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A.C. Greene elaborates on all the silliness
in journalism
By Bill Whitaker
If you think the daily journalism routine is a cakewalk, you
may also believe locomotives 90 feet long and 100 feet wide used
to chug daily through Texas.
They didn't, but if you believe everything you read, they might.
During a ceremony honoring Abilene-born A.C. Greene's far-ranging
work as a historian, author and newspaperman, the once-brash,
now "gentle curmudgeon" reminded journalism alumni of
Hardin-Simmons University of the pitfalls out there for the careless
and the overconfident.
The fact A.C., 73, recalled so many of his own mistakes with
such ease only suggests he's done his share of roll-up-your-sleeves,
in-the-trenches journalism. From my experience, it's always the
journalists who produce little who go around crowing how they've
never made an error.
A.C. has to have been one of the best-educated people ever
to work in a Texas newsroom, beginning with his early days at
the Abilene Reporter-News. For one thing, he was a voracious reader
of books, magazines and newspapers.
For another, even if he didn't know something, he'd sure claim
he did, then bone up on it later.
When newsroom staffer Betty Dozier - later A.C.'s first wife
- asked fellow newspaperwoman Rebel Jackson if the headstrong
young fellow in the Reporter-News newsroom was really part of
the staff, Rebel nodded.
"Oh, yes," Rebel said of A.C., then nothing if not
self-assured, "he's our new expert."
"Expert? At what?" Betty asked.
Rebel's answer: "Everything!"
CALLING MR. CARR
But even headstrong A.C. Greene was served up some lessons
about the rigors of daily journalism, and early on.
For instance, one day in the 1950s, back when A.C. was working
for the Reporter-News, he happened to take a death notice over
the phone from one of the many stringers our newspaper employed
throughout West Texas.
Seems the Merkel stringer was duly phoning in the obituary
of one of the town's best-known citizens, a Mr. Carr. A.C., trying
to do his job with at least some attention to detail, paused when
it came to the deceased's last name.
"Is that with a C or a K?" A.C. asked.
"Oh, now, come on, A.C.," the stringer replied, thinking
A.C. was just fooling. "I don't know anyone who's ever spelled
it with a K!"
"Well," A.C. said, "the British spell it with
a K."
"Yeah," the stringer said, "but he's not British,
he's American."
So A.C. took the information by phone and dutifully put Mr.
Carr's funeral in the paper. Within hours, "all hell broke
loose" in Merkel.
"That very next edition, the people of Merkel just burned
the wires because he was such a well-known man," A.C. told
me later. "And it turned out his name was not Carr but Clark!"
As many of us in this hectic, deadline-driven business have
done at one time or another, A.C. had simply heard wrong.
Possibly this mistake came about courtesy of the 1950s phone
system or the stringer's mispronunciation, but A.C. still confounded
things by not insisting the stringer meticulously spell out the
entire name.
After this, A.C. Greene even made stringers spell out "Smith."
He took no more chances.
CLEAR THE TRACKS
During his visit last Saturday, A.C. Greene mentioned other
mishaps committed during his days in Abilene, though perhaps the
most comical came when he was writing about the Coleman rodeo
and mentioned one of the activities as a "wild calf raping."
The wry journalist suggested that were such activities part
of rodeos, more people might come watch.
Of course, A.C., now of Salado, has made a deep mark in the
newspaper business, both at the Dallas Times-Herald and later
at the Dallas Morning News, where he continues to write a column:
"I've been doing it so long even the owners have forgotten
I'm there!"
Even so, mishaps still occasionally intrude. For instance,
A.C. was bedeviled in a "Texas Sketches" column by a
pesky typo while writing about a powerful, fast-charging Texas
& Pacific locomotive that was 90 feet long and 10 feet wide.
Except the typo rendered it 90 feet long and 100 feet wide.
That would make it a train to end all trains - and all railroad
crossings.
"I had all kinds of clever and unclever letters about
that one," A.C. told me later. " 'One woman wrote and
said, 'Well, at least it could've paid for itself - 100 feet wide,
going down the right-of-way, mowing down all those tall East Texas
pines!'"
Bill Whitaker, who in the 1970s was still rankling West Texas
stringers by making them spell "Smith," 20 years after
A.C. Greene, can be reached at 676-6732. E-mail: WTWARN@aol.com.
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Copyright ©1996 or
1997, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps. Publications
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