The Office As a Person

If an office was a person, Joe Franklin's office would be a bum.

So said William Whitworth, a "venerated profile writer and editor" who has just passed away at 87 when he wrote a 1971 New Yorker profile piece on Joe Franklin, who I'm call Mr. Memory Lane.

Sam Roberts in the New York Times gives Mr. Whitworth the 21-gun salute of tribute obits across 6 columns, with two photos. spread over more than half a page in this past Monday's print edition.

It is said a picture is worth a thousand words, and the downloaded photo of Joe in his office makes it clear that Mr. Whitworth was not exaggerating.  Oddly enough, the photo I chose shows Joe at the stage of his life closely resembling my father in size, dress, pose and stature. The resemblance is uncanny to me. My wife agrees as well.

The photo of Joe surrounded by what is likely huge amounts of Broadway ephemera is nothing but a cluttered closet compared to how the Collyer Brothers lived. They were the famous hoarders who in the 1940s stuffed their East Harlem mansion with so much clutter that they were found dead buried in it, 15 days apart. A news report from the era gives you a small idea of their hoarding.

On March 21, 1947, an anonymous tip sent authorities to the Collyer brothers' mansion in Harlem. NYPD officers found the dead body of one of the brothers amongst the 120 tons of trash they had collected. It would be another 15 days before authorities found the other brother buried underneath a collapsed pile of trash

Joe didn't shoe-horn a piano and large parts of a car into his office, and at least he was able to move around and go in and out. The brothers were hoarders as well as reclusive. At one point Joe had a restaurant in the theater district where he greeted the theater-going crowd with stories and sometimes risqué jokes.

My own working space here at home is called the "computer room." There are two desks and a desktop computer where the writing is done. The room is filled with so many pictures there is no more wall space to hang them from. The floor serves an easel for the overflow.

My wife calls me a hoarder, but I think that word overstates my proclivity for saving newspaper clippings. There are boxes of saved clippings that I admit I will probably never go through, but that I still want. She managed to convince me that she could toss one of the boxes found in a small closet to make room for Christmas stuff. I have no idea what I'm missing, but I still feel a bit of pain that I no longer have that box. I'm convinced it held many Russell Baker Observer columns. Oh well.

I still actively clip newspaper stories, in particular ones that have lead me to write a posting, like the recent obituary for William Whitworth.

Mr. Whitworth apparently worked at The Herald Tribune back in the day with Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe and Dick Schaap. I still miss The Herald Tribune: news, sports, editorial cartoons and just plain cartoons. To this day I still miss Our Miss Peach.

The Herald Tribune wobbled after the 114 day newspaper strike by the typesetters in 1962-1963. The president of Typographical Union No. 6, Bertram Powers, knew the typesetter jobs were doomed by the advancing ability of a computer that could direct the formation of type rather than huge, clunky linotype machines. Word processing as we know it was coming to the newspaper industry.

Up till then New York City had 8 dailies. Mergers occurred after, one coming from the combination of The Herald Tribune, World Telegram &Sun, and the Journal American: The World Journal Tribune.

A New Yorker cartoon of the era (This was NOT easily copied, despite owning two discs of complete New Yorker cartoons.) showed a massively elongated news truck that resembled the longest of stretch limos with the words World Journal Tribune... on the side. Nightly news that was 15 minutes at 11 o' clock went to a half hour. The dawn of televised news was creeping up over the horizon. Print news media has been shrinking ever since.

Mr. Whitworth however wasn't out of a job. The became a highly respected editor at The New Yorker and The Atlantic. He also wrote profile pieces, like the one he did of Joe Franklin. He might have been the only person who could tolerate The New Yorker's prickly editor William Shawn without resorting to physical violence.

For myself, I never heard of Mr. Whitworth, shown in the obit seated below a blowup of his Joe Franklin profile piece, appropriately holding a pencil for editing. I've read plenty of pieces by Robert Caro, Pauline Kael and other writers he's edited, but never knew of the man behind the curtain.

How nice it would have been to meet him. It's never going to happen now, but I would love to see what a top-flight editor would do to my postings. I might be advised to just concentrate on my other hobbies.

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