The Great Christmas Ball Caper

My journalism career was short-lived but rather exciting. I had no formal training in the craft beyond re-reading my dog-eared Strunk & White and a sheet of instructions provided by my editor on how to write news stories.

The paper was a small-town rag that was under new ownership, and that new owner took the bold step of going from a weekly to a daily publishing schedule.  This meant adding staff and making serious efforts to get material to fill pages.  Besides me, they also hired a young woman, fresh out of Syracuse University. and a couple of housewives who jumped at the chance to work for peanuts and get a by-line.

Besides our reporting duties, we were assigned a weekly column on a subject of our own choosing.  That turned out to be the best part of the part-time gig, but it also led to my departure after an all-too-brief tenure.

Most of my time was spent covering village and town meetings, which proved to be a real test of my observation and comprehension abilities. Staying awake was the challenge, but there were rare flashes of excitement that had me scribbling barely legible notes in my Official Brenda Starr Reporter's Note Pad.  Like the time when someone suggested the speed limit sign indicating the end of the 25 MPH section and the start of the 55 zone be moved to the top of a downhill stretch instead of at the bottom, in order to save wear on brakes. "Oh, no," blurted the Town Supervisor, "We take in a lot of money from speeding tickets on that little bit of road!"

Even as green as I was, I knew better than to include that exchange in my report.  But I didn't know better than to get mixed up in The Great Christmas Ball Flap.  At a later  meeting, a Main Street merchant from one of the small towns in my bailiwick asked the Board for some money to buy a dozen enormous Christmas ornaments to hang from the lamp posts during the holiday season.  He brought a catalog along to show the Board which decorations he had in mind, which were slightly smaller than a Volkswagen and costing in the neighborhood of $150 each.  The Supervisor took a few seconds to do the math before gasping something that sounded like "$1800!" and suggesting the requesting merchant ask the public for donations. 

On my way home from that meeting I composed a column in my head and banged it out on my SCM Electric before going to bed.  I said decorating Main Street was a great idea, but there were plenty of talented people in that town who could whip up better pieces for a few dollars, and the town could display them with a sense of pride the overpriced molded balls couldn't give.  Well, you'd have thought I had suggested the Volunteer Firemen's Annual Barbecue switch from chicken and pork to kittens and puppies by the reaction to that column.  My editor got irate calls from some Main Street business owners demanding my head on a pike.  The guy who pitched the Board at the meeting was threatening a lawsuit after his customers thumbed through the catalog, laughed at the prices and balked at kicking in any spare change for the Main Street Christmas Decoration Project Fund, as the collection jar was labeled.

My editor, a soft spoken gentleman who didn't like making waves, asked me to write another column in an effort to pat down the ruffled feathers in the Merchants Association.  I opened my piece by praising the civic spirit of the decoration proponents, but then made the mistake of trying to gently and respectfully explain why my idea of locally-crafted wares was a winner.  That was it. The paper's owner/publisher called and ended what undoubtedly would have been a stellar, serial-Pulitzer-winning life as a fearless investigative reporter, a cross between Seymour Hersh and Mike Royko.

Fortunately for me, all this happened before the Internet Revolution, so there won't be any record of my work available to mouse-clickers.  I did keep a scrap book of my clippings, but mercifully that got tossed long ago during change-of-residence triage. What I did retain were a couple friendships that endure to this day with people who parlayed their small-town-news adventure into what are known as "positions" rather than "jobs."  Plus, the young S.U. journalism grad I served with sold me her 1950s-era German Zeiss Ikon, which lit a spark that led to my interest in photography and old cameras.  And I still remember those "how-to" instructions I was handed when I signed on, and they've served me well over the decades. 

Oh, and those Christmas balls?  They scraped up the $1800 and hung those huge plastic things from the street lights, only to discover they were way too large for the scale of the streetscape.  There was one further indignity. This drama took place during the 1973-74 Oil Embargo and to save energy the towns killed the street lights. By 4:30 PM, when it got dark, the big globs were all but invisible.

The Phantom Hero

Writing about my days working for Big Eddie brought memories of those days bubbling up.  We were employed by a sub-contractor, doing design and engineering work for the company building photographic modules for Project Apollo. This was a rush job built around the nine-women-can-have-a-baby-in-one-month model.  We worked long hours in rather primitive conditions, but were well paid.  The revolving-door personnel practices meant vetting new hires involved little more than checking for a pulse, and resulted in some very, let's say interesting, characters reporting for work every Monday.

There was Annie, who sported the wardrobe and vocabulary of a lumberjack, and drove a big Ford flatbed truck.  She lasted longer than we expected, given her frequent shouting matches with the bosses. She actually left on her own, broadcasting an x-rated farewell toast as she headed for the door.  There was dead silence in the room after her departure, but we were silently applauding and cheering Annie for having the guts to say what we were all thinking.

Another hero of ours was the guy who forced the issue and shamed the company into enlarging the rest room from three-stalls to eight, in order to better accommodate the two-hundred digestive tracts in regular service to the work force.  Finding an unoccupied stall was a real challenge, and Eddie would physically remove anyone he found waiting for a vacancy in the toilet room.  "You're not being paid to stand around! Out!"  Then he'd pound on the stall doors and strongly suggest to the occupants that they should make it happen or he would squeeze it out of them. 

Nothing helped. The stalls were mainly being used as a hideaway for naps, or for reading the morning paper, which back then took far longer than the downsized editions common today.  Sooner or later it had to happen, and one day it did.  Someone with an urgent need simply could not wait a moment longer, and he left the evidence of his plight on the floor, along with his underwear.  News of this reached the top levels of management seconds after the discovery, and if there had been a fan in that dank, airless room...

Eddie's boss, a buzzcut-wearing squinty-eyed grouch who spoke in machine-gun bursts, went insane with rage.  He stood on a chair and demanded the guilty party step forward so he could "Rub yer *&%$#* nose in it!"  When no one did, he gave the order for every male in the place to "drop 'em" so he could check for missing undergarments. No one complied.  His nostrils flared and spewing smoke, he jumped down from the chair and double-timed towards one of the stunned employees, shouting, "OK, I'll do it for you!" but Eddie, in a rare display of decency, stepped up and quietly informed his boss that "you can't do that, you'll get us all in trouble."  With that, they both left the room.

The next morning, we found a work crew moving the rest room wall so plumbers could bring in another half-dozen seats. Two days later, we could stroll in anytime of the day and find an open stall.  No one ever learned the identity of the superhero who sacrificed his skivvies for our comfort.  It would have been fitting to name the refurbished facility in his honor.

Downsizing as Sport

Back before the cube farm era I worked in a large, open, barn-like room crammed with desks, drawing boards, and a couple hundred a-hole & elbow drones. Our project was for NASA's planned lunar mission, subcontracted to a giant photographic products firm. You'd recognize their name in a second.  Despite being fully staffed, and having no room for additional bodies, there were new hires reporting every Monday morning.  They were there to replace the ones who were summarily discharged the previous Friday by Big Eddie, our feared and fearless leader.  There seemed to be neither rhyme nor reason for the firings. The workload was fairly constant, and it wasn't necessarily the poorest performers who were axed.   

It always went down this way: At 3 pm on Fridays, Big Eddie would stroll down the aisle that divided the room, his fat head oscillating like a desktop fan (something we weren't allowed to have, even though there was no A/C nor windows).  Every so many steps, Big Eddie would stop, fix his gaze upon his intended target, and wiggle his "come with me" finger. The doomed worker would know he had to follow him to a small alcove in the rear of the room, where he and his fellow soon-to-be ex-colleagues would get nothing but a "Need I say more?" from Big Eddie's smirking mouth.  That was the condemneds' cue to get their coats and vacate the premises, pronto.

One Friday, Eddie entered the room for his 3 pm purge, and we saw him give the look and crooked finger to someone we all thought was too well connected to fear being chopped. The guy's face turned ash gray, his jaw dropped as he had visions of starvation, foreclosure and destitution, when all of a sudden, Big Eddie cracked a grin and waved him off. "Just kidding!"  That's when it became obvious that this was just sport for the management.  The turnover harmed rather than helped this job get done correctly and on-time.  But it must have been fun, because they kept doing it. We knew that if we escaped the Friday Reaper, we could count on another week of the fairly high wage we were earning. 

Years later, I saw an ad for Big Eddie's estate auction.  He had died in his recliner, watching TV, surrounded by filth and garbage, piles of empty junk-food bags and beverage cans, and he sat there for weeks until the postman alerted the cops. Eddie's mail was piling up, along with the daily papers.  Though Big Eddie's Cadillac was in the driveway, the mailman's knocks went unanswered.  I went to the auction out of curiosity, just to see how this odd creature lived. The house was a mess. It was clear he had done nothing to maintain it following the death of his mother, who shared the home with him for many years.  I thought the auction lots would consist of things like torture racks, medieval weaponry and human fingers strung on a necklace, but Eddie collected comic books.