Recalling an Old-Time Reporter
By Jeffrey Page
Advisory: You will find the word “Woodstock” in this paragraph and the one that follows, but rest assured this is not more Woodstock nostalgia.
In the new movie “Taking Woodstock” there’s a close-up of The Times Herald-Record and under one of the headlines are the words “By Charlie Crist.”
For 60 years, starting in 1933, Charlie was a reporter for radio stations and weekly papers in the Mid-Hudson, as well as for The Times Herald-Record, which is where I met him. I was hired in 1972 for the Sullivan County Bureau where Charlie once had been the boss. Now he was working mostly out of Middletown though he’d often return to the bureau to use the phone or the teletype.
But first he’d push his glasses to the top of his head, loosen his bowtie, light a cigarette and ask, “And what have you fellers been up to?” Never “fellows,” always “fellers.”
Charlie worked hard. Mornings he would be in the newsroom in Middletown. Then he’d drive back to Monticello, where he lived, to have lunch with his wife Gladys. He’d usually have coffee with us at the bureau, bounce around Sullivan, Orange and Ulster looking for stories, have dinner with Gladys and head out again to meetings. His work was his recreation.
Every small town needs its local paper, and every paper needs a Charlie Crist, a guy who can walk into a bar, or a diner, or a VFW hall, or a church, or a hunting camp, or a meeting of volunteer firefighters, and know everybody in the room. These were the places he found the “real people,” as he called them, that he spent a career writing about. I think he knew every cop in three counties.
Charlie loved to gab with anyone who loved to gab. He and I talked a lot about hunting. “A feller’s got to eat,” Charlie said, and I agreed. I just never understood hunting for sport. “You’d deprive people of the hunt?” Charlie said incredulously. I said a sportsman should hunt a bear on the bear’s terms – wrestle it. Winner gets to eat the loser. “Jeffrey, my friend, that is dumbest thing I ever heard from you,” he said, and would remind me that my “problem” was that I grew up in Queens, not Pine Bush.
Everybody knew him. People would stop by the bureau just wanting to say hello to their man Crist. The firefighters may have loved him more than anyone else for his coverage of the creation of the Firefighters Burn Treatment Fund.
I don’t think he ever slept. Once, I got a call in the middle of the night from the Liberty supervisor, Francis “Stretch” Hanofee, telling me that there was a bad fire at a school for emotionally disturbed kids. I raced over. And there was Charlie. “Thought you’d never get here,” he said.
Another time, it was Charlie calling before dawn with something about a derailment just across the Delaware from Barryville. But we don’t cover Pennsylvania, I said.
“Oh, put your pants on. I’ll pick you up in 15 minutes,” he said.
Charlie was one of the Record reporters who covered the big show at Max Yasgur’s farm in 1969. Five years later he summed it up.
“Half a million naked kids and some music,” he said. Charlie wasn’t cool, just salt of the earth, a man from an earlier time.
I don’t think Charlie would understand what’s happening to newspapers today. What would he say about papers being run by people with no background in news, or by venture capitalists who sink some money in, take a lot more out and walk away, letting the papers wither and die?
Charlie, who died in 1993 at 78, had his share of lame brained managers, such as some alleged geniuses at The Times Herald-Record who strongly hinted in 1978 that it was time for him to pack it in. What did he do? He went back to the weeklies and beat The Record on a regular basis with stories about firefighters and veterans, hunters and cops and other “real people.”
Then he’d drop into the Record bureau, push his glasses up, take a cup of coffee, and ask “And what have you fellers been up to?”
Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com
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