When Dick Feagler announced at the top of the Forum section front last Sunday that the end of the year would bring the end of his long-running column, disappointment from his many fans was almost palpable. Most of the people I talked to last week, no matter why they had called, noted how much they are going to miss him. That’s true of a lot of us.
But a lower-grade disappointment was also evident in the wake of Feagler’s acknowledgment that the coffee shop conversations that had become a staple of his commentary were not quite the way he has presented them. The “Coffee Shoppe,” as he described it, does not exist. The conversations he recounted were portrayals of real conversations with real people, but had rarely happened as he related them: a bunch of guys sitting around a coffee shop.
So had Feagler “been writing fiction all these years,” as one reader put it?
Well . . . no. Not really.
And . . . yes. Occasionally.
The role of the local columnist – which is what Feagler has been in this town for 38 years – is different from that of a reporter. A column is unbound by the form that governs most news stories; the columnist is free to use humor, irreverence, irony, outrage, sass and sarcasm in making his or her opinionated point. The columnist’s job is to capture the throb of city life; write about the region’s quirks, crooks, victims and heroes; make readers laugh and cry; stir them to delight or anger or action.
One of the devices Feagler has employed in his columns over the years is an invented character, an amalgam of people he’s known and talked to, that he uses when he wants to make a particular point in a voice different from his own.
For a long time, it was Mrs. Figment, a worldly and wise product of the Cleveland neighborhoods who would “call” and scold him, usually in opposition to something he had written.
“When I began writing about Mrs. Figment, I was in my 30s and she was about 55, and she would call and lecture me,” said Feagler. “But then I got to be 55 and it didn’t work as well, so I had to retire her.”
He wound up with the guys at the coffee shop, who would sit around and argue about the issues of the day.
“These were all real guys,” he said, “five or six of my friends, most older than me, who would meet randomly and talk about all these things. Usually, we’d meet over dinner or in my living room or somewhere else. But I thought it would be interesting to take that coffee shop setting and use all those different opinions. I could get more than just one take on things and write in a different voice, using people whose opinions might be different from my opinions.”
It’s a time-honored device. The best known was spawned by Chicago’s fabled Mike Royko, who spun yarns starring Slats Grobnik, his invented ethnic Everyman, in hundreds of columns.
“This used to be a very conventional device for a columnist,” said Feagler. “It probably isn’t anymore. But what the hell, I’m an old columnist.”
He’s right, it isn’t used much anymore – which is probably why his admission fell harshly on some ears.
I’m not sorry to see the device fall from favor (neither of our current Metro columnists, Regina Brett or Phillip Morris, uses it). Even though Slats, Mrs. Figment and the coffee shop boys were artfully crafted, and represented a very real part of their city, I’ve always preferred real people to amalgams.
Mrs. Figment worked better than the coffee shop, I think, because readers were in on the joke. Her very name gave her away. The problem with the coffee shop was that it was presented as real, and there was no tip-off that it wasn’t. Readers expect us to write as accurately as possible about people and events, and on the rare occasions when we step away from the literal truth, we need to give them an unmistakable signal.
How important is all of that in Dick Feagler’s case? Depends on the reader, I suppose. Part of his charm, and his place in our hearts and history, is the throwback style of his column. The Coffee Shoppe, for better or worse, was part of that, and I’m guessing that few of his readers consider his creation of it more than a misdemeanor, if that.
That said, there’s no getting around the fact that some people were misled, and we are not supposed to be in the business of misleading our readers.
It’s hard to say goodbye, and I count us lucky to have had the Mike Royko of Cleveland for eight years longer than the folks in the Windy City had the Dick Feagler of Chicago. But it’s not so hard to say goodbye to Slats and the coffee shop boys.
