Attitude had not been invented in 1964, at least not as an affliction. But I had it. I was an early victim.
Flushed with success as a working television journalist, complete with press card, I continued my college education at Louisiana State University part-time, a luxury other men my age did not have. It was only because the US Marine Corps’ pilot program rejected me for bad kidneys that I was classified as 1-Y by my draft board; not bad enough for 4-F, but bad. And good. It meant I would escape the luxury tours of Southeast Asia the government was arranging for most men my age at the time.
It was down to Nicholas Plasterer, a short, gray-haired kerfuffle of a man, to instil in me the techniques that had made great print reporters (for broadcast had not been fully invented then in 1964) in Advanced Reporting 101.
I chose sports as my area to report for the Louisiana State University student newspaper ‘The Reveille’, not so much because I was keen on sports, but more because I thought it would get me a better seat for football games. It did not.
My only previous sports reporting was with the Owosso (Michigan) Argus-Press where, when I was 16, I had a part-time job collating Friday night high school football scores, from the telephone, and writing incisive two liners about the result; (The Falcons clawed out a 22-21 victory…The Cardinals crunched…the Bombers blasted…). It was a firm foundation in the parlance and cliché of sports writing. The effort certainly never was entered for any reporting awards because it was indistinguishable from any of the other detritus of the paper, and there never was a by-line.
But, armed with cliché, I went to lessons to impress. So hazy are the memories now that I genuinely cannot say what I learned in the classroom and what was assimilated from that School of Hard Knocks.
Although, something in the way of technique must have adhered to my brain cells from Plasterer’s efforts, certainly an appreciation of semantics. For it was the vast meanings in the English language that set our separate egos to head-butting like stags.
Let me preface this with a few background facts. I was a full-time reporter with WAFB-TV, a Guaranty Income Life Insurance-owned television station. Reporters with the student newspaper were required to be interns at the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, a newspaper owned by a family which also owned television station WBRZ-TV in the same town. My employers were not keen for me to be working for the competition, and so I set about convincing the journalism department I should be exempt from that requirement.
I surveyed all the staff at Channel Nine, Red Hebert, Ron Albritton, Carlton Cremeens, the news director and Newton B. “Sonny” Carter, the photographer, and added up all their years of experience in print and television, and came up with a figure well over a half a century. Carlton then drafted a letter begging my exemption on the grounds that all this experience was a far better training ground than sleeping with the enemy.
It worked. I was exempted, to the great consternation of Mr. Plasterer who felt I should serve time like the others, and it was under this cloud that I began my assignments at LSU.
The head-butting started over a simple incident. I had to cover one of the regular season games of the LSU Fighting Tigers. The exact wording of my early copy escapes me almost five decades later, but it read something like:
“LSU quarterback Pat Screen’s prolific passing pushed the Tigers past...”
Woe was me when Mr Plasterer saw that.
Using me as an example in front of the class he interrogated me ruthlessly about the meaning of the word “prolific”. I tendered that it meant a lot of passes, an abundance of output, and that’s why the word was chosen. He countered that it meant ‘to produce a lot of offspring’, ‘father a lot of children’, and therefore was inappropriate, almost scatological, and therefore my grade would dip accordingly.
I countered with a plea for dual interpretation; he head butted back that it was his decision and I should take note of the meanings of words before flinging them about in such a reckless manner, and perhaps if I were installed at the local newspaper I might better learn these tricks of the word trade.
I was shattered. Shot down in front of my peers for the unforgivable felony of misusing the English language, accusing the university’s star quarterback of fathering a lot of children, and, most importantly for Mr Plasterer, not playing the game.
My turn for head butting came only two weeks later. I saw the screaming, bold-faced headline in the Sunday Advocate and cocked my head back, waiting for Tuesday’s class to propel it at my tormentor.
I chose drama over head butting during those 48 hours. When the class had finished filing in, I raised the Sunday Advocate sports page over my head in silence. There, in black and white, was what I thought surely must be the most important engraving since the Moses tablets.
“SCREEN’S PROLIFIC PASSING…“, read the headline
“Yes, De La Foret?” enquired Mr Plasterer.
“See anything about Pat Screen spilling his seed in this?” I thought to myself.
Aloud I said, “Same word, different source. Perhaps now you will change my grade.”
But he would not be swayed. He was right. His earlier decision would stand. He would not enter into a discussion about semantics. He would not talk about the slander generated by his Holy Shrine. He turned red, showing to me his discomfort at being caught out. He moved on, dismissing me as irrelevant.
I never again took a teacher seriously, not even the used camera salesman who flunked me in Reporting for Radio News Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, 7:30am (do the maths on early, early weekend risings).
I never forgot the lesson of intransigence, not even when I later was teamed up in New Orleans at WVUE-TV delivering the news with Pat Screen himself, the quarterback then turned sports anchor.
I told him how I had maligned his character in a Reveille story, and he laughed at its absurdity.
I never did find out how many children he had.
Pat later went on to become mayor of Baton Rouge.
He died of a drug overdose in 1994.