Monday, May 15, 2006

Things not to say in a headline

I missed the story in The Carthage Press, but I hear longtime Carthage Senior High School counselor Kent Harris has retired after a long career in education. Kent, or Skip as I have always called him, was always helpful to me in those days when I was doing school stories, including the Senior Spotlight articles I wrote about in a post Sunday.
I worked with Skip, a Lamar resident, long before coming to The Press. When I first worked for the Lamar Daily Democrat, as sports editor in 1978, Skip was teaching at Lamar High School and serving as volleyball coach.
The team did not win many games, it would be another eight years before Greg Kinser brought Lamar its first volleyball district championship, but it did easily defeat Jasper one evening.
In his jubilation over the rare victory, Kent said, "We blew their shorts off!"
Keep in mind I was 22 years old at the time and thought that sounded like a wonderful, extremely colorful quote, so I not only used it in the article, but I put it in the headline.
Much to my surprise, we had many readers in Jasper, including parents who did not appreciate having the shorts of their teenage daughters blown off on the pages of the local newspaper.
Fortunately, Skip Harris and I survived that incident, and as far as I know, neither one of us has used that phrase again to this day.

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