Old Beginnings : Is It Really Time to Say Goodby to Who, What, When, Where, How and Why?

IN REMINISCING recently about newspapering in the era of “The Front Page,” I recalled an anecdote concerning the phrase “the melancholy waters of the East River.”

That phrase, invented by a New York reporter, had won the praise of the managing editor; then it began to turn up in other stories, and the editor vowed to fire any reporter who used it again.

Inevitably, a reporter did, and he was fired. “Why are the waters of the East River melancholy?” the editor asked the culprit. “Perhaps because they have just gone past Yonkers,” the reporter answered. “Hey! That’s pretty good!” the editor said. “You’re hired!”

Alice Brockgreitens of Whittier recalls that when she worked on the St. Paul Dispatch/Pioneer Press, an editor, hoping to promote originality, banned the use of the articles a , the , or an as the first word of any story.

Anyone who has ever worked as a newspaper reporter knows that would be hard to achieve. When I worked for the Sacramento Union, I had an editor who invoked the same rule. We complied by simply eliminating the articles. Thus, we might write, “Church at 18th and L streets burned to the ground yesterday.” Obviously, that editor had a tin ear.

Ms. Brockgreitens recalls that, one night on deadline, her paper’s police reporter heard that police had fished the nude body of an unidentified woman from the Mississippi River.

Pressed for time and frustrated by the editor’s rule, he wrote the following story lead: “Hi, there folks! The nude body of an unidentified woman was pulled from the icy waters. . . .”

I have had my troubles with arbitrary rules imposed by misguided editors. When I worked at the Herald-Express, we were not permitted to use the word yesterday ; that was for the morning papers. The Herald-Express was an afternoon paper and was supposed to print today’s news today .

We were often forced to employ ingenious devices to make something that had happened yesterday look as though it had happened today. Once I was confronted with what seemed an impossible set of facts. A well-known person had died the day before, and everyone knew he had died the day before. I solved the problem by writing: “So-and-so was still dead today after having died yesterday. . . .”

A chastened city editor changed it to “died yesterday.”

While working at the San Diego Journal, I had trouble getting the word couple into the paper as a plural, which I think it is in most contexts. It takes two people to make a couple.

I would write “the couple were married,” and it would come out in the paper “the couple was married.”

One day I wrote the following: “The couple was married, after which it went on its honeymoon and made love to itself. . . .”

That was, of course, deleted, but it did not alter the position of the editor.

The Journal did not last long after that; neither did the Daily News or the Herald-Express, though the Sacramento Union is still in business.

Good lead writing is an art still practiced, though the presence of television has made it harder. The old who , what , where , when , why and how lead is no longer in fashion; the reader has theoretically already heard those basic facts on television, and the lead now tends to be more philosophical than factual.

Thus, we rarely read: “Fernando Valenzuela pitched a two-hitter and Kirk Gibson hit a two-run homer as the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the San Francisco Giants 2-0 last night at Dodger Stadium before a crowd of 41,469.”

We are more likely to read: “In the locker room before the game, Fernando Valenzuela said he felt good and believed he could pitch another no-hitter. That was not to be, but he came close.”

Lee Paine, executive editor of the Daily News, used to insist that no lead be longer than three typewritten lines. That caused much anxiety and frustration among the reporters, but it also produced some snappy leads.

One I remember was written by Les Wagner, a rewrite man, about a cocktail waitress who complained to police that she kept her money under her brassiere, and a patron had stolen it.

Wagner wrote: “Irma Du Pre was looking for a new bank yesterday. Her last one was a bust.”

My own favorite was for an interview with the notorious madam Polly Adler, author of “A House Is Not a Home,” who had retired and was living in Burbank.

I wrote: “There is a little green home in Burbank that is not a house.”

Alas, the then-editor of The Times killed it.