CALMING THE WINDS OF UNREASON

By H. N. Burdett

"There's just too much noise," my old friend and onetime colleague Bill Thompson confided in a brief exchange during a gathering of aging news reporters in the bowels of Annapolis' Maryland Inn several months back.

Skip Isaacs and Peter Jay, who earned their spurs covering the state legislature and went on to become Vietnam war corresondents, were there.

As was Gene Oishi, who covered Spiro Agnew's vice presidential campaign among numerous other achievements.

As was Jim Keat, former deputy editorial page editor of The Baltimore Sun and who, in another life when I was employed by a competing daily, 'scooped' me with monotonous regularity.

As was Don Hymes, whom I first met a half century ago when he was toiling for a courageous St. Mary's County weekly that had the cajones to crusade against malodorous slot machine politics, the fumes of which wafted from Southern Maryland and could be inhaled in the State House; he later became Maryland editor of The Washington Post, and, later still, communications director for the Montgomery County school system.

As was Don's wife, Valerie, once the Capitol Hill voice of Westinghouse television and today a tireless activist on behalf of combating recidivism.

To name but a few.

At an even earlier meeting of the Vintage Press Irregulars, Frank DeFilippo told me, "Just look around this room. You have here what could have been one of the greatest newsrooms ever." If there is a Heaven, I would be honored to have a small desk in the farthest corner of such a newsroom. Hell, I'd be honored to serve as a copy boy.

Frank knew whereof he spoke. In the 1960s, he abandoned his Underwood at the Baltimore News American, where he tapped out some of the more colorful political prose of his era, to become Governor Marvin Mandel's head flack and, later, the guv's chief of administration before the fall. He later headed the Rosenbush public relations firm, generously favored by the Democratic state political machine, and now bangs out readable commentary online with his same familiar flair.

The "noise" to which Bill Thompson had referred was not the boisterousness of that estimable company (in point of fact, they were a curiously quiet group), but rather the resounding cacophony that pervades the local and national airwaves and blogosphere, even as newspaper after newspaper vanishes into the ether. If a newspaper shuts down in any American city, does anyone hear it fall? The sound would be easily quelled by turning up the volume on Limbaugh, Maddow, O'Reilly and Olbermann preaching to their respective choirs.

Political discourse has degenerated from the sobriety and solidity of Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite, from Walter Lippmann and Murray Kempton to bloviators and bloggers shouting back and forth -- each convinced that victories in the wars to win hearts and minds are won by the loudest rather than by sanity and reason.

Bill Thompson and Frank DeFilippo have written self-published novels. Thompson's "The Waterbusher" focuses on the last lynching on Maryland's Eastern Shore; DeFilippo's "Hooked" is a roman a clef on the Baltimore city political jungle of the 1960s and '70s with a protagonist who remotely resembles the author. I wholeheartedly recommend both.

I'm not above plugging these works even if I felt they were other than damn good reads because both of these long-time friends can flat out write circles around most news reporters, past and present, I've known and read. But I categorically do not feel otherwise. And, for the record, I've also known and read both Gerald Johnson and Murray Kempton, who stand head and shoulders above the rest of us, as Colossus stands above the least visible anthills.

A native of western Maryland, Thompson now resides on the state's Eastern Shore, content to spend his days and nights with the three great loves of his life -- Susan, the Chesapeake Bay and his boat. He indicates that writing these days interests him less than it once did and to drown out "the noise" he has contemplated turning to quieter endeavors, like welding.

All of which brings to mind Duff Badgely. A colleague of many years back, Duff was a terrific young reporter who had both superior instincts as a "truffle sniffer," as DeFilippo likes to call reporters, and the ability to transfer what he'd dug up into formidable prose.

I'm not ready to elevate Duff to a pedestal alongside the likes of Flaubert, Dickens and Twain, but then I doubt that the latter were writing their venerated opuses under daily deadline pressure. Badgely was, and I assume still is, a Quaker -- a man of peace who, as they say, walked the walk as well as talked the talk. Another kind of noise -- that of a protracted bitter union election campaign (are there any other kind?) -- drove him from the newsroom and into, of all things, carpentry.

Duff did not view sawing and planing pine and hammering penny nails as exile, but as contributing more usefully to society than he felt he could by pounding a city room typewriter. To my mind, at least, carpentry's gain was journalism's loss.

I'd run into Duff and we'd have a pleasant chat now and again at Buddy Levy's drugstore of fact and opinion on West Street in Annapolis, a treasured haunt of yore to which I frequently repaired to calm the echoes of dissent and discontent from both left and right, that threatened to push me to the very edge of the abyss. I have since developed numerous guilty pleasures to avoid that fate.

I watch wonderful old movies. I listen to music of various genres. I read a little. Most of all, I spend as much time as I can with friends, reuniting with old ones and luxuriating in meeting new ones. As a young man, I was privileged to have enjoyed the company of wise older folks, who provided the best post-graduate education possible. Now, entering my own twilight years, I am privileged to be tolerated by wise younger people.

If I've learned anything over the years, it is merely what I've managed to retain from listening to and reading those I admire for one reason or another. If I occasionally impart a morsel of wisdom to my younger friends, full credit goes to those giants who kindly stooped down and lifted me to their broad shoulders.
###