How one piece of headline sausage got made
Plus a frank report on Yorktown weenies; Westchester development notes too
It was deadline day at the old North County News in Yorktown, probably in or around 2005, and I was hammering away at my keyboard, finishing an article, when Examiner Editor-in-Chief (then the NCN assistant editor) Martin Wilbur asked for help.
This was a role reversal, because then and now it’s usually me who asks Martin for his advice.
But on this particular afternoon, it was Martin who needed a hand. He stood up, and I sat at his computer.
He said he’d been staring blankly at his screen, suffering from a rare case of writer’s block, searching for a fun lead paragraph for a light-hearted article. I asked him the topic. The growing number of hotdog trucks in Yorktown, he explained.
“Let’s be frank,” I immediately wrote on his screen. “There are a lot of weenies in Yorktown.”
I’m not usually inclined toward or particularly adept at puns so it’s a moment I always remember and laugh about when thinking back to those days. It was the immediacy of writing that sentence that cracked us both up at the time.
So it felt a little like deja vu all over again this Monday when Martin called me on print production deadline day, uncharacteristically struggling with a headline.
I have a random question for you, he said.
He explained how there’s a local guy who helps people in Hawthorne with their dog
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