Sunday, February 25, 2018

Still Henry after all these years

When I was a kid, Sunday mornings were a sacred time.

A time when my siblings and I would gather around the most venerated object in our house.

Our TV set.

And at 9 a.m. we would watch the Sunday morning movie on Channel 3.

And we would watch it until our parents almost forcibly pulled us away so we could attend this thing called Sunday Mass.

But it didn’t matter much because we knew that Abbott and Costello, Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule would prove triumphant and things would turn out all right for whatever young couple they were trying to help. (Of course, the Universal contract players who played these couples would go on to have fairly undistinguished careers before fading out completely, but Bud and Lou could do only so much.)

Although I enjoyed all these folks, there was one other component of the Sunday movie rotation who meant more to me.

A guy whose movies always began with his mom calling to him in a voice that was one-tenth mother love and nine-tenths Armageddon:

“HENRY! HENRY ALDRICH!”

Henry, played by a young actor named James Lydon, was Charlie Brown years before Charlie Brown was Charlie Brown.

Henry was the world’s most incompetent high school student. There was nothing he couldn’t screw up.

And although I was much younger, I could identify with that. Sure, I was somehow able to read at a very early age, but ask me to tie my shoes? Or ride a bike? No sir. I was all thumbs. (I was probably all toes too, but no one ever asked me to do anything with them.)

So I sympathized and empathized as Henry, always a well-meaning sort with the purest of intentions, would get into a bit of trouble, then a dollop of trouble, then a tractor-trailer load of trouble, until he would finally, somehow, and unlike me, emerge victorious in the end.

Only Henry Aldrich would form his own band, then manage to run afoul of crooks and gamblers. Or swallow a serum that somehow caused him to enter a supposedly haunted house, where he surprisingly didn’t run into Bud and Lou or Red Skelton, who at the time were plowing similar cinematic turf.

Then there was the time that Henry, as editor of his school paper, was suspected of setting a series of arson fires that he himself was covering. The real pyromaniac was caught, but the real mystery — how a high school kid was allowed to cover real crime news — was never solved.

I thought about Henry a few weeks ago while I was watching an episode of “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” the vintage western that catapulted Steve McQueen to fame. In this episode, a woman hires bounty hunter Josh Randall, played by McQueen, to find her husband, who has fled after being falsely accused of murder.

Randall eventually finds the guy, brings him in, and justice prevails.

The guy was played by James Lydon — Henry Aldrich! Still getting into trouble!

Just a few days later, I watched an episode of “Trackdown,” the vintage western that catapulted Robert Culp to fame. In this episode, Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman, played by Culp, is confronted by a woman who says she can provide an alibi for her boyfriend, who is in the town jail, accused of murder.

It turns out that the woman is lying, but the real killer, who heard about her story but doesn’t know she’s lying, tries to kill her, muffs it and gets gunned down by Hoby.

So the boyfriend goes free. And he’s played by — all together, now — James Lydon, Henry Aldrich!

The show (which, surprise surprise, was produced by the same company as “Wanted: Dead or Alive”) never goes into the question of what happened to James/Henry’s wife from “Wanted.” Did she die? Or, more likely, did she finally get fed up and divorce him?

Perhaps we’ll never know. But I am happy to say that, as of this writing, Mr. Lydon, who also had a distinguished career behind the camera (he was one of the people behind TV’s “M*A*S*H”), is still with us at the age of 94.

I hope that he is well and that finally, after all these years, he is keeping out of mischief.

But I’m not uncrossing my fingers.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Newsroom Memories: The Fantastic Mr. Fah

It’s a Monday night in the newsroom, about 40 years ago, and with nothing else to do I pick up an obituary to edit.

The paper has no assigned obituary writer. Obits are written by interns or by whichever reporter is lucky enough to pick up the phone when a funeral director calls to dictate the death notice.

Most obituaries get a 14-point headline with just the person’s name. This obituary, for one Walter J. Fah, has a 36-point, two-column, two-line headline, which means that Mr. Fah had some claim to fame.

Upon examining the obit, I find that Mr. Fah was once mayor of one of our regional communities.

Editing the obit seems like a simple enough job, but I notice that Mr. Fah’s two sons have a different last name.

Well, it’s possible, I think. But of course I am duty-bound to call the funeral director and check.

Our conversation goes something like this:

“Hello, I have a question about the Walter Fah obit.”

A pause.

“You mean ‘Smith,’ don’t you?”

“No, Walter J. Fah.”

“You mean Smith — Walter J. Smith!”

Then I remember that the two sons are both named Smith.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “Was this guy a former mayor?”

“Yes! Mayor Walter J. Smith!”

“OK,” I say, and the conversation ends soon after, or at least my side of it does. For all I know, the funeral director is still grumbling about it, and who could blame him?

I finish working on the obit, then walk up to the managing editor and tell him that we almost had a headline saying “Former Mayor Fah Dies.”

He is not pleased.

I then talk to the night city editor, who is in charge of the intern who took the call.

I then see him walk up to the intern, whom I hadn’t seen before and haven’t seen since.

The night city editor eventually gets back to me.

He gives me the same explanation that I have often heard from reporters in similar — if not quite so blatant — situations:

“He says that’s the way they gave it to him over the phone.”

Fah, Smith. Yeah, anyone could get those confused.

And the phone excuse is ingenious because phone calls in the newsroom aren’t recorded or otherwise documented.

At least reporters who take obits over the phone are usually accurate. But as the years pass, the interns come and go. Granted, taking obits is a good test of whether a student or newcomer can master the basics of newswriting, and some interns turn out to be good.

But over the years I will see such things as:

“He was a Full Bright Scholar.”

“He worked for Floor Shine Shoes.”

And my favorite:

“He was a veteran of World War II, having served in Pernissia.”

When I saw that one I walked across the room to someone who was part of a follow-up crew after the Normandy Invasion.

He never heard of Pernissia either.

So I called the funeral director. Luckily, as I recall, it wasn’t the same guy who helped shepherd ex-Mayor Fah -- I mean Smith -- to his final resting place.

And now the answer you’ve been panting for:

Tunisia.

Well, at least Tunisia and Pernissia sound a little bit alike.

The good news is that the paper eventually assigned a full-time employee, a capable J-school grad, to write obits. The bad news is that a) after some years this guy moved on to another job at the paper; b) the obituary job was assigned to clerks who didn’t have the news sense that God gave an ostrich; and c) someone had to go and invent the fax machine.

This means that instead of having to take the time to dictate obits over the phone, funeral directors everywhere could type up an obit and fax it anywhere.

So we were flooded with obits from all over about people whose links to my area were hazy at best, and the clerks typed them up in full and sent them directly to the copy editors.

At one point, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see an obit for someone who merely drove through my hometown.

And I found myself spending as much as two hours a day working on obits before getting to the other news of the day.

Finally, relief came from an unexpected source: the ad department. There were so many obits coming in, and they took up so much space, that management decided to make money from them. This meant that all obits had to go through the ad department, and the folks in the newsroom weren’t allowed to touch them. Oh happy day.

From unhappy personal experience I have learned that the newspaper’s obits can be quite costly.

But if you retired from the newspaper, as I did some years ago, you get a free obit.

It’s always nice to have something to look forward to.