Mike Vaccaro Interview

Maudlin, huh? Well, let me tell you something. I remember covering one winter meetings when another person named Henry Hecht -- the real one, by the way -- had to leave a card game for an hour because he desperately wanted to watch the MASH episode that had Radar leaving the show. When he came back, he told us it was such an emotional experience, he was crying.

So to you, Mr. (Phony) Henry, I say if you think reading an emotional obit written for a friend or relative is maudlin, all I can say is I feel sorry for you. If Mike Vaccaro is writing it, I'll take maudlin any day.

Carry on,

Dan Castellano

 

I've always like Vaccaro when he was with the Ledger, but now my respect & admiration for him just jumped to a new level. The digs at Loopy and Philips didn't hurt, either. ;D

 

If I can be half the writer, reporter and person Mike Vaccaro is, I think I'd be a success.

 

Henry - sorry the interviews are not up to your standard.
If you have any questions about how the interviews are done, and why they are done that way, feel free to email me.

 

don't mind hh. we try not to. ;D 8)

 

When did HenryHecht go from a semi-respectable poster to a guy who goes out of his way to say nasty shit and tweak some of our most respected veterans? I'm trying to place the time.

 

I think it was the Ron Borges thread that put him over the top.

 

can he call you instead?

 

Never miss a Vac column. He can hit a big-league fastball. Really solid person. This business is better because of him. Good interview. Thanks for posting that.

 

Hecht: Writers prefer writing -- the way talkers prefer talking, and trolls prefer trolling. It's the natural order of things.

Kinda like how you're the human equivalent of a poop smudge.

 

Yes.

 

I think Henry has a very good point about e-mail interviews. They are better than nothing, but I have problems with them. A couple years ago, a kid from my old high school wanted to interview me and I kept trying to get the kid to do it by phone instead of by e-mail because, although it was to my advantage to do it by e-mail, I was trying to convey to him that it wasn't to his advantage to do it that way if he really was interested in finding out what it's like to be a journalist. Now since it wound up in the alumni quarterly and my classmates ended up seeing it, I am very glad we wound up doing it by e-mail because I write much better than I talk and I was able to get my points across very clearly. But there was certainly no give-and-take, no challenges, no provocation, no surprises. It's very much like a prepared statement, you've basically ceded control to the interviewee. We lose so much that way and the interviewer is working with one hand tied. There is a colleague of Vaccaro who has a rare gift for getting people to be themselves, for getting them to forget the recorder is on, for getting them to say things they normally wouldn't say. This is what should be the goal, rather than basically getting someone to write an essay for you -- eloquent but canned.

For instance, I'd want to challenge Vaccaro and say, "Well, you say your relationship with Lupica ended when you went to the Post. What kind of relationship did you have when you were in Newark? Did you interact at all when you were a young columnist in Middletown -- a writer's paper that allowed audacious, emotional writing that was sort of Lupica-esque -- and you were finally in a spot to introduce yourself at, say, a playoff game? Is he busting your balls now because you're at the Post and that's what the two papers do to each other all the time or because he considers you a threat? Have you and he talked about it?"

It's funny. A bunch of years ago two guys I knew way back got jobs as rival SEs in a town that was new to them both. They knew each other a tiny bit from conventions, that kind of thing. One of them said to me, geez I wanted to have lunch with him, he won't give me the time of day. I wanted to say, he liked you fine when you were a thousand miles away, now he wakes up in the morning wanting to beat your fucking brains in, not be your lunch date.