This is not a post about Arlen Specter, the senator who switched party affiliations due to certain sharp turns by his part for the past gazillion years. It's about an affectionate memory I have from my early days as a reporter.
The Pottstown Mercury (according to Wikipedia, the smallest circulation newspaper in the US to win two Pulitzer Prizes and where I had my first job as a journalist) was then a "feeder paper" for the Philadelphia Bulletin (it lives no more). What this meant is that aspiring reporters cut their teeth at The Mercury, covering a wide range of stories and writing columns, before moving up to the big city 35 miles southeast of our small shtetl. The newsroom was small - and we were packed in together, leading to our getting to know one another quite well.
To this day, I remember precisely where everyone sat, as the desks were pushed together, leaving us face-to-face and side-by-side. To my left, Dolly Smith, who ran the "Social Page," what's now called "Style" in most papers; to my right, Charles Carter, who covered religion, which was quite big as it is/was in most small towns. Across from me sat Paul Levy, not the Boston one, in fact his physical opposite. In addition to his incredible output - he churned out more stories than anyone else - what was truly remarkable about him was his typing faster than anyone I've ever known with two fingers on a manual typewriter! I can still hear his key pounding.
At the next bank of tables was Bob Boyle, the editor whose shirt was always covered with ashes, the copyeditor, whose name I've repressed as he committed suicide during my second summer there, and the copyboy, Billy March, whose job was principally to rip stories off the wire machine and bring them to Bob, whose principal job, from my perspective, was teasing me.
Beyond that bank of desks - and the point of my indulging this reminiscence - was Gordy Griffiths, hands-down the best reporter for the paper, and one of the consistently happiest people I'd ever met. Although everyone was nice to me (I was only 16 when I started and thus a bit of an oddity, being one of only two "women," if you could call me that at that age, in the newsroom), Gordy stood out. He was interested in my ideas, gave me suggestions, and once wrote a lovely essay, expounding on one of my stranger ideas: dry rain.
Simply put, there are two kinds of rain - the drenching kind that requires protection and the drop-here, drop-there, not-very-wet-kind, which I believe to this day exists. Now there's probably a real science to explain this but Gordy listened to my exigesis one day as if what I was saying made actual sense. The next he presented me with his interpretation of my thinking, which I still have somewhere on crumbling newsprint and which was called something like, "The Theory of Dry Rain."
I don't know how old Gordy was at the time - maybe early thirties, much, much older to the eyes of a 16-year-old, and his engaging with me as a peer meant a lot. And I loved his work, which was consistently good and creative. He covered the hard news of our small town and wrote columns.
I worked at the paper for four summers, going back to high school in between, and when I came home for vacations, always stopped into the paper to say hi, sometimes writing columns on my adventures during the year. Which brings me to explaining the title of this post. One day when I came back to visit, there was Gordy, as usual, with his adorable grin, the kind where lips are tight together and the side of the mouth scrunches down, as if the person is about to burst out laughing. On his lapel a button: "Specter, of course."
Being about 18 at the time, I barely knew who Specter was, but it turned out he was the now-famous senator, running for DA in Philadelphia. I did know that he was more conservative than my parents, Roosevelt Democrats, and I remember saying to Gordy, "Specter?" And he said, with that smile, "Of course."
Gordy was managing Specter's first campaign, or at least that's how I remember it. Perhaps he was just his press secretary. Regardless, he was deeply involved, thought "Arlen" was great, and, as was the case in those days, suffered no job consequences at the newspaper for being involved in a political campaign.
Gordy died young. I can't remember when or how and a search on his name brings up no information at all. But every time I see Senator Specter - and walk in dry rain - I think of Gordy.
