The Job of People Who Can Be Old and Young

Charlie Pierce spoke at the memorial serive for Clif Garboden, his friend and editor from Charlie's alt press days who died last winter. He was nice enough to share with us what he said. You'll want to read this.

You must remember this.

Regular readers of Hot Dots – the most consistently excellent exercise in American cultural criticism since James Agee hung 'em up – will recognize this as Clif's traditional four-word assessment of Casablanca on the occasion of Channel 38's running the thing 20 or 30 times a year.

Hot Dots had other consistent running themes – the existential questions Clif always concocted for Ask The Manager, a fierce and admirable anger at press releases when they appeared to have been written by Martians, and his prolonged skirmish with public-television's endless fundraising, especially when it involved programs dedicated to hot-air ballooning. But this one always struck me as perfect.

Saturday 8 p.m: Casablanca (Ch. 38): You must remember this.

Clif was the second person I met at The Phoenix, after my arrival in the winter of 1979. The first was Bob Sales, who introduced me to Clif, who was then the Supplements editor. The supplements were genuine phenomena. In this church right now are at least 15 people who will hide under their pews if I say the words, "Summer Preview." The supplements were advertising arks, huge and lumbering. The more copy you could produce, the more pages we could print, and the more advertising they could sell. Clif had to fill these ungainly beasts five or six times a year. He needed copy. I was getting paid by the word and I needed rent money.

The first piece I did was about lobsters. The original copy ran to 4000 words. I handed it in. Clif said, they sold a few more pages, have you got 2000 more words? I told him – I've got 2000 more words on everything. We got along fine.

There was never anything false about him. He was young, but he was never callow. He was old, but he was never cynical. He was young and he was old at the same time, and we never figured out how he managed that. It is a secret that he took with him.

He was young enough to be the guy who oversaw the Phoenix's transition away from gray Royal typewriters to an Atex system which is what word-processing would have been had Bill Gates been born a Bonobo. He was patient and he was kind, and he managed to train both the late Alan Lupo and myself without resorting either to bloodshed or strong sedatives.

He was old enough to be supremely dedicated to the craft of journalism, in all its forms, and in all its best instincts. He was as impatient with error as he was with cant. Once, I wrote a Christmas supplement piece in which I priced out the 12 Days Of Christmas. I have the same relationship with mathematics as a goat does to ice-skating. Every calculation in the piece was wrong by at least an order of magnitude. The Five Golden Rings cost more than the space shuttle did. Clif discovered this late in the editing process. He was not thrilled.

He was young enough to be such a glorious romantic about what we were all doing. He believed in the alternative press, and he placed all his faith in the adjective. When you hear today's wiseguy J-school hotshots waxing eloquent about citizen journalists and the flaws of the mainstream, corporate media, it's hard not to think, hey, folks, Clif Garboden got there ahead of all of you, and he brought us all along with him.

He was old enough to see the problems coming from miles away – the problems of timidity and doubt, the way false objectivity can be the dangerous enemy of truth and spurious balance the camouflage for cowardice. There was genuine steel in this son of Pittsburgh, and you overlooked it at your peril. He was heir to traditions of outlaw journalism in Boston dating back to William Lloyd Garrison and The Liberator:

Clif did not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation.

Clif was in earnest.

Clif did not equivocate, did not excuse, did not retreat a single inch.

And Clif was heard.

He was so very proud of what he did — of what all of us did — there on the corner of Newbury Street and Massachusetts Avenue, with the old molasses dripping down the walls and Dianne Dumanoski's Cretaceous husky snoozing in the middle of the floor, bestirring itself only to growl at Kimball, for reasons nobody ever understood. He was young enough always to want to do more of it, and he was old enough to communicate that love to generation after generation of young people who came through the doors after him, wanting only a chance, the people who have 2000 more word on anything burning in their hearts.

The great Albert Murray once said –

Whatever you do, if you do it with enough class, you can make your ancestors smile in their graves.

Clif's Pittsburgh forbears never stopped smiling, I figure, and he's with them now. It's up to all of us the keep him smiling by doing the kind of work that so engaged his mind and his heart. The knowledge that journalism is the job of people who can be old and young, all at once. That it is a place where the romantic and the realist come together in a single person. That it is a place that bends, at its best, always toward the good. That it is a place, now that I think about it, not unlike the Eliot.

And, yes, you must remember this.