Not all subjects of this category are deceased, although some have stopped functioning while others are hard at work wrecking havoc wherever they set their blue pencil. I am speaking of editors, of course.

If you choose to call yourself a writer, you will have to face up or face down one of these fellows sooner or later. They have the power to add or detract. They are little dictators in a world of their own. Long published authors have had to make their peace with them…otherwise, their works would never see the light of day. Of course nowadays, there is the self-publisher who was once defined as a user of a “vanity press”… but  guess it is more acceptable now, and certainly more appealing to a writer who is turned down once too often by editors of magazines and books. However, it is always more satisfying to be “accepted” and paid and published by these powers that be…the editors.

Readers of our works are familiar with my trials and tribulations via various editors over the years. In fact, my father chose to run his column in the Daily News as a paid advertisement rather than have the editor at the time, McKechnie I think, inform father that, if run as a column, it would be subject to addition, subtraction…and run any damn day he felt like it.

When I took over the I Say column in 1964 upon father’s demise, I was faced with a series of editors who, sooner or later, objected to something I had written, and omitted the offending paragraph.  This resulted in heated arguments and my eventual departure. One editor, Jim McGiffin, was a fellow skier and a good friend, but he unilaterally decided to omit the word “crap” from my text…and I decided to look for a more benign setting. I found it in the laudable confines of the Corning Daily Observer, courtesy of the great editor and publisher Mari Petty Barrill. Under her hands-off style I was able to make fun of a variety of public figures and do some of my best work.

And so it has gone over the years. Here today, gone tomorrow, hence our segue to the website venue you now read or don’t read. Sigh. Oh for the good old days when one could call a spade a spade…or an editor a cowchip.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 7:21 am and is filed under Passing Parade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.