Like a petri dish

by Greg Rasa

Over the years, I’ve thought about the honeybun. At the end of a late-night sports shift, when we were wrapping up and about to depart for Greek pizza or Heidelberg beer, Mark Kiszla was rummaging around the darkened Tribune office and discovered a terrarium in the advertising department supply closet. Kiz was inspired to conduct an experiment: He bought a honeybun from the office vending machines, unwrapped it, and laid it to rest in the terrarium. What secrets would this highly processed pastry reveal? Over the next year or two, we peeked in as it moldered, morphed, spawned insects and formed an entire ecosystem. No one in advertising was aware of the abomination festering under their noses. I’ve often wondered: What became of that honeybun? What did it grow into? What was its career like after it crawled away from the Tribune?

The Tribune was like that. Like a petri dish. Smart, irreverent young people, many of us having gone to school together, with Phil and Irene thrown in. We formed a culture, grew, and occasionally a Philadelphia Inquirer or Seattle Times came along to skim the penicillin off the top.

I started in sports, knowing nothing about sports (still don’t). My shift would start at 6 a.m. to rip (literally) the sports wire; the only other person there was Phil, doing the same for news. Hard to imagine how a man could stick a cigar in his mouth at that hour, but there it was. I asked Phil once how he got up so early every day. “Put the alarm clock on the other side of the room,” he advised, “and hit the ground running. Hesitate, and you’re DEAD!” A few years later, Phil’s advice helped when I found myself laying out the front page of the Seattle Times at 4 a.m.  

Speaking of dead, if you greeted Phil in the morning with a how’s-it-going and he replied, “It’s a beautiful day!” you knew that somewhere in the country a prisoner had been executed.

Phil, of course, was steeped in the Missouri Confederacy, and when I told him Gen. Jo Shelby had owned a sawmill that was torched by the Red Legs in 1855 on what was now my grandfather’s farm, he knew everything about it. He seemed to admire Shelby way too much and glossed over the murderous raid in Free Kansas that the sawmill was retribution for, but that was Phil.

Sounds like there are a lot of Phils now in modern-day MAGA Missouri, but we could’ve predicted that, since Phil’s views were shared by every fan who ever sat on his left or right. (Few were farther to the right.)

Random memories …

I think of Forrest and Gerrity all the time. A thousand funny things. Forrest tossing coffee creamer in the air and lighting it on fire. Playing bass with the Boxbeaters. Jug ears, his grin. Always the ladies’ man, he called those Duraflame fireplace things “sparkling love logs.” I never smoked pot on the Tribune roof, but I assume Forrest had a desk up there.

Gerrity. A tragic genius. I’ll always see him rocking in his chair and rubbing his hands together as he prepares to edit a story. I’ve generated puzzled looks over the years when I’ve used one of his phrases, saying of drab copy, “Let’s sinister this up.” How incongruous it must have been to have him as the boss at the Kansas City Business Journal. But the guy loved telling stories, wherever he was. Nobody in my entire career had more joy for journalism. 

Thank you, Mike Jenner, because I know you tried to help him.

Not ashamed to say I still choke up when I think about those two being gone. The same for Julie Lobbia. Tough losses.

When Julie was hired at the Riverfront Times, she said, “I’m the only person ever to leave the Columbia Tribune for less money.” That was probably true. She was so fearless she probably didn’t even fear poverty if it meant doing great work. She believed in the mission more than money.

Money. Man, the Tribune was so cheap. Remember if you needed pens or notebooks? Office supplies were kept up front in a walk-in safe, and you had to explain what you wanted before someone would let you in.

The federal wage-and-hour people raided the place over the fact we were never paid any overtime. Or so I hear — this happened after I was gone. Funny coincidence.

Everyone added something to the mix of personalities. When Paul Roberts got divorced, he quite irrationally bought a motorcycle. I think it was a BMW, even. Paul didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle, and on his very first outing he put it in a ditch. His sarcasm didn’t suffer a scratch. “I showed her,” he told us.

Paul, always the editor, always deadpan. We were someplace ordering food, and he picked up on a typo in the menu, telling the waitress, “I’ll have the hash brownses.”

We carried a grim wire story one day about people with tapeworms that ate their brains. It formed a running newsroom joke. Later, some arbitrary policy change came down, which was clearly straight from Hank. Why are we doing this, someone asked. Paul replied, “The worm turned.”

We had a librarian in the morgue. I can’t remember her name; she either preceded or followed Lisa Friend. She gleefully told this story. She was at one of the bars when Hank Waters started hitting on her. She knew exactly who he was, of course, but he had no idea she was an employee. And Hank was pretty drunk. At some point he asks her name. She then asks his. “I’m Hank,” he puffed. “But you can call me Hank the Tank!”

We used to get cartoons and puzzles via mail from the syndicate. “The Far Side” was at peak popularity then. Two weeks of “Far Sides” would arrive in a batch, and we’d gather around and gorge on them. Then we’d feel sad for two weeks because we hadn’t paced ourselves.

In one such mailing, the horoscopes failed to arrive. So we just made up our own.

One summer, we had an intern, maybe the only one we ever had: Christy Eagleton. As I recall, she became buddies with Lobbia and Jeff Truesdell. He’ll tell it better, it’s his story to tell, but they went swimming at the quarry when a storm came up. Jeff described getting out of there and said, “I could see the headline: ‘Senator’s daughter killed by lightning while skinny-dipping with reporters.’”

Forrest and I, maybe some others, fashioned cardboard fins for the Xacto knives and threw them at the bulletin boards. You couldn’t toss them like darts, you had to do this ninja sidearm fling to get them to fly right, and boy would they sink to the hilt. Heavy knives flying across the newsroom, just another day at the Tribune.

Cheesecake contest. Jim Curley, victorious.

Our Town. Still one of the best regular features ever to appear in a community’s newspaper. I remember helping hang an art exhibition of them, a pretty cool bit of outreach.

Keith McMillan. One of the nicest guys I ever knew.

I want to thank David, Curley, Keith, Tom, Trotter, Charlie Leight, Mark. Griffin, Kelsh, Bill Marr. Later on, when I caught up with him, Alan Berner. Surely forgetting someone. Tribune photographers taught me so much. (I’m my fifth decade of learning from Tom Reese. He was my Basic Press Photography TA, and we’ve been at three newspapers together.) These guys are the beating heart of our kind of journalism, the storytelling that we all took out into the world.