Photo by Bill Stokes
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, notes the keeper’s observation that it is not too far past St. Pat’s Day to remember Roundy Coughlin, the one-of-a-kind newspaper columnist who was with the State Journal when the keeper came on board there sixty-plus years ago.
Roundy, with the help of his long-suffering secretary Edith, turned out a daily sports column–“Roundy Says,” noteworthy for its ungrammatical style and the number of names it included.
When the keeper first started writing a column, Roundy stopped by his desk one day and advised, “Names, kid, get lots of names in your column. People love to see their names in the paper.”
There is a sample of Roundy’s work in the keeper’s recently published book, “Treeson: an APOLOGIA to Trees,” and readers might note that the keeper did his best to follow Roundy’s advice during his 35 years of newspaper column writing.
One of Roundy’s favorite lines was, “What more could be fairer?”
The keeper revives it here and notes that “Treeson,” is available from Amazon, at bookstores and from him at billstokesauthor.com.
