The other day I was going through a pile of old travel sections (something I almost never do) looking for a story I had written about an Easter I once spent in Greece. The section, which I eventually found, carried my Greek Easter story along with a story by Tania Grossinger about Passover at her family's famous resort in the Catskills. The third story on the cover - we didn't think that a pair of interesting Sunday narratives would be enough for readers back then - was about Rio de Janeiro. The headline - "Girl from Ipanema no longer so lovely" - suggested that it was the generic story you sometimes saw about how the inspiration for the famous song had inevitably aged. The byline - of a local freelancer - suggested otherwise. Before the jump I came to this:
"Inflation is once again on the gallop and unemployment lines are lengthening. What's more, Brazilian voters say they no longer believe the government is willing or able to solve the country's seemingly intractable economic problems..."
I checked the date of the section - March 31, 1991 - and was almost as depressed by how American newspapers have changed as I was by how Brazil hasn't.
My “Newspaper Days: A Journal of the Plague Year” has just appeared in the summer issue of the Southwest Review. It is an excerpt from a still unpublished book I wrote in 2007. My timing was excellent, not just because 2007 turned out to be a momentous year in American journalism, or because it ended up being my last full year at the newspaper, but because most of the characters in the book – the theater critic, the TV critic, the home & garden editor, the food editor, the book editor, the travel editor (me) – held positions that no longer exist at the newspaper.
On February 10, 1991 – during the first Gulf War – I ran on the cover of the Sun-Sentinel Travel section a story titled “Flight from Iraq.” It was written by a local woman who had returned home a few months earlier after being evacuated from Baghdad, where she had been working at the American Cultural Center.
Monday morning Gene Cryer was not a happy editor. “Nobody’s traveling to Iraq!” he bellowed, using a few more colorful words.
Gene and I had different views on what a Travel section should be. Like most newspaper editors, he saw it as an escape for readers, and a source of practical information; I thought of it as having more of an educational, as well as an entertaining, role; a place for armchair travelers. My hope was that readers would be interested to learn about a country that was now the focus of the world’s attention.
Yet that was about the only time Gene complained about one of my unconventional stories, and there were many. He allowed me to run the section according to my philosophy, in part because he had more pressing concerns (Travel is a low priority at any newspaper) but also because he was of the old school, unfazed by potential disapproval from advertisers. He believed in the people he hired, and trusted them to do their jobs as they saw fit. It was with great sadness that I learned of his death.
Whoever inherits my library will be surprised (well, perhaps not now) to find, tucked in some of the books, the New York Times obituary of the author. The most recent author to get this insert was Umberto Eco. I have no copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. And I have no copy of The Name of the Rose; the obit went into How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays. And, since I didn't get the Times the day the obit ran, I had to print it off the Internet. So instead of a thin page of tightly-worded newsprint, folded once, How to Travel With a Salmon now bulges with six 8.5x11 pieces of paper, folded twice. The moral: always buy the paper.
Reading the Herald this weekend I came across something I’d never seen in half a century of newspaper reading: the price of a book in an obituary.
This weekend, reading the frequent Facebook posts from a former colleague who was attending the annual meeting of national travel editors, I discovered the beauty of instant communication: I not only learned what I was missing – lots of talk about advertisers and sponsors – I felt grateful that I was missing it.