Perfection wasn’t always easy as outlined in founding editor Cliff Crase’s editorials entitled, Editor’s Notebook
That news is so old it has an odor! Those results were all two-tenths of a second off of my time! You spelled my name wrong! Why is my copy delivered last in the whole country? That photo was bad, you didn’t get my good side!” All of the above comments periodically land on the editor’s desk from various contributors. Questions and comments like these could be answered quite simply with one question.
What is a nice, well-educated microbiologist and an ordinary stock exchange analyst doing publishing a wheelchair sports magazine???
That last question I cannot answer, but the first bundle of questions and comments are easy. If you think wheel’n on water is impossible, just try to obtain the final results from a major sports event the day after the action. No one seems to know you. You sit on the phone or run around thinking the whole sports world has gone underground, or under the bar, OR both! After you have pleaded, bribed, and coerced the official data out of the proper people, your problems have just been born.
Many articles and results are phoned into our magazine office, recorded on tape, transcribed, proofed and sent to the typesetters. That process takes about a week. Then comes the layout work, which is tedious, and time-consuming. From that point it is on to the printers, and another week to 10 days, plus a few days for late material is expended. Then the copy goes off to the hippy-dippy U.S. Postal Service. God knows what happens to the magazine after that.
After all of the aforementioned rigamarole, the staff of SPORTS ‘N SPOKES gets a chance to sit back, sip some fermented fruit of the vine, and skim through the latest printed word in the world of wheelchair sports and recreation. The staff just knows that they are positively correct, and the brand new issue that has just hit the streets (and is laid to rest in the bottom of the mail bags of the nation) is a masterpiece done to perfection.
Many sips of the forbidden fruit later, the smirk of perfection is suddenly wiped off the faces of the staff (at least the ones who still claim to work for the rag) when errors like the following start to surface from the once claimed “magazine of excellence”.
The Boston Marathon is 26 miles, 365 yards. Everyone (ahem) knows that any race that is labeled a marathon MUST be a minimum of 26 miles AND 385 yards. Or this little gem…in the national swimming results, Class IV Men’s Butterfly; to imply that Scott Robeson swam a 25-yard butterfly stroke in 36.39 seconds is insane! Shucks, Scott, with more records attached to his name than any USA swimmer, could do 25 yards in that dumb time with one arm, blindfolded, and going upstream. The distance should have been 50 yards. Calling Jim Hernandez “Seattle’s Madman” wasn’t too swift. The tape later revealed the words, “Seattle’s FASTMAN”. Now, that is more like it! In describing the championship wheelchair basketball games, Gene Tatum, a Bordentown Elk, was said to have played a “wail” of a game.
Well, maybe so, but “whale” is more proper, and that little bit of incorrect syntax was pronounced really wrong by one of those impeccable lawyer-types. The whole Eastern Seaboard called the ED’s attention to the misspelling of a famous ball- player who was inducted into the National Wheelchair Basketball Association’s Hall of Fame for 1977. Al Slootsky’s name will never be the same. Sooooo, perfection is still far beyond the grasp of the SPORTS ‘N SPOKES staff. Ain’t no way we can sell every woid write! RIGHT?
This year marks SPORTS ’N SPOKES’ 50th anniversary, and as part of the yearlong celebration of this major milestone, this special department is dedicated to some of the best columns from founder Cliff Crase. This month’s Classic Cliff from the September 1977 issue of SPORTS ’N SPOKES looks at some issues the editorial staff still faces today.