Putting the Temp in Tempo
The Tempo section of the Chicago Tribune has just been torn apart. What didn’t look broken to the outside eye is being fixed regardless.
Editor Howard Tyner praised Tempo to the skies when he lifted James Warren last winter from editor of the section to editor of the Washington bureau. In retrospect it wasn’t the section he admired but Warren, his own discovery, for holding Tempo together by inspiration until Tyner could rescue the operation with a bulldozer.
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“That it was destabilizing is taken for granted. Of course it was destabilizing,” says Tyner, contemplating the uprooting and clearing. “If you get into a situation of throwing the whole thing up for grabs, there are a lot more people who are destabilized.” Here Tyner referred to a brutally simple proposal of his own: to post a notice that all 12 of Tempo’s writing jobs had been declared open and anyone on the paper could apply. Imagine this approach being taken to the editorial board, or to the sports section, or to any part of the paper that valued continuity and content.
No doubt other writers can be found to do the sort of long, reflective features that distinguish Tempo. Giving them a chance is commendable. Giving them a chance for four months and then running them off is sort of weird. “It may prove it needs to be a little longer,” said Tyner. “I think it’s an experiment, an attempt to introduce different people and different styles and different approaches.”
(Could this idea spread? Will Royko be next to step aside to give someone else a turn?)
“First of all, I read the book,” he said. That sets him apart right there. He reads the books of his radio guests, marks them up, stays up till two or three in the morning finishing them. Which is why, he went on, “I’m trying to avoid books to some extent. Because they kill me.”
“Well, sometimes you gotta go around,” Terkel allowed. “Suppose someone stops in the middle of a sentence. Why did that someone stop in the middle of a sentence? There’s a hurt there. You’re not going to say, ‘Why did you stop?’ Later on, come back to whatever that thought was. You’ll find very often black people laugh at a moment when they’re describing humiliation. ‘So I went to the bar, and they wouldn’t serve me. Ha, ha, ha.’ Or ‘I taught this white kid how to work, and then I got fired.’ And he starts laughing. Why the laugh there? Why’d the person shift subjects here? Why’d the person raise his voice there? And yet you store that, and you go on. You don’t come right at it. So that’s a form of guile.”
