Jan. 11, 1989: King George discovers Paul Ott Carruth
(Author’s Note: This is one of a series of Packer stories I’ve written soon to be collected in a volume called, strangely enough, Packer Stories. If you’d like to read more Packer stories click here. If you want to learn more about the Packer Stories book, click here.)
King George came through the place yesterday, and even if you’d never seen him you would have known he’d been through on account of his voice. King George has a deep, boomy voice, and he never learned to use it soft, so from halfway across the building you can hear him go at it with Colin or the Kraut or the rest of the coin guys. The King also has a habit of when he talks of making everything sound like a royal proclamation. You go to the Crystal with him and when he orders the blue-plate special he proclaims, “And I shall have the blue-plate special,” and makes a big thing of handing the menu back to Ellen or Betty or whoever’s waitressing, as if he had never been there before and she had no idea he would ever have the blue-plate special. Fact is, he eats there almost every day when he’s in town and he always has the blue-plate special, so the proclamation bit is just an act for an audience which has seen it a thousand times anyway. Maybe that’s just the way he is around everyone, but if it is you feel bad for his wife. You’d think it’d be even more tiresome to be married to that than it is to see it around the Crystal five times a week.
The way he talks is what got him called King George more than anything, but he looks the part, too, in a minor-league kind of way. “A community theater’s idea of a king,” that’s how E-Boe puts it, and it’s a pretty fair description. King George has white hair and lots of it combed straight back, bushy white eyebrows, the start of some pretty good jowls, and he’s six-foot-four and walks like he’s got a ramrod shoved down his back. Not that you wouldn’t want to mess with him. It’s actually the opposite – guys like O’Strowsky and E-Boe feel like it’s their duty to mess with him just because he comes off so darn important. E-Boe and O’Strowsky aren’t mean about it, the way they mess with him, but one of the reasons they’re here is because they don’t take to self-important types like the King. When they find ‘em they cut ‘em to ribbons.
King George used to work at the company before most of us were around, back when it was just coin magazines. He’d write about medals and tokens and anything made of gold or silver, but eventually he just narrowed it down so he was writing about new coins. Most the new coins that come out in the world aren’t meant to be spent but are just big old pieces of silver with the Queen of England on one side and maybe some cocoa palms or astronauts on the other. Mostly they come from islands, volcanic specks out in the middle of the Pacific that don’t have any use for big pieces of silver except they make some money for the islands’ governments, which don’t have a lot coming in otherwise. Naturally they aren’t made on the islands; the islands contract with private mints all over the world to make the coins, and the mints ship ‘em out to mail-order guys and coin stores all over the world. Maybe four or five wind up back in the gift shop on the islands or on the prime minister’s desk, assuming the islands have a gift shop and the prime minister’s got a desk.
King George would write about these new coins from these little islands and slather them up good, like he does with the waitresses, so that collectors would finish reading about these coins and get this overpowering urge like they just had to have them right now. Collectors can get like that when something strikes them the right way. If their life is their collection and their collection’s totally incomplete because it lacks this coin, then their life’s totally incomplete until they get this coin, and who’s gonna settle for an incomplete life? Once they get the coin their life’s complete for a week until the next issue comes along and the lack of some other coin makes their life totally incomplete. That’s why you don’t find a lot of happy collectors in the world.
After a while the islands that make these coins figure King George is too good to just be doing this for one magazine, so they hire him to lay it on good on all the magazines. Difference is that when you’re on the inside pumping up coins no one figures it’s some kind of advertising plug planted to sell coins, but when you do the same thing on the outside it’s public relations. King George probably isn’t the smoothest operator when it comes to public relations, either, with his high-hat manners. Still, he works pretty cheap for a public-relations man and the volcanic specks out in the Pacific think he’s a fairly big muckety-muck as far as coins go, so they keep him around.
Last time King George was in he pulled his royal act all over the building, even on O’Strowsky, who kinda knew King George back from his days doing the coin magazines. Back then King George wouldn’t even deal with O’Strowsky, whose job it was to put together the news pages talking about all the new coins.
“King’d saunter over to Colin,” O’Strowsky says, “hand him some pictures and proclaim the way he does, ‘And here are those pictures and that story for Page 1, Colin.’ Colin’d take them and thank King George and then throw ‘em on top of one of the mountains on his desk and forget about ‘em for a couple weeks. Then he’d drop ‘em on my desk and say, ‘Here. Better get ‘em in before His Highness cuts off our heads.’ I had a pretty much standing story for these coins. Mess around with five words on the lead and a couple sentences down around the third paragraph and I’m done. Colin’s happy, King George never noticed the stories were all alike, and I save my dignity – or at least I got more time to work on junk like the numismatic history of the Ottoman Empire always gettin’ dumped on me.
“Last time the King’s in he finally talks to me -- finally, after all the years I spent writing about his coins. Sees me in the hall and says, ‘And how are you today, O’Shaughnessy?’” O’Strowsky does a passable imitation of the King, though it kinda sounds like the King crossed with Walter Cronkite. “O’Shaughnessy – and my name was in the paper every damn week writing about his coins! That did it for me right there. I said, ‘Great – how’s everyone back at the palace?’ and just kept walking. That fried it. Totally fried it.”
“So I figure next time he comes in we’ll fix him,” O’Strowsky says. “E-Boe’s got a buddy in Green Bay runs a mint, company that makes medals and coins, including coupla coins for the King’s banana plantations. E-Boe starts talking to this guy and comes to find out they got a new press they’re just bringing up and they need to test it out. E-Boe says to the guy, ‘Listen, I’ll pay for the silver, don’t care if it costs me two hundred bucks. I need to play a trick on the King’ – and this guy knows all about the King, even knows he’s called the King, ‘cause he has to deal with him on a business basis, which I guess is worse even than having to write about his coins. This guy’s all for it, so E-Boe says, ‘I want you to take the obverse’ – that’s the front – ‘from one of the King’s coins, then for the reverse I want you to use that Paul Ott Carruth thing you did.’ Over in Green Bay they had to strike some medal for Paul Ott Carruth being the Packer’s community-service leader or something, this company did it, and E-Boe knows about it because he wrote it up for the paper.
“The guy makes the coin just the way E-Boe says, and it looks absolutely real. Queen Elizabeth on the front, Paul Ott Carruth on the back. They even dig up one of those little black velvet boxes to put it in. I got it at my desk, and when I hear the King coming through I pick up the velvet box and start heading up the hall towards this voice. I find him up by Colin – who knows about this, too – and the King says, ‘Why, hello there, O’Shaughnessy,’ like he’s gonna be friendly after our little encounter the last time. I let that blow past and say, ‘Hey, thanks for sending along the coin,’ and hold up the box. ‘We’ll get this right in the magazine.’
“You can tell he’s not so sure what coin so he kinda stammers around and says, ‘All right, uh, that’s fine,’ and then he says, ‘Uh, is that it? May I see it?’ I play right along and say, ‘Sure,’ and hand him the box. He opens it, sees the Queen on the front all official and then flips it over and sees Paul Ott Carruth on the back. His jaw drops – I mean, drops. He turns red and then white and then red again, all up to the top of his head. He’s saying, ‘How did – how could they? They’re supposed to notify me – and you! And you – why they’d send it to you? You’re not even on the mailing list.’
“This is going pretty well, so then I say, ‘Uh, can I have that back? I need to shoot it. We’re putting it on the cover.’ He stammers some more and fumbles with it, then says, ‘Yeah, sure.’ He’s not really thinking to look into this in any great detail, ‘cause if he does, you know, he’ll figure out it’s all just a trick. His mind is just working over the idea of, ‘How could they do this without me? How could they?’, so I go in that direction.
“’You didn’t know about this?’ I ask, like I’m surprised they’d do this without him – and all the time E-Boe’s hanging back of me couple steps tryin’ not to bust a gut laughing. Then I get all sorry and say, ‘Gee, you know, maybe they’re going in a different direction with these sports coins. Maybe they just want you to do the non-sports coins. You really ought to call out there and check it out.’
“He’s really sincere, goin’, ‘You’re right. I should. I will. All right,’ and then he’s gone, vanished – doesn’t stay around to talk with the coin guys, nothin’. He’s just gone.
“I get two phone calls from him between then and now. The first one goes, ‘Hello there, O’Shaughnessy. This is George Kopar. What was the name of the football player on the obverse of the coin?’ I tell him and he hangs up.
“Second one, this morning, he just calls and says, ‘Hello there, O’Shaughnessy. This is George Kopar. You know, I never liked you, O’Shaughnessy,’ and hangs up.”
“Think he figured it out?”
(Author’s Note: This is one of a series of Packer stories I’ve written soon to be collected in a volume called, strangely enough, Packer Stories. If you’d like to read more Packer stories click here. If you want to learn more about the Packer Stories book, click here.)
King George came through the place yesterday, and even if you’d never seen him you would have known he’d been through on account of his voice. King George has a deep, boomy voice, and he never learned to use it soft, so from halfway across the building you can hear him go at it with Colin or the Kraut or the rest of the coin guys. The King also has a habit of when he talks of making everything sound like a royal proclamation. You go to the Crystal with him and when he orders the blue-plate special he proclaims, “And I shall have the blue-plate special,” and makes a big thing of handing the menu back to Ellen or Betty or whoever’s waitressing, as if he had never been there before and she had no idea he would ever have the blue-plate special. Fact is, he eats there almost every day when he’s in town and he always has the blue-plate special, so the proclamation bit is just an act for an audience which has seen it a thousand times anyway. Maybe that’s just the way he is around everyone, but if it is you feel bad for his wife. You’d think it’d be even more tiresome to be married to that than it is to see it around the Crystal five times a week.
The way he talks is what got him called King George more than anything, but he looks the part, too, in a minor-league kind of way. “A community theater’s idea of a king,” that’s how E-Boe puts it, and it’s a pretty fair description. King George has white hair and lots of it combed straight back, bushy white eyebrows, the start of some pretty good jowls, and he’s six-foot-four and walks like he’s got a ramrod shoved down his back. Not that you wouldn’t want to mess with him. It’s actually the opposite – guys like O’Strowsky and E-Boe feel like it’s their duty to mess with him just because he comes off so darn important. E-Boe and O’Strowsky aren’t mean about it, the way they mess with him, but one of the reasons they’re here is because they don’t take to self-important types like the King. When they find ‘em they cut ‘em to ribbons.
King George used to work at the company before most of us were around, back when it was just coin magazines. He’d write about medals and tokens and anything made of gold or silver, but eventually he just narrowed it down so he was writing about new coins. Most the new coins that come out in the world aren’t meant to be spent but are just big old pieces of silver with the Queen of England on one side and maybe some cocoa palms or astronauts on the other. Mostly they come from islands, volcanic specks out in the middle of the Pacific that don’t have any use for big pieces of silver except they make some money for the islands’ governments, which don’t have a lot coming in otherwise. Naturally they aren’t made on the islands; the islands contract with private mints all over the world to make the coins, and the mints ship ‘em out to mail-order guys and coin stores all over the world. Maybe four or five wind up back in the gift shop on the islands or on the prime minister’s desk, assuming the islands have a gift shop and the prime minister’s got a desk.
King George would write about these new coins from these little islands and slather them up good, like he does with the waitresses, so that collectors would finish reading about these coins and get this overpowering urge like they just had to have them right now. Collectors can get like that when something strikes them the right way. If their life is their collection and their collection’s totally incomplete because it lacks this coin, then their life’s totally incomplete until they get this coin, and who’s gonna settle for an incomplete life? Once they get the coin their life’s complete for a week until the next issue comes along and the lack of some other coin makes their life totally incomplete. That’s why you don’t find a lot of happy collectors in the world.
After a while the islands that make these coins figure King George is too good to just be doing this for one magazine, so they hire him to lay it on good on all the magazines. Difference is that when you’re on the inside pumping up coins no one figures it’s some kind of advertising plug planted to sell coins, but when you do the same thing on the outside it’s public relations. King George probably isn’t the smoothest operator when it comes to public relations, either, with his high-hat manners. Still, he works pretty cheap for a public-relations man and the volcanic specks out in the Pacific think he’s a fairly big muckety-muck as far as coins go, so they keep him around.
Last time King George was in he pulled his royal act all over the building, even on O’Strowsky, who kinda knew King George back from his days doing the coin magazines. Back then King George wouldn’t even deal with O’Strowsky, whose job it was to put together the news pages talking about all the new coins.
“King’d saunter over to Colin,” O’Strowsky says, “hand him some pictures and proclaim the way he does, ‘And here are those pictures and that story for Page 1, Colin.’ Colin’d take them and thank King George and then throw ‘em on top of one of the mountains on his desk and forget about ‘em for a couple weeks. Then he’d drop ‘em on my desk and say, ‘Here. Better get ‘em in before His Highness cuts off our heads.’ I had a pretty much standing story for these coins. Mess around with five words on the lead and a couple sentences down around the third paragraph and I’m done. Colin’s happy, King George never noticed the stories were all alike, and I save my dignity – or at least I got more time to work on junk like the numismatic history of the Ottoman Empire always gettin’ dumped on me.
“Last time the King’s in he finally talks to me -- finally, after all the years I spent writing about his coins. Sees me in the hall and says, ‘And how are you today, O’Shaughnessy?’” O’Strowsky does a passable imitation of the King, though it kinda sounds like the King crossed with Walter Cronkite. “O’Shaughnessy – and my name was in the paper every damn week writing about his coins! That did it for me right there. I said, ‘Great – how’s everyone back at the palace?’ and just kept walking. That fried it. Totally fried it.”
“So I figure next time he comes in we’ll fix him,” O’Strowsky says. “E-Boe’s got a buddy in Green Bay runs a mint, company that makes medals and coins, including coupla coins for the King’s banana plantations. E-Boe starts talking to this guy and comes to find out they got a new press they’re just bringing up and they need to test it out. E-Boe says to the guy, ‘Listen, I’ll pay for the silver, don’t care if it costs me two hundred bucks. I need to play a trick on the King’ – and this guy knows all about the King, even knows he’s called the King, ‘cause he has to deal with him on a business basis, which I guess is worse even than having to write about his coins. This guy’s all for it, so E-Boe says, ‘I want you to take the obverse’ – that’s the front – ‘from one of the King’s coins, then for the reverse I want you to use that Paul Ott Carruth thing you did.’ Over in Green Bay they had to strike some medal for Paul Ott Carruth being the Packer’s community-service leader or something, this company did it, and E-Boe knows about it because he wrote it up for the paper.
“The guy makes the coin just the way E-Boe says, and it looks absolutely real. Queen Elizabeth on the front, Paul Ott Carruth on the back. They even dig up one of those little black velvet boxes to put it in. I got it at my desk, and when I hear the King coming through I pick up the velvet box and start heading up the hall towards this voice. I find him up by Colin – who knows about this, too – and the King says, ‘Why, hello there, O’Shaughnessy,’ like he’s gonna be friendly after our little encounter the last time. I let that blow past and say, ‘Hey, thanks for sending along the coin,’ and hold up the box. ‘We’ll get this right in the magazine.’
“You can tell he’s not so sure what coin so he kinda stammers around and says, ‘All right, uh, that’s fine,’ and then he says, ‘Uh, is that it? May I see it?’ I play right along and say, ‘Sure,’ and hand him the box. He opens it, sees the Queen on the front all official and then flips it over and sees Paul Ott Carruth on the back. His jaw drops – I mean, drops. He turns red and then white and then red again, all up to the top of his head. He’s saying, ‘How did – how could they? They’re supposed to notify me – and you! And you – why they’d send it to you? You’re not even on the mailing list.’
“This is going pretty well, so then I say, ‘Uh, can I have that back? I need to shoot it. We’re putting it on the cover.’ He stammers some more and fumbles with it, then says, ‘Yeah, sure.’ He’s not really thinking to look into this in any great detail, ‘cause if he does, you know, he’ll figure out it’s all just a trick. His mind is just working over the idea of, ‘How could they do this without me? How could they?’, so I go in that direction.
“’You didn’t know about this?’ I ask, like I’m surprised they’d do this without him – and all the time E-Boe’s hanging back of me couple steps tryin’ not to bust a gut laughing. Then I get all sorry and say, ‘Gee, you know, maybe they’re going in a different direction with these sports coins. Maybe they just want you to do the non-sports coins. You really ought to call out there and check it out.’
“He’s really sincere, goin’, ‘You’re right. I should. I will. All right,’ and then he’s gone, vanished – doesn’t stay around to talk with the coin guys, nothin’. He’s just gone.
“I get two phone calls from him between then and now. The first one goes, ‘Hello there, O’Shaughnessy. This is George Kopar. What was the name of the football player on the obverse of the coin?’ I tell him and he hangs up.
“Second one, this morning, he just calls and says, ‘Hello there, O’Shaughnessy. This is George Kopar. You know, I never liked you, O’Shaughnessy,’ and hangs up.”
“Think he figured it out?”
posted by Kit Kiefer | 7:53 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home