A friend with a long habit of hanging onto curious artifacts recently gave me the banner reproduced on top of this column, clipped from the Sept. 5, 1992, edition of the Billings Gazette.
I happened to be playing tennis that morning, a Saturday, at Pioneer Park, when a Gazette truck pulled up alongside the newspaper rack just off the sidewalk. The driver jumped out and began removing the papers from the rack.
I recognized him and hollered over, “What are you doing?”
Ed Kemmick
“Have you seen the paper yet?” he shouted back. When I said I had, he leafed through one of the newspapers and held up a page. “Did you see this?”
I left the court and went over to look at it. “This Weekend,” the banner at the top of the page read, “Make blood sacrifices at the coven of your choice.” I knew the second half of the banner was supposed to read, “Worship at the church of your choice.”
I also knew, in a flash, what must have happened. I was an editor in those days, when we still sent stories out in galleys of type that were cut out, waxed and physically affixed to a newspaper-size sheet of paper, in preparation for producing an aluminum plate ready for the printing press.
Copies of all kinds of regular elements, including the Page 1 banner, banners on the section fronts, columnists’ mug shots and “standing heads,” as we called things like the “Worship at the church of your choice” banner, were kept in drawers in the paste-up room.
The printers would just reach into the drawer, grab a banner, a mug or a standing head, wax it and slap it on the page. Sometimes these regular elements were stripped from the pages and reused, but with standing heads the more common practice was simply to print out 30 or 40 of them and keep them on hand for one-time use.
In this case, I assumed, whoever typed up the banner and then copied-and-pasted it 30 or 40 times, thought it would be funny to make the last one of the series read “Make blood sacrifices at the coven of your choice.”
The paste-up person would chuckle, maybe tell a colleague or two and that would be the end of it. But when you do something so often that it becomes a rote movement, you don’t really look at actual words anymore. When people say, “I could do this job with my eyes closed,” it’s almost true.
Back in those pre-Internet days, when newspapers bestrode their communities like a colossus, they took themselves awfully seriously. “Citizen Wayne,” as he was known, certainly took himself seriously.
Evidence of that was displayed on the front page of the Gazette the following day, in a piece headlined, “To our readers: An apology from The Billings Gazette.” Schile was quoted as saying he “fully intends to terminate those who were responsible.” Furthermore, he said, “There is no place in this business for the person or persons responsible for this totally unacceptable message.”
The apology then turned somewhat craven: “The Gazette does not, under any circumstances, agree with the message that was printed Saturday. Nor would The Gazette ever sell advertising carrying that message.”
So much for tolerance. Why would the Gazette announce that it was opposed to the free exercise of any religion? Witches and warlocks are people, too, you know.
Anyway, it was a crazy week at the Gazette. A witch hunt, if I may call it that, was underway, and there was all kinds of speculation as to who might be responsible, and all kinds of rumblings from the powers that be that heads would be rolling soon.
One intelligent reader, Margaret Rogers, had her letter to the editor printed the following Sunday, in which she pointed out the irony of the promised retribution in light of the teachings of Jesus, who so often preached forgiveness.
But even she, I believe, missed the boat because she went on to say that the responsible person was not trying to hurt a particular religious group “but rather to make a sick, disgusting joke of all religions.”
I am convinced there was no malice involved, that the perpetrator never dreamed his or her words would make it into the paper. No matter. If the perp was ever identified, he or she was not terminated, and the threats and bluster quietly evaporated.
It was amazing that with all of those professional snoops in the newsroom, none of us ever definitively ID’d the prankster, though it was just as well. Some mysteries are better left unsolved.
The only embarrassing aspect of the whole thing was the realization that nothing any of us wrote, probably in that whole year, was remembered half as long as that one short sentence.
