School paper’s movie review an omen
Judging from the contents of the campus newspaper during my senior year at White Station High School, I was dest i ned to either (a) draw cartoons or ( b) review movies. Now I do both by writing reviews that some readers say ought to be on the funny pages.
The masthead of The Scroll for the 1976-77 school year lists me as Features Editor, Cartoonist and Business Manager. John Beifuss Reporter Michael Kelley explores the history of Memphis City Schools as the 165-year-old system became part of a consolidated Shelby County Schools this week. If you are a subscriber, you can read Kelley’s story in the opinion section on our website, as well as our smartphone and tablet apps. Activate your account at commercialappeal.com/ subscribe. Share your MCS memories at facebook.com/ commercialappeal. My performance of the latter responsibility probably provoked more laughter among my peers than the fruits of the middle-listed job title; it’s also a likely explanation as to why we managed to publish only three “newspapers” during the school year.
Although perhaps not the jewel of the Memphis City Schools system it would become in the Optional Schools era, White Station at the time was a quality institution. That’s one reason it amazes me to remember how we basically were left to produce The Scroll entirely on our own, with almost no adult intervention or assistance, once we were put in charge. It was at once a declaration that freedom of the press is inviolate and a suggestion that serious journalism is no more important to the integrity of the republic than is a quality Pep Club.
In those dark days, the school provided no funds for the newspaper, so the small staff had to raise
money to f inance the publication of each issue. This meant selling boxes of candy, like every other organization in school, and selling ads to business that took pity on us.
Judging from surviving issues of The Scroll, certain advertisers were betting that a certain percentage of White Station Spartans wasn’t bound for the Ivy League. In addition to Mr. Formal and Burger King, our most loyal advertisers included the Navy, the Army and the Marine Corps.
Another advertiser was Zantigo’s, a fast-food Mexican restaurant on Mt. Moriah that sold a sort of chili-cheese burrito known as the “Chilito.” A peculiarly porous cylinder that could absorb massive amounts of Zantigo hot sauce, the Chilito was the perfect delivery system for sauce-swilling contests that did to the stomach lining what Don Emilio Barzini’s boys did to Sonny Corleone in “The Godfather.” I’m sure we devoted more effort to getting a Chilito coupon into the November issue of The Scroll than into creating the actual newspaper that contained it. As a result, even the most dedicated Scroll archivist from the Class of 1977 no longer has a copy of that issue without a coupon-sized rectangle torn from its pages. Intact issues may be rarer than mint-condition copies of Action Comics No. 1.
Which brings us back, at last, to cartooning.
I drew a so-called political cartoon for each copy of The Scroll. The most coherent of these was created after the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter as the 39th president; I placed his familiar big-toothed smile and hairdo onto the facade of the White House over the caption “New Tenant.” I was both validated and schooled when I very soon thereafter saw a political cartoon in Newsweek magazine with the exact same theme, but the more clever adult artist had transformed the pillars of the White House into Carter’s teeth, rather than simply plastering a grin onto the front of the building. This cartoonist also left off the hair and the caption: He knew all you needed was the grin. In other words, less is more, a lesson I still haven’t learned, as this column is demonstrating.
I also wrote movie reviews for The Scroll. My first review was of “The Omen,” the famous demon- child movie with Gregory Peck in which a priest is impaled by a lightning rod and a photographer is decapitated by a sheet of plate glass in a sequence that set the template for the entire “Final Destination” franchise. I would say the man’s head bounced along the glass like an errant soccer ball, but in 1976 I don’t think we were familiar with this thing called “soccer.” Anyway, I loved “The Omen,” especially on the big screen at the old Paramount theater in the Eastgate shopping center. “Let’s hope we see no sequel to ‘The Omen,’” I wrote, because a follow-up would destroy “the deliberate ambiguity” of the film’s ending. Then as now, nobody listened to me; three sequels followed, plus a remake.
Next I reviewed “Marathon Man,” in which Dustin Hoffman is pursued by Laurence Olivier as a sadistic Nazi doctor who makes inventive use of a dentist’s drill. Yes, I made a “skin of his teeth” joke in the review.
What has changed in the 35 years or so since I left Memphis City Schools? I’m still writing. Still drawing (still for no pay). Still watching, every once in a blue moon, “The Omen.” And still thanking perhaps the best teacher I ever had, Miss Evelyn Mills, who in ninth grade got me to read — and love — the “Iliad,” the “Odyssey” and “A Tale of Two Cities.” And that’s no joke.