“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” the classic Dickens line rolls when I think about the Houma Daily Courier. Even more revealing is the headline this paragon of American journalism printed: “Waterproof Negro Drowns in Bayou.”
Now even a clod like me has a smidgen of basic physics in his background, enough to think most anything waterproof couldn’t drown, but not so according to the Courier, as it was generally referred to by the locals, or just as often by a good selection of epithets ending with Courier, or in more printable and just as common language, many diverse descriptions culminating in “rag.”
Truthfully, just those five headline words capture much of the Courier heart, at least when I worked there, a heart slightly racist, but not thinking this was so, and behind the times in even using “negro” to describe anyone. Very often the overworked and undereducated error maker at any given time was absolutely oblivious of the great comedy created. As far as the Waterproof negro goes, it was failing to recognize that the name of a small town, in this case Waterproof, Louisiana, just a short boat ride down Bayou Lafourche from Houma, might inspire different interpretations when partnered with a drowning victim.
I discovered Waterproof and so much more after sending a resume in response to the Courier seeking a new managing editor. I think my successful job hunt might have had something to do with the ability to make almost as many mistakes in my resume as the Courier did in its front page every day, prompting the publisher to think we might be a good fit.
In a telephone conversation with the publisher, I was given a vision of great fortune and enormous opportunity and encouraged to come down to Houma for an interview, not for the editor’s position, it had been filled, but for an opening in the advertising department. Enticed by a vision of great riches available if I walked out of the newsroom and into the ad department, I accepted the invitation.
My first inkling that all was not as described came upon discovering the Waterproof Negro headline as I paged through the bound newspaper files in a darkened and almost deserted newsroom. It was after seven at night and all but one staff member had left for the day. An obviously weary reporter informed me the publisher was on the phone and would call me into his office soon. In the meantime, I paged through the bound files of recent issues, discovering the Waterproof headline and so much more. “My God,” I thought. “This paper is even worse than the Standard Mess.” And it was, in more ways than I knew at the time.
It never happened, but the Courier would have made an outstanding subject for a National Geographic special. It was a cultural goldmine of old, new and just plain weird, Cajun hospitality and plantation working conditions mixed together to form a gumbo that was hot and spicy one moment and then as putrid as a rotting armadillo the next, the prehistoric holdovers still decorating Louisiana roadsides today in great abundance. A friend once commented that all armadillos must be born dead on the side of the road, and I’d seen hundreds of dead ones before a living example crossed my path, most appropriately, during our honeymoon where we camped in East Texas in a tiny pup tent.
“Arman the Armadillo” as we named him was a nightly camp visitor who originally frightened us as the creature huffed and puffed in the middle of night in search of tasty insects to eat. I pictured a gigantic bear in the darkness, until the little guy wandered out of the underbrush and right past the two of us less than a foot away, the almost blind animal seeming completely unaware we were nearby.
The Courier made a lot of blind racket too, and on occasion scared me even more than the armadillo did.
After investigating recent content and still waiting for my interview, I discovered a second problem, my hands looked much like they did after I changed the oil in my old VW, a rich black I picked up anytime I read the Courier. We never figured out why, but of the hundreds of different newspapers read in a lifetime full of different reading material, we never found a medium that so readily transferred to the fingers as did the Courier. Every time I read it, I had to wash my hands. I don’t know if it was the ink the Courier used or the paper it was placed on. Part of me thinks today maybe the words just wanted to run right off the page to get out of the place and avoid guilt by association, a feeling I eventually had on almost a daily basis. Many years later I still don’t know what caused the ink transfer, but I sure do remember 14 months of black hands.
Originally, the inked hands frightened me because I was about to be interviewed for a job and wore my best and only suit, a light brown corduroy far past the point of respectability and style, but the wearer too uncultured to know it. It was, though, my best clothing option and just dry cleaned, and I knew if I wiped my now soiled hands on much lighter clothing the outcome and first impression might be even worse.
I was about to panic when the reporter who first greeted me smiled and offered a paper towel. Like all Courier employees she knew the problem, I think actually anticipated it, and came to my rescue. She was the first kind young lady I met at the Courier that was always filled with them in every department. I think we even dated once, but I’m not sure. I do remember her frizzy brown hair, demure smile and the inside of her apartment for some reason, but not what, if anything, that happened there. All I clearly remember today is thanking the young reporter profusely that evening and then my interview where I was promptly hired. Life, as I knew it, was about to change dramatically.
I’d never worked previously at a newspaper where the actual printing took place at the same location and the experience still reverberates as did the huge web press on the ground floor of the old brick building. Standing next to the huge machine when it fired up seemed like having an old steam locomotive roar past on a track six inches away. No matter where you were in the structure, you’d hear and feel the gigantic press hum and then the entire building shook for a moment until calming down to a strangely comforting buzz, a signal that one more project was done for the day. Of course, three minutes later, the next one began, a daily paper having a rhythm unlike any other I suspect.
The only day we didn’t publish was Saturday, although just about everyone worked at least a half a day. My half day almost always involved a hangover from our weekly Friday night poker game and a very dull meeting with the publisher, ad manager and my eight colleagues. More than anything, the required meeting was to gather the troops together to assure that no ads were missing from the big Sunday paper, and if some were, the person responsible available to fill the blank space that represented money in the bank, a tiny bit for the ad rep, a big chunk of change for the publisher.
There are a number of times in my life when I had the dramatic feeling of being an alien in an unknown world, the first one was my entry into the Courier. I didn’t expect a language barrier but soon encountered a big one. My immediate supervisor, Smitty, as everyone called him, spoke a language I never knew existed, and that’s because only Smitty spoke it. At first, though, I feared working in Houma would be like trying to find my way through Hong Kong, but it turned out to be more like Ozzie and Harriet Meets the Creature from the Black Lagoon with great food at every intermission.
I rode in terror as Smitty took me around personally to meet my major accounts and orient me a bit to Houma. Out of every 20 words he spoke, I only understood about five and was sure my new job would end before the sun set. The problem was a combination of factors. The first was an accent most often misrepresented when an outsider tries to imitate it in a place like Hollywood. It’s not so simple as “dis, dat, deese, dem and dohs” replacing “this, that, these, them and those,” it’s often much more pronounced and varied, at times much subtler, and seems, as most accents do, to differ with age, education and specific background.
Smitty was born and raised in Bayou Country and sounded like a typical Cajun crew boat captain, but also much different. Smitty just pronounced a lot of words in a unique way I’m at a loss to describe. Most fortunately, experience around Smitty greatly increased interpretation and I soon learned to pick up over 80 percent of what he said, and this was usually enough as the other 20 percent were curse words.
One might gather due to the last sentence that Smitty was a mean and coarse man, but nothing could be further from the truth. I never knew anyone who didn’t like him. He truly was a gentle soul who really cared about the people who worked for him. We all loved the guy, even when he cursed us out for some reason or another. Cursing was just Smitty’s way to vent tension and stress, and abundant stress from too much work and too little time in which to do it was daily Courier stew.
Smitty would generally spew a string of vulgarity and then follow it up gently every time with something like, “Don’t worry about it,” the reassurance always coming with a warm smile everyone at the Courier knew to be genuine. After any tirade, Smitty would then go about his business always rooted deeply in the Courier. He practically lived there from early in the morning until late every night.
Smitty would take a break, though, around two every afternoon when he’d call on a major account who was also an old drinking buddy. An hour later, Smitty would return, and for the next hour or so nobody could tell for sure what Smitty said as all of his other speech mannerisms combined with bourbon to produce a language only Mork from Ork could translate. It could be dangerous to pretend otherwise.
The best example of the danger of false interpretation occurred one afternoon when Smitty exploded on a gal working at a nearby desk. She’d grown accustomed to saying something like “Oh that’s nice” every so often as Smitty addressed her in his foreign tongue when she had no idea what Smitty was talking about.
“Nice, nice?” he roared one afternoon so loudly everyone in the room froze. “My goddamned dog died and you think it’s nice?”
After that, I soon escaped from another nearby desk to avoid being too close to Smitty’s vacations. The ad room was divided into a smoking section that included Smitty and a non-smoking one I moved to as soon as I could even though I smoked some at the time. The inconvenience was worth it, I figured.
Still, as a known smoker I was subject to interrogation one afternoon when our publisher and boss of bosses went around to each of our desks with a cigarette butt centered in the same kind of cheap paper towel I first used upon entry to the Courier world.
“Is this yours?” my publisher asked sternly. I’ll get to the answer later and much more about alligator journalism in a world I never knew existed, one perched near the Gulf of Mexico and caught in some kind of strange time warp I’m most fortunate to have experienced. I always wanted to go into outer space, and the Courier came close enough for me.