Buffum's favorite story About a story

Asked whether he remembers any favorite story he or Kathy Goforth wrote while they were at the Beacon Journal, our New York City correspondent Charlie Buffum came up with this irreverent gem for the blog:

I forwarded your question on stories to Kathy. I know she won a Penney-Missouri award one year for a feature she wrote about battered women [I think].

The funniest story I recall well about Kathy's writing is how she was a new hire, an Akron University English major stuck writing obits and wondering how to make the move to real newspapering. Goforth thought she finally had gotten her big break when an obit came in for a guy who had died of a heart attack while deer hunting. "Aha!" she thinks. "When they see the intricate, ironic American gothic, heart-rending literary gem I develop this into, they'll rush out into the newsroom and say, 'Who is this Goforth? Why isn't she on page one?'" So Kathy calls the guy's widow, his hunting partner who recalled that the deceased had trouble turning off the gas lanterns the night before, the sherriff's office, etc., labors mightily, and whips out a four or five-take masterpiece. Then she sits back smugly, waiting only for the technicality of being discovered. Finally, Loren Tibbals stands up, copy in hand, and slowly walks to Kathy's desk. Here it is, the moment! No doubt a moment to be enshrined in her biography when published in "Great Ohio Journalists, Vol. 1" She looks up, smiling modestly as Tibbals peers though those thick glasses and asks, "Did you write this?" "Why yes, Loren, I did." Tibbals tosses it on her desk, turns to walk away, and snaps back over his shoulder: "Jesus Christ, Goforth, you got a quote in here from everybody but the Goddamn deer. Cut this to three graphs." Ah fame. More fleeting than a whitetail on the first day of hunting season. Anyway, it's not a story she wrote, but its a story ABOUT a story she wrote that remains one of my personal favorites, right up there with "Stick This Slug Up Your Ass," Ron Kuhne's "God Willing" addition to the front page weather, and watching Bill Schlemmer put out his innumerable wastebasket fires. Damn, those were fun times, weren't they? As for me, the only story I ever won a prize for (state AP award) was for writing about the sun coming up in Medina [big news], one of Perry Morgan's brainstorms.

Blog Guy’s Notes: The “slug” quote actually was a line of type set by a Linotype operator back in the days of hot type when each line of a story was a lead slug. The printer who set this line of type sneaked it into the middle of a story and it was actually printed in the newspaper. The other tale is about Ron Kuhne who was responsible for writing a one paragraph weather summary for page 1. Kuhne thought he would have fun with the copy desk so he wrote a graph which ended up with something like “sunrise tomorrow at 4:59 a.m., God willing” That bit was missed by the copy desk and it too was printed in the newspaper. If anyone has a copy of either and knows the date of publication, please send it to us. Oh, and Schlemmer was a pipe-smoking managing editor.