Doug Marlette's Magic Time
I'm just getting to the late Doug Marlette's novel Magic Time. Doug was a Greensboro native, and we met and talked many times. I'm embarrassed it has taken me so long to read this novel of newspapering, race and the South.
While I have never met an editor like this, I love the description:
When Carter appeared in his office, Callahan leaned back in his swivel chair behind an antique mahogany desk stacked with newspapers. He lowered his smudged glasses and peered at Carter with pterodactyl eyes. Callahan was like something out of The Front Page, with his ill-fitting suits, coffee-stained ties, salt-and-pepper buzz cut, and matching day-old stubble. He spoke in a steady stream of U.S. Marine Corps-honed profanity and the jaundiced aphorism of the fourth estate. "I was born in the middle of the night," he would mutter in disgust over some politician's lie, "but not last night." His brutal candor was legendary. He once described a recently elected Miss Ellis County as "so ugly she could haunt a nine-room house from across the street," unaware that she was the niece of the society editor who was proudly showing him the photo running in her section. Carter had thus far dodged Callahan's standard retort to bad copy: "He couldn't write shit with a turd in both hands."
Callahan bounced his right knee up and down like a jackhammer as Carter stood in the office, making his case. When listening to a story pitch, Callahan would always take a deep drag on his cigarette. The cigarette was like an egg timer. You had only as long as he could hold the smoke in his lungs to spit out whatever you had to say. In the event of an unnecessarily long verbal drumroll for a story idea, Callahan would shoot smoke through his nose and, alluding to the loquacious circus ringmaster who oversells his star attraction, say, "Bring on the dancing bear, son, bring on the bear."
I have heard editors talk about bringing on the bear and not being born last night, but never with such style.