Live From ... The Philadelphia Bulletin Reunion
Where: Franklin Inn Club, Camac Street, Center City. When: 12:30-3:20 p.m., Jan. 29.
"There are so many newspaper people here, I think we could start our own newspaper! Give me rewrite!" shouts Peter Binzen, thrusting a fist in the air.
And so the reunion of former staffers of the Philadelphia Bulletin gets off an enthusiastic start, following the opening toast by Don Harrison, in which he proclaimed this event wasn't a sad occasion, but a happy one to celebrate a once-glorious newspaper.
Harrison, who held a variety of editing jobs at the Bulletin, was especially happy with the turnout -- about 40 talkative souls, many graying -- because Binzen had begun setting up the event only a couple of weeks before.
The Bulletin folded 25 years ago today, a victim of the Inquirer's glory days, some would say, though others will rightly point out that afternoon papers, good and bad, were falling by the wayside then.
I remember the Bulletin as a family-friendly newspaper, with its Daily Chuckle and comics on the very back page. As a Bulletin paper boy, I even earned a couple of trips by adding new homeowners to my Cherry Hill route.
Ron Goldwyn, who landed at the Daily News after the Bulletin's demise, says he still has an honor box on his front porch with the paper's final edition.
The idea for the reunion grew out of a regular Monday luncheon meeting of the quarterback club of the "quirky" Franklin Inn Club, Binzen said. Harrison was coming to talk, and the idea arose of staging an impromptu reunion. People like Inquirer editor Dotty Brown and Harrison made some calls, and the event came together. "It amazes me," Binzen said. "It's just an indication of the loyalty people felt for the Bulletin."
And for the old journalism. "The Bulletin covered every grass fire," Binzen says. "Lot of great reporters who went onto the Inquirer. A lot of them retired." Old journalism? The days of typewriters (these machines with keyboards that actually slapped marks on sheets on paper) and copy boys and chaos in the newsroom with a lot of yelling, "Copy!" as those typed sheets were hustled off to be turned into print.
The Bulletin had seven editions, he says. The last one was 5 o'clock in the afternoon. So people were working around the clock. At its height, the Bulletin had the biggest daily circulation in the North America, over 700,000.
What went awry? "The Inquirer got a whole lot better. ... As long as we were competing against Walter Annenberg's Inquirer we were in pretty good shape." Annenberg was a great philanthropist, but a lousy publisher, Binzen said.
David O'Reilly, now the Inquirer's religion editor, clinks a glass and has a story to tell about the top editor's secretary. As soon as she saw this new hire in a gray flannel suit, she said to herself he'd be her future husband. Sure enough, the day the paper folded, he asked her out, and a couple of years later O'Reilly and the secretary were wed. One particular date, he remembers, he felt this magical connection, and took her arm to walk arm in arm. "We were emotionally married that day," he said.
Marci Shatzman followed up by relating her tale about an "erotic dream" about a fellow Bulletinite she'd long known but didn't really like. She later talked about it with Daily News bud Jill Porter (to Binzen's overhearing shock), who set the two divorcees up. Today, Brian Feldman's sitting across from her, her husband of 26 years.
Carroll "Buck" Shelton, in a later conversation, said he was hired at the Bulletin before anyone else in the room, as a copy boy in 1945. His mother worked in the dress pattern department. In those days, he explained, the paper printed a dress pattern every day, and women came to the Bulletin Building (a great place to watch the Mummers Parade, he added) to buy copies of previously printed patterns. He left three months before the paper went under to become editor of the Norristown Times Herald.
Dick Langman said the memory that stands out most for him was when he was working on the "telegraph desk," a holdover term for the area where teletype machines printed out news from national and international wire services. It was November 1963, and when the machine made five pings, he knew the story had to be a "real big one." That's how he learned of the Kennedy assassination. He also recalled laying out the paper at 7 a.m. to get in all the final results of one of Ronald Reagan's elections.
So many memories in this room. Too little time to meet the rest of the crowd, which has been filing out. Attendees included John Farmer, still a political writer for the Newark Star-Ledger; George Packard, once the Bulletin's executive editor; Rem Reider, editor of the American Journalism Review; Nessa Foreman, an art critic now with WHYY, as well as a contingent of current and former Inquirer writers and editors. Stu Ditzen, Denise Cowie, Liz Williams and Tom Gibbons departed in recent years. Walter Naedele, Joe Slobodzian, David Taylor and Tom Infield are still at the Inky.
Those interested in learning more can check out Nearly Everybody Reads It, a collection of recollections edited by Binzen and published by Camino Books.
