Jim Goldsworthy, Columnist
Cumberland Times-News
February 28, 2010 — I picked up the morning paper and read the front-page headline aloud:
“Potholes will be problem as snow melts,” I said, adding “Nooooo (fooling).”
One of the other editors shrugged and said, “That’s one of those stories that ... well, what sort of a headline would you put on it?”
Probably something like, “Potholes will be problem as snow melts,” I said. That is what the story says.
However, there was a time when I did better than that.
Believe it or not, Cumberland’s potholes once were far worse than anything we have today, particularly on Mechanic Street. We called them “(Whatshisname) Tank Traps,” after the man who was mayor at the time.
Soupy Lancaster, the city editor, sent reporter Syd Brant and me out to document the most majestic of them with a Polaroid camera and a tape measure.
Syd and I tossed a coin and I lost, so I took a picture of him kneeling beside the pothole with a snap-brim hat on his bald head and a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, trying to stretch the tape from one end of the abyss to the other.
My recollection is that it was more than eight feet long, several inches deep and close to two feet across at its widest point, making it the Marianas Trench of potholes.
Joe Delaney, our artist, added to the photo a drawing of a gnome sitting on the rim of the pothole, dangling his feet into it.
The caption read something like, “Evening Times reporter Syd Brant measures Mechanic Street’s most treacherous pothole as Harvey, the Highway Hobgoblin, looks on.”
That didn’t win us any friends at City Hall, but so what? It helped increase the volume of people who complained about the potholes until something was done about them.
A few months later, we ran a photo of the dilapidated old railroad bridge that crossed the highway in the Narrows, and Joe brought back our gnome friend as Tommy, the Trestle Troll.
The Sage of Shriver Avenue told me he hit that Mechanic Street pothole and had to get his Jeep towed because it blew out one of his tires and bent one of his wheels. He wasn’t going that fast, so much as the pothole was that deep.
I wrote a column about his experience and wracked my brains to come up with a good headline, but to no avail.
The night before it went to press, I woke up at 3 a.m., sat straight up in bed and said out loud, “A Street Scar Maimed His Tire.”
To this day, that’s probably the best headline I’ve ever written.
Unfortunately, it may now be lost on most younger folks because we’ve got at least one generation of people (maybe even two or three) growing up who, in many cases, have little appreciation of our cultural heritage.
When I was a kid, my friends and I were were familiar with the music, movies, sports and literature and many other things that were around long before we were born. For that matter, we had a general awareness of both American and world history.
One night, there must have been a full moon in Newspaperland because we encountered a remarkable run of screwy misadventures, mostly involving computer problems, misunderstandings and what you might say were unconventional phone calls and visitors.
“Somewhere,” I said, “Rod Serling is looking down and laughing his (beast of burden) off at us.”
One of the twentysomethings asked me, “Who’s that?”
I didn’t have an answer for him. I still don’t.
And not long after that, one of our teensomethings asked another fellow and me when Pearl Harbor was attacked. It was the night of Dec. 6 when she did this.
He and I are about the same age and told her what she needed to know without having to Google it or look it up in the encyclopedia.
A while later, she returned to ask, “How far apart are Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”
My friend and I put aside what we later discovered was our mutual temptation to say, “Call Curtis LeMay. He can tell you,” and told her our best guess was a few hundred miles.
“No,” she said, “how many days?”
I almost told her it would depend upon whether she walked, rode a horse, took a car or flew, but said, “Three days: Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945.”
The next morning, we discovered that she had written a story about three local sailors who fought in “The Battle of Lady Gulf.”
Another young fellow who used to work here was lecturing one of our editors on what he believed was an utter lack of communication between the newspaper’s departments.
I was tempted to tell him that some of us don’t have that problem for the simple reason that we actually talk to each other about what’s going on.
Instead, I recited the following (speaking with the appropriate accent):
What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
Some men, you just can’t reach.
So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it.
Well, he gets it.
I don’t like it any more than you men.
The kid gave me a blank stare and asked, “What are you talking about?”
I remarked that he must not be a Paul Newman fan.
“Never heard of him,” he said.
When I told another of my contemporaries about this exchange, he said, “Kid probably doesn’t eat salads, either.”
I liked this youngster. We talked about a lot of subjects, including some of the items I’ve got pinned to my walls in Dilbertville, our editors’ cubicle city.
One thing he never asked about is a little sign that’s there to inspire me when I need to put aside whatever lack of motivation I’m experiencing and do my job.
It says:
Still shakin’ it, Boss!
