Saved by Garfield, the feline

Perhaps it was simply the luck of the draw, a run-of-paper situation in which the advertisement could be placed on any page where space allowed. Or maybe the Bangor attorney advertising his services in the Wednesday morning newspaper had specified that his ad must run on Page A2, adjacent to the daily corrections and lottery numbers boxes.

Either way, the man got the ultimate bang for his buck.

“New bankruptcy laws can help you. Call for details. We are a debt-relief agency,” proclaimed the single-column display ad. Directly over the ad was the daily listing of the winning Maine State Lottery numbers. And above that was what I believe my Franco friends might call the piece de resistance, the chief dish of this little gourmet meal: A correction box item listing the correct winning numbers for the Powerball lottery drawing of last Saturday with an explanation that an incorrect set of numbers had, regrettably, previously been published.

As one to whom the words “lottery” and “bankruptcy” in the same sentence complement one another as ham enhances eggs, I thought the juxtaposition was comical, the more so if it had been unintentional. I’ll grant you that any person who might have chucked his potential winning Powerball ticket of Saturday last into the trash compactor on the basis of the incorrect set of initially published numbers probably didn’t find it to be much of a hoot. But, still…

The business of laying out a newspaper page – fitting news and photographs around the advertisements that pay the freight – can be fraught with peril that might not occur to a layman looking at it from afar, albeit probably somewhat less chancy in this age of rapidly advancing technology than in days of yore.

Those memorable occasions when some harried printer under a tight deadline might have taken matters into his own hands, absent an editor hovering over him, and chopped off the jump from the Page One lead story in the middle of the final dangling participle were the least of an editor’s worries.

In a day when a layout person might not have been privy to the advertising copy designated for the page, or had a late-arriving ad shoehorned into the page at the last minute without his knowledge, it was easy to become a cropper.

Most any veteran newspaper editor can tell a horror story involving the inadvertent placement of an uncomplementary news story about a business or profession hard by an ad paid for by a prime advertiser in that profession. Hell hath no fury like a newspaper advertising manager who picks up his morning newspaper to find such a bitter witch’s brew waiting with his cornflakes and coffee to jump-start his day, believe me. But advertising managers, editors and publishers are not the only ones concerned with a newspaper’s layout and content.

Advertisers, God bless them, have a stake in the process. An airline that regularly advertised in Maine newspapers once issued an edict that its ad must be pulled if news of a commercial airline crash was in the paper on the day the ad was scheduled to run. Car dealers have been known to go nuts if photographs of mangled cars of the brand they are attempting to sell make it into the crash-and-burn section of the paper too often for their tastes. That sort of thing.

Plain old garden-variety readers occasionally write to the editor about matters of page layout, and when they do it often has something to do with politics. During the Reagan administration a lady from a small coastal town wrote to say that she was “damned sick and tired of what is happening to your paper lately.”

Turns out we had committed the sin of running a Page One wire story about Nancy Reagan’s purchase of expensive china for the White House next to a story about the national debt limit.

The two items were absolutely unrelated, she said, although our layout had made it appear that they were – had made it look as though taxpayers were paying for the china when that was not the case. She continued in the same vein for two single-spaced typewritten pages, citing similar instances of layouts proving, she said, that the paper was flat-out prejudiced against Reagan.

In the end, though, she assured us that she was not going to stop buying the paper. It was, she said, the only way she had of keeping track of the daily antics of Garfield, the smart-aleck cat.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him via e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.