Because it is so glamorous, only occasionally do I pull back the veil on our world of commerce and information here at Wednesday Journal World Headquarters on Oak Park Avenue. I mean, if you knew how elite and effete we get to be, then everyone would want to be in community publishing.
So Monday I was walking through the rear portion of the ground floor of the HQ, heading to the bathroom actually, when I came upon two people speaking in animated voices. They were behind the green drywall wall that divides the public portion of our 1,000 grand feet and the private portion. The inner sanctum if you will.
The topic, to give you the shorthand version, was, “So whose crap is all this stuff!?”
One voice belonged to Jill Wagner, our newly promoted Reader Development/Circulation Manager. The other was Cathy Yen, the executive director of the Oak Park-River Forest Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber shares space at the World Headquarters, and they are as elite and effete as they want to be. It is why we get on so well.
A portion of the debate was about the mini-fridge, perhaps the most argued-over device in any modern office. “I thought the fridge belonged to the Chamber,” said Jill. “We thought it was yours,” said Cathy. I noticed that neither moved to actually open the door. No one wants to be the first to open a mini-fridge door. If possession is nine-tenths of the law, opening the fridge door is one moldy step toward having to clean it out.
Ignoring the damned mini-fridge, a possible swap of storage space was deftly suggested by Jill.
Cathy, shrewd negotiator that she is, comically suggested that she’d trade space in the back room for one of the five giant boxes of Twizzlers sitting front and center amidst the debris. Noticing my look of astonishment and befuddlement, Jill quickly noted that the huge stash of delicious, 100 percent organic, Twizzlers were “for the parade.” Moving past astonishment and into full befuddlement and ineptitude, I said, “We already have the Twizzlers for the 4th of July!?” I was, you see, concerned that the candy treats might not be at their peak of freshness for our friends and fans and was also stunned that Wednesday Journal Inc. might have done something in advance.
“It’s Memorial Day on Monday. The River Forest Memorial Day Parade,” said Jill, with a certain “snap out of it” tone that I remember from my seventh-grade nun, Sr. Dennis, who on an equally lovely spring afternoon in the late 1960s said to me in front of the entire class, “What’s wrong with you, Dan? Are you in a semi-stupor!?” Not knowing what a semi-stupor would be or if it was a good thing or an eraser-cleaning-after-school thing, I just nodded at the good woman.
On Monday, though, I sprang into action, determined that there was still time to avoid the ignominy of having the Journal entirely forget about Memorial Day — again. I raced up the stairs to our elegant newsroom and said to Ken Trainor, “It’s friggin’ Memorial Day. Did we remember to put it in the paper?” He assured me, since he doesn’t want Ginny Cassin, the doyenne of all things Memorial Day, to kill him, that the always moving remembrance in Scoville Park was well noted in the Calendar section (see page 27). What about the parade in River Forest, I asked. Looking suspiciously astonished and befuddled, Ken shouted across the cavernous, and yet still elegant, newsroom, “Jacquinete (Baldwin, editorial designer), anything in that Calendar thing about the parade?”
Alas, there was not. And so, the parade thing is now included, I pray to God, on the Inside Report feature (see page 3). Then Claire Innes, our seldom befuddled or inept art director, said, “I could put a refer on page one.” And I said, “Then it would look like we planned it that way all along! Let’s do it!”
See you Monday on the parade route. The fresh as real fruit Twizzlers will be flying.
