Former Editor at Peace With His Ulcer

“It’s smudge,” claimed a member of the audience at the Orange County Book Club the other night.

“It’s sludge,” said another.

“It’s not ink,” said an engineer and amateur letterpress printer of my acquaintance. He began with lampblack and then cited a formula I failed to understand. “The stuff is made so it will clean easily off the presses.”

“Maybe it’s the newsprint. Western paper is probably not of the best quality. I know of no Eastern papers that are so dirty,” said yet another.

Through it all, Nick Boddle Williams, former editor of The Times, smiled patiently from the rostrum. He was the evening’s speaker.

Then a woman offered a suggestion: “Buy some gloves for reading newspapers I saw in a mail order catalogue. They have rubber fingertips for turning the pages. When they get dirty, pop them in the wash.”

“Will they cover the knees?” asked a man.

That drew a laugh.

“You’ve got to remember,” Williams said, “newspapers must adopt ‘the cheapest way of putting words on paper.’ ” He didn’t believe The Times was dirtier than any other newspaper in the country. Perhaps someday when enough people complain, publishers will insist on a better quality ink that won’t soil the hands, he suggested.

Williams, who had overseen The Times’ dramatic growth while he was editor, had been looking backward in his talk. He related how on Dec. 7, 1941, when he was a Times’ copy reader, he had scooped the other metropolitan papers by two hours with the banner headline, “It’s War.” On the strength of his work, Publisher Norman Chandler had promoted him to assistant editor. He was named editor in 1958.

Williams retired in 1971. He has now turned 80. His duodenal ulcer, earned during his editorship, had not given him as much as a twinge for at least two years, he said.

“Let me give you some advice about a duodenal ulcer,” he added. “Avoid it!”

The reason Williams offered for living so long and leaving behind the pain of that ulcer was that he had become a dedicated wave-watcher from his Laguna Beach home. With something potable in hand, he said, he enjoyed watching the ocean chewing at the bluff while reaching one of the day’s important decisions--where he and his wife, Barbara, would go to dinner that evening.

Some members of the audience seemed to want him to solve this newspaper’s contemporary problems. Moreover, they seemed to want his assurances that the world would not be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust.

Yes, he counseled, he thought our nation’s greatest challenge was to learn to cope with a giant autocracy without ourselves becoming an autocracy. We must learn to deal with the Soviet Union while preserving our own freedoms, he said. And we must move into the future cautiously and look before we leap. There is a possibility of war, but it’s very small, and we must act prudently to avoid it.

Good words, wise words, the kind to be expected from an old man who looks deeply into waves and vastly “out over the Pacific to the Channel Islands,” and who, sees, really sees, the “gulls go skimming by.”

No, he told a questioner, he had never been a great reporter. He had only been a reporter for a month. The good reporter must be aggressive, he said. As a reporter, he thought of himself as more “insidious” than aggressive.

Williams’ experience had been as a writer for national magazines, and as an editor. In college he had studied Greek, Latin, French and “a little English.” He said he enjoyed language.

Under Otis Chandler as publisher, he had shouldered the prodigious assignment to try and make The Times into the best newspaper in the nation “and do it fast.” This meant establishing foreign bureaus and strengthening the Washington bureau.

Williams did it--at the expense of the ulcer, he confessed.

And that, I think, says something fine about Nick Williams as an editor and latter-day wave watcher.