Still alive and still drinking beer at the Packer games, and he's written his story and sent it to me. Can you believe it?"
"Aren't the cups kinda, you know, stinky?", comes in from Homer, who sits across from Donnie B and shares a VDT.
"Could be - prob'ly were at one point, but he washes out the cup when he gets home, writes the date - date of the game -- and the who the game was against on the bottom and he puts it on a shelf - here, here's a picture - so they're all organized. He can show you the cup he drank out of at the Ice Bowl, show you the variation from the Bears game with the Magic man, anything. He says he even knows when things started to get real commercial."
"When they started charging more than two bucks for a beer?", Donnie B. asks without even looking up from his terminal.
"Well, when they started looking for advertisers and it mattered what kind of beer was in the cup, when they started to get real picky about their logo and how you use it, stuff like that," O'Strowsky says. "And he's right - you can see it. Looks like a buncha beer cups, sure, but you start looking at the buncha beer cups and pretty soon you start seeing different things. Start seeing the march of time, the whole progress of the commercialization of the National Football League. Gets pretty interesting after a while.
"Didn't he ever miss a game?," asks Homer, who also wonders why none of this cool stuff ever comes his way, only it does and he can't see how cool it is.
"Oh yeah - he missed one," says O'Strowsky, in a way that you can tell he's still kinda awed by the whole thing. "Missed one game, on account of his daughter's wedding, but even there he had guy next to him drink a beer for him and save him the cup. Says his record's tainted, but he doesn't know anyone else who's been drinking as many beers for as long at Packer games as he has - and when you think about it, that's a real record."
"So is he trying to sell it or anything?," Homer asks.
"Oh, I guess he is. You know, you're always trying to sell something you're collecting, you get extras or what have you, you try to trade - but who's he going to trade with? But like he writes here - let me get down to it - "the thrill of assembling a once-in-a-lifetime collection like this is more valuable that anything I might realize in selling all or part of my collection."
"Needs some work, huh?," says Donnie B.
"Needs some work," says O'Strowsky. "But we'll get 'er into shape and put her in the magazine, make him famous. 'The guy with 40 years of Packer beer cups.' It'll be everywhere."
About this time Mort, who's been saying nothing through all this, which is just the way Mort is, comes over, picks up the picture and starts looking at it hard. Lifts up his glasses to get a better look, then hands it O'Strowsky and says, "Don't think you should print the story."
O'Strowsky likes being an angel and defends his minions, also doesn't like having his editorial judgment questioned, so he pulls himself up and makes his voice hard and says, "Okay - why's that?"
"Cup's a fake," Mort says. "That one right there" - and he points to a reddish one over in the right-hand corner. NFL championship cup, 1968.
"I't's a fake. Seen 'em before at shows. Cup company printed up a bunch as samples, kept 'em in a warehouse for 20 years. Some bright collector-seller was cleaning the warehouse, found the cups, started dishin' 'em out here and there at shows. You can get a hundred of 'em for fifteen bucks. You can't print the story. Collector types would pin you to the wall" - and since collector types are about the only types that read the words between the ads in O'Strowsky's magazine, O'Strowsky knows that Mort's right. He can't print it. The angel just lost a soul.
The rest of the guys chime in now, because they've all been in a position when they get taken on something someone swears is real, and it's very uncomfortable, since people are depending on you to know everything - which is impossible, but that's the way readers are.
Naturally O'Strowsky takes it kind of hard the rest of the afternoon - even takes an afternoon break, which is kind of unusual for O'Strowsky.
When he's gone I ask Mort, who doesn't usually go to shows or pipe up on these arguments, how and where he got the scuttlebutt on the fake cups.
"Oh heck, I don't know if that cup's fake or real or anything in between," he says. "I just get so damn tired of him making a Broadway production out of these collectors and their collections that only himself and four of his buddies give a crap about I had to do something. Plus, I want to hear him get on the phone with this guy and tell him he's got a fake cup."
Then I understand, and it actually makes some pretty good sense. Some people might think Mort's being cruel but Mort's a humane and charitable guy when it comes to writers, too. Just the editors give him trouble sometimes.
Friday, August 20, 2004
Still all high-falutin this month, with another excellent poem by Randy Seals. We will tap back into the sports vein soon. I promise.
OLD INDIANS
for my grandfather Paul Franklin Vaughn
We played bottlecap baseball,
my Grandpa Vaughn and me.
At the edge of the tracks
where the L&N ran north to Burlington
and south to Cairo
and west into Missouri,
after it had split the prairies of Illinois.
We played in the summer sun when the heat made
devils on the tracks and they shone like silver ribbons.
And sometimes we sat high above the world
listening to railroad chatter and drinking Coca Colas's with our feet up.
And sometimes my grandfather would whittle
and give me little boats and cars.
We played checkers on a bench that
he had carved into a board.
And maybe sometimes I would win.
And when the trains were slow
we would leave the tower
and cross the tracks
and walk through the fields
to look for arrowheads.
And I would find little ones.
And while I looked
my Grandpa would tell me
how the Indians had hunted
and lived and raised their families here
until the railroads forced them out.
And then,
when he was done
we would both stand very still
and look across the prairie grass.
And I saw two things.
Indian Campfires
and a faraway look
in my Grandpa's eyes.
As I got older I saw my Grandfather less.
But every time I would see him
he would greet me as he always had.
In French that he had learned in the first world war.
And he always smoked with his elbows on the table.
And he always wanted to buy me a beer.
And he always did what Grandma said.
And he always drove a Ford.
And the last time I saw him.
I helped him sip beer
through a straw.
And he gave me his railroad watch.
It keeps perfect time.
I miss that old man.
OLD INDIANS
for my grandfather Paul Franklin Vaughn
We played bottlecap baseball,
my Grandpa Vaughn and me.
At the edge of the tracks
where the L&N ran north to Burlington
and south to Cairo
and west into Missouri,
after it had split the prairies of Illinois.
We played in the summer sun when the heat made
devils on the tracks and they shone like silver ribbons.
And sometimes we sat high above the world
listening to railroad chatter and drinking Coca Colas's with our feet up.
And sometimes my grandfather would whittle
and give me little boats and cars.
We played checkers on a bench that
he had carved into a board.
And maybe sometimes I would win.
And when the trains were slow
we would leave the tower
and cross the tracks
and walk through the fields
to look for arrowheads.
And I would find little ones.
And while I looked
my Grandpa would tell me
how the Indians had hunted
and lived and raised their families here
until the railroads forced them out.
And then,
when he was done
we would both stand very still
and look across the prairie grass.
And I saw two things.
Indian Campfires
and a faraway look
in my Grandpa's eyes.
As I got older I saw my Grandfather less.
But every time I would see him
he would greet me as he always had.
In French that he had learned in the first world war.
And he always smoked with his elbows on the table.
And he always wanted to buy me a beer.
And he always did what Grandma said.
And he always drove a Ford.
And the last time I saw him.
I helped him sip beer
through a straw.
And he gave me his railroad watch.
It keeps perfect time.
I miss that old man.
