The evergreen joy of reading bad headlines

Mine was a newspaper family in a variety of ways — when I was a kid, we subscribed to both a morning paper (The Morning Journal, known both then and now as The MoJo) and an afternoon/evening paper (The Evening Review).

My own now-adult kids grew up reading newspapers and enjoying the Sunday comics, because when they were little, I wrote about food and cooking for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for eight years. The P-G had a dedicated food section twice weekly — Thursdays and Sundays — so I always had the paper in the house on those days, and typically on others as well.

When you are from a family of wingnut proofreaders who don’t even realize that they’re doing it, newspapers and really, any form of other people’s writing, turn out to be an eternal source of both misery and joy: misery at the errors in every single issue, every single day and joy at finding an unintentionally funny headline, poorly worded phrase or out-and-out misspelling. This joy has been undiminished by the plummeting numbers of newspapers found in real life because much of the same fun can be poked at those papers which are available online.

The bad headlines don’t appear as often as problematic issues tucked into the article itself, because headlines are short and punchy and it’s easier to see from the jump what the problem is. Still, those headlines do appear. From recent memory in our region’s newspapers:

DROWNING VICTIM RECOVERING

MAN SUSPECTED OF HAVING SEX WITH A VAN

My late husband Steve was a newspaper journalist all his adult life, starting out when newspapers were still everywhere. At one point, he worked as a staff writer for the Massillon, Ohio Massillon Independent. He told me once about a staff meeting which had been scheduled just after someone realized that in a FPAF (front page, above the fold) article, “Massillon” itself had been misspelled. Steve said wonderingly, “I had never, ever heard an editor scream like that.” Amazingly, no one was fired.

The pretty much undisputed champ of creating American newspaper headlines may be Vinnie Musetto, whose gloriously succinct 1983 New York Post headline about a murder in a New York City strip club was:

HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR

Headlines and articles aside, you can find good stuff even in the ads. Maybe 15 years ago, a work friend told me about a supermarket circular in one of our local newspapers. I didn’t believe what he’d mentioned and so the next day, he brought the circular in to work. It mentioned a broad variety of foodstuffs, but management clearly had a special enthusiasm for JUMBO RIPE FRESH FUCKING PINEAPPLES — “jumbo,” “ripe,” and “fresh” clearly being insufficient adjectives to describe the extraordinary quality of this fruit.

Back when Sarah Palin was serving as vice-presidential candidate with John McCain, one Ohio newspaper featured a photo of her in front of a microphone, pointing a finger at the crowd. The headline:

PALIN AIMS, FIRES

Nothing wrong with that, but it happened to sit directly to the left of a slightly smaller headline:

DIRECT ATTACK KILLS THREE SOLDIERS

My longtime friend Mook has written a column on and off for decades for one of our local papers. You may be wondering at the cruelty of his parents to have named him Mook (rhymes with took or look). And yet! Mook is the nickname my dad and I gave him after he unwisely shared with us an article set in the wee hamlet of Hookstown, Pennsylvania, not far from here.

In the olden days, there was a newspaper process called “cold type” in which the type for a piece had first to have been typed and was then photographed. There was some sort of device thingie* called an OCR, or optical character recognition. The OCR at the Review was fussy and sometimes had difficulty distinguishing an “H” from an “M.” So Hookstown became Mookstown and my dad and I shortly thereafter decided that obviously our friend’s name was now Mook.

I was very excited around the same time to share with Mook an article about two policemen and a man who had only one leg. My memory is that the illegal burning of a leaf pile was at the heart of the matter. The policemen stopped to tell the man to put out the fire in his yard, and the man refused.

Some fussing back-and-forth commenced and at one point the man — who was not wearing his prosthetic leg at the time — fell down. Gloriously, the reporter then described what happened: “The policemen helped the man to his foot.” That’s a direct quote from both the article and the police report. I about died.

Mook told me some days later that he’d gotten in touch with JoBob, the reporter who’d written the piece. He congratulated her on the gloriousness of helping someone to their foot (SINGULAR) and she immediately improved the conversation by then sharing with him yet another police report.

A totally different policeman was typing up a report of a call to which he’d responded and the person who’d made the call, when the policeman arrived, turned out to be someone who was wearing a get-up that was atypical for early morning in a rural farming community.

As JoBob and the policeman were talking, he double-checked his spelling with her. She corrected him and yet he still managed to spell “stiletto” correctly and “heels” wrong. So the exact wording was that the person had answered the door wearing “stiletto heals and fishnet stockings.”

She’d also written an article which bore the just plain weird headline of MURDER/SUICIDE VICTIM IMPROVING, which to my eye reads like what will follow is a short piece on a medical miracle.

Not here locally but in a different rural community in the midwest, years ago, there was a newspaper article on what had followed a small farm’s fencing having collapsed after a major storm. The headline:

30,000 PIGS ESCAPE LOCAL FARM

What had actually happened was that 30 sows and pigs had wandered off post-fence-felling.

This local headline is probably my favorite of my adult life:

CEMETERY CONDITIONS NO LONGER AS GRAVE

You can’t make this stuff up.

_{*Technical term.}

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