Tales from the Seven Star *******

By Charlie Buffum
In the days when dinosaurs ruled journalism, the Beacon Journal was a strange land, filled with smoking wastebasket fires from careless smokers, and peopled with curious “Front Page” characters. Some of them, children, did not even have college degrees!

It was a time when the owner, John S. Knight, came to work every day, in a suit and tie, and actually cared about every word that appeared in his paper. His chief Allosaurus was Ben Maidenburg, who bullied and sneered but wasn’t above lending ten bucks to a needy printer or reporter when needed.

It was a time when Fran Murphey, who favored bib overalls, ran a half-column snapshot of a circus in her “Around Town” column and regularly climbed into the back of her cluttered car in the BJ parking lot to catch a 4 a.m. nap after writing a column all night.

Speaking of women journalists, it was not very distant from the time that the newspaper’s distaff legend, Helen Waterhouse, in her 80s, had rushed to cover a raid on a mismanaged old folks home in the Portage Hotel. On the elevator going to the scene, one of the assistant DAs turned to the wispy-haired, disheveled Waterhouse and asked, “How are they treating you here?” Witnesses say she sputtered for weeks over that one. But Helen is a story for others to tell.

Anyway, children, at this golden time, there was a young man named Bill Berger.

Bill, now departed, had a ‘40s pompadour haircut that he retained throughout life. He had served in World War II as a Marine Corps “airdale,” the back-seat gunner in a lumbering torpedo plane in the Pacific. He once almost shot off his own tail, he claims, but being an airdale, he missed. He was later recalled to almost single-handedly win the Korean War, too.

Berger was for many years the BJ’s cop-shop reporter. He got so close to the police that he was considered one of them by both the cops and the editors. But he was always conscientious. (For his journalistic reward, he ended up handling Soap Box Derbies and Spelling Bees for the Promotion Department. Ah, meritocracies… But that’s another story, too.)

Bill was a great practical joker. He had a desk and typewriter at the Police Station, outside the Detective Bureau. The detectives, headed by a jolly guy named Carroll Cutright, once decided to give Berger some of his own medicine. They taped a dead fish under his desk. For days, Bill couldn’t figure it out. When he finally did, his first thought was, “Don’t get mad; get even.”

Cutright was a natty dresser, sort of the sartorial equivalent of former Kansas City Chiefs head coach Hank Stramm. Cutright had a new fedora hat of which he was very proud, Bill noted, and his retaliation plot was hatched.

Every day, Berger carefully folded a strip of toilet paper and slipped it inside the hat’s headband, adding a strip a day. As a result, Cutright’s hat rode higher and higher on his head. He knew something was “fishy,” but couldn’t figure it out. It went on until the chapeau was set precariously high on the Chief Detective’s head and a strip search was indicated. They didn’t mess with Berger again.

Another time, a cop who didn’t trust the practical jokers hanging around the station decided to lock and park his brand-new car in a parking lot across from the BJ, rather than keep it near the Police Station. Bill found out. It was winter, and at the time when computers were coming in, and IBM punch cards were in vogue. Bill collected piles of the little punch-card confetti pieces.

With the help of two police accomplishes, he went to the parking lot and, after flashing badges, the cops used master keys to open the new car. Bill carefully fed the confetti into the car’s windshield defroster vents. He and the cops hid by a BJ window to watch.

The victim cop came to the parking lot, looked around, unlocked his car, and got in. A puff of blue smoke as the engine started. Next, the driver turned on the defroster. This was clear because the inside of the new car immediately looked like one of those snow globes, shaken, not stirred.

As Bill told it, the cop jumped out of his car, drew his pistol, and screamed. He demanded to know from the lot owner how this happened, and the conspirators saw the poor operator wave his hands, obviously explaining that “It was the police!” The guy started looking around for the culprits. “If he could have found us right then, he might have shot us,” Bill laughed, clearly without remorse.

Ah, journalism. How could people like that put out such a damn good paper, one that people actually read … and believed?