<\/p>\n
I had<\/strong><\/span> these editors at Sun Newspapers, Stan and John. This was in the early 1980s. My beat was the city — Collinwood.<\/p>\n I just saw John — the head editor — at a wedding. He told my wife I got in a fistfight with Stan at the paper. Alice, on the way home from the wedding, said to me, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you tell me about that fight? You were hotheaded.\u201d<\/p>\n I never got in a fistfight. Prove it! Maybe a little yelling but I never hit Stan.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how<\/strong><\/span> it went down in ’83:<\/p>\n Stan, marking up my copy, said, \u201cHow can you write like this?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cListen, schmuck,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019m not writing like this. I\u2019m leaving.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t get so worked up.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou have no tact, Stan. No ability with human relations. My copy is easy to edit. You\u2019re dictatorial. We don\u2019t get paid enough to listen to this.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYour copy<\/strong><\/span> is the most difficult here,\u201d Stan said. \u201cNo, I take that back. Bob\u2019s copy is.\u201d<\/p>\n I never hit Stan. By the way, I’m friends with Stan. The recent wedding — the one mentioned above — was Stan’s younger daughter’s. I talked copy editing at the wedding. I told John how a summer intern at a national publication had recently tried to change a line of mine from \u201cI said\u201d to \u201cI replied.” (For example: \u201cI like ketchup,\u201d he replied. <\/span><\/em>instead of \u201cI like ketchup,\u201d he said<\/span><\/em>.)<\/p>\n “I let it stand, John,” I said. “I had other battles to fight. But then when the story came out, the \u2018I replied\u2019 practically ruined it for me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWho says \u2018I replied\u2019?\u201d John said.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody. Exactly. It\u2019s \u2018I said.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n John and<\/strong><\/span> I agree on that, at least. Nice. But John still claims I got in a fight with Stan. Lately he has hinted he might downgrade the fight to “maybe it was some pushing.” I’d like a full retraction, John.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had these editors at Sun Newspapers, Stan and John. This was in the early 1980s. My beat was the city — Collinwood. I just saw John — the head editor — at a wedding. He told my wife I got in a fistfight with Stan at the paper. Alice, on the way home from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30018"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30029,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30018\/revisions\/30029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}