A former colleague reminded me of the babysitting job I was given by a newspaper editor some forty years ago. I was the court reporter, covering every level from city police court to the New York Court of Appeals, plus the federal court in the beautiful Art Deco building on Broadway in downtown Albany. An exchange program with an English-language newspaper in Pakistan permitted a young reporter from that country to shadow me for several weeks. His name was Hassan Jafri. He accompanied me on my rounds and I introduced him to judges, attorneys, secretaries, police officers, law clerks and courtroom hangers-on.
One day we were sitting in
police court (generally, the most entertaining of the venues I covered),
waiting for the action to start. Most of our talk up to this point had been
professional, with me briefing him on such things as journalistic practices in
the U.S. compared to Pakistan and the constitutional basics. Hassan told me
that before flying to Albany from Karachi, he had visited Baltimore. Relatives,
I assumed. No, he was making a pilgrimage of sorts, not religious but literary.
He wanted to visit three “shrines”:
Edgar Allan Poe’s grave,
the H.L. Mencken House and the house where F. Scott Fitzgerald and his family lived
while he completed Tender Is the Night. Hassan was more deeply and appreciatively read
in American literature than most of my fellow native-born reporting and editing
colleagues. I was surprised and delighted. I could talk books with a guy from
the other side of the world. I felt a certain patriotic shame remembering the
words attributed to Mencken:
“The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.”
2 comments:
I remember Hassan. He was a wonderfully curious and animated individual. We were having some kind of union issue at The Knickerbocker News and Hassan explained in Pakistan they’d have resolved it by throwing the editor out the window. He mentioned what he perceived to be the cultural “holy trinity” in the United States: John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I told him we are not that sophisticated as a culture. The third of that trinity was Elvis Presley.
You had best have an armed guard with you when you visit Poe's grave - very bad neighborhood (or it was the last time I was there, many years ago). Also, if I remember correctly, Baltimore has a statue of George Washington standing on a high pillar, with his arm benignly outstretched to his countrymen; when seen from below - the only way you can see it - at certain angles it looks like the Father of Our Country has an enormous schlong.
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