Another great moment in journalism ...

At a school? And end up posting in my own not-Poin thread?

 

So you're not denying it. Interesting ...

 

A non-denial denial. OTOH, all those teachers who have fought the urge to Poin may need an outlet? Guessed I missed my chance.

 

Oh, this location made me laugh because one of the last of my many Trash-80 stories was in Williamsport. Covering Podunk County's first team to reach the Little League World Series, and working on my outdated Trasher, when the guy from the New York Times walks by, stops, comes back, pats me on the shoulder, points to the computer and says, in truly sympathetic fashion, "God help you, my son."

 

Oh, the stories ...

Pre-computer days, back before sanity prevailed, we were the official scorers for the local American Legion baseball league. So I'm out at the one place in the boondocks where we had to go and hit the usual phone booth to dictate my story and, yes, the full box score. As I'm starting dictating the story to the SE, I notice there is a wasp's nest in the booth, so my first words when I was starting to dictate were something like "Goddam it, son of a bitch." Says the SE: Uh, we can't print those words ... the he laughed when I told him the situation. I went down the road about 5 miles and found another booth and dictated the story and box. Of course, the SE says, when we started, "OK, picking up from son of a bitch ..." We both had a good laugh about it the next day.

We were testing out the original portable transmission units ... Texas Instruments, Teleram, Portabubble, etc ... and, as the guinea pig, I covered the conference tournament, the first/second rounds of the NCAA Tournament, the Sweet 16 and the Final Four with a different unit each week. Talk about learning curves ....

And the telecopiers. Four minutes or 6, and when a page split, it had to be resent.

Nope, don't miss them.

 

Almost 40 year old memory, but here goes ...

I was a junior in college at the University of Florida, and would file sports updates with Florida News Network for WRUF every day, so I got to know their people pretty well. When John Spenkelink was about to become the first person executed in Florida after the death penalty was re-enacted, the call came for someone to go to the Florida State Prison in nearby Starke. So I drive my 1971 AMC Hornet up, find myself in a huge grass field with TV trucks, print guys and a bunch of protestors from both sides. And because FNN was feeding UPI, I wind up with one of only four phones in the entire place. While everybody else has to take turns at the convenience store pay phone 18 miles away, I've got a dail-up phone stashed in my car all night. It rings every hour on the hour, I do a quick live scener and hang up until it rings again. Had I been more enterprising, I could have made a lot of money "renting" that phone out. But I was 20, loyal to a fault and wet enough behind the ears that I was naive enough to not understand the gravitas of the situation.

 

I think I've told this story on here before, maybe not.

Was covering a girls' high school basketball game some 90 or so minutes from the office. Game ended, did my interviews and went upstairs to the home ec room -- which doubled as the hospitality room. The teacher in charge of the room left around 10:30 or so that night and left me in there to finish my story (another sports reporter was in the school's office filing his story, which I didn't know at the time), so I asked if she would mind leaving her computer logged in just in case I had problems with the school's wireless.

Lo and behold, the wireless stopped working. I had a thumb drive on me, so I saved it and then uploaded it on the teacher's computer. Tried logging into my email, but the school had hotmail blocked. Tried logging into Facebook, but that was blocked as well. Running out of time and deadline creeping up fast, I was running out of options. Finally, it dawned on me to try SJ. Logged in and sent one of our writers a PM through here, and then called him.

Told him to check his PMs, and his response was "Why?" Told him what happened and he goes, "Good thinking. Got it."

I was honestly surprised it work, but I got the story in just before deadline.

 

These are great stories, but I don't know if anything can touch the one about delivering a fake newspaper to the radio station. Not sure who told it but would love to hear it again.

 

I thought the great moment was covering a football coaches meeting.

 

There was news value to the first part, discussing realignment. The second part, the all-league stuff, will come out eventually and I suspect they'll blow the snot out of it. But it wasn't a deadline job and I hadn't covered that league all season so had no idea of who did what if I'd been allowed in that part of the meeting anyway.

 

This one, also at my first paper, does not involve me directly, nor does it really have much to do with journalism. But it is too funny not to tell, and my friend swears it is true.

My co-worker and friend at the paper, just out of college, was assigned to cover a Friday night high school football game in a town about 45 miles from the office. The town's newspaper graciously allowed our reporters to use its newsroom after the game to write and file our stories. Also covering the game is a female reporter, also not long out of college, from our competition back home. Always seemed to be an attraction between the two -- she'd even asked me once if he had a girlfriend.

They cover the game, go back to newspaper's office, write and file their stories. At some point, they'd also agreed that when they drove back, they'd "hook up" at his apartment.

So he gets on the interstate and drives way over the speed limit because he wants to get back before her so he can rid his apartment of dirty dishes, empty beer cans, old pizza boxes, etc., and maybe even put out some candles and cheap champagne. Unfortunately, he's pulled over for speeding in the middle of nowhere. He can't call her -- this was long before cellphones. The state cops were not particularly efficient, and the ticketing process took almost an hour. He gets home at about 3 a.m.; she's not there.

So he calls her in the morning. She wants nothing to do with him -- ever again. She'd waited outside his place until about 2:30 and finally left, figuring she'd been stood up. Even crazier, the papers assigned them to write sidebars at a Big Ten game that day. They didn't say a word to each other at the game.

About a month later, the reporter at our competition left to take job at a newspaper in California. Not sure what eventually became of her. My friend left journalism long ago and has been married for almost 30 years, with two grown kids. Instead of frowning upon his pre-marriage shenanigans, his wife thinks the story is hilarious.

 

This would be a great story to tell kids to illustrate why it's important for them to clean their damn rooms!