Lou Carr, Rock Star
Thanks to the length of his legendary career, Jack Kerouac and I had the same editor
Here's the scene. It's Friday night, and in a dusty attic in Richmond Va., there's me, a 12-pack of Rolling Rock and box after box of old news. There's a ton of tattered, yellow newspaper clippings and stacks of wire service copy, news ripped from rolls of cheap paper with edges prone to a curl.
The task at hand is throwing away enough paper to get 20-some years of my life into a single box.
It keeps me busy until 4:30 a.m., and the end result is a pile of empty beer bottles, one neat plastic box chocked with memories, and two huge garbage bags full of clips, including a small mountain of old UPI wire copy.
Every clip tells a story, and the process has been more emotional than I had ever imagined. For most of my life, people looked at me as a writer, not a dot commie, and it's like I'm saying goodbye to myself.
Originally published Feb. 1, 2005. Click image to enlarge.
Now to the cosmic karma of it all.
First, I found out the First Dumpling woke up jarred — 102 miles away, I might add — at the same time I was wrapping up my trip down memory lane.
A few hours later, my mother called Dumplin' to lament how I don't write anymore, and how good I was at it.
At the time of that call, I'm driving to Virginia Beach to see her. Tired from just a few hours sleep, I'm blasting a classic rock 'n roll station. The DJ is doing a segment on famous people in rock who have died this week, and as soon as he's finished with Jim Capaldi of Traffic, he launches into the obit of Lucien Carr.
Lou Carr wasn't exactly Top 40.
But he was a rock star to me.
***
Lou Carr was a legendary editor at United Press International, the heart and soul of the A-wire, the top stories of the day. He was there for 47 years, and I lived in fear of his phone calls for 11 of them.
Unabashedly old-school -- "When I see that lead, I want to either cry or get horny" -- it was his job to make people better, and he was brilliant at it. It meant a lot when you got a "good job" from Lou Carr.
More often than any compliment, he was the guy asking the question you should have asked. He was the guy who'd know the perfect verb that escaped you. He'd be the guy who'd put your stuff in active voice, cut the length of your story by a third, and make it better. "Why don't you start with the second graph?"
Via Wikipedia, Jack Kerouac, left, and Lou Carr in 1944.
He had an unbelievable sense of what people would want to know. I carry that sense of anticipation into my Web work to this very day.
But too much thumb-sucking about me; Carr would have ridiculed all the grafs I've used to set this up. He'd tell me I was burying the lede (the most important part), even if I'm trying to explain why I'm doing all this.
I'm trying to introduce Lucien Carr to trailing generations.
Because working for UPI won't get you on a classic rock station.
***
Before rebellious young people tatted and piereced themselves, before grunge and flannel shirts, before the long-haired freaky people who need not apply, there were the beatniks, the hip cats, the people in the 40s and 50s who took on the culture of suburbia and grey flannel suit corporate conformity.
And Lucien Carr was one of the prime movers.
The Beat Generation, as it came to be known, came about because Lou Carr introduced a bunch of his brilliant buddies to each other, and then kept them all on a short and to-the-point pursuit of the excellence. Jack Kerouac on the road, Alan Ginsburg howling, William Burroughs on whatever planet he called home. Behind most great writers, you'll find a great editor. Like Lou Carr.
He wasn't the type to put himself first; while The Beat rolled on, Carr got a real job. At United Press, no less, and he stayed with it until '93. For youngsters, think of the earliest days of Microsoft, and why Bill Gates got two thirds of the company and Paul Allen got one third: Allen had a day job.
In recent years, Carr's biggest media ride came when Kerouac's original manuscript for "On The Road" was put up for auction. Carr had given him the old wire-style spool of paper so he could keep writing without having to stop and change paper in his typewriter.
I know a bit about writing on wire paper.
The day Lou Carr died, I was up to my elbows in it.
***
Lou Carr , back in the day.
In the news business, in the area of news wholesalers such as UPI or the Associated Press, the term for getting your story in the paper instead of the other guy was "getting the play."
Lou Carr got a lot of play with his obit, and most of them mentioned that he killed a homosexual stalker. Even though it was self-defense, Carr spent two years in prison for stabbing his ex-Scoutmaster with a Boy Scout knife. Left hanging between the lines was the suggestion that his prison past is what led Carr to low-profile, in-the-background pursuits.
I believe this is misplaced pop psychology.
It's a legitimate calling and a satisfying pursuit to make things better. Lou Carr wasn't a friend of mine, he was a presence, a voice on a phone, a name at the end of a rocketgram message from the big desk. Better is what he made me — and everybody else who had the fortune/misfortune of having a big story in their laps.
There's a name for that, you know.
Editor.
-30-
Mr. Marshall, who uses italics when speaking in the third person, would be remiss if he did not mention another legendary UPI editor, the gravel-voiced — and extremely talented — Jack Warner. The best friend a story ever had passed away in 2018.
("-30-" is an old-typesetter's mark meaning "end of the story")