TREESON:: an APOLOGIA to trees

By Bill F Stokes

Treeson is an apology to all the trees that went into making the newsprint to carry the author's drivel to readers of the Chicago Tribune, Milwaukee Journal, Wisconsin State Journal, and Stevens Point Daily Journal of a 35-year newspaper career back when

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Stokes Author
• Release date: Dec 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781088081075

Book preview

TREESON:

An APOLOGIA to Trees

Bill Stokes

Other books by Bill Stokes:

Margaret’s War

The River Is Us

Hi-ho Silver Anyway

Trout Friends & Other Riff Raff

Ship the Kids on Ahead

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Children’s’ Books

You Can Catch Fish

Slapshot

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Daily Column

Kickass the Doorstop Dog is a daily post on

Bill’s page at Facebook, and is also available at www.billstokesauthor.com

Chapter One

Newspapers are dying, and I don’t feel so good myself.

I had a thirty-five-year run with newspapers back when they claimed the remains of the day with the finality of buzzards; and failure to at least kick through the newsprint bones would be dereliction of personal history and a missed opportunity to apologize and firm up my relationship with trees. The fact that my middle name is Forrest is not enough. Maybe shuffling through some of the corpus delicti will make it easier to deal with the annoying guilt fantasy that interferes with my peace of mind:

A great windowless room awash in white light; thousands of strangers mill about, mumbling and wringing their hands, some of which appear to be ink-stained. In front, a half dozen robed and bearded men slouch around a long table, not unlike copy editors congregating at a state desk. They appear bored and anxious to break for lunch.

Suddenly one of the men points at me and says, You there! The ink-stained wretch! Front and center!

My knees buckle, but I manage to stagger over to stand in front of the table.

The record shows that hundreds of perfectly good trees were killed to print your journalistic drivel. What do you say to that?

Before I can answer, one of the other robed men speaks. Oh, lord, must we listen to another sniveling newspaper guilt trip!

Well, they’re a dying breed, you know, and there may be some historical merit.

Old newspaper hacks have about as much historical merit as horse diapers!

We process all applicants.

But newspaper people! Such a waste! They’ve always gone straight to hell. No questions asked.

That policy changed with the new green pastures program.

And they go on forever about how important they were at exposing and explaining and commenting on everything from world wars to potholes.

Maybe we can get this one to move it along more quickly.

Not a chance.  They have no more respect for an unexpressed thought than a cat in heat.

Let’s get started anyway.

I should have stayed on gate duty: Thumbs up.  Thumbs down. What a job!

Between this troublesome fantasy and the growing demands of a bladder to be the command organ, I get about as much sleep as a bordello guard dog. Maybe if I respond to the question that the fantasy poses it will loosen its grip on my tree guilt. At the very least there can be no harm in reviewing my involvement in newspapers’ decline as the low-tech process of using pieces of trees to deliver the news goes the way of woodsheds and outhouses.

One of the first real news stories I wrote was the following:

DOG KILLS CHICKENS

Leo Kaszewski, 545 Briggs Street, reported to police that a dog broke into his chicken house Wednesday afternoon and killed two chickens.

That’s not going to win a Pulitzer but it’s certainly worth the paper (trees) it was printed on, at least to Leo and his neighbors on Briggs Street. The story shows tight editing, and while we are spared a verifiable version of my original copy, it probably went something like:

"In the quiet gloom of Wednesday afternoon, a creature lusting for blood made its way cautiously along Briggs Street.  It stopped suddenly and tested the wind: Chickens! The creature salivated and... ..."

Obviously, along with journalism study at the University of Wisconsin, I took too many creative writing courses, being encouraged in that regard by kind remarks from TAs and profs. But I had a wife and five kids, and as graduation loomed, if words were to figure in my life work, a regular payday had to be a part of the plan.  Dreams of replacing Hemingway took on a To Have and Have Not character, and I went out on the newspaper-reporter job market, which, in its stinginess and task descriptions, did not seem all that different than requirements for restaurant dishwashers. I interviewed at a half dozen newspapers in Wisconsin and Illinois with no discernable effect; and then one day, a letter arrived from Sherm Sword, city editor of the Stevens Point Daily Journal. It read in part:

"I have your note of Nov. 12 regarding the opening on the Daily Journal news staff and I apologize for not having answered sooner. The Ed Gein story has kept us somewhat busier than usual.

The job we have to offer perhaps will not produce the sustained daily headline material that the Gein story has provided...

Yes, and Noah said it might rain!

The Ed Gein horror of murder and grave-robbing produced one of the most sensational news stories of the 20th century and drew reporters to central Wisconsin from all over the world. Gein’s farm, where a woman’s butchered body was found hanging in a machine shed on the opening weekend of the 1957 deer season, is only twenty or so miles from Stevens Point. The Daily Journal was the nearest daily newspaper, and the lone reporter there—Quincy Dadisman—was the go-to journalist for the wire services as the sensational story played out. His work earned him a job offer from the Milwaukee Sentinel, and I was hired to replace him.

Thank you, Ed Gein.

By the time I arrived in Stevens Point, the Gein stories of murder, grave-robbing and household items made from human body parts had all pretty much been written; and the community was struggling to recover from debilitating shock and disbelief. Macabre rumors, jokes and exaggerations were rampant.

One morning shortly after I took over the Daily Journal news beat, I stepped into the closet-like chambers of Justice of the Peace Emmet Welch and was greeted by a cloud of his foul cigar smoke and an unexpected question, Have you seen him yet?

Before I could ask who, he was talking about, Welch said, Amazing that they would let him go after all the horrible stuff he did.

He paused and shook his head.

Legal technicality probably, Welch said, and he looked at me. Keep an eye out for him, he said. Maybe you can get an interview. Ask him about that lamp shade he made from human skin.

And then Welch casually turned to finish his notarizing duties for the young couple standing slack-jawed and bug-eyed in front of him.

Welch used my arrival in his office to do his Gein shtick a few times after that, stopping only when a woman who was briefly taken in, threatened to beat the hell out of him, and me, apparently just for listening to Welch’s outlandish put-on.

As the Gein thing was sustained with that kind of nonsense, I built on my journalistic reputation with things like:

SLEEPS THROUGH HEART ATTACK

Two customers drove into a Stevens Point filling station Friday night and found the attendant sitting slumped over a desk.  Their efforts to rouse him were futile and fearing he had suffered a heart attack, they called police. Two policemen responded to the call and succeeded in waking the attendant, who had merely been sleeping.

We can talk about the trees that went into printing such news, but I loved the morning beat that produced its content. Every day it was like transforming your senses into a pack of unruly dogs and taking them for a walk across town. It tuned you in to the weather, the seasons, the commercial and social flow of the community, and the sights, sounds and smells of humanity. Sometimes a sulfuric stench from one of the paper mills dominated, but I never thought of it in terms of trees dying to make paper; it was more like an endless industrial fart.

A highlight of the morning rounds was the sheriff’s office and jail, where the smell was of mold, stale smoke, sweat and bean soup. Sheriff Herb Wanserski was paid a county stipend for each meal he served to prisoners, and the prisoners consumed a lot of bean soup.

It’s good for them, Sheriff Wanserski said once when I asked him about it—Makes them anxious to behave so they can get out and get some fresh air.

Sheriff Wanserski used other incentives to make his charges anxious to get out of jail. One of them involved an old button accordion that he could not play very well, but which he used to produce loud, discordant wheezing noises as he stalked up and down the aisle just outside the cells. When the prisoners—most of whom Wanserski knew on a first-name basis, had been audibly offended to the point of yelling obscenities and banging on the cell doors with anything they could lay their hands on, Wanserski would whoop with laughter and tell them that all musicians appreciated an enthusiastic audience.

A jailbreak of sorts provided one of my first big stories. Frank Mathews, being held for bad checks, discovered that one end of a bar in his upstairs cell window had been sawed through. Frank made a hacksaw out of a table knife and sawed through the other end. He then wiggled through the window, dropped to the ground, and walked over to have a beer at the nearest tavern, where deputies picked him up several hours later.

A cellmate who had helped Frank with the sawing had been unable to fit his fat butt through the opening and complained bitterly about this when I talked to him the next morning.

Sheriff Wanserski said Frank had been a model prisoner whom he trusted to do odd jobs around the jail.

He never gave us any trouble, the sheriff said, obviously not bothered by the fact that several days previously while taking out the garbage, Frank had decided to go get a beer. Deputies had found him and brought him back that time too.

Sheriff Wanserski said he had known about the jail window bar being half sawed off and had an order in for the county maintenance crew to come and weld it.

Proving beyond a doubt that a picture is worth a thousand words, the Daily Journal ran a photo of Sheriff Wanserski standing outside the jail, holding the sawed-off bar, and gazing up at the window from which it had been removed.

The photo gave something of a boost to Wanserski’s political image, which had taken some recent hits. Up until the Gein story broke, he had been taking heat for not having solved the mysterious disappearance several years ago of Mary Hogan, the proprietor of an isolated rural tavern near the county line. A blood trail had run across the floor of Hogan’s tavern, and though Wanserski had nothing beyond that to work with, there was grumbling that his detective abilities were wanting. While there is no way to verify its exact wording or even its veracity, the story went that when Wanserski walked into Gein’s house with the first contingent of shocked lawmen, he picked up a human skull from the table and said, Mary Hogan! I’d know her anywhere.

But the opportunity to report sensational Gein items was exhausted by the time of my arrival, and I was stuck with chicken stories. I wrote the following for the Aug. 3, 1958, edition of the Daily Journal:

DOG KILLS ALL OF DEPUTY’S

CHICKENS AT SHERIFF’S HOME

A dog with no respect for the law killed 11 chickens at the residence of Sheriff Herbert J. Wanserski, 440 W Clark St. Wednesday night and was disposed of after being caught in the act, Wanserski said today. Ten of the 30 chickens at the Wanserski residence before the dog struck were owned by Deputy Sheriff Thomas Milanowski. Wanserski said today that all 10 of Malinowski’s chickens were killed and only one of his own.

Milanowski declined comment.

Worth the trees?  It seemed so at the time.

Chapter Two

Mark Twain, the newspaperman that all journalists must worship, once said, "Necessarily we are all fond of murders, scandals, swindles, robberies, explosions, collisions and all such things when we know the people, and when they are neighbors and friends, but when they are strangers, we do not get any great pleasure out of them, as a rule."

Collisions!

Collisions involving neighbors and friends!

It was part of my job at the Daily Journal to report every traffic collision that occurred in Stevens Point and Portage County, specifying vehicular directions, injuries suffered by occupants, details of vehicle damage and driver violations. Journalists of the day elsewhere were writing about Hugh Hefner being hauled into court for an under-age Miss January, and Jimmie Rodgers being paid outrageous sums for singing Honeycomb, or how the Van Allen radiation belt had been discovered, or what Ike and Dick were up to in Washington, but I was stuck agonizing over which fenders were damaged when a car heading west on Main Street collided with one going north on Third Street.

I had to get it right because if I didn’t, managing editor Jim Hull would stalk into the city room and stand next to Sherm Sword’s desk with his back to me and use a sharp pencil to point out on a folded copy of the Daily Journal just where I had gone wrong. It was a daily ritual, and I can still see Jim standing there, hunched over with his pencil in one hand and using the other hand to scratch the terminus of his digestive tract. It is not a pleasant image to recall.

In the early going, this intensified until I would wake up at night mumbling about fenders. It did not help that during my entire Daily Journal tenure, my sense of direction was off by 90 degrees. I have not had that trouble elsewhere, but I could drive into Stevens Point from any direction and everything would be fine: east was east, and west was west and so on. But once inside the city limits, everything would suddenly rotate 90 degrees so that east became north, etc. etc., and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

And then there were the Polish names that had to be spelled correctly. So there is Tzebiatkowski on Frontenac Street, heading south, which seems like east to me but it cannot be because Frontenac runs north and south, and then there is Pazerlowkowski driving north on McCulloch Street, which runs north and south according to my faulty sense of direction, and Tzebiatkowski and Pazerlowkowski collide at the intersection of Frontenac and McCulloch and I had to figure out whether it was the right front fender of Tzebiatkowski’s car that was damaged or maybe the left front, and then whether there was a dent in the left front or the right front, or maybe the left rear fender of Pazerlowkowski’ car.

I even tried diagramming the accidents on paper, but I still turned in copy with fender damage that could only be explained if the vehicles had been going in reverse or headed west on a north-south street. City editor Sherm Sword did his best to get things right before press time, but it was obviously too much for one man, and there was always a lot of work for Jim Hull’s sharp pencil.

I never did figure out why fenders were so incredibly important to Jim. Maybe it went along with his strong editorial stands against unpleasant weather. Perhaps I should have reacted like the late Milwaukee Journal writer Dick Davis, who once held a pair of long scissors threateningly under the nose of an editor and said, Don’t you ever touch my copy again! You are nothing but a goddamned seamstress!

The mark of a good editor is restraint, somebody once said. That may be true, unless you need them to keep you out of trouble, such as the time much later when, with a different newspaper, I wrote about the suet in the chimney of the farmhouse where I grew up. No editor was alert enough to change suet to soot so I felt obligated to write a correction for the next day’s edition explaining that our cows could fly and sometimes we had to shoot them down, hence the suet in the chimney.

If Twain is still with us, we call on him for another quotation: "I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one."

Newspapers responded to the advent of radio in the 1930s by demanding that the Associated Press not distribute news to radio stations. That was not a good call, and then when television came along, about half the newspapers demanded to be paid for listing TV program schedules. That didn’t work very well either. In the 1950’s media scene, television was like a huge posse coming over the hill in pursuit of the fat and aging