Late Edition A Love Story - Bob Greene new book

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Greene: A lesson from Woody Hayes

Bob Greene's new memoir is titled "Late Edition: A Love Story"
The book chronicles his tenure at an Ohio newspaper in the 1960s


Bob Greene recalls a 1967 lesson in manners from Ohio State University football coach Woody Hayes.



July 12, 2009 - 2 hours, 59 minutes ago


By Bob Greene
CNN Contributor

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from CNN Contributor Bob Greene's new book, "Late Edition: A Love Story," a memoir of his time working at an Ohio newspaper in the 1960s.

The localness of what we did down at the paper defined everything. Even as a kid brand-new to the staff and brand-new to the newspaper business, hired to work during summer vacations, I could tell that.

It was a localness not confined to the geographic scope of our news coverage -- it went without saying that the Columbus, Ohio, Citizen-Journal wasn't about to send its reporters to Africa or France (or even to Kentucky or Indiana). The men and women in the city room arrived at work each day knowing that they weren't going to be assigned to anyplace from where they couldn't drive back to the office by deadline.

The localness extended beyond that, though, and infused the very feel of the place. One night in the summer of 1967 the phone on the sports desk rang and I picked it up with the customary: "Sports!"

The person on the other end said:

"Now, that's no way to answer a telephone, is it?"

"Who's calling?" I said.

"To whom am I speaking?" the caller said.

"This is Bob Greene," I said.

"Now, I've seen your name in the paper," the caller said. "It's Bob Greene Jr., isn't it?"

I had been permitted to write a few sports stories that summer; I used the "Jr." at the end of the byline.

"Yes," I said. I thought I recognized the voice from somewhere.

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"Now, I believe I know your mother and father," the caller said. "Are your parents Robert and Phyllis Greene, from Bexley?"

"Yes," I said.

"I know they didn't raise you to answer a phone that way," the caller said. "When you answer a business telephone, the proper way to do it is to tell the caller your name first."

"All right, sir," I said.

"I know your parents are fine people, and I'm sure they taught you good manners," the caller said. "You don't want to disappoint them by giving a bad impression of yourself on the telephone, do you?"

"No, sir," I said.

"Good," the caller said. "Now, this is Woody Hayes. I was calling to speak with Tom Pastorius. Is Tom there, please?"

And, my hands shaking, I connected him with Pastorius, one of the paper's sportswriters.

I knew it really was the head coach of the Ohio State University football team because of that phrase early in his lecture to me -- "To whom am I speaking?" His grammar was always scrupulous -- no "Who am I speaking to?" from Woody Hayes.

The localness was all around us. Woody had met my mother and father on a few occasions, he remembered them, and he was setting their son straight. He may have been the most nationally famous person in the community, but he was first and foremost a member of that community -- during all his years as head football coach at Ohio State, Woody kept his home telephone number listed in the Columbus phone book: W.W. Hayes, on Cardiff Road. That made for a lot of late-night crank calls from a lot of insulting or drunken people, but he thought that if he was going to represent the community, then he should be as available as any other man or woman in town.

Once, years later, I heard a story -- I'm almost certain that it was Citizen-Journal sportswriter Kaye Kessler who told it. It seemed that very early in Jack Nicklaus's golf career, Nicklaus's father, Charlie, a Columbus pharmacist, was following his son on tour, and Woody Hayes offered to travel with Charlie Nicklaus to keep him company and provide moral support. Apparently at one tournament someone in the gallery kept referring to Nicklaus as "fat Jack" -- Nicklaus was a little hefty in those younger days. And, the way I remember the story, either Woody Hayes had to physically restrain Charlie Nicklaus from going after the fan, or Charlie Nicklaus had to restrain Woody. (I have a feeling I know which one was which.)

It was all part of the localness. Woody Hayes and Charlie Nicklaus were two Columbus residents on the road to cheer for a local golfer; the fact that the local golfer would become the greatest ever to play the game was incidental. And we -- in the eyes of our readers, and in our own eyes, too -- were, proudly, the local paper.

That was all, and everything, we aspired to be. Just like the proud local papers in a thousand other American towns. "I know they didn't raise you to answer a phone that way," Woody said. He thought, by saying it, he was doing me a favor. He was.

Excerpted by permission from "Late Edition: A Love Story," published this week by St. Martin's Press.

2009 - CNN

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Commentary: Your never-ending workday

By Bob Greene
CNN Contributor

10:16 a.m. EDT, Sun June 21, 2009

Editor's note: CNN Contributor Bob Greene is a best-selling author whose new book, "Late Edition: A Love Story," will be published in July.



(CNN) -- I think perhaps the oddest person I have ever known was a man by the name of Robert Hyland.

But the truly odd thing is that we all seem to have turned into him.

Hyland was the vice president and general manager of KMOX radio, the 50,000-watt powerhouse in St. Louis, Missouri.

He came to work every day at 2:30.

In the morning.

That's right: Hyland would show up at his office at 2:30 a.m. each day. He would then work straight through until 5 p.m.

He didn't do this once in a while; he did it each and every day. He didn't do it to set an example for his employees.

He did it because he couldn't seem to stop working.

"I'm not one of those people who need sleep to be refreshed," Hyland told me once. "I'll go to bed between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., and I'll wake up at 1:30 a.m. I have an alarm clock, but I never set it. I wake up automatically. I shower and shave, and I'm at the office by 2:30."


I asked him if this schedule made any sense at all.

"It's a good time to get a lot of work done," he told me. "The phone isn't ringing, and there are no distractions. I have a pile of paperwork on my desk, and I go through it."

At 9 a.m., he said -- after he had been at work for 6½ hours -- the other people at the office would show up. And he would keep going.

Hyland may have seemed eccentric -- he readily understood that perception; he said to me: "I think what you're thinking is that you're talking to a nut" -- but if he had lived a little longer (he died of cancer in 1992 at the age of 71), he would have witnessed something that might have astonished even him:

The rest of the world joined him in his obsession.

Hyland died just before the era in which everyone began using cell phones and staring at home computer screens. Society might never have been ready to do what he did -- come to the office in the middle of the night and routinely work 14½ hour days -- had the technology revolution not come along.

But come along it did -- and with it came the erasure of all the boundaries that at one time separated the workday from leisure time.

E-mails and text messages and BlackBerrys and all their digital cousins may have given us the illusion of freedom -- we tell ourselves that we are unfettered by traditional offices, that we can go anywhere we please -- yet in the end they have created a nation of Robert Hylands. We're never off the clock; that cell phone may ring at dinnertime, that allegedly urgent e-mail may arrive at 11 p.m., that instant message from the regional manager may pop onto the screen when we're on vacation with our families.

And what do we do?

If your answer is, "We ignore them," good for you. But the truth is, mostly we don't ignore them -- mostly we snap to attention.

Ask yourself this: What do you think would happen to an employee who received an e-mail at home from his boss at 8 o'clock on a Tuesday night, and who responded to the e-mail by writing back:

"I'm sorry, but I'm only available for work-related e-mails during office hours. If you'd like to communicate with me about this matter, please feel free to do so tomorrow after 9 a.m."

That might be the rational answer. But how many people -- especially in this economy, and in this job market -- do you think would dare to do that?

And it's not just when we're working for our bosses -- it's when we're purportedly doing things for ourselves. Try to picture your father's or grandfather's reaction if in, say, 1958, he had been trying to make an airplane reservation and he had been told by the airline:

"We'd like you to purchase a computer and set it up inside your house. You pay for it; you also pay for the electricity to run it. Now, we'd like you to buy a printing machine -- you pay for that, and you pay for the ink inside it, and you pay for the paper that feeds into it. Now, we'd like you to use the computer you've paid for to do the work of reservation agents, so we don't have to hire as many of them. Got it? Now, use that computer, make your own reservations, and print out your own ticket. On your own time."

Had your dad or granddad been told that, half a century ago, he might have thought he was having a nightmare. But we're grateful for it; we tell ourselves this is progress. If we log on at the moment the seat-selection process opens up, and we manage, by playing airline-roulette on our keyboard, to get ourselves an aisle seat, we feel triumphant. We barely stop to consider that we're working for the very airline company to which we're paying our money.

Robert Hyland said he would feel funny not working all those hours -- he even did it on Saturdays; on the sixth workday of his week he would come in, as usual, at 2:30 a.m.

"I just don't think that most people have the commitment to their jobs that I do," he told me.

If only he had lived to see 2009. He would have been just a face in the crowd -- just another American to whom the notion of quitting time has lost all meaning.



The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bob Greene.

2009 - CNN

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