There was a time even after the Internet was launched in 1989, and even after the World Wide Web became the dominant form of communication after its launch two years later, that the best place to get a feel for the sentiment of a town was in the local newspaper’s letters to the editor.
Oh, lots of newspapers still have a letters section in their Opinion pages - but readers can rip off a scathing letter in a few minutes in their word processor, copy and paste it into their email program, hit send, and it’s on its way to the paper - with no more thought expended than when swatting a fly.
Plus, who even reads the letters in the local newspaper anymore? Outside of interns at city council offices responsible for tracking every public mention of the boss?
Far more dialogue about local political and community life is happening online - Twitter, Facebook, Nextdoor, etc. The idea of the local paper as the hub of discourse in the community has been significantly eroded.
But before email and “contact us” forms on web sites were developed, the act of writing a letter to the editor was a different method of communicating. It was more deliberative than tweeting or posting to Instagram: It took some time, and multiple steps. Until the advent of low-cost printers that could be connected to personal computers in the mid-1980s, a letter to the editor was either written by hand or on a typewriter.
Either method is quite simply a different process than writing on a computer - and that assumes the author of the letter actually types on a keyboard, rather than dictating it into their mic and having the computer convert it into text.
There is no CTRL Z command in your pen to quickly undo a change; you can’t move blocks of text around on a typewriter - not without scissors and tape. Typos last, unless you want to start over or break out the correction fluid.
So you write slower. Sort it out in your head before you commit it to paper.
And even so, getting it just the way you wanted the first time was unlikely - so multiple drafts were the norm. Even for a simple letter to the editor.
As someone who still has his grandmother’s Smith (no Corona yet!) manual typewriter from the 1930s, and started his journalism career on electric typewriters in the late ’70s, I can tell you that writing on a typewriter is a more deliberative process than typing in a word processor. You have to think two or three sentences ahead of yourself - maybe even a couple paragraphs. I would often write an outline by hand before starting to type up an article on the typewriter just to save myself having to rewrite a section later.
Even the best electric typewriters couldn’t go as fast as a word processor for touch typists (although hunt and peck typists might not have ever noticed the difference).
Writing by hand also required a bit of thinking ahead - when you are stuck with whatever you’ve written, you tend to be more careful about it.
After you were done with your letter, you had to find an envelope and a stamp, pull that morning’s (or afternoon’s) paper out of the trash, look up the mailing address, and then put it out in the post.
A day or two later it would get to the newspaper offices, where staff would either slot it for publication or put it in the dead file.
And then you waited to see if it made it into the paper.
Okay, not many of my contributors were very good at that last part.
They would invariably call me.
“Did you get my letter?” “When will it run?” “You’re not going to change anything, are you?”
I supervised the opinion desks at several newspapers - the last one had a policy that we simply ran every single letter to the editor we received. Some days that was more than a full, ad-free page of letters. (The publisher did allow us to limit each writer to one letter every three or four weeks.)
But at the other papers I worked at - and at most newspapers with which I’m familiar - the policy was to publish a representative sample of letters received.
Letter-writing campaigns could skew that policy, however - and local political groups intentionally attempted to do so.
But we got to be pretty good at detecting organized letter-writing campaigns - it wasn’t hard to figure out who was writing from a sample provided to them. And oftentimes, they didn’t personalize it at all - they just copied what they were given, and then we’d get 15 of these letters, all individually mailed, all saying the exact same thing.
We’d then run two or three of them, and append an editor’s note: “We received 20 other nearly identical letters, and are running these as a sample of them.”
When the letters section of the local paper was the de facto bulletin board for town, you’d often get a back and forth going - much as you do in the comments sections of many online newspapers today. But rather than people responding to each other almost in real time, or over the course of several hours, these conversations might occur over several weeks - as those responding to a letter had to repeat the steps above.
People weren’t in such a hurry back then.
Not even to try to get the last word in in an argument.
The world seems to move much faster now, with little time for reflection.
News cycles don’t even last as long as it took for a letter to get published in the newspaper 20 years ago. In the time it would take for a letter to get from a reader’s home to our office, today’s news cycle has already moved on - and whatever issue had prompted one of our readers to put thoughts to paper is already forgotten.
In our rush to have our say now, I do feel we’ve lost something of value.
Discernment, for starters.
If more of us were practicing true discernment, our nation’s politics would not - could not - be so polarized. Honest reflection does not lend itself to either / or arguments.
And while the advent of the Internet was supposed to herald a decentralization of public discourse - a sort of commons with no gatekeepers, where there was no opinion page editor deciding which letters got printed and which ones didn’t - that has turned out to be a chimera.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube all have poor track records of banning those users whose views don’t comport with the prevailing orthodoxy.
And unlike the local newspaper, there is no one you can call to complain. No letters editor, no publisher. Just some algorithm, some computer code that flagged your post - your thoughts and opinion - as being unacceptable.
It all rather makes the point that not all change is progress.
Those who make a habit out of Lost in Cyberspace are going to notice a few trends. One of the most prominent will be Count Basie.
The great jazz singer and actress Lena Horne had a wonderful observation about Basie and his band: “Count Basie isn't just a man, or even just a band. He's a way of life.”
As has been written in this space before, Basie was one of the few - along with Duke Ellington and Les Brown - Big Band-era leaders who was able to keep his band going when musical tastes moved away from swing following World War II.
It would have been the summer of 1983 that I saw Basie. I was, like most white kids who grew up in the ’70s, enamored of what we today call “classic rock.” At the time, we just called it “rock.” The first record I ever bought was by Paul McCartney & Wings in junior high, and even two years into colleges my tastes hadn’t really budged much.
My folks had an annual membership to the San Diego Zoo, which gave you four guest passes each year. One day my buddy Pardo and I were visiting my folks’ house, and my mom calls me over.
“Son, I don’t ever talk to you about music - but here are three tickets to the Zoo for this Saturday. Count Basie is playing. I know you don’t like jazz, but you should go so someday you can tell your grandchildren you saw the great Count Basie.”
I hemmed and hawed, but Pardo reached over and grabbed the tickets: “Thank you, Mrs. Trageser.”
Pardo’s dad had spent his career in the Navy as a drummer in the Navy show bands and jazz bands, and Pardo was a huge Maynard Ferguson fan.
Pardo invited his roommate, Big Dan, to go with us.
The day of the show, we get there early so we can score front-row seats. I don’t know why front-row seats were such a commodity, but this was open seating and Pardo wanted to be down front.
The concert was in the Wegeforth Bowl at the Zoo - at the time, it was where seals and porpoises performed live shows in a trough of water between the audience and the stage. We got there early, before anyone else, and took turns guarding our seats while the other guys went for sodas and food, or just to see some of the animal exhibits.
By the time the show started an hour, hour and a half after we staked out our seats, the bowl was full - with overflow fans standing in the concourse behind the back row. San Diego being a military town, and Basie having found his greatest success in the early half of the 1940s, the crowd leaned heavily toward WWII vets: Sailors, Marines, probably a few soldiers and airmen, too.
The band came out sans Basie, and played a couple tunes to warm the crowd up.
Then, after the second song, the announcer asked the crowd to give up for the Kid from Red Bank, Count Basie!
Basie was confined to a scooter by then - a stroke having robbed him of his ability to walk.
As he came out from backstage on his scooter, the crowd stood and cheered - not polite, opening night at the opera cheering; this was the kind of full-throated greeting you hear at sporting events when the home team has just won a playoff game.
The man himself hadn’t played a note yet - in fact, he was still working with an assistant to navigate moving from his scooter to the piano bench, from whence he led his band. And yet the crowd is giving him a raucous standing ovation.
This one tough-looking former sailor, who looked like the kind of guy who'd just as soon punch you in the face as say hello, was standing next to me, clapping and cheering, with tears running down his face.
Being a young guy in my early 20s, I didn't understand. I mean, it was clear that the members of the audience held a deep affection and respect for the man on stage.
But I didn't yet understand how memories and emotions from one's youth can stay out of sight for decades on end, and then just come bursting out.
Me, Pardo and Big Dan - all between 20 and 22 - we just saw 12 old men on stage.
These older veterans in the crowd saw a hero of their youth - a man whose songs had topped the charts while they were serving their country when they were our age, a man whose music, perhaps, they had courted their wives to.
They, and he, were closer to the end of their lives than their beginnings.
While that band may have been staffed by men whose joints ached, whose hearing was suspect, whose heads no longer sported the trendy coifs of their youth, they weren’t quite done yet.
Not by a long shot.
Once seated, and once the ovation had died down, Basie plinked a few notes on piano in his sparse style, then held up one hand, brought it down, and 12 men hit that note as one. Over the next hour or so, I had my musical horizons expanded in ways I never expected. Saxophones, trumpets and trombones could create more energy than the largest stack of Marshall amps in the world.
A kid who had spent his adolescence eagerly listening to everything the Eagles, the Doobie Brothers, Steve Miller and Led Zeppelin had put out was suddenly bored by everything he’d heard up to that point.
This was music of a complexity and sophistication I’d never imagined.
Sure, I’d heard jazz before. My grandmother loved swing - Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman.
But I’d always been able to just filter it out - anytime I heard it, I mentally slapped a “jazz” sticker on it, and tuned it out.
But right here, in front of me, was the living embodiment of what jazz was all about: Skilled virtuosos riffing on the melodic theme during their solos, improvising new lines on the spot, with an energy and panache that fed the crowd’s own excitement - and in turn fed off of it.
When the last song was ended, I was standing alongside those older fans of the band and yelling and screaming as loud as they were.
And on the way home after the show, Pardo, Big Dan and I stopped at Tower Records, and I picked up a selection of Basie’s albums - from compilations of his hits from the late ’30s to his small-group recordings for Pablo Records in the ’70s.
That led to a lifelong fascination with jazz and blues - a journey that continues today, some 40 years later.
Basie would be gone less than a year later. Big Dan is no longer with us. Eventually, Pardo or I will join him, and then only one of us will be left to remember that magical day at the San Diego Zoo when three young guys from the ’70s fell under the spell of swing music courtesy of the great Count Basie.
As mentioned above, not every letter to the editor that we received was published. Some were unsigned - we had a policy that only letters from real people would be published, and we required a phone number to confirm identity.
Others were so poorly constructed that we simply could not make out what they were trying to say.
And yet others ...
One day in the early 1990s, at the old Oceanside Blade-Citizen, I received a letter from one of our regular writers. She hosted a show about new age spirituality on the local public access television station, and liked to discuss alternative viewpoints on religion and the afterlife in her letters.
But in this particular letter, she claimed to have been kidnapped by space aliens that landed their ship on the old El Corazon property in eastern Oceanside, where they proceeded to videotape her being repeatedly, forcibly raped by an Oceanside police officer - whom she identified by name.
As soon as I read the letter, I filed it in the “DO NOT RUN” folder in my desk drawer, and forgot about it.
A week or so later, I got a call from her, wondering when her letter is going to run.
“I can’t run that letter - you’ll get us all sued.”
“But it’s all true,” she protested. “I tried to file a report with the Police Department, and they just laughed at me. The news reporters won’t do an article about it. How will we get this story out there to warn people about this man if you won’t run the letter?”
I asked if she had filed a civil complaint against him. She had not.
I then patiently explained to her that if there was no official action to report on, then publishing such accusations against the police officer would be libelous - a form of character defamation that would allow him to sue not only her, but myself, and the owner of the newspaper.
She became angrier and angrier, and finally hung up on me.
Which in turn ticked me off - hanging up on someone is pretty darn rude, and I’d been professional and patient with her.
She called back a couple minutes later, and I told her there was nothing more to discuss, that I didn’t care to spend time talking to someone who had hung up on me. She wanted to know who my boss was so she could appeal this decision. I gave her the name of the managing editor - and as soon as the call ended, I pulled her letter from the dead file and gave it to Rusty so he’d be familiar with it if she called him.
Which she did.
Rusty made all the same points I’d made, even more patiently - or at least, it always sounded more patient, because Rusty never lost his Texas drawl and it could charm most anyone.
Except TV psychics, apparently, because she grew angrier and angrier before she hung up on him, too.
When she called Rusty back, he said he, too, didn’t care to spend time talking to someone who would hang up on him when they didn’t get their way. So she asked who his boss was, and got the name of the publisher.
Rusty handed me the letter back, “You better go give this to Tom, Jimbo, before she calls him.”
As I walked into Tom’s office, his secretary, Alicia, called in over the intercom, “Mr. Missett - a call from a reader about a letter.”
Tom quickly glanced over the letter before handing it back to me, and indicated I should take a seat in front of his desk - when something that happened in your area of responsibility made its way to Tom, he wanted to make sure you shared his pain.
He put the call on his speaker phone, and let the woman explain why we should publish this letter.
Tom let her finish, and then tried to explain to her that if he did order me to run it, the paper would invariably be sued and he’d lose his job - and as much as he wanted to keep his readers happy, he had a wife and kids to consider.
They went back and forth and then - BAM - she hung up on him.
Tom Missett was as informal a man as ever lived - but when you violated one of his rules of basic decency, that frosted him like nothing else. I saw a slow burn in his eyes I’d never seen before.
A minute later, Alicia piped in, “Mr. Missett, so and so is calling back.”
Tom told her to put the call through, and before the woman could say a word, Tom lit into her: “I don’t appreciate being hung up on! As to your letter, not only am I NOT going to order Trageser to run it, but he’s sitting here with me right now and I’m ordering him not to run any letters from you ever again.”
She sputtered a bit, but before she could mount any kind of counter-argument, he finished his thought off before he hung up:
“Not only that, when you die, I’m not running your damn obituary in my newspaper!”
-30-