I guess I never really knew Paul Greenberg. I worked with him, sure, and I was around him regularly in the newsroom in Pine Bluff, but I never really got to “know” him as a person.
Part of the reason is that he wrote opinion pieces, and I had long before learned that everybody has an opinion. In time, I came to modify that adage: “Everybody has an opinion, but the vast majority are not worth the effort it takes to express them. This is an all-inclusive statement.”
I seldom read Paul’s pieces, or any other opinion pieces; I had a brain, too, and another person’s view of the world is not necessarily one with which I would agree, or would care to know. If a piece also imparts some information that is new to me, or re-examines something from the past, that’s a different matter, but I still look for the slanted bias of opinion.
Other than sports, women’s news, ads and, usually Paul, those of us on the copy desk reviewed just about every item that went into the paper, including letters to the editor. I remember when two preachers got into a war of words over a passage or two from the Bible.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
One would decry the interpretation of the other, which would spark a lengthy rebuttal. This continued for some time, back and forth through many column feet of type, until we finally realized they were using free space in the newspaper for their own Holy War just so they could see their names in print. No longer allowed to carry out their skirmishes for free, they shut up.
I liked Paul as a person; he was congenial, seldom critical without cause and diplomatic when he spoke, choosing his words.
On two occasions, though, he borrowed my own witticisms without giving me what I thought was due credit. The first was when I was still in high school, writing for the Pine Cone (one word in the dictionary; two on our masthead), the Pine Bluff High School student newspaper. I was impressed that he picked it up, not impressed that he did not give me credit since it appeared in a by-lined column. The second time involved a quip I had posted on the newsroom bulletin board. I can almost forgive him for that one as it was not signed.
I sometimes wonder if perhaps Paul had submitted my name, as we both had entries in the Bicentennial edition of “Who’s Who in the South and Southwest.”
Most unexpectedly, Paul sided with me one day, after the paper changed hands and the new overseer took issue with my use of a slang term. While the brass said it was seen as an insult in Las Vegas, from whence he came, that onus had not reached Pine Bluff.
Overhearing our exchange, Paul intervened, arguing that since the term applied only to people who were breaking the law, they could not be maligned. Calling a thief a crook isn’t libel. The boss man disagreed, but Paul refused to back down; so did the brass. That may have started the divide that eventually sent Paul north.
Maybe part of the reason I never got to know Paul was that I didn’t understand him. With most folks, I find it easy to tell where their head is, what motivates them, why they act as they do, like our jovial sports editor, Frank Lightfoot, or our laid-back regional editor, Bill Lancaster. Not so Paul. To my mind, he seemed to almost be from another planet. His very thought processes were beyond my ken.
He would sometimes emerge from his glassed-in office (or Ivory Tower, as my mentor Connie Elkins called it) to pose a question, then might have to explain the context of his query before we could offer any kind of response.
I got to know his son Daniel better, through a shared interest in comics, but the lad veered off into Dungeons & Dragons and lost me. Paul’s wife at the time, Carolyn, was a bubbly, pleasant woman, but I never knew much about Ruthie, the youngest member of the family.
As for Paul, I do not think I was in awe of him (OK, maybe just a little), but he was not a man with whom I could sit down and chitchat; his chit was on a different plane from my chat. From time to time, I still see his name referenced by one columnist or another, and I wonder if they know something I don’t, perhaps can see into that other plane on which he existed.
I do not think that is the case, though. Rather, like the dueling preachers, I think they invoke his name in a bid to raise their own status. That observation has led me to develop a new adage, since I know of none that properly applies: The truly great are seldom revered within their own lifetimes, merely tolerated.
A longtime copy editor, D.H. Ridgway was the last news editor at the Freeman-owned Pine Bluff Commercial, and the first to hold that post at the corporate-owned version.