I always thought it would only be spelled as lead. Yet, there it was, journalists referring to their lede. More than interesting to me is that a look through the Shorter version—two good sized volumes—of the OED, lede is not even there. My embedded spell checker doesn't recognize lede. No matter, I do not change it to lead.
I never went to journalism school. I never really worked on the school paper, other than to have pull with someone who did, who recorded me as having been there so I could buff up my extra curricular resume even further. A no-show job. Do not get too excited. My deceit didn't get me into Yale, or Harvard. One person in the graduating class got into Harvard, and he was the valedictorian. Public school kids didn't get into Ivy League schools.
If anyone remembers the 1958 movie 'Teacher's Pet' starring Clark Gable and Doris Day, he a hard-bitten newspaper editor who wears a hat, talks fast and drinks, she, a night school journalism teacher. If there's a category, it would be a "rom/com," because of course Clark and Doris start off as antagonists, and then of course...of course.
Anyway, Clark embeds himself in her class without her knowing he's a newspaper man. Doris tests the class's ability to write a lede by reciting a hypothetical story of a robbery and a shooting. See if they can turn the account into a newspaper story.
Students struggle. Heads down, pencils scribbling away at the page. Our hero Clark turns his effort in quickly. Doris smiles. How can he have done a good job?
Well, of course he did a good job. He's a pro. In one sentence he captures the whole event, and even of course adds some adjectives that bring it to life. He receives the adulation of his young classmates, and the slowly evolving respect of the teacher.
A real life 'Teacher's Pet', Jim Gannon, would be Robert D. McFadden. His conciseness has earned him a Pulitzer, and if I have it right, Margalit Fox, a former obituary reporter at the NYT, told me Mr. McFadden still shows up. He's 82. He's written so many advance obits that it is almost guaranteed that if someone leaves us past the age of 80, and has anything to do with NYC, there will be a McFadden obit in the paper.
And so today we have the obituary for Henry Stern, a former NYC park's commissioner who was sometimes referred to as Hug-a-Tree-Henry. (Not in the obit.)
Mr. McFadden's lede is flawless. Not only do we get a summary of Mr. Stern, we get a comment on Robert Moses, a former Parks Commissioner who is forever memorialized by Robert Caro's biography 'The Power Broker.' Mr. Moses is referred to as "the Napoleonic Robert Moses." It doesn't get more concise than that.
One of Mr. McFadden's obituaries is is forever etched in my memory when John V. Lindsay passed away. Lindsay, a two-term mayor and Silk Stocking district Congressman for seven years, was one of the city's most frustrating mayors. His administrations saw more strikes than half an inning at a ball game, was the city's mayor in what I'll consider my coming-of-age age.
The lede went:
John V. Lindsay, the debonair political irregular who represented Manhattan's Silk Stocking district on the East Side for seven years in Congress and was a two-term mayor of New York during the racial unrest, antiwar protests, municipal strikes and other upheavals of the 1960's and early 70's, died late Tuesday night at Hilton Head Medical Center, near his home in Hilton Head, S.C. He was 79.
The sentence at the end of the the paragraph simply grabs you if you knew anything about Lindsay:
...the riches evoked by his patrician manner turned out to be illusory, and he and his wife, Mary, lived for years in a one-bedroom apartment.
Anyone who was in the city during Mr. Stern's tenures as Parks Commissioner knows Henry was a character. He did look like a Jewish leprechaun at times when he had the goatee, resembling Ray Ralston as the devil in 'Damn Yankees.'
Henry loved trees. and the obit makes good note of that. He was responsible for attaching the botanical names to stately trees. When I worked in the Madison Square Park area I always made note of the 'Ulmus Americana' near an entrance walkway. It is a stately elm.
If anyone knows anything about elms,you know that the Dutch Elm disease just about wiped them out in NYC. I forever remember the neighbor's elm in front of the house next door. I wasn't very old in the 1950s when they had to cut that one down, and another, from the lawn of the house next to them.
The 1998 funeral for a tree mentioned in the obit was held by Henry for the Weeping Beech tree in Flushing that had to be "euthanized" after years of keeping it on botanical life support. Henry got emotional. So did I.
This is the vegetable equivalent of an Egyptian pharaoh going into his sarcophagus surrounded by his adoring little offshoots.”
I remember that tree. My mother always took me to look at it. It was near the Bowne House, a historic Dutch house dating to 1661.
Funeral services for Henry are March 31 at the Park East Synagogue, 163 East 67th Street. If anyone knows anything, that is just east of Central Park, which of course is full of trees..
No other information is given, but I hope Henry goes somewhere shady.
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