When I was a copy boy, city editor Al Haviland demanded that reporters get the lead nice and high, and so here it is: This, I am happy to report, is my final column as ombudsman.
Having accepted the assignment for three years and having now served four, I requested last January and the Globe agreed that I would be reassigned in September to the Living pages, to one of the best jobs in journalism, the writing of feature stories about people who live and work in my favorite city, Boston.
These final paragraphs provide an opportunity to address a question raised by a reader who was furious at something I’d written and demanded to know: Who judges the ombudsman?
Fair question. And so, let the ombudsman judge himself. I confess that in many ways I have not lived up to my own expectations. Too many telephone calls were not returned, too many letters went unanswered, and too many legitimate issues raised by readers were not written about. I sometimes wrote too harshly and on other occasions not assertively enough.
Specifics? I was flip and gratuitous in criticizing David Arnold and Larry Tye, two exemplary reporters, for minor infractions. I regret that. I also wrote something negative about Royal Ford, the energetic auto writer, and failed to call him, which was foolish, because he had a valid explanation. In writing about The Country Club, I chided sportswriter Will McDonough for insensitivity. A shouting match ensued in my office, and although we repaired our friendship, I now believe it was I who was insensitive.
In recent months, as a lame duck, I became less antagonistic and less effective. For example, in writing about an environmental group, Forest Ethics, whose ad the Globe refused to publish, I was not assertive in questioning the advertising department. Readers condemned me, and justly so.
I am guilty of the same carelessness I chastised in reporters. In writing of my interview with journalist George Seldes, I said he had lived at the foot of Mount Ascutney in a brick house on Skunk Road. Wrong. As a copy editor alerted me later, he lived on an unpaved road south of Skunk Hollow. That may not sound egregious, but I had lectured colleagues that a newspaper is judged not merely by the boldness of its reporting and bravado of its writing but by the respect it gives to the smallest fact in the least significant story, and by the attention it devotes to every paragraph, every sentence, and every word. I should heed my own advice.
I wrote pretentiously. I used the word ”logomachy” and I referred to a ”a hymenopterous insect” when I should have said, simply, ”a bee.” I forgot E.B. White’s admonition not to use a $10 word when a 10-center will do.
An embarrassing encounter occurred with the columnist Brian McGrory, who wrote that Charles Dickens had dined at Locke-Ober. A reader complained that Dickens died in 1870, five years before Locke-Ober opened. I challenged McGrory, who said: ”I got that from a story you wrote in 1990. I assumed that if you wrote it, I could trust it.”
Every day was a surprise. One morning a package landed on my desk with a thump. It was a hardened yogurt poppy seed cake with white chococate frosting and a note from Bonnie Ford of Bedford, who said she had followed a Globe recipe, but the cake tasted like gravel. That night, I followed the recipe, and she was right. Gravel. Too many poppy seeds, and why? An error in the recipe.
I’ll miss the jousting. Is alien an appropriate word for immigrant? How is it that politicians who man gle the language orally write elegant prose on the op-ed page? Do they write it themselves? And if not, is the Globe compromised?
I’ll miss the humor. Impressed with the title of ombudsman, a reader wondered if I got to wear a secret decoder ring and shoulder sash. Another asked how Patricia Wen, in one story, could spell ”triskaidekaphobia” properly, then misspell ”definitely.” I had written that new type would make all columns shorter, and a reader replied that a redesign can’t be all bad if it castrates the ombudsman’s column. When the Globe wrote that a driver had slammed on her breaks, Paula Porter wrote to say, ”Give me a brake.” When a reporter described Dava Sobel as a diminutive woman writer, a reader asked, what’s next — that John Kenneth Galbraith is a tall man writer? In complaining about typos, Mark Murphy cited a story about a tea party that referred to a teat party, although he conceded it sounded like more fun. When a reporter wrote that snow would ”fall from the sky,” Malcolm McPherson said he was stunned, because he assumed it came from a big snow maker in a swamp near Marshfield. A reader from Wellesley wanted to alert our drama critic that in theater in the round, all the people look at the faces of the actors half the time, not half the people half the time. When a science writer said that Centaurus A is near our solar system, a Woburn reader pointed out that it’s 64.5 quintillion miles away, or as distant as a dream.
Life goes on now without the secret decoder ring, without the shoulder sash, with no more lamentations about cranky columnists, erotic underwear ads, writers not on speaking terms with the English language and what is the difference, anyway, among podium, rostrum, and lectern?
Someone else will have to figure out how we ran a photo of Jerry Garcia with Stanley Kubrick’s name. Someone else will have to explain why we said that Richard Dreyfuss was driving a Volkswagen in ”American Graffiti” when it was a Citroen. And someone else will have to console Ellen Draper, whose desperate e-mail demanded to know if there was a typo in the amount of sesame oil in the recipe for Betty’s Wasabi Dressing in Pink Potato Salad. ”Let me know quickly,” she wrote. ”My avocado is getty mushy.”
