Last week when I reviewed Ty Cobb’s book I had hoped to include some of my personal interfaces with the iconic news man. Unfortunately space did not permit this, so I wish to relate some today.
I first became aware of Ty Cobb, the sportswriter, when I came to Reno to play basketball for the University. In the day room at Lincoln Hall there were usually a couple of copies of the Nevada State Journal. Fellow athletes and I were quick to grab the sports page. Under Ty’s direction it was chock-full of local news, regional and national sports stories. Each of us were excited to see our names appear in print. Unfortunately for me Ty seemed to have trouble with my first name. I was either called Bob, Stan or Steve Spencer. I learned much later that the problem probably was caused by Coach Jim Aiken. To illustrate Aiken’s lack of memory, on one occasion I happened to be sitting next to him at a basketball contest. Staring at me through his coke bottle glasses, he grabbed my arm and said, “Get in there for Spencer, he is really screwing up!” When I informed him I was Spencer he replied, “All you guys look alike to me, get in for Clarkson”.
One day at spring football practice for Aiken I happened to notice a tall thin guy standing at the edge of the field with a note pad in his hand. When I asked the coach who it was he replied in a raspy growl, “Ty Cobb of course.” During a break in the scrimmage I walked over to Ty and said “I appreciate your mentions in the paper, but my first name is Harry”. He immediately scribbled it down and said, “Thanks”.
When I returned to the U after my stint in the Army I was lucky enough to get a job with Ty as one of his “Journal Jocks”. “The Jocks were a group of athletes who happened to be journalism majors and Ty recruited us to cover local high school basketball games. For our efforts we were paid a handsome sum of $5.00, a pretty good stipend in those days. After graduation I was an editor for a weekly newspaper for the Catholic Church and would take sports stories about Bishop Manogue High School over to Ty at the Journal.
Also during that time I was appointed Reno City League Basketball and Softball Commissioner. When Ty learned of it he asked me if I would be available to write reports on the games following their conclusion. This time around he offered quite a bit more than the previous $5.00.
It was at this time that I got a real feel for what a news room was really like. It was a cacophony of jangling phones, clattering typewriters and shouted obscenities.
In this maelstrom Ty would be sitting calmly at his desk, either typing away or answering the phone and laying out his sports page with no notice of what was happening around him, sort of like the Rock of Gibraltar in the midst of a roaring sea. When I would arrive at the paper shortly before the midnight deadline, I would ask Ty, “How many inches?” He would reply, “8 or 10 or 12” and I would write to fit. Chief among the stories were the box scores. As Ty was extremely concerned about having local names in his paper and because we had 32 teams of 10 players each, he was assured of at least 300 readers the next day.
When I was volunteered to be the publicity man for the Reno Rodeo by the rodeo president Charles Mapes, Ty said, “Finally I have a newspaper guy doing the publicity”. Prior to that time, an old style P.R. man Fred Shield had handled the publicity and not being a writer he would schmooze the newspaper men in order to get stories published. The most important job with regard to the Reno Rodeo was the publication of the 16 page special Rodeo Edition. For this task Ty and I would work hand in glove, with him suggesting topics and me researching and writing them.
For me, Ty Cobb was probably the most famous personage to be born in the tiny hamlet of Virginia City and I would challenge anyone to refute that claim.
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