The 4 Horses of the Aaronpocaplypis
Or however the heck you spell it: A little about me and my work
As the World War 2 Oral History Substack approaches 200 subscribers and numerous followers, I thought I should tell you a little about myself and about my work.
I won’t bore you with details about the first 35 or so years of my life other than the 17 years I spent as a copy editor at the New York Post and the Daily News. Riding the subway to high school in New York City I often craned my neck to read the headlines in the newspapers other passengers were reading. The summer of my freshman year in college (The City College of New York) I got a job as a copyboy at the New York Post. I had joined the staff of the Campus, one of two school newspapers, and there was a pipeline to jobs at the Post. Several senior staffers were already working at the Post, including Clyde Haberman, Maggie’s father, who had the honor of having been fired as a stringer by the Times. Seems he was covering an awards ceremony and he made up an award named after Jake Barnes, the fictional character in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” who was impotent. The Times was not known for its sense of humor then, and still isn’t, although it eventually rehired Clyde.
When an aging Post sportswriter named Al Buck was found deceased in his apartment after he didn’t show up at work for several days, a clerk in the sports department was promoted and I became an agate clerk, compiling box scores and runs for the week, and even picking horses although I had never been to the racetrack. Don’t worry about it, I was told, just take the other handicappers’ picks and scramble them.
One of my jobs as an agate clerk was to provide little two and three paragraph “filler” stories to occupy space if an article came up short — this was in the days of “hot” type. I would pick out perhaps a half-dozen stories and write headlines for them. These stories included Japanese baseball games and “professional” wrestling.
Galley proofs of these fillers were sent to a number of editors, including the legendary managing editor Paul Sann, who circled one of my headlines and scribbled the word “good,” and my future as a copy editor/headline writer was sealed. (Although it seems kind of hokey now, the headline was for a two or three paragraph story about a championship wrestling match between Bruno Sammartino and The Sheik, in which the victor had to pin his opponent to win the match. Realizing he was about to lose, Sammartino exited the ring and was disqualified, but by not being pinned was able to keep his coveted championship belt. The headline I wrote was “Bruno turns the other Sheik.”)
At one point, my goal in life was to write a textbook about the craft of writing headlines. I even started a blog called “How to Write Headlines,” although I had already given up my dream of writing that book. After leaving the Daily News for the Bergen Record in New Jersey, I was passed over for a key promotion and had to suffer the indignity of less talented editors rewriting my often very clever headlines.
It was at about this time that I had begun attending reunions of my late father’s tank battalion and interviewing veterans of World War 2.
I wrote my first book, “Tanks for the Memories: An Oral History of the 712th Tank Battalion in World War 2,” in 1994. I was working full-time at the Record and was faced with the question of how am I going to sell 2,000 copies of the book, which I self-published after not taking too well to usual dozens of rejection slips. The editor at Armor Magazine liked the title, which reminded him of the Bob Hope song “Thanks for the Memories,” and called the book “must reading for any tanker.” That brought a couple of dozen sales but I still had no idea how crowded the market for military books was, especially for someone with no military or publishing experience.
But at that time, the mid and late Nineties, I made a critical decision. I was continuing to interview veterans of the 712th Tank Battalion and some of the veterans I interviewed were already passing away. Rather than focus on trying to sell the books — some of the publications to which I sent copies for review were so deluged with books that they had a two-year wait before a review appeared if it would appear at all — I decided to keep on interviewing World War 2 veterans while they were still available.
Which, 30 years after the publication of that first book, brings me to the headline for this Substack, for which I owe a shoutout to new subscriber Linda Rose’s Liberty Lights Substack.
While I have written multiple books, and created a series of oral history audiobooks (more about those in a future newsletter), I focused my interviewing on four main areas, with one I guess you could call it premium book in each category.
The areas are: The 712th Tank Battalion (“Tanks for the Memories” is now in an expanded third edition); the ill-fated Kassel Mission of Sept. 27, 1944 (Up Above the Clouds to Die); D-Day veterans, many of whom I interviewed in conjunction with the 50th anniversary (The D-Day Dozen); and prisoners of war (Prisoners of War: An Oral History).
Those are the 4 Horses of the Aaronpocapalooza. I will write more about them soon.
PS: If you’d like to read more about my copy editing/headline writing days, here’s a link: