By Michael Miner
“I did have a few rock slides,” says Gleason. “The thing is, [Jack] Griffin and I sat side by side for 17 years, and he never had anything on his desk. We had Bob Pille with us then, and anything on his desk, he’d square off the edges. He was known as ‘Mother Pille.’ He was a very easygoing guy–except for squaring off his papers.”
“When Ogilvie was governor he came in once, and he was looking at these two little green tomatoes. There was a photographer with him who took a picture as he was looking, and I said, ‘I’ve got a cutline for that. “Governor fondles young tomato.”‘”
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“Do we really need stacks of yellowed newspapers on desks, on floors and jammed into cabinets? How many books can one human being really claim they need to have within 15 feet of their desk? I could go on and on.
“The morning I wrote that memo,” he E-mailed back, “I walked into the newsroom via a different route than usual to speak with someone on the desk. Along the way I passed a particular desk that I had asked several times to be cleaned up and noticed it remained a ridiculously horrible mess. Then I took a walk around the floor and saw that my several earlier requests to clean other places had been ignored totally. So I wrote the memo. The cleanup crew wasn’t a bluff at all; but the final arrangements never were completed because it became obvious several days before the deadline that my message had been received and actions were being taken.
Nothing better exposes the limitations of daily journalism than a long, complex court case, brimming with public significance, that the papers make a sensible decision to ignore.
