CCJ Traveling Curriculum trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books:  The Beast: A Journey Through Depression and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression. She blogs regularly here.

I found him in the parking lot standing near a snarl of fire hoses. He looked like Wile E. Coyote after one of those dynamite experiments:  stunned, grimy and—in this case—glasses askew. I was a novice reporter; he was the plant engineer who had been there when the three-alarm fire had started. The fire was mostly out, but the whole block was still swarming with firefighters, and a police helicopter hovered overhead. With all that racket, I had to shout: “What happened?” He shook his head, clearly baffled. “Mixing chemicals,” he yelled back. “We’ve done it lots of times.”

“So why did it go wrong this time?” I persisted, scribbling hard. 

“I dunno,” he said, “but if I had it to do over, I’d use smaller proportions.”

 He didn’t say it to be funny, and I didn’t take it that way; I was thinking about my deadline. It wasn’t until I was back at the office writing the story that this, shall we say, understatement struck me as a classic. The all-time classic of this genre, by the way, has to be the story, reported by Cornelius Ryan in The Longest Day, about the Canadian soldier trying to make the beach at Normandy on D-Day under a withering enemy barrage, who said:  “Perhaps we’re intruding. This seems to be a private beach.” Ryan notes that he of course didn’t hear this remark himself; it was overheard by a soldier he interviewed who said he’d overheard it. To me, it sounds nutty enough to be true.

Other quotes, however, should be filed under “too good to be verified.” A staple of tornado coverage, we all know, is the quote from some stunned observer who says, “It sounded like a freight train.” Years ago a reporter I knew in Atlanta was sent to cover a train derailment out in the Georgia boondocks. Beau returned with a story that quoted a resident of the small town where the derailment had occurred:  “It sounded like a tornado.” Beau is a master of the deadpan expression, and has steadfastly maintained all these years that that’s what the man said. I admire Beau for that, I really do.

If necessity is the mother of invention, boredom is its father. At my first job at a small weekly, we had to write “stories” for an advertising section called the Business Services Directory. We despised this, of course, and one week when it was my turn I made up a company—Collapsible Auto Parts—and wrote a story about its helpful employees and excellent service. If memory serves, I included the advertising director’s phone number as its business number.

They say that people don’t believe what they read anymore. If only. The next thing I saw of that story, it was laid out in camera-ready copy, about to get shipped to the printing press. Note to file:  if you’re going to do this sort of thing, do not make up stories about child heroin addicts for the Washington Post; make up advertising copy about nonexistent businesses for the local county rag. That way, you may avoid getting fired. I still wonder, though, why nobody ever asked what the hell a collapsible auto part was.

Newsrooms—at least in their pre-corporate days—tended to attract people who have trouble fitting into the standard business world, or anywhere else for that matter. One of the latter was my friend Dan Baum (who later left the newspaper biz to freelance, naturally, and was last seen writing for The New Yorker). Once, when the desk had been sitting on one of his stories for what Danny thought was an unreasonable length of time, he took a copy of the front page over to his editor, placed the editor’s hand on it and explained patiently, “Ed, this is a NOOOOS-paper.” Not a way to get popular with the boss.

Another time, a colleague wrote a story about the phenomenon of women who converted to Judaism upon marriage so that their children would be born Jewish. The story featured a quote from one woman along the lines of, “I was an Episcopalian before, but I find my life very fulfilling now. I’m happy as a Jew.” Danny posted this on the bulletin board, the quote marked in red, and beside it the comment:  “I always thought the expression was ‘Happy as a CLAM.’” To this day, I cannot hear anyone say, “Happy as a clam” without cracking up and thinking politically incorrect thoughts, and if there is any justice in the cosmos Danny will someday have to answer to Jehovah for this. He’ll probably have a smartass comeback then, too.

So many stories. Some have been told elsewhere; the saga of Roscoe Dean, for instance, the rotund Georgia legislator whose waistline vastly exceeded his IQ and whose political ambitions exceeded the sum of both squared. Dean wasn’t a total fool; he had sense enough to ask a fellow legislator to write his maiden speech for him. This he proceeded to read on the floor of the Georgia House, every word, including the marginal admonition:  “Logic weak; yell like hell.”

Or, speaking of Georgia politics, there was the legislation introduced one year to put the state’s electric chair on wheels and hold executions at the scene of the crime. I forget the name of the local Nobel laureate who came up with this idea, but the name of the proposal was the Traveling Electric Chair Bill. And this explains the following headline on the front page of the Atlanta Journal:  “Traveling Electric Chair Passes Senate Panel.” You may think I’m making that up, but that headline was followed the next day by this one:  “Traveling Electric Chair Clears House.” Baby, that thing got around—but before it could exit the Georgia Capitol Dome and get out on the streets, somebody, somewhere, steered it to some dead letter committee agenda, where it died a merciful, and private, death. The news media has had fun with stories lately—Larry Craig comes to mind—but, honey, they just don’t know.

One more, and I’ll quit. One of my editors was a former Baptist youth minister—a great guy, very smart, who despite considerable effort could not shed a certain squeaky-clean aura. One night a bunch of us were out drinking, and on about our fourth pitcher of beer Ed, I will call him, decided to tell a joke. Bad move.

“Hey, guys, you know why Baptists never dance?” he asked. No, we said, figuring if anybody could enlighten us on this point it would be a former minister. “It’s because they’re afraid somebody might peek in the bedroom window and think they’re having sex standing up!”

Ed chortled. There was a long pause while we all looked at each other. Then, finally, somebody down the table cleared his throat.

“Dude,” he said. “You told it backwards.”

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