I would like to add two footnotes to the brilliant two-part history of Big Table [“Naked Censorship,” September 29 and October 6].
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First, Daily News columnist Jack Mabley never considered his audience to be the university but rather Charlie Six-Packs. His attempt to impune “beat writing” was a hack columnist’s attempt at narcissistic overreaching. In terms of journalism, he was just about on a par with that right-wing drunk Paul Malloy, who was the TV critic for the Sun-Times. Both were a disgrace to the profession. (Yes–profession–pre-O.J.) That the University of Chicago’s president and high-powered trustees should have taken Mabley seriously is just another example of the time of terror in the 1950s. (It would only be a few short years later when journalists like Mabley and Malloy were ignored by their younger peers. Some of us went on to form our own version of Big Table in 1968, only we called it the Chicago Journalism Review.)
In short, Paul Carroll was and is a mensch.
