Andreas Bohnenstengel, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper in thanking Karen Mayers for pointing out that April 18 was “National Columnist Day,” which gives the keeper an opportunity to lament the fact that he cannot stop writing columns even at an age when he might better keep his mouth and his mind shut to preserve what remnants still remain.
When the keeper first began writing a column for the Wisconsin State Journal, Roundy Coughlin, the Journal’s famous ungrammatical sports columnist stopped by the keeper’s desk one day with some advice: “Names, kid, get lots of names in your column. People love to see their names in the paper.”
There were days when Roundy’s column was little more than a list of the names of people he had encountered, which made his advice difficult for the keeper to follow.
A standby column subject for Roundy was the difficulty he had in opening the packages of crackers that came with his soup over at Crandall’s Lunch.
That sounds a lot like the keeper’s propensity for writing columns about his frustration with some of the modern packaging, like his whimpering over the indestructibility of bubble-wrap.
If you are too young to remember Roundy, ask your grandpa or grandma about him. Everybody knew him, and probably had their names in his column.
“What more could be fairer,” was a trademark Roundy comment, and there is an item about him in the keeper’s book “Treeson: An APOLOGIA to Trees.”
Photo by Bill Stokes