Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [17]
Running up the middle of the city room was a pipelike affair about six inches in diameter. It served as the office bulletin board although structurally its function was to hold the wooden ceiling off the wooden floor. Toward the top of the pipe, near the ceiling, there was a wicker wastebasket, wired fast. Ben Price tied it to the top of the pole one day when an order came down for all Stars and Stripes men to get an hour’s exercise every day.
Price and a couple of staffers used to drag out a new case of pastepots every few days and get their exercise by tossing a few of the glass “balls” through the (waste) basket.
The boys got the greater part of their exercise in climbing up to retrieve the glass pastepot-balls until one day Charlie White staggered into the shop and through the thick lenses of his glasses turned red eyes on the basket. Charles was no athlete, but somehow the pastepot he grabbed from Ham Whitman’s desk sailed truly through the air and into the basket. Charles was pleased, but irritated.
“Hell of a basket,” he grumbled. “It’s got a bottom.” He climbed on a chair, jerked the basket down and kicked vigorously at its bottom. The kick carried too far. As a matter of fact, it carried Charlie’s foot, ankle and knee on up into the basket, and carried Charlie completely off his feet so that he wound up threshing on the floor, the basket jammed up around his waist. In the confusion he lost his glasses, and his myopic eyes spun wildly as he kicked and wrestled with the basket.
At the height of Charles’s battle with the wicker wastebasket, Lieutenant Colonel Llewellyn walked into the office, and where never in a sober moment would he have thought of saluting, Charles suddenly was seized with a self-martyring urge to stand up and salute. He did, and as he stood there, the basket still around his leg, glasses lost, thin hair mussed, coat up around the back of his neck, eyes glaring wildly and his balance a precarious thing, the character of Hubert, Dick Wingert’s cartoon hero, was born.
The thing had an aftermath. Because Charles had destroyed the bottom of the basket, when it was replaced on the pipe, the pastepots went right through, and, nonbouncing, splattered glue and glass across the room each time the mob exercised.
This, presumably, was the army.
On the walls, finally, in addition to the cheesecake, there were dozens of clippings, memos, pictures, and odds and ends of printed material. There were weekly notices of inspections and various formations, which eventually, as they were disregarded, came to have, you felt, a sort of pleading note in them. Sort of please, fellows, come on up to inspection this week.
One of the staffers’ favorite headlines pasted to the wall was: YANKS GET ABBEY FOR GI CHAPEL
It came from the first Thanksgiving in England. For the traditional
American services, the friendly Britons gave up their most precious religious symbol, Westminster Abbey. It was a good story; it was worth a top head on page one. That meant thirty-point type, a size that simply doesn’t permit the word “Westminster” to be squeezed into one line. The resourceful Desk solved it with their headline describing the venerable abbey as about to become a GI chapel. It shocked a few chaplains, but most of them understood there was no disrespect involved, and there had been a neat job of head writing.
Just behind the Desk was the favorite clipping of the city editor’s. It served as text when anyone turned in a paragraph or more of meaningless copy, and it had been clipped from the November 25, 1941, issue of the very Times itself. It read (and there were a couple of staffers who came to be able to recite it by heart):
With a British Armoured Unit
LIBYA, Nov. 23
The battle of the tanks in Libya is still going on furiously. At the
time of writing the issue is still in the balance. The Germans are fighting furiously to destroy the British tank forces and to break through the ring. The British are fighting with equal fury to prevent them. Both sides have given and taken some very hard knocks.