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If you read an earlier post, you probably already know that I was a part-time sportswriter for the Peoria Journal Star (in Peoria, Illinois . . . duh) when I was 19 years old and going to college back in the late 70's. The PJS employed quite a few college students as part-time sportswriters, especially during high school football and basketball seasons since there were so many games to cover and only so many full-time sportswriters.
There was a group of us who would pull pranks on our editor. He was a nice guy, and better still, had a great sense of humor. We would create suggestive and sometimes even lewd headlines for our stories. He was well aware of our little game, and it was really an exercise in seeing just how closely he'd read our work - to see if he'd be able to spot things that were incorporated tongue-in-cheek. Ya know, kinda like the old "And Sammy Sosa is on base with four balls" kind of thing.
Well, that little game stopped abruptly one weekend when one of the pseudo-headlines got by him and actually went into print. It was not my headline, but a fellow sportswriter's. Keep in mind this transpired during the winter when hundreds of high school basketball teams were competing. Lots of stories. Lots of smaller headlines.
The school was Monmouth High School. Their "mascot" or "team name" was (and still is, I think) the ZIPPERS. Yeah, the Monmouth Zippers. If you don't believe me, look at the photo of their basketball team I've attached above. They had a very good record at that point in the season because of their senior star forward, Eric Dicks. During the game in question, Eric was hurt in the 3rd quarter of the game, and Monmouth ended up losing a close game because their star was sidelined for the end of the game. He'd torn the ACL or some sort of ligament/tendon in his right knee and would be out of action for the rest of the season.
Before reading further, care to guess the headline that got by our editor, was put into print for the Sunday edition, and resulted in all of us getting a stern lecture by the associate publisher?
Come on, take a guess.
Okay, are you ready for it? Wait for it . . . wait for it.
"Zippers Fall, Dicks Out For Season"
Classic!
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that's a terrific one!...never heard of it until now...as a copy editor at the star, i collected clever stuff like that...i cut the heds out and pasted them on an old tobacco tin that hung out on the copy desk in the 1980s...example: "normal man marries oblong woman"...there are photos of the hed-slathered tin in the facebook group, "peoria journal star alumni"...worth a look.
ReplyDeleteWell, I think I was there 2 or 3 years before you joined PJS.
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