For those of you who know me and my family, enjoy. For those of you that don't, I hope you enjoy it anyway. And Merry Christmas!

The Gift of the Moll-I

A Christmas Story.

Two hundred sixty-four dollars and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And one hundred thirty-eight dollars and sixty cents of it in the smallest pieces of money - pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by babysitting, by making clay-covered pens and selling them one or two at a time at craft fairs. Pennies earned by actually doing something her parents asked for a change. Three times Molly Mae Kiefer counted it. Two hundred sixty-four dollars and eighty-seven cents. That pretty much shot the whole day right there.  And the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing to do but sit down and cry. So Molly Mae Kiefer cried. Which led to the thought that life is made up of little cries and smiles, with more little cries than smiles – especially now that she had braces.

Molly finished her crying and dried her face. She stood by the window and looked out unhappily at a gray cat walking along a gray fence in a gray back yard, and wondered what the heck Benji was doing out loose. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only two hundred sixty-four dollars and eighty-seven cents to buy her brother Andrew a gift. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result.

Andrew had expensive tastes, which made things difficult, seeing as his income was slightly south of zero. Expenses had been greater than she had expected. iTunes adds up. Many a happy couple of seconds she had spared from fighting with Andrew she spent planning to buy something nice for him. Something fine and expensive -- because he would flat-out have nothing to do with anything cheap.

There was a tall glass mirror between the windows of the room.  Suddenly Molly turned from the window and stood before the glass mirror and looked at herself. Her eyes were shining, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Quickly she raised on her toes and on to pointe.

Now, Molly and Andrew Kiefer had two things which they valued. One was Andrew’s love of hunting. The other was Molly’s love of dancing.

She put on her Land’s End coat, her Land’s End scarf, her Land’s End mittens, her Land’s End boots, and her Land’s End hat over her Land’s End sweater, Land’s End shirt, Land’s End pants, and Land’s End socks. With a quick motion and brightness still in her eyes, she danced out the door and down the street.

She ran to the dance studio (her driving lessons still being a work in progress) and dashed in the door, out of breath.

"Will you buy my dance shoes?" asked Molly.

"Let us have a look," said Ms. Tori.

Out came the beautiful new pointe shoes.

"Twenty dollars," said Ms. Tori.

"Easy come, easy go," said Molly, who knew she hadn’t paid a cent for the shoes. Poor mother and father! “Give it to me quick.”

The next two hours went by as if they had wings. Molly flew to the sporting-goods store and found the perfect bow at last. It surely had been made for Andrew and no one else.  Fancy, yes, but also expensive. She gave the shopkeeper two hundred seventy-five dollars and hurried home.

"If Andy does not kill me before he looks at my feet, it will just be like any other day," she said to herself. “But what could I do--oh! what could I do with only two hundred sixty-four dollars and eighty-seven cents?"

Andrew was never late coming home from school.  Molly held the bow in her hand and sat near the door. Then she heard his step and she turned white for just a minute.

The door opened and Andrew stepped in. He looked thin and very serious. A fall spent running cross-country and a winter of hockey – not to mention a continual growth spurt – had him looking tall and thin.

Andrew stopped inside the door, as immovable as a dog smelling a bird. His eyes were fixed upon Molly. There was an expression in them that she could not read. Molly went to him.

"Dear Andrew," she cried, "do not look at me that way. I sold my pointe shoes because I could not have lived through Christmas without giving you a gift. Our mother and father will buy me another pair. I just had to do it. "

"You have sold your pointe shoes?" asked Andrew, slowly, as if he had not accepted the information even after his mind worked very hard. “Does that mean I don’t have to go to yours and Danny’s dance recital this year?”

"Do you not like me just as well without dance?" said Molly. "I am the same person without my pointe shoes, right?”

Andrew looked about the room as if he were looking for something.

"So where’s my arrows?" he asked.

"You need not look for them," said Molly. "You sold them to buy me more ballet lessons, just like in the story -- right?"

"Oh, heck, no," he said. "But I am really glad I get to skip that dumb recital. Now, did I leave the arrows in my bedroom, or are they downstairs?"

White fingers quickly tore at the tall lad. There was a scream; and then, alas! a change to tears and cries.

“You big dummy!” Molly cried – and look! Young Danny had taken a break from his singing and dancing to slip in a few licks of his own on his big brother. “It’s a dirty cheat! A big dirty cheat! You could have sold the arrows to buy me a leotard! Or those hockey medals you got for winning state – again! How many state-championship medals does a lummox like you need, anyway? That does it! I’m out of here!” And with that she stormed upstairs to do her homework – for Molly is nothing if not an excellent student.

Andrew fell on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.

"Do you think we should tell her that mom and dad got her brand-new pointe shoes – and that fancy leotard she wanted – and another pair of Land’s End boots?" said he.

“And your bow – right?” Danny said.

“Maybe someday. But we’ll take this one back to the store and get her money.” He pulled an iPod Touch from his pocket and tossed his brother his Nintendo DS. “And now, why not play some games? iCarly is on in half an hour."

The magi were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Baby Jesus. They invented the art of giving Christmas gifts. And here I have told you the story of young people who most unwisely expected each other would give the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days, let it be said that the Kiefer children, all three, brighten our days with their laughter and love and warm hearts. They may not be the magi quite yet. Let us call them the Moll-I.

John McNulty is one of the lost treasures of American literature, a legendary rewrite man, a chronicler of life in and around the Irish pubs that thrived in the shadow of New York's elevated railway, a humorist of exquisite taste and gentleness, a dialectician without peer, a classic storyteller.

The McNulty Project aims to re-create John McNulty's style and gentle humor in a semi-fictional memoir set in Iola, Wisconsin, in the late 1980s and early '90s. In addition, The McNulty Project features biographical sketches of McNulty and excerpts from his best stories.

Dive in anywhere -- but if you're interested in the blog, you'd best start with "This Place Where I Work." Enjoy.

-- Kit Kiefer

July 7, 1990: Slum Is Where Your Heart Is

Sometimes about now the slummers come out of the ground in bunches, like radishes. We call them “slummers” not because this place is a slum or anything but because that’s what they call themselves when they take their turns through the building. “Oh, we’re just slumming,” they say sort of half-jolly and half-ashamed, no one there along with them from the company guiding them through, and we smile and wave about as much as any museum exhibit would like to.

Colin’s different about them, as you’d expect. He comes roaring out from behind the mountains of papers on his couple of desks, grabs their arms and says everything in big letters, all so you can hear him down at the other end of the building, “Hey, c’mon back here! Ever seen stone money from Yap? Know why they call it Yap, doncha? Scandinavians – like the Vikings discovered America -- came to the island and couldn’t pronounce ‘Jap,’ see, and so they said to one of the natives, ‘You – Yap,’ and it stuck. Here – know why it’s got a hole in the middle? It’s a fertility thing,” and he goes on like that, five minutes. All lies, every one, but slummers are shook up at the end of it. No different than going to a horror movie, Colin says. Not a lot of truth in a horror movie but it shakes you up just the same, which is what Colin’s after.

Colin can get away with it because he's Colin. Rest of us can't because we are who we are. World's foremost authorities on Chinese money are hard to come by. Card guys you can get five for nickel, with one stick gum.

Hard to figure out why slummers come here, though. It’s not on the main road. It’s not even on the road you take when you don’t take the main road. It’s on the road you take when you have to get somewhere that’s on the road. Unless you're a deer, which case it's the road you take to die. People coming from New York really have to have it in their heads they want to come here. People from Chicago it’s more reasonable, but at that it’s two hours out of their way going anywhere.

Only thing we want to know about slummers is what kind of people they are: old-car people, comic-book people, baseball-card people, postcard people, people with a reason to come here other than it's a big flat building in a town of little flat buildings. They look at us curious and then look somewhere else, they're not baseball-card people. They look at us curious and keep looking, staring, maybe some disbelief, they're baseball-card people, unless Duke is nearby, which case it's just Duke.

Once we figure out what kind of people they are we're done with them unless they're baseball-card people. If that's the case we send out whoever's least busy to talk with them for a while until they ask Their Question. Their Question is "What is this worth?", or one of its stepchildren, "My friend has this ball," and "Can I retire on my collection?" We tell them and they go away happy sometimes and less than happy most of the time, which is the way life breaks anyway outside of baseball cards, so what's to complain about?

Four slummers were through the other day, and this is before Colin got hold of them. For whatever reason Mort doesn't wait for the stare. We have a box full of odd packs and cards no one wants because they're worthless and ugly besides. Pacific Flash Cards, sportswriter cards, Sportflics, which are these cards with three images that change when you tilt them, stickers. We call it the Steal Box in hopes that one of the help will figure they can take this box to a flea market and make a killing, but unfortunately everyone around here's too smart to grab the Steal Box.

Mort reaches in the Steal Box, grabs a handful of packs and cuts a straight path to the slummers. "Here you go!" he bellers for Mort, which is near a normal voice for anyone else, then he pushes the packs into the slummers' chests and lets go, so they have to grab on. "Baseball cards! Go get rich on baseball cards! Tell 'em Rick Baumer said you can retire on these baseball cards! Go to the nearest card store! Do not pass go or collect two hundred dollars! Go on -- go! Whatcha waiting for? Go!"

Slummers don't know whether to thank Mort for their fortune or just take the fortune and run. They don't run, but they walk a lot faster.

We must have looked different at Mort, because he swings his head fast so he can give us all a look and then says, "Two things: Baumer was least busy and I'm deadlining a 304-page issue. Okay?" And then he heads back to the pagination he has spread all over his desk and the layout table.

"Okay? Yeah; okay by us," Whitey says, and throws some more dog packs in the Steal Box. "Every slummer needs a piece of the slum to take home with him."

Wednesday, June 6, 1990: Whitey can't trump the storytellers
Whitey's a hockey guy, in that he has that square Gump Worsley shape some people have that play hockey. Gump Worsley was a pretty good goalie in the '50s and '60s, and he was shaped square all around - square jaw, square shoulders, square legs when he got the pads on - except for the belly which was soft, and people loved Gump because he was shaped like them, not like some athlete, and he was called Gump, which told you something right there.

When Whitey came into his Gump Worsley shape he took to goalie. That and catching baseball. You find lot of guys play hockey goalie in the winter and catch baseball in the summer. They get used to people firing hard things at them fast, get the mentality for one and find it works all right with the other.

Whitey being a hockey guy gets most of the hockey gear, the hockey stories and the people with the hockey stories coming to him naturally, like some special kind of gravity sorts out the hockey stuff and sends it falling into his lap. Maybe because it's hockey or maybe because it's Whitey, but the stories that fall to him are better than the ones that fall to the football guys or the baseball guys.

Most of the people who call up Whitey about hockey are either from Canada or Detroit. Everyone knows about hockey and Canada, but hockey stuck pretty hard around Detroit too, with Gordie Howe and the rest of the Red Wings being so good and Canada being so close. All the Slovaks and Poles and Bohemians took to the Red Wings and never got it out of their system, plus the guy on the radio did the Red Wings games was so good for so long, so that kids started following the games because their dads did, and their kids followed the games, and maybe even their kids, ones that were born recently enough. When it comes to hockey Detroit is a lot more like Canada than the States.

For being in the business of catching hard things at least part-time, Whitey is aggressive about winning. He doesn’t like losing. Someone tells Whitey a story and Whitey tries to tell a better one, bigger story, larger lie, only it’s hard with the hockey guys. “Canuck calls me up from around Winnipeg somewhere – out there in the muskeg or whatever they call it – and starts telling me about his buddy Garth and the pickup hockey game they have Friday nights,” Whitey’ll say by way of introducing one of the stories that beat him. “Friday nights in Winnipeg, you know, not much going on, gets cold, gets dark early, pickup hockey game’s bound to wind up like a kegger around here. Have a few, skate around some. Then you have a few more, skate around some more, maybe bounce someone into the boards, that calls for a cold one, grab another one, before you know it you’re fresh out.

"Someone yells for Garth to drive down to the LCB – the liquor store, in Canada government owns the liquor stores, there’s something for you – and he says, ‘Hell no, I’m not taking my car down there. You want me to get arrested for drunk driving?’

“’Naw, naw, don’t take the car,’ they tell him. ‘Course you don’t want to take the car. They’ll arrest you in a minute. Don’t want you getting arrested. Take the Zamboni.’

“Okay, so taking the Zamboni sounds all right to Garth, tells you how far gone he is. They open the garage door and he backs out the Zamboni, doesn’t hit a thing if you can believe it, drives it along the side of the road to the liquor store.

"Now no one driving past thinks this is anything unusual, so you gotta believe in Winnipeg people are driving Zambonis everywhere – beauty shop, grocery store, take the kids to soccer games, who needs a minivan. Parks the Zamboni in front of the liquor store, grabs a 24-pack of Molson Canadian, pays for it naturally, then hops back on the Zamboni.

“Canuck tells me Garth would have made it all the way back no problem if he hadn’t made a detour to a Tim Horton’s, donut place named after the dead guy. Winnipeg cop was hanging out there drinking coffee and chomping on a cruller, saw the Zamboni and put the arm on Garth. Finished his donut first, of course.”

“That’s pretty good,” Homer says.

“That’s not the best,” Whitey says back. “Got another call, this time from the Hawk, he calls himself. Ask him if it’s short for Black Hawk and he isn’t just Dale Tallon or Stan Mikita or somebody and he just laughs, crazy kind of laugh. But he’s not Chicago, he’s Canadian; you can tell from the ‘oot’ and ‘aboots.’

“Hawk I’ve talked to before. Don’t know what got him calling me, why I deserve him, but he’s amazing. I can name any hockey player ever in the NHL and he’s got a story about him – and it almost always involves the Hawk. I say, ‘Give me an Orest Kindrachuk story,’ and he goes into how he – the Hawk – shot pool with Orest Kindrachuk all night in a bar in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, almost to Alaska. He’s shooting pool with Orest Kindrachuk and this native babe picks him up – I mean, literally picks him up – and heaves him into a full-length mirror back of the bar the long way, and Kindrachuk couldn’t do anything more about it than a daisy. And this guy’s one of the Broad Street Bullies.

“Or I’ll say, ‘Give me a Dave Hreckosy story,’ and he’ll say Hreckosy was the most scared player he ever met, scared of the puck, and the reason he scored 40 goals that one season out in California? Psychedelic mushrooms. Hooked up with the guy who supplied the Grateful Dead with their peyote and junk and got on the mushroom-a-game plan. Smoothed him right out. Next year the connection was doing 10 hard in Soledad and Hreckosy was back to being scared of the puck again, and in another three years he was out of the league.

“Finally I figure I’ll test him so I say, ‘Give me a Pete Laframboise story.’ Pete Laframboise is my favorite hockey player ever. I liked the name. That and the Kansas City Scouts. How can you not like somebody with a name like that played for the Kansas City Scouts?

“Hawk says, ‘Pete Laframboise is an honorary chief in the Inuvik tribe of British Columbia. I was there. We were up in the very northern tip of British Columbia, out of Prince George, between there and Quensel, fishing for salmon with an Iuvik guide. Turns out these Indians are just nuts about hockey and hockey players, and when they found out Pete played in the league they had this special ceremony. They crowded 20 people, whites and natives, in a sealskin tent, anointed Pete with this special mixture of bear grease, ashes and juniper, clothed him in a bearskin cape and named him, “He-Who-Dwells-Among-the-Ice-and-Berries.”’”

“I knew everything about Pete Laframboise – kind of beer he drank first of all, and everything else, from hanging out with him for hours at card shows where no one wanted his autograph – and this was in Canada yet, so that tells you what kind of hockey player he was when no one wanted his autograph in Canada – so there was no way he could have been an Indian chief. No way.

“I actually had his number. Gave it to me when he was bored, wrote a story on him, turned out all right. I called him up and told him the Indian-chief story. When he stopped laughing he said, ‘You’re kidding, right? That’s the biggest bunch of crap I heard in my life!’”

“So were you mad?” Homer asked.

“Mad? I wished I’d have thought of it. I admire someone with that much reckless diregard for the truth. Hey, you think if I work on the Hawk hard enough those Indians would make me a chief?”

Dec. 3, 1989: God rest ye merry, gentlemen

Thing you have to understand is that Duke is a big man. Not so tall as all that, maybe six feet if you get him in platform shoes, not that in your wildest imagination would you ever want Duke on platform shoes, but for argument’s sake, six feet in platform shoes. Wide though, maybe 300 pounds, maybe 350, and not strictly all beef, either. There’s surplusage amidst the billows and folds, enough for a couple seasons of hibernating at the normal rate. Duke’s okay with it and so are we.

Duke needs nourishment. See Duke eat and you think of some wild pumpkin vine that turns out 200-pound pumpkins, where if you want the 200-pound pumpkins you gotta feed in the tons of water and fertilizer. Duke can lay waste to groceries, in other words. No shame in that, big man like him eating like he does. It’s other people that can get mean, like the time Duke is in St. Louis and the guy playing guitar in the country-western band stops playing when Duke walks by and says into his mike, “Hey, how many hot dogs can you eat?”

Isn’t nice at all, but when Baumer hears Duke tell that particular story he gets an idea, sort of idea that comes to Baumer naturally but wouldn’t occur to most guys in a year of ruminating.

“How many hot dogs can you eat, Dukester?” Baumer asks him without too much of the underhanded tone Baumer’s voice can get sometimes.

“Well, I’m not too much of a connie-sewer of hot dogs, not as much as some of them entries,” Duke says. Like a lot of big guys Duke isn’t bothered by much. Bulk who could get blown away in a strong wind says it’s because they got so much ballast they’re like one of those kids’ toys where you punch it and it pops right back up again. Bozo the Clown is one. You punch these big guys in real life, hit ‘em a shot or two like losing their job and kids in trouble, and they pop right back up. You get the feeling Duke’s taken a couple of those punches, but he’s popped back up good as anyone would have a right to.

“I like spare ribs,” he goes on, “when Charlie gets them two crackpots goin’ and she’s got spare ribs in ‘em both, I can eat both of ‘em without stopping. Spare ribs, now that’s a meal that hits the spot. Gotta get the ones with meat on ‘em, not the kind where they call ‘em ‘spare ribs’ ‘cause they spare the meat. Nope, spare ribs in a crackpot there with sauce – ketchup, brown sugar, maybe some A-1 – and then hand me a fork and stand back.”

“But how many hot dogs, Duke? How many hot dogs can you eat?” Baumer’s really trying to be gentle with the guy but it’s wearing on him since gentle isn’t his usual thing.

“Hot dogs? Never counted in one sitting, but I figure I could do 30, 40 easy. Maybe more if I was really hungry, if you depraved me of food, you know.”

“What if there was money involved?”

“If there was money involved I’d eat until they’d have to wheel me away on a girlie.”

Then Baumer tells Duke his plan, which we had already figured out because we know how Baumer’s mind works. Baumer wants to stage some eating contests pitting Duke against whatever competition he can find. Maybe there’ll be some local contests at corn roasts or lutefisk suppers or whatever, and if Duke does well enough there Baumer’ll take him to card shows and have him eat against the competition there. Big guys go to card shows. It’s the major leagues. If Duke wants to eat his way to the top that’s the way to go.

One of the coin guys hears about Baumer's plan over the cubicle and says, "You can call it the 'Eat the Rich Tour.'" He's an anarchist.

Duke listens to the plan and says he’s all for it. “If there’s money involved and the food is free, I couldn’t say no. It’d be inconcealable,” he says. Baumer and Duke shake on the deal.

Holidays you’d think there’d be no shortage of venues for a professional eater to eat, but if they’re out there Baumer’s not finding them. So Baumer, who sees that quick payday shining like four o'clock sun, starts worrying about his meal ticket, so to speak, getting out of eating shape ahead of the matches Baumer has planned for lord-knows-when. That’s when Baumer hit on the idea of the holiday party.

Normally a holiday party would be about the last thing Baumer would want to be involved with, since all the holidays mean to Baumer is more trouble shaking money out of his deadbeat advertisers. But this year one of his advertisers had gotten real rich off of some Babe Ruth autographs he had gotten from the widow of the clubhouse boy who signed them in the first place, so he sent Baumer a big packing crate full of all kinds of booze. Everything from good whiskey to a two-liter bottle of wine coolers was in that crate, and Baumer, for all his faults, isn’t what you’d call a drinking man. Baumer’s idea for the party was to break open the crate and everyone bring a dish to pass, and work in Duke on some competitive eating there, so he wouldn’t lose his edge.

Only thing was, Baumer just told the people he invited about the front half of the deal. The thing about keeping Duke in training he didn’t tell them, maybe because he didn’t want the idea to get around that Baumer had an ulterior motive, even though everyone he invited figured it was Baumer, and Baumer always has an ulterior motive.

Of course, Baumer tells Duke he wants him to really do some damage. “Think of it as your last big run before a marathon,” Baumer tells him before realizing that talking to Duke about running marathons isn’t going to make any sort of impact whatsoever.

Publisher was overcome enough by Baumer’s gesture to offer his house as a location for the party. Nice house, all logs on the outside and inside, tucked back in the woods couple miles out of town. Shows what you can get around here when you’re a publisher and your wife is daughter of the guy who owns the furniture store and funeral home. Good furniture inside obviously, huge dining-room set and all.

Everyone shows up a little early to the party, figuring that’s the best way to get their choice of booze, even though with everyone showing up early no one gets exactly what they want. Everyone’s there early except Duke, who isn’t a drinking man mainly because it takes away from his eating. “Stomach’s only got so much room – why waste space on something that’s not going to stick around a while?”, he says. Table’s laid out nicely, everyone’s dishes right out there for the buffet they figure they’ll have later once Duke shows up and everyone’s got about two-thirds of a bottle of something in them.

Seven o’clock right on schedule Duke comes piling into the place. By this time everyone’s sort of drifted away from the dining room with their drinks. They’re downstairs looking at the autographed footballs or playing pool or watching the football game on TV, this being the time of year when there’s always a football game on TV. Duke throws his coat over a chair and is pretty much drawn into the dining room. He pulls out one of the dining-room chairs and sits himself down in front of this huge buffet of food, grabs a fork, brings some of the dishes over his way, and starts eating right out of them, no plate or anything.

Duke pretty much reduced three or four casseroles to the bones when some of the other guests come shuffling back upstairs. They’re hungry enough about this time, especially after thinking about the food they’d brought and everyone else had brought, and when they see mostly three-quarters empty serving dishes and Duke leaning back with a smile on his face they aren’t too far out of it to put together two and two and figure Duke it was had done the damage. They aren’t very happy about it, either, even when Duke points out kind of sensibly that they had done the damage to the booze and he had done damage to the food, and it’s just a matter of picking your poison. Publisher’s the maddest guy of all, maybe because he was worried about the dining-room chair Duke was sitting on.

Party doesn’t last too much longer after that. People pick around for a little something to stay their stomachs and knock down the booze, snatch up what’s left of their dishes, grab their favorite bottles and their coats and pile out. Duke’s too happy to move much; besides, there are leftovers. He doesn’t get how he ruined the publisher’s lovely spread.

Baumer’s about the last one out, and the publisher takes him arm before Baumer can slide out the door. “I know you had a reason for doing this, besides the booze,” publisher says. “When I find out, it’d better be a good one.” That’s all he can say, ‘cause how can you fire a guy makes the company more money than any other single individual? Baumer nods his head and slides the rest of the way out the door.

As he heads out to his car, though, Baumer has a smile on his face, big a smile as Baumer can muster. He starts humming a Christmas song, too. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” it is. Nothing’s letting Baumer dismay. He’s found his ticket to the big leagues.

Nov. 24, 1989: Great Job, Except You Gotta Work Sundays

Way the day before Thanksgiving is around this place, no one is left around except the ones that haven’t anyplace else to go, like it is day before Christmas and around New Year’s and all such holidays. You’d think it’d be the best time to get serious work done, with two-thirds the gang gone and all, but one person’s singing “Over the River and Through the Woods” most the day, another person’s on his phone to his family all the time and you’d think it was Albania where they were from the amount of shouting he had to do to make himself heard, and another person just wants to mingle, and so even if working serious was your intent you couldn’t any more get serious work done than you could make a turkey dinner out of venison.

People that hang around are people who live here, people without any family and people whose family live too far away so it’s too expensive to go, which means it’s the usual die-hards holding down the fort-- O’Strowsky, Bulk, Baumer, Mort, and Don and Maggie, plus the postcard lady, the coin guys (King George is around, from the sound of things), and the old-cars crew. Baumer can even act mellow day before Thanksgiving because all the deadlines are dead and no one’s around for him to call on the phone and harass for money or lie about position.

Day like this, when it winds down around toward the end and everyone only moves fast when they’re cleaning up their desk and bustling out the door, people talk about whatever pops into their heads, which with sports guys is sports. Bulk I think it was started playing the “stupid kicker” game, where he names off a kicker and anyone else who’s playing has to name off someone worse. Surprising amount of ground rules with this game, like there are some kickers so stupid that they’re off limits. Happy Feller is one, because even if Happy Feller had been good he’d still have been Happy Feller, and that’s enough to win the stupid-kicker game by itself. Dean Dorsey is another one off limits. He’s a Packer kicker who once shanked an extra point so bad it went out of bounds. Wasn’t a Packer kicker for long, shanking extra points out of bounds like that, but longevity’s not a requirement in the stupid-kicker game.

Mort had won the stupid kicker game with Richie Szaro, so then people started talking about stupid positions in general, and what the most useless job is on a football team. Obviously you talk to a football coach he tells you every position’s important on a football team, and that’s Baumer’s line, too, but guys with imagination, like the editors, don’t settle for that explanation.

“I don’t know if it’s useless or not, but I know the best position on a football team,” Bulk says. “Backup quarterback. What’s better than backup quarterback? You go in when the starter’s hurt. If you do good you’re a hero. You do bad, what’d you expect? You’re a backup quarterback. Look at Zeke Bratkowski all those years. Goes in when Starr is hurt, throws three touchdown passes, he’s a hero, next week he’s on the bench again. No pressure in that. Gary Cuozzo, Earl Morrall, all those guys. Backup quarterbacks. Nothing better.”

“Yeah, you gotta draw the line between the backup quarterback and the third-string quarterback,” Mort says. “Third-string, you never even get to play. Maybe you’re on the taxi squad, maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re cut because they need another offensive tackle that week. Drive you nuts, living like that. It’s like this issue of the magazine they need you to edit the feature article and next issue they decide to do a photo spread instead, so it’s so long. Second-string, though, they always need you. Good job there.”

“What I think the guy is with the best job is the guy hikes the ball to the punter,” O’Strowsky says, and right away everyone knows he’s right, that the best job on a football team is the guy who hikes the ball to the punter or kicker, but they let him go on and say why anyway. “You’re not the usual center, so you’re not getting beat up on all game by these nose tackles and big defensive tackles and middle linebackers. You got maybe eight plays max where you’re in. Less if your team is any good. Eight plays is about the right amount to play in a game. Keeps the blood flowing, keeps you in shape. People are trying to kind of speed-rush past you and you’re trying to get the ball hiked and then hustle downfield, so it’s not a deal where you have to be 300 pounds and so muscle-bound you can’t lift your arms over your head. Not saying a skinny guy like me could do it, but almost. Gotta believe you could do that job until you’re 40, at least, without so much damage as a sore wrist when you get up in the morning.”

“Not like Jim Otto, where it takes him half the day just to get out of bed and the other half the day just to get back in bed,” says Mort, who comes from the place where Jim Otto went to high school.

“Yeah, right, like that,” O’Strowsky says.

“Gets paid enough, too,” Mort says, and heads nod around the area, even Baumer, seeing as the talk had turned to dollars-and-cents money. "Great job."

"Great job," O'Strowsky says, but with that Polish-Irish glint in his voice, "great job all right, but you gotta work Sundays."

“Think it’s too late for me? I think I’ve got the wrists for the job,” Bulk says. He may have the wrists for the job but the rest of him is in need of about 100 pounds of development.

“Perhaps,” O’Strowsky says, deadpan like he can get. “Why don’t you go home and see? In fact, why don’t we all go home and see?” And everyone who was pretending to work stops pretending, grabs their coats and bolts. No one cares to stop them.

May 7, 1989: Not like O'Strowsky's on bread and water
Amazing thing happened today, in that it’s amazing it didn’t happen sooner. It wasn’t such a big thing that you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it or you were new to the place. You have to know the people to know something’s up. O’Strowsky, who’s a skinny guy and normally so full of energy drives the editors nuts sometimes, first time we noticed him after lunch looked drained, like someone pulled the plug on him somehow. Didn’t think too much of it, with 24 pages of magazine to get down to production, but when break came and I took one couple of guys had noticed it too and were talking about it.

E-Boe, who has the ear of the publisher sort of, says he knew right off what was going on. “Geez, thought you guys would’ve guessed,” he says. “O’Strowsky is on double-secret probation.”

Now, people call it “double-secret probation,” like in the movie, as a kind of joke, since everything’s a joke around here. Actually there’s nothing’s funny about double-secret probation if you’re interested in keeping your job, which O’Strowsky is, on account of what he does being so specialized that no one else would want to hire him, and then he’s O’Strowsky besides, sort of halfway between prickly and goofy, and not everyone wants that. There’s never anything secret about it, that part’s wrong, not in what acts like a newsroom sometimes filled with people who can remember stuff from their college journalism classes when they want to.

“Hey, now that’s a surprise,” Whitey says. Whitey always figured he was next because he never holds back a punch when the chin is out there, and with O’Strowsky getting it that lets Whitey know he’s next. Whitey is the saddest guy in the building that O’Strowsky on double-secret probation outside of O’Strowsky himself.

The upshot of the conversation to that point is, “Okay, so who’d he tee off now?”, since part of what O’Strowsky is is a guy who will off and say what he wants to about someone only he’s just saying it to be funny, because it’s a good line, because the words fall together right, and the guy on the receiving end doesn’t see it that way. He reads it as an insult straight up when it’s really just O’Strowsky not taking it serious. O’Strowsky says he’s been like that ever since he was able to write, even had to get on the P.A. system in junior high and apologize for calling dirtballs “dirtballs” in the school newspaper. When you’re doing retractions in junior high you got a career path all laid out for you, no question.

When people start figuring out who O’Strowsky coulda teed off enough to get himself on double-secret probation the list just keeps getting longer and longer, with everyone going around the table naming someone O’Strowsky crossed the wrong side of somewhere along the line.

“Oh, geez, F.F. Bosway,” Bulk says, naming a guy who reps a real bad sports artist half the time and some pretty good baseball cards the other half the time, only he keeps trying to weasel the bad sports artist into the good baseball cards and O’Strowsky keeps calling him on it. O’Strowsky also doesn’t like the way F.F. Bosway talks about the successful career on Wall Street he gave up to rep a bad sports artist. “If he was so damn successful, what’s he doing in this business with this guy?” O’Strowsky asks, and he’s got a point.

“I’m in -- Barry Glevin,” Donnie B says. Glevin is 16 years old, a millionaire and totally obnoxious because he’s 16 years old and from Long Island and a Yankee fan and a millionaire eight times over from using his dad’s money to buy a couple thousand cases of baseball cards just before the boom hit. After that he started his own card company and bought up rights to the popular young players in all the sports, rookies of the year and draft picks before they go sour. He poses with ‘em in pictures, chubby, curly-headed kid next to a seven-foot-tall monster and a 350-pound run-stuffer. Pictures look great on dart boards. Glevin has ‘em sign balls and then he sells the balls with the cards, which isn’t such a bad idea other than it was Glevin thought of it so he makes it out to be a whole lot better idea than it really is. Glevin’ll call up O’Strowsky and command him to write about his cards knowing O’Strowsky’ll write what a ripoff the cards are. Once that happens Glevin whines to Baumer until Baumer gives Glevin a full page gratis so Glevin won’t pull his ads. It’s a stinking way to make money, at least not spend money, but it’s easy to do when you’re 16 and don’t care what happens when you’re 25.

Homer votes for Guy Lee Partley, another ego with legs attached who made his millions selling leisure suits through the mail and brought that experience intact to sports cards. He’ll hit you up with a big, colorful brochure advertising 100 1987 Topps cards for 10 bucks, cards you can buy for a buck at any card show, flea market or rummage sale. Even buys TV time on Sunday mornings to sell his cards, gets on TV himself to sell them, the big ham. O’Strowsky doesn’t like Guy Lee Partley thinking he’s qualified to sell baseball cards because he used to sell leisure suits, doesn’t like his big ham face showing up on TV when there used to be Looney Tunes and the Jetsons, doesn’t like getting called up by Partley and patted on the back over the telephone, and really doesn’t like him taking advantage of folks who don’t know any better and aren’t in a position to buy O’Strowsky’s magazine to know better.

The Phantom votes for the Fat Man because the Fat Man hates everyone.

Duke says Baumer “scapled the corporate ladder” to get back at O’Strowsky.

E-Boe says, “Well, you’re all wrong, boys. You all know who Dick Rickens is, right?”, and we all nod, because everyone’s read his book about pitching in the ‘60s, Sox It To Me. O’Strowsky says he read it 11 times between the ages of 11 and 17, which is exactly the way everyone thought O'Strowsky spent his formative years. “Dick Rickens has got that company makes baseball cards of the pictures you send in. Good idea, made him a lot of money, cool and so forth. However – and this is interesting – company got in hot water recently because a guy who turned out to be a convicted child molester had a whole bunch of cards made. Turns out that was his angle – ask kids whether they want to be on baseball cards, then get the camera out and take his kind of pictures. They catch the guy – wasn’t trying hard to not get caught – and ask him how he found out about Dick Rickens’ company, guy gives them O’Strowsky’s name. Child molester reads O’Strowsky’s magazine, calls up O’Strowsky and asks him a question I bet O’Strowsky gets asked twice a week, that’s how popular these cards are -- and you remember the piece he wrote about them. O’Strowsky gives him the answer; he doesn’t know. Now the guy turns out to be a child molester, he gives ‘em O’Strowsky’s name, company has to do something to show it’s taking it seriously – beats me what it is they’re supposed to be taking seriously – and O’Strowsky gets double-secret probation.

“It’s not long – only a week – and it’s not bread and water or anything. Just has to be nice to people who call, tone down the negative stuff for an issue, he’ll be fine.”

“And if Barry Glevin calls?” Donnie B says.

“Has to be nice to him, I suppose. And write nice things about his cards for a change.”

“Baumer know about this?” Bulk asks, but all Donnie B says is, “It’s gonna kill him. It’s just gonna freakin’ kill him.” Whitey, on the other hand, is smiling.

This place on Third Avenue

This place is a saloon that grew up in the neighborhood, like one of the kids of the same Third Avenue block, between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth streets. It is somewhat dim and dusty and it is run in a catch-as-catch-can style, with no efficiency at all. It isn’t tough like some of the buckets-of-blood along the avenue, but practically everybody in here, customers and all, could take care of himself in a jam, each in his own way. This saloon has a good air to it, with no cheapness, although everything is plain and simple. The bar itself is plain, but solid. The wooden stools in front of it will hold you all right if you sit on them. The glasses are thick and large. These glasses, and the bottles, are the only things in here that shine. The occasional sun is nicely screened through the benign dust on the windows, some of which look out on Forty-fourth Street and the others on Third Avenue. Occasionally the “L” rumbles by. There is an active serenity about this saloon, and somebody is always doing something, at least talking, all the time it is open.

From Red Smith’s obituary on McNulty, collected in For Absent Friends:

Jim Thurber’s Credos and Curios … has a piece about John McNulty, and it just tore me up. Both Thurber and McNulty are dead now and that is why you don’t hear people laugh the way they used to.

Thurber says it is difficult to describe McNulty but John himself found it easy one day after a Derby Week in Kentucky. We had come over to Louisville after a stay in the Blue Grass country around Lexington and one of our crowd showed McNulty a snapshot he had made on a horse farm.

It showed John in a paddock in the Norfolk tweed jacket and snapbrim hat that nobody else could wear so jauntily, and a foal no bigger than a boxer dog was nuzzling his hand. McNulty didn’t try to conceal his delight.

“Look at that!” he said. “Imagine throwing a man like that out of the Social Register – John McNulty, heir to the McNulty rewrite millions!”

If there’s anybody here who doesn’t know, McNulty was a great writer of memorable books, author of incomparable pieces in The New Yorker when the magazine was better than it is, but mostly he was a newspaper stiff, a sportswriter for a while, oftener a rewrite man. When he felt identification necessary he identified himself as a writer, “author of those best-sellers, ‘Barking Dog Rouses Family, Saves 5 From Fire,’ ‘Hotel Thieves Get $45,000 in Gems.’”

Every story Thurber tells about McNulty reminds me of another. Jim describes a walk about the streets with McNulty: “Two men would pass by you, one of them saying, ‘It’s the biggest gorilla in the world. They call it Garganetta,’ or a waiter in the café would tell him, ‘We get stranglers come in here all hours.’”

McNulty didn’t invent these characters, he attracted them like a magnet. In a single afternoon with him in a saloon called Little Czechoslovakia, I met Gabriel the Horseplayer, a timid little man who was afraid to carry a Racing Form because then the cops always picked him up; a former fighter, who, John said, might have been light-heavyweight champion of the world except he hated to hit people; a German butler McNulty called the Clash Man because, though he seemed a fairly decent guy, his mild arrival in the saloon caused everybody to bridle and pretty soon there’d be a loud row; the nephew of the proprietor, a kid from a wartime prison camp with a face empty of feeling who played the piano so mechanically that John would rage at him, “Look, I’ll show you how to play ‘Some of These Days’ and mean something,” and the kid would look at him blankly and John would be ashamed of himself.

“’This is Joe the Russian,” McNulty said. “He was bartender here but he wasn’t a good bartender. When he got to like somebody he wouldn’t take any money from him.”

When Joe denied this with spirit, John said, “You gave me plenty drinks.”

“Sure,” Joe said, “but you deserve it.” …

Chances are this isn’t a sports column. The way it happened, there was this book by Jim Thurber, who used to get these notes from McNulty, too. The last one, Thurber says, began, “Dear Jimmy: I think maybe that threescore years and ten is subject to change without notice.”

McNulty was sixty at the time. I’m not sure what year it was. I remember I was in a motel in Buffalo and in the morning paper there was a one-sentence obituary under a one-line head. The copyreader who wrote the head would not get my vote as the most meticulous craftsman in the business. It read:

“John McCarthy, Writer.”



From a second Red Smith-written obit of McNulty, also collected in For Absent Friends:

… Only a long-shot fancier could have composed the telegram that a newspaper in Columbus, Ohio, received after several days of unexplained silence from its reporter, McNulty, on an out-of-town assignment.

“Have been invited to join Marietta Lodge of Elks. Please send birth certificate and more expense money.” …

When he wasn’t speculating about how a rewrite man in Mecca would write a lead on a convention story (“Mecca became the New York of thousand today as the International Association of Pecan Growers gathered”), the stories he told were mostly about horse playing.

Like the time in Palm Springs or somewhere that he got $400 down to the local bookmaker. As John explained it, he had the money but it was in a joint checking account he was reluctant to milk. Because the bookie was getting importunate, John telegraphed n Eastern publishing house asking $2,000 advance, by wire, on a novel whose manuscript he would deliver on such-and-such a date.

This went through channels, causing delay. By the time the check (for $1,000) arrived, John was $12 on top of the bookmaker. He sent the check back, explaining he wasn’t going to write the novel, after all.

This place where I work

This place where I work is a publisher, does magazines for hobbyists in a small town just to the right of the center of Wisconsin, out in some rolling farmland that’s pretty all year. It’s out here because the old guy that runs the place is from here, published his first magazine at the kitchen table 40 years ago, and things just grew without him really trying to. It’s sort of the same way today only the table is bigger, and you got more and more people pushed up to it all the time.

Hobbyists have real specific passions. It’s our job to figure them out, and it’s not easy.

It’s like postcards. Most of us have a hard time understanding why people get all worked up over postcards, but the postcard editor tells us she can’t figure out what’s so great about baseball cards (which is what I write about), so there you go.

Most of the people who work on the editorial side are experts first and writers and designers second, and while sometimes it shows it’s better than the alternative, which is real pretty magazines with big words in the right order that the readers don’t read because they don’t go deep enough. The editors, the ones that are experts as opposed to the general dopes like myself, have these knotty balls of concentrated knowledge of a subject, sometimes only a little bit of a subject. For instance, one of the coin editors is the world’s number-one expert on Chinese coins. Knows why some have square holes and some have round holes, and what all the letters mean on both sides. Most places that’d never get you hired, might even get you fired. Here it gets you an editor’s job, which is real fortunate for all the collectors of Chinese coins in the world.

What you wind up with in this place where I work is an office full of people talking different languages, saying English words but assembling them in some dialect, like rhyming slang. They can’t talk to almost anyone else in the office about what they really want to talk about, which is their knotty little ball of knowledge, and they can’t talk to anyone outside the office about their knotty little ball of knowledge, because the office is in Iola, Wisconsin.

Iola has about 700 people; 100 or so work here. Town’s full of Norwegians. You got Norwegians pumping gas and making bobbers, Norwegians milking cows and laying out other Norwegians at the Olson and Johnson Funeral Home, Norwegians cleaning house and selling houses and teaching school and driving around in pristine 1977 Buick LeSabres with 12,000 miles on the clock. They eat pie with lunch at the Crystal Café and lutefisk at the Northland Lutheran Church. They can’t help but run into the people from the magazine company with their knotty balls of knowledge, because they like pie with lunch at the Crystal Café, too. There’s not much the Norwegians and the magazine people can talk about with each other should they ever get thrown together at the counter or down at Honeymooners, so they talk about the Packers. If they didn’t talk about the Packers before they came to Iola, they learn. If you sit at the counter long enough, and everyone tries to, talk turns to the Packers. What they talk about when they talk about the Packers may not be what everyone else talks about when they talk about the Packers, but it’s how you talk in Iola. Mostly I like to sit back and listen.

Dec. 23, 1988: Magazines don’t tell you what day it is

One of the things gets most people who don’t do magazines is the way the calendar gets all bollixed up for the guys doing the monthlies. O’Strowsky, for instance, might be doing three monthlies all at the same time, one with an April cover date, one with a February and one with a March. All three of them are going to be on the newsstand in February and off it in March, and only one of them is right with the calendar when it’s actually on sale. Readers can’t keep it straight, and the publishers aren’t too clear on it, and there’s no telling what it could do to a fellow like O’Strowsky.

What I mean by that is O’Strowsky might start deciding what he’s going to put in the issue with a February date in October, the one with a March date in September, and the one with an April date in July. Or it might be totally reversed, with the February magazine being decided in July, the April one in September and the March one in October. If that’s not enough to throw your calendar right in the millpond, O’Strowsky will be lining up a cover for the February one the same time he’s editing copy for the April one and writing his columns for the March one, and designing pages for all three, and helping out on the music or comics or coins magazines when one of their editors is off at a show or on vacation. It’s sort of a miracle that a page from the March issue doesn’t show up in the April magazine, but O’Strowsky makes them look different enough that all the articles wind up in the right place. Ads are another story, but O’Strowsky’s never been one to worry about the ads.

One thing’s for certain, and that is that O’Strowsky will be working on all three of his magazines right up to the second he walks out the door for Christmas. If you can pin him down a spare second between magazines, O’Strowsky says he kind of likes it that way. “It’s got a bustle to it that’s right for Christmas,” he says. “It’s the right speed. It’s like that line from The Great Gatsby” -- you should know that The Great Gatsby is O’Strowsky’s favorite book, that and Ball Four, and he quotes from it every chance he gets – “about the returning trains of my youth, with the frosty breath and fur coats and blowing snow and everything. It’s like that. It’s got a tempo -- Christmas tempo. Move them along, get them out the door like you’re sending presents, stamp ‘em and mail ‘em, throw your own pack over your shoulder, walk out the door yourself, take a deep breath of the fresh winter air, it’s Christmas. I like it. It’s nuts for a while, three big deadlines always, but I like it.”

I ask him if all the different months that he has to juggle don’t get him sort of discombobulated with the calendar, and he almost shouts, “No way!” Then he calms down some and says, “I mean, you know when it is when you go outside. Dark when you leave work and cold, it’s winter. Darker it is closer to January you are. Dark when you leave work and warmish, it’s spring. Light when you leave work and smells like cow manure, later spring. Warm when you wake up, ride your bike from five to six in the morning, peas by the side of the road, it’s summer. Warm and beans and corn by the side of the road, late summer. Not quite so light, not quite so warm, burning leaves, and potatoes by the side of the road, fall. Christmas the wreaths are lit and the lights are on. You know. Magazines don’t tell you what day it is. One of the things I like about here is you know without the magazines having to tell you. Something’s always here to remind you.”

After he said that I looked around O’Strowsky’s desk – just took a glance, you know. Nothing wrong with that. You know what? No calendar anywhere. I guess if you’re always working four months ahead and three months behind calendar doesn’t really stand for much. Knows when it’s Christmas, though. Gotta hand it to him. Knows when it’s Christmas.



Dec. 26, 1988: How can you talk to a guy reads Baby Huey comics?

You can always tell who’s been working here the shortest by who works day after Christmas. Even guys who like working here and haven’t got anyplace better to be, like O’Strowsky, don’t work day after Christmas. Usually they’ve been somewhere away from Iola for the holiday, and nothing’s really that close to Iola that you’d want to end Christmas at 7 o’clock just to get back, what with two-lane winter roads and everything. Exceptions are Don and Maggie, who do the comic-book magazines and wouldn’t dream, wouldn’t ever dream, about doing anything else but comic-book magazines. Bought a house two blocks from the company to be close to the comic-book magazines on nights and Saturdays and Sundays when no one else works, that’s what Don and Maggie did. They spend their vacations at comic-book shows so they can come back and write about them in comic-book magazines. They buy comic books out of their own money to give to the company so company can have a library of comic books. Don and Maggie, you envy them the way their life is so complete, just them and the comic books, and what could be better than spending your entire life writing about comic books? Envy them but wouldn’t want to be like them. That’s the paradox right there.

So day after Christmas you got newcomers like Homer and the Potato Phantom working along with Don and Maggie, no one else, like you could roll a bowling ball down the hall and not hit anyone till you get to the coin-catalogers, and naturally the three of them start talking.

“You know, I used to read comics,” Homer says all earnestly. No one can sound more earnest than Homer, you can’t not believe him, you just can’t.

“Used to?” Don says, saying it like the very thought that someone could read comics once and decide to not ever read comics again would be like a man deciding to have an operation that’d make him a squirrel. Worse than that, maybe.

“Yeah, used to. In fact, I learned to read from my mom reading me comics.”

“That’s very good, isn’t it, Don?” Maggie says. Maggie is the junior partner here. “Learned to read from his mom reading him comics. Isn’t that a great way to learn? From comic books. Learned to read from comic books.” She’s talking to Homer now. “Look where it got you. Isn’t it a wonderful thing?”

“It’s not amazing that he learned to read from comic books, Maggie,” Don says, and Don is the senior partner here. “It’s amazing that his mother read him the comic books so he learned to read. It’s not enough to be amazed. You have to be amazed in the right places, Maggie.”

“So what were the comic books?” Don asks. He’s curious, but can’t tell whether he’s curious because he wants to know the comic books responsible for molding Homer into the editorial assistant for a weekly baseball-card newspaper or because he smells a stash of vintage collectibles hiding out in a mom’s attic. With Don, could be either.

“Great comic books – Baby Huey, Sad Sack – great comics,” Homer says, earnest as he was when he said he used to read comics to start with. “My mom did the greatest Papa Duck ever. I can still read ya some of the lines – like they go to Florida and the sun is out and Mama Duck says, ‘Just look at that moon.’ Isn’t that something, how I still remember that?.”

Don and Maggie hear “Sad Sack” and “Baby Huey” and it’s like someone rolls their sucker in the dirt. “Great comics?” Don asks, and he’s got half the Santa Claus equation right. He’s shaking like a bowlful of jelly, but he’s no jolly old elf. “Those comics, those great comics of yours you learned to read on, are wretched –“ and he draws out the word and says it again, in case Homer didn’t get it straight the first time. “Wretched! The art is horrible, plots are juvenile, the jokes are lame – what you just said, that’s as good as it ever gets, isn’t it? -- dialog is worse than inane, characters are cardboard.” Now he’s sputtering. “There’s – there’s not a complete sentence – not a complete sentence – in a carload of issues. The ads don’t even save the comics. ‘Sell seeds – win prizes!’ – they’re hideous. It would be a complement – a complement -- to call them the worst comics ever created.”

Thing about Homer is that Don sputtering all over the place doesn’t change a thing for him. Baby Huey comic books and his mom taught him to read, and been reading nearly 20 years; nothing Don says is ever gonna move that around. It’s day after Christmas and he’s getting paid regardless, no one’s paying attention to whether he’s working, and the baseball cards will be waiting for him any time he chooses to go back to them. “Oh, well. I liked them,” he says, and walks back to his cubicle.

Don’s still muttering, not muttering under his breath but muttering so’s Homer can hear. “Sad Sack. Baby Huey. Can you believe it? Honestly, can you believe it?”

“Takes all kinds to make a world,” Maggie says, even though she says it like she doesn’t believe herself overmuch.

“Oh, shut up,” Don says, and attacks the latest Superman more serious than usual.





Dec. 31, 1988: Nothing worse happens to you the whole year

Donnie B got caught working New Year’s Eve, like you couldn’t convince anyone it’s a holiday, and to make things worse he got roped in to going to the Crystal Café with a JT and a couple of coin guys who must really have been lonely, asking JT and Donnie to go to lunch at the Crystal with them.

Donnie’s not usually a Crystal kind of guy. Something about hamburger casserole followed by pecan pie and then an afternoon spent amidst the baseball cards doesn’t make his heart skip a beat. But what the heck, it’s the end of the year and who knows what the evening’s gonna bring, probably nothing but you never can tell, so Donnie goes over to the Crystal with JT and the coin guys.

Coin guys start to talking once they’ve ordered their specials about New Year’s Eve and what they’re going to do to celebrate it, them being coin guys and yesterday’s football games being of marginal interest to them. Fred Waldvogel, he comes from over near Oshkosh from a real German family, probably no more than 40 years removed from the boat. Morty Bornsen comes right from town, Norwegian as all get out, just a real old goat right down to his folks buried on the hill in the shadow of the steeple of the Northland Lutheran Church. Guy who runs the company hired Morty out of high-school years and years ago and he’s still here, putting together catalogs and turning himself into an expert by inches. It just seeps into his brain, he figures, like nitrates in the groundwater. Call themselves Fred and Borney, too, like the Flintstones, like it's a big joke on everybody.

“So what you do for New Year’s Eve, Fred?” says Bornsen, like maybe he’s had this discussion with the German more than a couple of times but feels like he needs to stage it for the benefit of Donnie and JT.

“Aw, you know,” Fred says back, and Donnie can’t tell whether or not he’s catching on – “go to the folks’ house, have some cheese and crackers, watch TV, play schafskopf until midnight, then have more crackers and herring and wine, toast the new year with the wine, then head off to bed so’s we can get up and watch the parades in the morning. Just New Year’s. Nothing exciting –” which is not a lie for a fellow like Fred who could make going over Niagara Falls in a barrel seem as exciting as wash day. “And Borney, s'pose I know how you like to spend your New Year’s.”

“Not too different from yours, not too different at all,” Bornsen says right back to him. “You know what it’s like around here – not too many places you’d care to be found on New Year’s Eve, none at all really, ‘less you’ve got a snowmobile or a death wish, one of the two. Stay home, y’know, parents’ big old house down there on Main Street, eat cheese and crackers, last of the rosettes, then midnight comes eat lutefisk and lefse, drink wine, beer, toast the new year, go to bed so we can watch the parades in the morning.”

“So Borney,” JT asks with a trace of mischief in his eyes, not that Bornsen and the German are going to catch on to an expression foreign to them as mischief, “why ya eat lutefisk on New Year’s?”

Before Bornsen can get out with “tradition” the German steps in. “I’ll tell you why: Eat lutefisk on New Year’s, ya know nothing worse gonna happen to you rest of the year.”

“Aw, c’mon now, Fred,” Borney says, upset for him, which isn’t much upset to the rest of us. “That lutefisk goes down like butter. Just like butter.”

“That’s the butter going down like butter, Borney,” Fred says back. “Lutefisk goes down like lutefisk. Tell ya, you’re better off with a flagon of melted butter, drink that down, throw the lutefisk away.”

“Ja, well then, what about you, with the herring? Eat herring on New Year’s and nothing worse happens to you the whole year. And there’s no butter involved here, don’t go tellin’ me there’s butter involved. It’s a pure desire for pain and agony makes a man eat herring on New Year’s. Fish done up to taste like a pickle. Ugh. Try explaining that so it makes sense. Pure desire for pain and agony, I tell you.”

JT sees these guys might need some calming, can’t have coin guys making a scene in the Crystal, so he says, “Well, maybe it’s like this: Maybe you” – and he’s looking at Fred – “eat herring so nothing worse happens to him –“ and he’s nodding in Borney’s direction – “all year long, and maybe you –“ he’s looking at Borney now – “eat lutefisk so nothing worse happens to him all year long. How’s that sound?”

Fred or Borney couldn’t figure out what JT was getting at, and the ham and scalloped potatoes were showing up right at that moment, so the coin guys shut up and ate. As for Donnie, he figures nothing worse is gonna happen to him after the ham and scalloped potatoes, and leaves it at that.

Jan. 3, 1989: Baumer wins a couple hundred on nothing at all


Getting back to work day after New Year’s is tough enough without Baumer coming around talking about couple hundred bucks he won playing some kind of goofy bowl-game football thing with a big advertiser and some of his buddies. Nobody minds that Baumer won money off these guys, since they can afford it first and second, better that a local jerk like Baumer wins it than a jerk from out-of-town which is most guys that advertise and like Baumer enough to include him in their private little football game. But it’s just the way things are that Baumer’s the guy wins these jackpots and not anyone else around the company. Anyone else would be better than Baumer but it’s always Baumer. One of those things confirms there’s an unseen hand guiding things, but the hand don’t always have a brain attached.

Doesn’t take long, maybe five minutes after the coffee, for Baumer to establish with the sports department that he hit the jackpot. “Way it works,” he says, with the air of someone who just won four hundred easy money, “is that you put in your fifty bucks – assuming you guys could scrape together that much -- and for that fifty bucks you get a bowl game and a team. Can’t choose the bowl game, can’t choose the team. Done for you, drawn out of a hat. Then there’s a scale of what players on your team do for you in that game and what the game is and everything that determines how many points you score. Team with the highest scores after the New Year’s Day bowl games wins the pot. And guys, start spreading the news, I am the pot winner.”

“Never would have guessed,” Mort says from behind his terminal.

“What bowl did it for you?” Homer says, acting interested the way he does with everything, lunch to grass to spots on his shirt.

“Independence Bowl, guys. Southern Mississippi over UTEP. James Henry – two punt returns for touchdowns.”

“Independence Bowl?” Whitey says, and you know this isn’t going to be good. “Southern Mississippi? UTEP? Punt returns? And this is a bowl game? How lame can you get? Geez, Baumer, if you’re gonna win money in one of these stupid pools, wouldcha at least earn it? You won couple hundred bucks on nothing, absolutely nothing at all – not only nothing you had control over, but nothing that meant anything. The flukiest way of scoring touchdowns in the worst bowl game of the year won you four hundred bucks – and you’re over here bragging about it? If I had Nebraska or Michigan I’d be wanting your scalp right about now. Go shake down your guys for the money and brag about it to them – see what they say. Bet they’ll just rush over to shake your hand, too.”

Whitey could probably take Baumer and Baumer knows it, so he kind of does a half-high-and-mighty strut back to his end of the building, and Whitey shuffles back to his terminal along the back wall way he always does.

“What’s the matter, Whitey?” O’Strowsky says. “You have the Peach Bowl?”

“You’re as bad as he is,” Whitey snaps back, hammers the keys of his terminal and grunts, “Independence Bowl. Southern Mississippi,” like we didn’t get it the first time.

Jan. 3, 1989: Colin’s not much of a process guy


Like’s been said before, all kinds wind up working for the company. Example of that is Colin, guy who writes most of the big coin catalogs. Colin’s about the smartest guy in the world, but people who aren’t nearly as smart take one look at him and figure he’s dumber’n a bag of hammers. Not that there aren’t some things that Colin does in the course of a day that aren’t indeed dumber than a bag of hammers, bag and all. Like for instance, sometimes he mixes up his lunch with his work and starts writing on his summer-sausage sandwich and taking a mouthful of papers. Doesn’t get too far with either, but just the idea that you could confuse a summer-sausage sandwich with a page of Chinese cash is enough to get the absent-minded-professor talk, at least, going around.

Just about everybody likes Colin, mainly because they understand, having done close to most of these things themselves. O’Strowsky likes him much as anyone because O’Strowsky’s first job at the company was working for Colin doing the coin magazines. Colin pretty much let O’Strowsky alone except for giving him hot tips that mostly involved Colin’s buddies, gin-and-tonics, Chinese coins, and calling pay telephones at 3 a.m. Singapore time. Nothing much came of these hot tips but O’Strowsky had fun chasing them down. It was nothing like real journalism but almost like real journalism, the way O’Strowsky describes it.

O’Strowsky likes going up front and visiting with Colin after he gets off deadline because he says he needs a shot of intellectualism, which is one of the little ways he has of telling us what he thinks of us, brain-wise. We try to like O’Strowsky much as anyone else around here but he doesn’t always make it easy.

Me, I think I could use a shot of intellectualism too, so I tag along with O’Strowsky next time he goes up to talk with Colin. Not having been a coin guy myself I don’t know much about Colin’s operation except he does the big coin catalog which is the biggest and most prestigious thing this company does, if you ask the coin guys about it. As kind of an impartial judge myself I’d have to say it’s complete enough, and big as you’d ever want one of these things to be. Set you right up if there’s any table you can’t quite reach, that’s for sure.

Colin’s operation sits behind a row of floor-to-ceiling cabinets, so from the hall you can’t see what’s going on. Makes you think of one of those backroom operations where they put up a false front of a laundry or flower shop only here the cabinets are up so no one can see what a mess Colin’s desk is.

Colin’s desk is actually a couple of desks – two or three, depending on if you count the filing cabinets with a piece of quarter-inch plywood across the top. No matter the final number, they’re all covered with at least two feet of paper, not neatly stacked paper but a mountain range of paper with peaks and valleys that stretch across the available space, landscaped with pictures and letterhead and page dummies, with drumlins and moraines and outcroppings and a breathtaking bridge across the top of his terminal. It’s something, all right, and those of us who know paper think it’s more impressive than a big coin catalog. Most of us are disorganized to a degree. Sort of comes with the territory, prerequisite for working here. But this is disorganization on a master scale. Nothing you can do but step back and try to drink it in. Never again in your lifetime, you figure.

I can’t speak real clear in the presence of such greatness, so I sort of stammer out, “So how – what – I mean, how’d you wind up here?”

Every piece of Colin’s shape is out of control, from his height to his hair to his stomach to his beard to his shirt, which tells me more than I need to know about the blue-plate special at the Crystal. His voice is a rumble, a belch with enunciation. I like him.

“Say O’Strowsky dragged you up here? Make it seem like some sort of expedition,” he says to me by way of introduction.

“O’Strowsky’s back there questioning the intellectual manhood of anyone who doesn’t come up and see you,” I say. “Figured I had no choice.”

Colin lets go a belch-rumble of a laugh, sits down facing his left-hand desk, reaches into the foothills of that mountain range, pulls out a picture, writes something on the back, then hands the picture to us. “Easter Island stone money,” he says. “Islanders used to wear it around their necks, trade it for cattle. Can’t put a price on it, of course, but they don’t need to know it. Collectors, I mean.”

“So you put a price on it?” I ask.

“Course. No one’s gonna check it except those what already have it, and for them it’s like warm milk, makes them feel good. Them that wants to buy it already have a price in mind they’re willing to pay, and could give a damn what a catalog says. Funny thing, the way it is with stuff like this. You put it in knowing no one will ever refer to it, but you leave it out and people write ‘cause you’re not being complete. Damnedest business in the world. Damnedest.”

“What’d you do before?”

“Insurance, if you can believe it,” he says, and I can believe it because everyone has a past that doesn’t go along with what they are now, like the plates shifted between their old life and this one. “Actuary. Know what an actuary is, doncha?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Actuary’s someone who tells you when you’re gonna die.”

“Or when your house is gonna burn down or your car is gonna get wrecked, yeah. How much your insurance is gonna cost you, mostly. Thing about actuaries – thing about insurance – is it’s all the process. How you get there’s more important than getting there. ‘s like there’s ten thousand ways to get from here to Buffalo – more, when you figure out the variations – take a turn here, go straight there. Hundred thousand ways to get from here to Buffalo. Insurance company just wants to know the shortest. Shortest and cheapest. Nothing else matters. Not the most scenic, historic, one with the best restaurants, none of that. Just shortest and cheapest. It’s the process. Follow the process, get you to shortest and cheapest. Used to check my process all along to make sure I was doing steps in the right order, following their procedures, not leaving anything out. Me, if you can believe it, having to buckle down and do everything strictly by the book.

“I got around that quick enough. Figured out enough to bluff the checkpoints and just made up the insurance rates from there. It’s an art anyway. Don’t let all the process people tell you different. Insurance rates is an art, just like coin catalogs is an art, just like anything else they haven’t computerized and castrated is an art. Guys selling the insurance said my rates were easier to sell than hot buttermilk biscuits. Insurance company made money, like insurance companies like to do, they were head-over-heels in love with their swell process, and all I was doing was figuring what rates should be without following any process except the one up here” – and he tapped a wild clump of hair with a foot-long of a finger. “’s an art, I tell ya.”

“Like to say the insurance company went all to hell after I came here, but truth is salesmen are still selling and the company’s still making money. Takes more than me leaving to knock the pins out from under an insurance company. Got a Christmas card from one of my old chums back there, said they put in whole new processes this year and things run smoother than ever. Smoother than ever! Ain’t life grand?

“Ah, what the hell. ‘s good here. No process whatsoever here, not in this department. Asked the old guy if he had a process to do any a’these catalogs and he said, ‘Just do ‘em the way makes sense to you.’ That changes. Some years I think it makes more sense doin’ ‘em chronologically, other years makes more sense doin’ ‘em by denomination or metal content. Some years I go by continent, other years I go straight alphabetically. Some years I do the pictures first, some years I write the words. No one minds, long as girls in production get it on time and there’s a place in back of the book where people can go to look up their coins. Not the shortest or the cheapest, but everyone gets along with it fine.”

This is what it means to be a satisfied man, I’m thinking, so before I get too overcome with admiration I tell Colin I’ll see him around and truck back to the department. Almost makes me wish I’d had a past in insurance and a mess of insurance processes to run away from.

Jan. 7, 1989: Afternoon’s slow except for the wedding cake

Gets kind of quiet in the middle of the afternoon around here. O’Strowsky goes out and runs around at lunch to burn off energy and comes back mellow, and when someone who’s as hyper in the mornings as O’Strowsky turns mellow in the afternoon, he can’t help but drag down the place. Afternoon’s when guys do most of their layouts, since staring at a black-and-green screen for a couple hours doesn’t get you anything but a stiff neck and more fixit work to do later on. Paragraphs turn into nonsense, all stretched out and shrunk. Sometimes you’ll make it to the end of a story that you’ve edited in the middle of the afternoon half-asleep, go back to the top and start reading, and find words with a hundred T’s all strung together or paragraphs that end in the middle of a sentence or start two inches down from the last paragraph. Sometimes you have to dig out the original manuscript to figure out what they were saying to start with, and when the manuscripts are handwritten on the back of a light bill the way McManus likes to do, you might as well make up something likely, because nothing’s going to give you a definite answer.

Don and Maggie sit next to Whitey and they fight sometimes, knocking at each other with words, in the middle of the afternoon, just so they’re not falling asleep. This afternoon, though, it’s Whitey lets out a yell about two o’clock, two-fifteen. “Cripes sakes!” he yells. “Wedding cake! What the hell they expect me to do with wedding cake?”

You have to remember that Whitey does prices, which means he has to figure out as best he can what baseball cards and things like old bats and balls are selling for and whether prices are legit, then he has to take all this information and make price guides out of it. He probably has the most important job on this end of the building, since all the collectors want to know is, “How much is it worth?”. Problem is he never has any problem telling Baumer how things are and who ranks where, and that doesn’t sit well with Baumer. At least Whitey doesn’t go around pissing off advertisers like O’Strowsky, but if there were advertisers in Whitey’s way he’d piss them off without thinking twice just by shooting straight and not holding back. That’s the kind of guy he is.

Whitey’s yell wakes up anyone thinking about sleeping through the afternoon, but Donnie B’s closest so he’s the one sticks his head over the cubicle wall.

“What’s the yelling about wedding cake?” Donnie B asks. “You don’t need a wedding cake, do you?”

“Aw, it’s this auction,” Whitey says back. A lot of what he does involves going through auction catalogs after auctions and matching up selling prices with items. You gotta know when the prices are there just to hold up the market for something the auction house might have been stuck with a gross of, like press pins or Woodstock tickets. Woodstock tickets are the worst. Must be a couple million Woodstock tickets floating around, and 80 percent of ‘em look like the day they were printed. You need a good eye for scams to plow through auction catalogs without getting hurt, and Whitey’s cynical enough to make it without a scratch.

“Wedding cake? Whose wedding?” Donnie B asks.

“Guess.”

“Geez, I don’t know. Bo Belinsky and Jayne Mansfield?”
“Bo Belinsky never married Jayne Mansfield. Mamie van Doren either.”

“I give up – Steve Garvey?”

“Try Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.”

Donnie B’s not as much of a cynic as Whitey, but since he edits Whitey’s price guides he’s cynical enough. “Wedding cake from Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe’s wedding? How you know it’s authentic?”

“Got me,” Whitey says. “But you gotta believe there’s a better way to make seventy-five bucks than faking a piece of wedding cake. In cellophane, yet.”

“They put a grade on it?” A grade isn’t like a grade you get in school – A’s and B-plusses and all that. Grades in sports memorabilia describe condition, whether something is Mint – that’s perfect – or Near Mint or something worse. A lot of Whitey does is figure out whether someone’s faking a grade to get more money for whatever they’re selling.

“Say it’s in excellent condition,” Whitey says. “Here – let me read you what the book says: ‘Own a piece of history’ –“

“God, it’s always ‘own a piece of history,’” Don says. “How many pieces does history have, anyhow?”

“Got me,” Whitey says, before going back to reading. “’Own a piece of history: wedding cake from the legendary lovers, the 20th century’s most spectacular cultural icons, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. This spectacularly preserved artifact is in remarkable condition for its age and comes packaged in its original cellophane wrapper. An invitation to the wedding reception is included as provenance. Hold this priceless artifact in your hands an’ immediately be transported to a place and time of legends. Price estimate: seventy-five to one hundred dollars.’”

Don does a half-laugh, a hard little breath, after Whitey finishes reading. “’Hold this priceless artifact in your hands and immediately get cold hands,’ what they meant to say. I mean, it’s gotta be frozen. How else could it have kept all these years?”

“I dunno. It’s in cellophane.”

“You want to eat anything’s been in cellophane for forty years?”

“No one said anything about eating it.”

“What else you gonna do with it?”

Whitey’s a cynic, but now he’s playing straight man to the cynic on the wall of his cubicle, he knows it, and he can’t help it. “Display it, I guess.”

“Display it? Okay, this is a piece of wedding cake that’s been in cellophane for forty years. You ever take some of your wedding cake and throw it in the freezer, thinking you’re going to eat some every year on your anniversary?”

“Uh, no.”

“That’s right; I forgot. Okay, you throw some of your wedding cake in the freezer and first year you take it out it’s not so bad. Wash it down with champagne, it’s okay. You’re still at least half in love anyway, so it don’t matter. Next year it takes a little worse, you’re a little less in love, takes more champagne to wash it down. Third year you take one look at the cake, throw it away and drink the champagne out of the bottle. Fourth year you dispense with the champagne entirely. Fifth year you clean out the freezer, open up the aluminum foil, go, ‘Yuck!’, throw the cake away. Now that’s five-year-old wedding cake wrapped in aluminum foil and stored in a freezer. You think forty-year-old wedding cake’s wrapped in cellophane’s gonna do better than that? And you’re gonna display it? How?”

Whitey’s trying to regain his footing, but it’s tough. “Well first of all, I’m not gonna display it. Idiot who bought it’s gonna display it, is what I’m sayin’. I don’t know; I’m guessin’ that he gets a picture of the two of them, DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, maybe puts the picture on a wood plaque with the invitation to the reception, then the wood plaque has a little piece on the bottom stickin’ out where he can put the piece of wedding cake – assumin’ it doesn’t have to stay in the freezer. If it has to stay in the freezer I’m haven’t got a friggin’ clue what the hell he’ll do with it.”

“Okay, assuming it doesn’t have to stay in the freezer and you can put it on your little stand like you say,” Donnie B says. He’s sort of half-mad now, like you can tell he’s figured out it doesn’t really matter, like he knows it’s doing a fine job keeping him awake on a winter afternoon. “What’s it gonna look like, this nice little stand with this cellophane lump sitting on it? What’re people gonna say – ‘Oh, that’s nice but someone left their old Hostess Cupcake on this platform’? ‘Here, let me throw it away for you’ – and then where are you?”

“Cut it out,” Whitey says. He’s had enough, whether it’s helped him stay awake or not.

“Okay, okay, so forget displayin’ it. How do you grade it?”

“Don’t know. Unopened? Unique?”

This gets a bunch of the other sports guys going, guys who’d been listening as things went along, more or less as a way to stay awake.

“What about the double-autographed piece of cake, with the signatures in the frosting?” says E-boe from around the corner.

“Yeah, and the rare double-rose error,” chimes in Bulk.

“I had three of those pieces of cake, but my mom threw them out,” O’Strowsky says, and that clinches it. Once you pull out the my-mother-threw-them-out line the game’s over. No one else is gonna say anything to top that.

“Aw go back to sleep, wouldcha?” Whitey says, but no one does.

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?”

Jan. 17, 1989: Guy here can’t figure out “Layla”

The afternoon was getting long and on the tired side, even for the ad guys, who can usually talk their way through little slumps in the middle of the day. Maybe the ad guys are feeling it because it’s Wednesday and all the guys who sell cards at shows and advertise in the magazines pack up their stuff on Wednesdays and head to Cincinnati or Plymouth or wherever so they can set up for Thursday night when the dealers sell amongst themselves or Friday when the show opens to the public. Sports ad guys can’t get anyone on the phone on Wednesdays, whether to sell them an ad or ask them where’s the money for the last ad, so they get kind of at loose ends in the afternoon, and that’s when they come over and talk to editors.

Sports editors won’t talk much to the sports ad guys on Wednesdays because Wednesday’s the busy day for the guys do the weeklies. They got to get all their stories written down to a length by Wednesday so Thursday they can polish them up and Friday they can put the paper together. Wednesday’s the work day, in other words, so no ad guy’d better come by making small talk. Won’t work, and even Baumer’ll be told where to go.

So you got a situation where the ad guys got nothing to do and the editors want nothing to do with them, and all the ad guys from the other magazines, those that’d want to talk to a sports ad guy with time on his hands, they’ve got calls to make so they don’t want to talk to sports ad guys. The only people left for sports ad guys to talk to are editors from the other magazines, like cars or comics.

For whatever reason, Baumer likes talking to Don the comics editor on days like these. It’s strange because Don doesn’t exactly suffer fools and Baumer doesn’t ooze intelligence. The way it winds up, works out swell all around. It’s getting-beat-up practice for Baumer, which comes in handy in his line of business, the sports guys who sit on the other side of Don think get a few laughs at Baumer’s expense, and Don usually strikes a blow for thinking men.

This is one of those Wednesdays, and Baumer ambles over to Don’s desk right on cue, steps right into it.

“So Don,” Baumer opens, “Got a question for you I been thinking about: Whatever happened to Derek and the Dominos?”

“Who?” Don expects pretty much anything from Baumer when he ambles over on a Wednesday afternoon, but this comes from a little deeper space than Baumer’s usual stuff.

“Derek and the Dominos. You know, had that big hit with ‘Layla’ then you never heard anything after that.”

“And what’s the reason you think I know anything about Derek and the Dominos?”

“Music, comic books – it’s all that stuff. It’s that stuff – pop stuff. I mean, it all kinda falls in together. Read comic books, listen to music.”

“Things you do when you sit?”

“Yeah, like that – things you do when you sit. Read comic books, listen to music, eat.” Don’s not the smallest guy in the world so you can see what Baumer’s getting at. Sounds too simple, sounds dumb actually, but that’s Baumer and even Don knows you just gotta let most of it slide.

“So what about Derek and the Dominos?”

“What happened to them? Where’d they go? Can’t have such a big song like ‘Layla’ and just disappear.”

Don spins around in his chair the way he does when he lectures people, and drops his glasses down on his nose so he can look at Baumer over the top. “First thing you have to realize is Derek and the Dominos didn’t exist. Didn’t exist, don’t exist.”

“Sure they did. They did ‘Layla.’”

“No, they didn’t exist. They were a made-up group. Eric Clapton, Duane Allman and some other musicians got together in the studio, made an album, called it ‘Derek and the Dominos,’ and after that album and another album they were done. No Derek, no Dominos, no Derek and the Dominos.”

“You’re wrong,” Baumer says, and that’s when we really start listening. Nothing good ever happens to Baumer when he tells Don he’s wrong, but he steps right into it, he always does. “I mean, Don, you’re a smart guy ‘n’ all, but you’re wrong. Eric Clapton was in Cream, and then he was just Eric Clapton. Just went from one to the other. He never was in Derek and the Dominos. That’s something else.”

“Did you ever listen to ‘Layla’ on the radio – perhaps after your softball game, in the bar, in the strip club, perhaps? That’s Eric Clapton singing. Listen to the voice; compare it to any other Eric Clapton record. That is Eric Clapton singing ‘Layla.’”

“That’s what I mean,” Baumer says, and now everyone’s confused. “Derek and the Dominos did ‘Layla,’ then Eric Clapton did ‘Layla’ right after that. I mean, the two versions are really close – really close. Almost identical. But they’re different. Listen close and you can tell they’re different. But Derek and the Dominos’ was first, now they’re gone. What I want to know is what happened to them.”

Don’s one of those guys you can hear the color get into his cheeks, and this is one of those times. Sounds like a south wind blowing up a thunderstorm. “What I am trying to tell you is Eric Clapton was a member of Derek and the Dominos. There are no two versions. There is only one version. There is the Derek and the Dominos version of ‘Layla,’ and that is the only version.”

“Listen, the song comes on the radio – right? And at the end of the song, what do they say?”

“They say, ‘”Layla,” by Derek and the Dominos,’ or something close to that.”

“Only sometimes. The other times they say, ‘Eric Clapton.’ And you can hear the difference between the songs when they say Derek and the Dominos and the songs when they say Eric Clapton. It’s different. It’s not the same song. So what I want to know is what happened to Derek and the Dominos.”

Don will never admit defeat, not ever. But by the same token, he can see where this is going, and what he needs to do is bail out. “Okay, here is what happened to Derek and the Dominos. One guitar player died in a motorcycle crash. The bass player is dead too. Not sure how, but I do know he’s dead. The other guitar player went through drug rehabilitation. Every now and then he’ll pop up on a song. Drummer, I don’t know.”

“What about Derek?”

“He’s gone too. Lost his voice. Can’t sing anymore.”

“Okay, thanks.” Baumer actually sounds sort of relieved. “I always figured it was something like that.

“Oh, you’re welcome,” Don says. “It’s amazing what you can learn just sitting around.”

“I guess,” Baumer says, and he’s off.

Don doesn’t usually stick his head over to our side, but this time he’s got no choice. “I don’t know what he ate as a child,” Don says, “but if fish is brain food he was fed strictly on red meat.”

“Yeah, but his mind’s at ease,” I say. “Can’t put a price on that.”

“Maybe you can’t,” Don says, and that’s all we hear from him rest of the afternoon. And that’s not a bad thing for a Wednesday, either.