Ed Sidey interview about journalism career, Iowa City, Iowa, April 8, 1998

Section 1: Q: I have heard everybody talk about linotype, but I am still a little fuzzy about how that works. Can you go through that for me? A: Sure. We just shipped ours out. The last, the Model 14, went out to the shop three weeks ago. Chuck Dunham, over in eastern Iowa, bought it and he said that he has an outlet for some places in South America that still use linotypes and he thought he had a market. We'll see about that. But the linotype is a great machine. We used to cuss it all the time when we were operating it. But the name suggests the function. It sets a line of type instead of individual letters on a stick that you have in your hand. And you did that by a keyboard. A little like the typewriter keyboard, but enough different that you couldn't translate from one to the other very easily. All the capital letters were on one bank and then the lower case letters on another. Each time you pressed a key, it dropped a brass matrix, a mat, down a channel and into this slot where the mats were assembled one letter at a time. And then, your spaces came in there. That whole line, then, was held in kind of a gripper and it was pressed into, actually, it was a complicated machine, rotating and held against hot lead. The hot lead was pumped by a piston against the face of that mold. And it cast a line of type. The line was ejected then in a tray and they came out one at a time. A good linotype operator could find a job anywhere in the country at any time. Depression times included. A real good linotype operator, like Clara [Sisson], who worked for us, could hang the machine. That meant that you were fast enough on your keyboard and the mats dropped fast enough so that the line was all ready for the next cast before the one ahead is kicked out. We had operators like that and most shops did. The advantage...I am in love with old things, I guess, all the time. And the linotype had the advantage of being completely recyclable in its materials. Once the page was printed, why, you took all those slugs, those lines of type, and you threw them into the hell box and the hell box went to the pot and were melted down and then cast again. Over and over. And you didn't have much waste. Occasionally, you would have to add a little bit of tin or a little antimony to the mixture, the type metal, but most of the time it just functioned with very little drain. Now, the offset method, you know, you shoot the negative and it is scrap and it goes to the scrap dealer and you plate the plate and it's printed and then it goes to the scrap dealer and you are always using materials. But, we didn't have much waste in that letterpress method. Q: Why is it called the "hell box?" A: [laughs] I don't know. It is one of those old printer's terms. The hell box was right here by the stone. I suppose it would be hell if you had to re-assemble one of those pages. That happened, by the way. In my student days in Iowa State, we printed on an old Goss Comet press. And the Free Press had a Goss-Comet at one time. It was a flatbed press that printed from a big roll of newsprint. An ingenious kind of thing. Somehow, the system of gears and everything, that web was advanced and stopped over the paper and then the impression roller came across and pressed it against the type and then came up and the whole thing moved on and so on. Anyway, it was a flatbed press and we assembled those pages in big iron frames called "chases" and clamped them in with screw-type clamps so it held the page. The pressman, in putting one of those pages on, late at night - it was a daily paper and it must have been ten-thirty or eleven o'clock at night - it slipped and the whole page fell into the pit underneath the press. We were still there. And it was the front page, of all pages. He called, my brother and I and several others of the student staff were still in the building, and said, "We have got bad news." We went down and we scooped that pied page up from the pit and we assembled it in galleys of type. Of course, it didn't make any sense at all at that point. But we did have the galley proofs of those stories. And we had enough labor on hand so that everybody had a galley of type. One guy would read the first line and everybody would look through, to see if they had that line. "I've got it." "OK. Put it in." The next line and the next line. Well, as you went along, it got easier. We re-assembled that page and, by George, we got the paper printed about an hour and a half late, but nobody knew the difference. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: You have got a roomful of potential journalists? A: Really? Good. I thought they were all radio and television people. Q: They are journalists, aren't they? A: Well, that's debatable. [laughs] Q: What is the incentive for them to work for a country newspaper? How much could they expect to make and would you recommend that they work for an Iowa country newspaper? A: First of all, yes. I think that would be the greatest training in the world. Money-wise, no. Even today, the wages are miserable. But, if you really get on a good newspaper, one with some good editors that can kind of ride herd and teach you the business, there is no better way to learn to write for anything that you would do. I am not that familiar with TV scripts, but when I was working in Omaha, one of my best friends was a WOW radio newsman. And they, pretty much, did the same thing we did, which was write news copy to fit their style and their space limitations and whatnot. Anybody that is going to be in journalism, I think, needs to write. And the more writing you do, the better you get at it. A weekly newspaper is a great place to learn to write. Q: Is that all it is, though? Just a training ground? A: You could become a publisher and starve to death in a dignified way and have a lot of fun. And I think my brother, of course he has got a glamorized vision of the small town and the newspaper and all, but he thinks that is what we are missing today is fun. And, in a sense, he is right. But it is too bad you have to starve to get the fun. But it is fun and you have a great sense of satisfaction if you stick with it. And this would be the thing that would hold you in a small town and on the newspaper, would be to see some of those projects that you helped. Now, this community building - this is boosterism. But, when you can look back over forty years of that boosterism and say, "Boy, we did a job in that town. Look at that. School complex. Three school buildings. A beautiful athletic field. The whole campus. And the trees are now big enough and everything looks great." Q: Getting back to Brian's response, that is only based on if you have enough money to own the paper. And it still gets back to the training ground issue. To attract bright, young Iowa State and University of Iowa students to Adair, it would seem the paper would have to offer more than fun. So, I guess what I am asking is, the built-in limitation is, unless you own a paper, is it just a training ground? And it is a damn good training ground. But, there is not that much money in it unless you own a paper and there isn't even that much money if you own the paper. A: There are some enlightened journalists of my generation and earlier, Leo Mores comes to mind as being a real leader in community journalism. He is the publisher emeritus at Harlan. His two sons now run the Harlan paper. At a time when he had kind of established himself, and hit his stride, he went around the state looking at bright young men. Chick Gonzales at Guthrie Center was one. Paul Bunge up at Osage. Frank Morlan over at Osceola. He would go to them with a proposition. They were out of journalism school and working as ad or news people on weekly papers. He would say, "There is a paper for sale. I will buy it and I will establish you as publisher and you can pay me off over time from your earnings. Eventually, you can own a controlling share of it and be the publisher." And that worked for Leo and it worked for those guys. We need more of that kind of dedication, I guess, you would call it. But, I don't know of any program right now that is doing that, or of any individual. I don't think he had any missionary zeal. He saw a good financial thing. He is a millionaire. And, those papers have prospered under that kind of home ownership, where those guys like Paul and Chick work twenty-four hours a day. Q: How do you see the future of small-town newspapers in Iowa? Is there a future? A: I think there is a demand for the product and that means that there would be a future. And the chains make money on them, so apparently financially, maybe you would have to have more than one to get to a living wage. I don't know. I complain about the low wages in the community newspaper, but it is a good life. And I have never starved, obviously. Q: Could you be more specific about how much money we are talking about here? A: Well, we are talking about family income in the neighborhood of twenty to thirty thousand dollars. And that is with the wife working night and day and the publisher playing around. [laughs] Q: That might not be attractive to students. A: I know. It is realistic, though. There were times when the relative pay was better than now. Hugh keeps telling me, and I have no idea what the salaries are, for instance, in the television stations, but they must have a tremendous wage scale if what he indicates is true. And all those people, and all doing the same story. Three Des Moines stations, all covering the same fender-bender accident on the six o'clock news. That is terrible. If I had a staff of two people, I could think of features that I would do every week. I don't know how many, you guys would know, how many people they have on the Des Moines television news staff. All I see, is like you, the anchor people at the desk reading the news. Q: KCRG in Cedar Rapids has about forty people. A: Forty people. Just think of that. Well, on the Register, damn them, they have got a hundred reporters. The things they could do would be immense, I think. I met a weekly newspaper editor, I don't know whether he went into broadcasting or moved up to a daily, I just happened to casually meet him at some kind of function. He said, "I was in the weekly newspaper business for a year." I said, "Where was that?" He told me. It was a little town. He said, "I never worked so hard in my life." I said, "Well, yes. That sounds realistic." And he said, "It was just night and day. I had to write all this news. All that sports. All that city council. Everything. I never had to write so much copy in my life." And that is why it would be excellent training, you know. You have to deal with all those topics. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: I am interested in hearing more about the newsroom climate and what it was like when you were with the World-Herald. Did all the guys go out afterwards? A: Oh, yeah. I was a single man then. My brother was single. I think we had one of the last old, front-page editors in Fred Ware. He was managing editor. He had some of that old flamboyance. He was a bow-tie man. That came from the old letterpress days, you know, when you didn't want to wear a tie like this because it dragged over the type and got ink on it and got caught in machinery. But, Fred was...he loved to pretend to be gruff, so he presided over that newsroom with a loud voice. When he yelled, "Sidey," it echoed through the whole room. "Come up here and explain this sentence to me. I cannot make heads or tail of it." And you would have to walk that long walk from the back up to the desk and talk to Fred. And, yet, at our famous office parties, Fred was the leader of the glee club and the biggest partier among us. Actually, he loved all those people that worked for him. And then, the reporters, those of us who were single, would assemble at the bar behind the World-Herald Building and gripe about the management and mumble about joining the union - and we never did. But, it was a fun time. We had a reunion of old-timers in Omaha a few years ago. We had a whole afternoon of telling stories about Fred Ware. I will tell you one. This reporter, he was continually fighting with Fred. He had been castigated for some minor, or no, reason that day because Fred Ware, an ardent gardener, had a pet garter snake that patrolled his garden and kept the bugs out. And the snake had disappeared or died. It was a sad day and he was taking it out on the reporters. So, this guy was on his way out to a story, but heard about the sad day that Fred was having. On his way back, he saw a snake crossing the road on the pavement. So, he jumped out of the car, grabbed an old flashbulb container, scooped up the snake, and stuffed it in this box, and took it on back to the office. When he had his chance, when Fred was away from his desk, he put the box with the snake in it on Fred's desk. He was waiting, then, for the big explosion because Fred liked to do big explosions. Instead, Fred came in, opened the box, looked at it awhile, and then he started looking around. And he could figure out, pretty much, who would pull a gag like that. He spotted his man and called him up front. The explosion never came. Was it Jim Denny? He said, "Jim, that is the nicest thing anybody ever did for me. Thank you so much." Denny was just as deflated as could be. No big explosion. But, Fred was sincere. He thought it was really a gift. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: Can you tell us about some of the slang you remember, from the earlier days? A: Those terms that I used, like "hell box." Q: You called the women, what? A: A "sob sister." Well, that was because, mostly, a lot of the stuff she had to write was stories about the dead child, or the woman bereaved, or the family wiped out in the accident. We are still doing those kind of stories. You look at television. Have you noticed how the camera loves to see people cry? And if you can just get a lens in there to get that tear trickling down, well, that is big journalism, I guess. Q: Terms like "thirty lede." A: A lot of them were measurement terms. You thought in picas instead of inches. The ten-points, the type sizes. We still use them in a way, but they have kind have gone by-the-board. On your Macs, when you set display type, you still use point size like ten point and twelve point. Q: We use pixels, too. You wouldn't know what that is. [laughs] A: I wouldn't know what that is. Best I didn't. But, the whole vocabulary...the printing craft, you know, goes way back to Gutenberg. And those terms, I suppose, grew up with the printers. A great tradition and a great spreader of knowledge in the printing trade was the tramp printer. And, we had Shorty, among others. Tramp printers usually had a drinking problem, so they couldn't stay around too long. But they were always kind of on the road and, between bouts, they would find a job. If they were good, why, they really could help you. Shorty came back year after year after year. He would do fine for about two months or three. Then he would fall off the wagon and disappear and we wouldn't know where he was or anything. But he used to leave behind his home-made contraptions that helped the job. And some of them worked and some of them didn't. But he would pick up ideas in one shop and then cobble it up and try it on the press in the next shop. It wasn't a bad system because he could tell you about the way somebody did the job. Not just the pieces of machinery that they worked on. "Here is an easier way to do this, boys." Shorty left his mark on our shop in the...when I came back to Greenfield, we were printing on a flatbed Miehle. We didn't even have the Goss Comet yet, so we were printing from sheets four pages big. Two and two. And then we would turn them over and run them through again for the other side. That was a hand-fed press. We didn't have a feeder on it. And then, on the final run, the second side of the four-page sheet, we attached an Omaha folder, which is a...well, it was a marvelous contraption when it worked. A folder that would take that sheet and run it through in a system of tapes and knives and put a fold in here and down through rollers into another and so on and so forth. It folded it about four times coming out in that size of paper. We were always fighting that thing and cussing it, but when it worked, it sure saved a lot of time because, before that, they were hand folding those big sheets. My dad was a genius in keeping that folder running. In fact, he was about the only one that could do it and had the patience. Because these tapes would jump off the pulleys and get tangled up in the rollers and things like that. Q: Do you still have some of your old equipment? A: No. It is about all gone. When we decided, a year ago, to print at Creston on a regular press, we started selling it. About everything is gone. We have one little hand-fed job press that we will probably keep as a memento of the old days. Q: You sold it as antiques? A: Some of it went to the scrap dealer. Printing presses were wonderful because they were massive and the steel was first-rate. When all the shops in Iowa went offset and there was a surplus of that stuff, there was just more antique machinery than the antique lovers could deal with. And it was kind of a sad moment when some of that went out the door. But you can only live with so much antique. Part of Iowa's trouble is, you know, we have got huge amounts of buildings that were built in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900. Great time of expansion in the state. Now, all those buildings are aging. And all of our antique lovers are trying to save all these buildings. And we have got them in Greenfield. "We have got to do something to save the Opera House. We have got to do something to save the old library building. We have got to do something to save that old hardware store on the corner." Well, there is only so much that we can save and we had better make choices and start tearing down. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: How is the make-up of your community changed? Do you have minorities in your community? And, if you do, how do you handle that in your newspaper somehow? A: No, we don't have a great influx of minorities. We have the Vietnamese family, the Cam family, that we adopted. They are all integrated. Their kids play basketball and get their names in the paper just like the other kids. We have no big packing house that would draw the Mexican workers that some towns have. So, what's left is all of us old immigrants from a hundred years ago. Q: Speaking of old, you have an aging population in small cities. That, obviously, affects the circulation of your newspaper. Can you talk a little bit about that? A: We do have a high percentage of elderly and they are the best readers we've got. Boy, when their paper doesn't get there, we hear about it. That is the high point of the day. I drop a bundle of papers off at the Good Samaritan Nursing Home in Fontanelle and those folks are up there waiting at the door sometimes. I don't know, when it comes to readers, it is hard to beat that type of reader. Whether that will hold up when I am in the nursing home and I will still be reading, I don't know. Q: Are you replacing the readers that you lose? A: Well, we hope so and I think so. I have noticed...I wondered about this ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Whether those kids of thirty years ago would read, because they sure didn't when they were kids. They didn't read for fun. They could do an assignment when they had homework to do and that sort of thing, but they sure didn't read for fun. But, now I have seen those kids my son's age have got kids in school, and suddenly they are interested in the school board minutes. And they hadn't been until that time. I will bet you when they pay their taxes, they get antsy about the city council. So, I think there is an audience there yet. You read what you want to read or what you're interested in and your interests change. Q: What is the circulation of your paper? And has it gone up or down? A: We have dropped some. It's about 2900. But it has held pretty steady. At the peak of our circulation, and that was probably about when I came back to Greenfield, we were up around 3300, 3400. But we have lost a tremendous number of farmers in Adair County. The population of the county has gone from 12,000 down to 8,000. The town has held more-or-less steady at 2000 people. We feel we are lucky to have held at 2900. But, we send a lot of papers out of state, too. They are the people who have gone out to California and lived there twenty years and still want to get the Greenfield news, so they take our paper. And we've raised subscription rates unmercifully on those rich Californians and they take it. [laughs] And I think we'll jack it up again next year. [laughs] -- <br><br> Section 6: Q: You mentioned when you worked in Omaha, you would gather and mumble about joining the union, but you never did. Why didn't you? A: I don't know. It was more fun to gripe [laughs] than to really get involved in union affairs. We weren't that bad off, salary-wise. We thought we were, but gee whiz, I saved money when I was in Omaha and we came to Greenfield and I had some money saved to start building a house. I think we knew that life wasn't all that bad. We didn't see any great benefit from the union. It was mostly, the editorial policy of the World-Herald at that time was terribly conservative. Old Henry Doorly just dominated that editorial page. We are talking something like Col. McCormick in the Chicago Tribune. And we objected to that more than the actual pay or wage or working conditions. That sort of thing. Q: Was there ever a time, after you became the publisher and you had this heavy work schedule and were running day and night, that you wanted to get out of it and do something else? A: No. I wanted a vacation, but I never thought of getting out of it. In that heavy schedule time, there were times when we didn't have any reporting help, I was the reporter for Greenfield and that meant a lot of long hours. And all I craved then was just one week. To miss a press day, I figured, would be the ultimate luxury. And we finally missed a press day when I married Linda. [laughs] We had the wedding in northern Minnesota where her mother has a cabin and I missed a whole press day. Q: Where was that in northern Minnesota? A: Longville. Actually, it was Cross Lake at that time. She changed. But we did it up in Minnesota. Q: Any more questions. Q: About offset type, how does that differ from linotype? You are talking to a printer dummy. A: I don't think that is a dumb question at all. The linotype is a raised letter type. And, if you see in the linotype slug, you actually can read that line except it is a mirror image, so you read it backwards. Upside down and backwards. The next big step in composition from linotype came with photo composition and we had machines called compugraphic machines that set, with a beam of light through a film type of letter, which set a line of type on a photographic paper. And that was in correct printing order. Then, that was burned unto an aluminum plate. So, it was a photographic image on the plate. Do you understand how offset works? The basic principle of offset printing? It is based on the fact that oil and water do not mix. That simple, scientific principle. The ink is an oil-based ink. There is a fountain solution is water-based. The fountain solution dampens the plate and then the plate comes around on the ink roller and the ink roller puts the ink down only where the photographic image has affected the surface of the plate. It rejects the ink in the rest of it. And that, in turn, transfers to a...they call it a plate roller. It is another roller in the whole chain of rollers that, in turn, puts that image on the plate. So, the offsetting is that extra roller that goes from the plate to roller and then to paper. Well, actually, the big cylinder that takes the ink, puts it on the paper, the...make sure I get this right - if you were to print a stack of papers and you got one kind of bleeding through on the back from the one below, it would be called offsetting. That is where that word comes form. Anyway, it is a photographic process. Oil and water don't mix. And the whole thing works, but it will drive you up the wall when you first try to do it. When we got our first offset press, and it was just a marvelous piece of machinery, but if you get the water too heavy, the ink doesn't work right. If you get the ink too heavy, it smudges. The balance has to be precise and very hair trigger. And I admire those pressmen immensely that can master that. Q: What is better in your mind, the linotype or the offset? A: I think the old letterpress method was better for a kind of poorly trained, country printer-type craftsman. But, our problem with that, I was one of the last ones to switch to offset, there were many advantages, really, to offset printing. You get beautiful do on the pictures. You can get very crisp blacks compared with the letterpress type. And it's faster and you don't carry heavy forms of lead around and you don't have accidents like dumping the thing in the pit. There are lots of advantages. But, oh my, that offset method uses paper. You start up the press, and to get the water and the ink just right, you have got to run it up to at least half-speed. Our Goss Comet printed 16,000 an hour, so that means, if we were going to run it up, we were doing 8,000 an hour and we didn't have it right yet. So, not one usable paper and they are coming off the pile. The pressmen are stuffing...throwing them out into the trash barrel. And I am paying for all that paper [laughs] at five hundred dollars a ton or whatever it was at that time. It was very wasteful and still is. It is still printed that way, but they can do beautiful work when everything works. And, now they do color. Four color. -- <br><br> Section 7: Q. What advice would you give to aspiring journalists about the business of journalism, or the craft of journalism. A: Well, I just love the profession and I am glad to see that you guys are considering it anyway. A: ...Iowa, of all places and the...it is a great place to raise a family. My grandchildren ride to school on their bikes and they ride home. We never lock the doors. As a matter of fact, I don't even know where my house key is. I haven't seen it since we moved in. And, we don't worry about things that they do in the cities. Q: Would you talk about the tremendous changes in the layout and the make-up. The use of color, for example. I have seen a number of country newspapers now, in the last week, and there doesn't seem to be much change in them in that respect. They seem to be like they were when I looked at them twenty years ago. Thirty years ago. Have you ever thought about changing the image of the paper? A: My son has done a little of that. I don't think much of his front page make-up frankly. My thought is that I like a newspaper, as Donald Kaul once said, "I like my newspapers long and gray." I still think the New York Times is the best newspaper in the world. We get the Sunday Times. I just marvel at the job they do. They really cover the news. And that nice, single column, make-up looks good to me. I don't know. Even the New York Times is using color now. I was horrified, but I will still read it because they really cover the news. I don't think that color is justified in my size paper except now and then as a special kind of a gimmick or a promotion. I know there are papers my size that are fooling around with four-color pictures, news photos, and it can be done on the Macintosh now. Those separations aren't too expensive. If you have got the press and pressman that can handle the registry, and I think we do at our printer, we could do a little fooling around. But it just isn't worth the time and trouble as I can see it. I would rather have more pictures in black and white of the snowstorm or the whatever than use one color picture of it. It kind of tells the same story. But, probably the neglected area of newspapers right now, I think, is maybe the headline writing and the page layout. We, I think, are probably doing the last step in a slap-dash manner. "Let's just throw the thing together and get it out of here." Linda does a lot of that paste-up and I don't quarrel with her in the way she does it. But she doesn't have enough time, really, to lay things out. Now you can do that on the Macintosh, I guess. And some are getting into pagination so you can put your stories where you want them and spread the heads. But once the reader gets used to a look or a newspaper, they pretty well tell you, "Don't change it." When we went offset, that's what they told me. "Don't change the look of the Free Press. I hope you don't screw things up, Ed, when you do this." It is kind of like, you get used to the faces of friends. You are used to them and you don't want them showing up with green hair or doing funny things with make-up. Q: Has an advertiser ever pulled his advertisement out of your paper and, if so, why? A: Yeah, we've had some. I am trying to think of a specific case, but none come to mind right off hand. I think we have had some that have pulled advertising over editorial policy. Not too many. Most of the excuses we have got are, "Business is lousy and I can't afford it." Or, things like that. And we say, "But business would be better if you advertised." An advertising budget is an easy thing to cut if times are tough. What about your experiences on ads? Did anybody just blow up and get mad at us? Q: They try to control it a little bit. A: Yeah, I know they do. Q: "Will this be in the paper this week? Are you going to cover that?" That's always something. -- <br><br> Section 8: Q: I have got a question about those five minutes when you and Hugh decided who was going to go to Time, or who was going to go to Washington, and who was going to go back there. A: Well, I never had an offer from Time. Q: Who was going to take over the Greenfield paper. Your brother probably makes twenty times as much as you. A: I have never been able to pin down what his salary is. [laughs] Q: Twenty thousand for a family income. And I am sort of computing what your brother probably makes. And he was on a first-name basis with every President since 1956. He really has been one of the premiere journalists of our time, of our generation. A: I think so. Q: Any regrets that Hugh didn't take over your father's business? A: No. I often wonder what he would have done with paper. How much he would have improved it or hurt it. I admire what he has done and that sure is a glamorous life. You are right. He is the one reporter that I know of in all of Washington that went swimming with John Kennedy nude in the White House pool. He was that close a friend. Q: Seymour Hersh's book. I don't know if you have read The Dark Side of Camelot. And he also accompanied Nixon to China. But, any regrets? Is there any envy? Is there any sense of "Hugh is having all the fun while I am doing all the work." A: No. And he has helped the paper tremendously. Not just in moral support, but financially. Our Macintosh system was a surprise present from Hugh one spring morning. He had connived to set up with the dealer. I had told him that I was looking into the next generation of typesetting equipment. This compugraphic, photo-type setting and stuff was on the way out. So, he contacted Mike Lyons and got Mike to order a full package of the Macintosh and printer and all that stuff, I don't even know all the names yet of some of the things we needed, and have it sent there. Mike called me and said, "I am on my way through Greenfield down to, I forget the town that he said he was going to, to do a demonstration. I would like to stop in your shop on the way and just show you what this Macintosh typesetting equipment can do for you." I said, "Mike, I am not ready to do that. I can't afford it. It will be a year or two before I can even talk to you about buying that stuff." "No, no," he said. "You have got to see it now." So, he came in. I came to work and he had these stacks of boxes all over the place. All these typesetting things set up and running. And, I said, "Mike, you have gone to an awful lot of trouble for nothing. You have got another show to do here down the road. Why did you do all this work?" He said, "Ed, it's yours." And he handed me the bill of sale for all that stuff. And Hugh had paid for it. Another thing, the car. I had said something on the phone when we were talking. I had been having trouble with my old Mercury station wagon. I said, "I hope the darn thing holds together for another year or two. I am going to have to buy a new wagon. We have got to have a wagon to haul all those papers around and they are so expensive. But, that Mercury has been a real good car for all these years." That is all that was said. We got a phone call from the car dealer, Dick Weller. He said, "Ed, I need you over here. We are going to do an ad and I need a tall man to stand beside this car and show how he can fit into that driver's seat." I said, "Oh, Dick. Get somebody else. I am busy." "No, Linda wants to do this and she is going to be over here to take the picture for me. You can just run across the street and we will be done." So, I said, "OK." And I went over there. I got into the car and I did the pose. I am on the roof and all this stuff. Then he said, "OK, Ed. You have done well. Now, here is the car." I said, "What?" He said, "This is the key to the car. The registration is all paid. The license is done. Drive it." And he and Hugh had set this all up and gave it to the Free Press. So, we have a rather unusual brother relationship here. But it is fun. And I don't feel a bit jealous. He has earned, I think, the salary because of the hours and the days and the weeks, even, that he was away from home. And those trips. I really believe him when he says that all that flying and airline miles gets very, very tiresome. And he has had to do a tremendous amount of it. Now, he is more-or-less completely retired and I don't think he is going to do that book because you do burn out after a while in the writing business. At least, you need a re-charge. Maybe he will need a year or two of re-charge. And I may jump in and do that book while he is...[laughs] Q: I want to thank you very, very much. A: Thanks to you folks.