Some Backstory 

Both Larry and I had fancied ourselves writers of sorts at an early age, and our poems and short stories were heavily influenced by Poe and Lovecraft.  And, yes, it was all pretty awful.  Larry was a much better writer than I, but that didn’t stop me.  By the time I got to high school, I had written two juvenile novels, and Larry and I “published” a spiral bound book of poetry typed up by an all-girl typing class and copied on what had to be a Model #1 Xerox copy machine.

When we started seventh grade in the fall of 1958, Larry and I showed up at the call for volunteers to work on the school newspaper, brilliantly named the “School Star.”  It was a folded, four-page slick with short vignettes made up entirely of rock ‘n roll song titles, articles describing a day’s activities of a mystery person whose name was revealed on the last page, breathless news about pep rallies, weeks-old sports events, elections of homeroom officers, and obligatory feeds from the principal’s office.   Excitement was in the air.  We were to be officially called reporters with our names on the mast head.  An honored few would even be allowed to have by-lines.  At age eleven, it was almost too much to handle.

                 

The October 1960 issue of the “School Star” with Larry and I as co-editors.

 

We Make the Junior High Big Time and Almost Blow It

Somehow, Larry and I stayed on for two years, and by the time we got to ninth grade, we had advanced all the way to being co-editors.  Sadly, it wasn’t because of talent.  Nobody else wanted the job.  By then, we both felt we had seen something of the world, but as sophisticated as we knew we were, it was still all pretty heady stuff.  At the first call for volunteers, we gave out assignments and sat back and waited for the copy to roll in.  As the top writer on the staff, Larry was to interview the principal, who could always be counted on for morale-building blandishments that merited front-page-center treatment.  I did the editorial, the content of which we’ll mercifully pss over in the interest of saving face.  The ninth grade typing class did up the copy.  And as a special treat, the advisor decided that Larry and I would take the copy down to the town newspaper, The Sunbury Daily Item.  Unfortunately, we failed to acknowledge the bad omens. 

Larry, whose mother always dressed him as if he was at Choate or Lawrenceville, got specially dressed for the occasion.  I was wearing my usual: ill-fitting hand-me-downs from one cousin or another whose mothers universally had hideous tastes in boy’s clothing. Larry was in a navy-blue blazer with a patch sewed over the left pocket that sort of looked like it was from a prep school.  Underneath were a white shirt and a regimental striped tied.  Brand new chinos just broke at the top of brand-new penny loafers.  For bling, he was wearing a Bulova watch and a chromed ID bracelet.

As usual, Larry was waxing philosophical as we left for the Item after school and went down the stairs onto Catawissa Avenue.  While waving his arms to make a point about something, he stumbled and went down hard across the last four steps.  The folio for the entire first issue of the paper scattered across the sidewalk and onto the street.  While Larry wailed, I retrieved all the papers.

Aside from bruising his right arm, right elbow, right knee, scratching the hell out of his face, and slicing his right ear, the real damage was to his outfit.  The right elbow of his blazer was ripped, and the entire right leg of his new chinos was torn from the cuff to the knee.  When he stood up rubbing his arm, the tatters of his pants flapped in the wind.   A couple drops of blood dripped off his ear onto the shoulder of his jacket.

“Good God, you mother’s going to have a fit.”

“My mother?  What will they think at the Item?”

I allowed that I really didn’t know and volunteered that it might be good for a laugh, an ice breaker.  Larry was not amused.  Then he started rubbing his knee, which was conveniently exposed for whatever first aid might come to hand.  A drop of blood hit the back of his hand.

“Oh, shit.  My ear, too?”

I took a look.  “Give me your hanky.”

“Hanky?  Hanky?  You’re not using my pocket puff as a compress.”

“Okay, bleed to death.”  He grabbed mine out of my hand and used it to sandwich the top of his ear.  “Ow!”

“Hold that pose. I hope the hell you’ve been eating your parsley.  You aren’t a hemophiliac are you?  Uh, we’re supposed to be there by four.”

Larry looked at his watch.  It was already 3:30 PM.  He grabbed his elbow with his left hand while holding his ear with his right and staggered across the street.  He looked like he was flaminco dancing in slow motion.  I started laughing.  His mood went from self-pity to anger.  “How am I going to impress this Mr. Smith guy looking like I spent the night sleeping along the railroad tracks?”

“Maybe he’ll think it’s just part of your being a bohemian writer.”  Larry was three steps ahead of me.  “Don’t walk too fast, you’re liable to lock up your knee.  Then I’ll have to carry you, and you know I won’t do that.  We’ll have to call an ambulance.  Hey, that should impress Mr. Smith a lot, especially if they turn on the siren.  What an entrance!”

We turned onto Market Street.  Unfortunately, we had to walk right past the uptown Rea’s drug store and soda fountain.  Already, there was a knot of high school guys standing around the parking meters.  Larry rolled his eyes and moaned.  “Can it get any worse?”

Apparently, it could.  Because the wind was stronger (Market Street ran east/west), Larry’s bifurcated right pant leg looked like one of those long flags used on boats in yacht races.  Everybody in the group started laughing.  Larry tried his best to look dignified as he stared straight ahead and limped past.

When we got to Marlin’s Sub Shop, the laughter and taunts died away.  I tried to be helpful.  “Why don’t you let me tie the two pieces together right below the knee.  Without the flapping, maybe nobody’ll notice.”

Larry decided to ignore me, too.  I just sighed and stayed a discreet five steps behind.  Because Sunbury at that time was a working man’s town, it was still an hour and a half before quitting time, and there weren’t all that many people on the street.  Mercifully, nobody seemed to notice us.  By the time we got to the Item down at the corner of Second Street, Larry had calmed down somewhat.  But he was panting fairly hard from his forced, double-time march down the entire length of Sunbury’s main drag.  We stopped at the bottom of the entrance stairs.

“You sure you want to try stairs again?  They’re kinda bad luck right now.”

Larry gave a snort and shot me a withering stare.  Up he went, the huge heavy door almost slamming me in the face.  I caught up with him at this long counter.  Neither of us had ever been inside the building, so we had to ask the lady if she could ring up Mr. Smith and announce that the co-editors of the School Star had made their official appearance.  Luckily for Larry, the counter hid the lower half of his body.  I said nothing and laid low.  The lady hung up and said that Mr. Smith knew we were coming but was too busy to come down.  We should give her the copy, and she’d deliver it in person.  I stepped up and handed it over.  She looked at Larry and slightly cocked her head, then went back to her desk.  I took it as our cue to scram and headed for the door.

Outside on the sidewalk, Larry turned around and stared contemptuously at the door.  “My mother spends a fortune on a new outfit.  I destroy it two seconds after leaving school.  I humiliate myself in front of half the high school outside of Rea’s.  I stagger down Market Street in excruciating pain, probably crippling myself for life.  And that’s it?  Nothing?”

He stiffly turned around and looked right at me.  “I don’t believe he exists.  Trust me, there’s no Mr. Smith.  It’s all a lie:  the BIG LIE.  They probably ship all their contract stuff to some dingy shop in Herndon or Pillow or Mauk Chunk.”

Larry knew that Mauk Chunk was zillions of miles east past the anthracite fields and on the banks of the Delaware River.  But it sounded dramatic.  I heard all about it all the way to our house on Wolverton Street, where his mother was waiting impatiently in the car.

 

It Gets Worse

Aside from the inauspicious beginning, Larry and I could sense something really big was going to happen:  fame, fortune, maybe even a Pulitzer Prize.  We really thought that that was it:  deliver the copy, sit back, and wait for the pile of newspapers to arrive at the school.  It all came crashing down when a week later the advisor called me at home and in a panicky voice announced that we only had four galley sheets and needed seven to “make the paper.”  I immediately called Larry, who had the good fortune to live in Klinesgrove about six miles outside of town and who was conveniently unavailable to do anything about such crises.  Together, we mulled things over and discovered that neither of us had ANY idea what a galley sheet was and had NO idea what they had to do with putting out a newspaper.  The previous year, the outgoing editors had told us that all we had to do was turn in the copy to the advisor, and a week later the stack of papers showed up at the principal’s office, ready for distribution.  Sounded pretty slick to us.  As eighth graders, we had never been invited to “paste up,” and somehow our advisor had neglected to let the two of us in on the secret.

The next day we got the news:  we had to come up with three more galley sheets or we wouldn’t have enough to fill four pages.  And we had to deliver the copy in two days.  Larry called his mother from the school office and told her to pick him up at the library at 9 PM.  I called my mother and told her Larry was having dinner at our house and that we HAD to eat right when we got there at 3:30 PM.  Study hall didn’t exist in junior high, so we were stuck.  No writing while at school.  Never having seen a galley sheet, we had to guess how much copy we had to write.

By the time I got to ninth grade, my mother was used to my insanity, and she knew that it was ten times worse when Larry was in the mix.  She had Campbell’s Alphabet Soup and toasted cheese sandwiches on the table when we rushed through the back door.  I grabbed my Smith Corona portable, slammed it into its cheesy case, and we were gone inside a half hour.  The Old Man was still at work, so we had to hustle the twelve blocks to the library on foot.  Larry silver-tongued Ms. Wolfe, the head librarian, to letting us use the second floor room in the tower of the old, converted Victorian house.

We were at our best.  Larry had bought an Easy Crosswords magazine at Shipe’s Corner Tobacco Store on the way and copped the first puzzle, quickly laying it out by hand, clues and all.  On my typewriter, I wrote an essay titled “Rock ‘n Roll Will Never Die.”

“Genius, Lytle.  Pure genius!”  Larry grabbed my typewriter and pounded out a poem about the death of Wolfgang von Trips at Le Mans.  So it went.  Somehow, the obvious fact that we were writing for kids, many of whom weren’t even teenagers, never entered our minds.  Larry was in a parallel universe.  I sat mesmerized while he wrote another piece on the “learning life lessons through sports” cliché.  We were editing copy when Ms Wolfe broke in to announce the library was closing in five minutes.  On the way back, I had the greatest idea of all:  I’d take last year’s Christmas issue of Playboy that I shoplifted from Shipe’s and pilfer the annual gift guide.  Back at the house, I stayed up an hour past my bedtime to finish the piece.

The next morning, Larry read my copy.  “More brilliance, Lytle.  This will be THE story of the issue.”  He didn’t seem to care that we had three more issues to put out before Christmas.  The gift list was spectacular.  It included:  a complete hi-fi featuring a Marantz Model 10 FM hi-fi tuner, a MacIntosh MC-275 amplifier, an Empire turntable, and a huge Barzilay cabinet, all for the tidy sum of $1,000; a set of Walter Hagen golf clubs at $900, a Hart, Schaffner, & Marx tuxedo at $500, and finally the coup de grace, a $1,200 bottle of Caswell & Massey cologne.  When I worried about the prices, Larry was unconcerned.  “That’s what parents are for.”

 

The End of It

The next day, Larry was unaccountably forced to go home on the bus right after school let out.  The advisor gratuitously told me that she had talked to Mr. Smith at the Item, and he was displeased with the delay.  With that cheery send-off, I trudged all the way down to Market and Second Streets with the extra copy.  I knew for sure that I was going to be publicly humiliated in front of all these ink-stained men wearing funny square hats, and everybody in town was going to know about it, and I was positively going to have to DIE to live it down.  My heart was pounding inside my Dick Van Dyke sweater as I was ushered upstairs and into this oddly-smelling set of offices.

And there he was, Mr. Smith himself, bushy eye-brows and all business.  Like Scrooge waiting for the appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Present, I was ready for just about anything but was definitely NOT ready for nothing.

Mr. Smith looked over the copy, grunted, and then looked up, “The most important thing to know in this business is the most important responsibility: deadline.”

I just stood there.  “I suppose you wrote all this yourself?”  I just nodded my head, not wanting Larry to be swept into the massacre I knew was coming.

“That was smart.  Never delegate in the middle of a hurricane.”

He then smiled and shook my hand.  He actually showed me around a bit, and I got to see all those machines that made print out of hot metal.  On the way out, he even introduced me to Harry Haddon, the Editor in Chief.  Mr. Smith and I became professional friends of sorts.  For some reason, he liked me, and one month (I think it was December) he even let me deliver the paste-ups to his home over the weekend.  But one thing’s for sure:  from that day on, I never, never, never missed a deadline.