Stop the Presses!!! Max Moss, dear friend, mentor, best newspaperman I ever knew, grabs his pica pole and wax pencil and puts out his final edition

 Max Moss, the best newspaperman I ever knew, died at 11:30 a.m. Thursday at his home in Pleasant View, Tennessee.

He had been fighting cancer for a long time, and he knew for the last few months that he was going to lose the battle. 

After his first diagnosis more than a year ago, he underwent treatment, and the cancer subsided and it seemed like he may be out of the woods. But, as it usually does, the cancer returned with a vengeance a few months ago, and the doctors gave him at the most six months to live. 

I think, because he was a tough but kind gentleman, Max made it through four of those months in pretty good style, and he really didn’t need to be on pain medicine for much of that time. I believe he was as determined as possible to keep his head clear.

He wanted to be able to talk with his wife of 59 years, Merrily – more on her in a bit – and with his kids and grandchildren. Perhaps spin a fishing yarn or two. Maybe talk about his old friend, Bobby Knight, the legendary coach of Max’s beloved Indiana University Hoosiers, whose antics made the old alum chuckle. I’m not sure he liked it when Bob threw the chair across the court, but other than that, the eccentricities of the coach pretty much delighted Max.  

I ran into Knight a few times, and I told Max the coach was an asshole. Max just laughed. “That’s just Bob,” he’d say. Max didn’t swear – I took care of more than the whole newsroom’s share – but I think to Max, Coach Knight perhaps was an asshole, but a lovable one.

Until recent days, I was able to call him, and he was never one to complain. In fact, the last time we spoke, which was just before this last descent toward death, I asked him how he was doing.

“Can’t complain,” he said, one of his regular expressions. “Don’t really have all that nasty stuff yet.” Or maybe he called it “icky stuff.” Like I said, he didn’t swear.

He didn’t dwell on it, but I could tell he was having a hard time talking, and he needed to get off the phone in 15 minutes or so. Most of our calls lasted at least a half-hour. But my friend was running out of fire.

I also knew that I wasn’t going to interfere with his pride by forcing him to talk when it really was becoming almost impossible, because of the drain on his lungs.  Of course, the cancer wasn’t just in his lungs. It had spread to the liver as well. 

It never got to his spirit.

Here’s a note I got from him on June 11:

The news is not good.

 Monday, I learned the latest scan I had shows I have cancer in my liver and my lung.  Nothing can be done to stop/slow its spread.

"Maybe six months" is what Max Jr., Karen and I learned when we met with the specialist who helps folks dealing with such situations.

For now, while I'm still feeling OK, Merrily and I, with the kids' help, are getting our financial and other such details in order.

Max 

Perfect news writing. Who, What, When, Where, Why and How in the lead. Inverted pyramid. Solid ending adding final information.  

Because of the COVID thing, I could not go up to see him in the last few months. I am fortunate enough that I went up there just before the shutdown.  It was before the final diagnosis, but he knew that time was coming.

I really needed to see him then.  I knew he was failing, not from complaints from him but because his son, Max Jr., kept me informed.

Max Jr. was there the last time I was up there and Max and Merrily were in good spirits, sharing donuts that their son had picked up fresh that morning.  I knew he was getting tired then, too, so I left after an hour or two and rolled back downhill to Nashville.

Besides that, the two Maxes were bound for yet another doc’s visit in Nashville.  Max Jr. took the donuts along when he and his dad climbed into the young man’s fire-engine-red pickup with Oklahoma tags.

The last three times when I have called up there, Max was sleeping.  I spoke with Merrily and Karen while he rested.

 But, like I said, the last time I spoke with him, maybe three weeks ago, he was the same loving old friend who pretty much taught me all I ever needed to know about being a newspaperman.

We talked about our lives in newspapers. We spoke of pica poles and souping film, printing it wet and sizing it for reproduction in the camera room.  Cigarettes tossed to the floor of the composing room while Glover Williams put the waxed copy on the pages.   

I reminded him again of my “Whitey Ford/Fuchs Winner” headline when we spoke of the art of getting headlines to fit, back before the computer took that task, basically all of the layout and design tasks, over.

We spoke of the first time I met him. It was on the second day I worked at The Leaf-Chronicle in Clarksville.  Monday, I reported to work with sports editor Gene Washer, who had hired me the week before for $125 a week, just enough that I could afford an efficiency apartment in a rundown section of town on the other side of Crossland and near the Cumberland River.

Monday was Max’s day off. Seeing as that was September 12, 1974 or thereabouts and it was sunny, I’m sure Max was out at Lake Barkley, fishing. 

I did go out with him once when he fished Barkley. He wanted to see if I’d become interested. Or maybe he just wanted to spend some time with me – we loved each other as friends and colleagues – so he bought me a one-day license. I think he lacked faith that I’d take up the hobby. He was right. My only passion back then was in the newsroom. Or maybe in a bar.

Anyway, I enjoyed being with him when we launched at Bumpus Mills Marina, in Stewart County, but I believe I only caught one crappie. And I avoided a snake hanging from one of the branches.  

We stopped on the way back at another spot near Barkley where he wanted to show me a beaver dam. No, we didn’t kill any beaver and eat them.

Hell, we’d barely gotten crappie, but thanks to Max, we did carry enough back to the Moss’ North Clarksville home for that evening’s meal. Merrily cleaned and cooked them.

It wasn’t too long after that Max asked me to come out to his house and help him get a pool table down in the basement. It was a tough job. And I know when he moved, he left the pool table in the basement.

Oh, Max and I did take many more drives out to Bumpus Mills Marina, because he and Merrily had purchased land there. They later gave up plans of building a home there.  But he did like to go look at that land and also down at the water. He was good company. We several times paced out his lot, and he continued to dream of walking from his house and dropping a crappie line in off the dock.

Before I go on much farther, I need to mention more about Merrily. She is a wonderful woman, always welcoming me into their home. In fact, on Saturdays, Max and I generally would get into the newsroom at around 10 a.m. or so.  We had about 16 broadsheet pages to fill for Sunday. We’d work until at least 1 a.m.

We’d spend the first couple hours talking to football and basketball coaches to get the results of games we hadn’t covered. Back then, The Leaf-Chronicle, the oldest newspaper in the state, covered something like seven or eight counties, including all of the ones in the immediate area of Tennessee as well as two counties in Kentucky.

Oh, and we also covered the sports at Fort Campbell, the military post near where Max lived and the place where he had served much of his own infantry stint.  He did go to Vietnam once, delivering some top-secret papers from honchos at Fort Campbell to others in Saigon.  He told me he was scared (he didn’t say, “shitless,” but he didn’t need to), and was glad to uncuff that briefcase and leave it in Nam and get the hell … or “the heck” … back to Clarksville and Fort Campbell.   

Anyway, I was talking about Merrily.  In recent weeks, when I have called up to the comfortable house she and her husband shared in Pleasant View, Tennessee – halfway between Clarksville and Nashville – she answered the phone. “Your buddy’s sitting right here,” she’d say. Or “your buddy’s sleeping, so if you can call back later.”

The last time I spoke with her, though, her words were a little scrambled. I figured she was a little tired.  Max Jr. told me, a few days later, that she had suffered a stroke, likely brought on by the stress of caring for her husband. And, of course, knowing all the while that it was a losing cause.

Merrily, it should be mentioned, is brave in her own right.  Long ago, she worked for the city of Clarksville, with her workspace being in the City Garage.  That apparently was before people realized how caustic a workplace can be, and her lungs were permanently scarred by the fumes created when cars and trucks were being painted.

She is down to something like 10 percent lung capacity. But she doesn’t complain, either.  In fact, she joked with me that as Max’s disease got worse, he was even having to use more oxygen than her.

Max told me, with a laugh, that the problem with being on oxygen was that he and Merrily got their hoses – those thin, clear plastic things attached to the oxygen tanks – tangled up.

Since my last call to Merrily – her husband was resting and morphine was taking its toll – I have spoken with their beloved children, Max Jr. and Karen.  I’ve known them since they were children, of course.

Both of them would be in their family room on Saturday nights when Max and I took our dinner break. We’d been in early, and we would close out late. So we usually took about an hour and a half, picked up some Whoppers with cheese at the Burger King by the Red River and we’d go out to the Moss home to watch Archie Bunker. Max provided the beer, although we limited ourselves to one or two, because we still had hours of work to go.

We always were joined by Fluffy, the wonderful black dog with the imaginative name, who was glad for hamburger scraps.  I was very sad when Fluffy died.

Oh, and the smoking.  I had smoked since I was about 16. In high school it was mostly cigars and pipes that I would puff on while walking along nearby Lake Michigan (we lived in the barely-northern suburbs of Chicago).  In college, during my first set of finals, I ran out of cigars in the middle of the night and went down to the commons room below the dorm to put two quarters in the machine for a pack of Camels or maybe Marlboros or Winstons. Not Luckys though, even though LSMFT was their slogan (Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco).

My smoking of tobacco and otherwise became a big part of my being as I made it through college.  I liked to roll my own, but Camels probably were my preferred tobacco cigarette.

When I got out of college in 1973, and after I toured the country in my 1965 Ford Falcon, I gave up smoking. Not a big deal. Oh, the occasional “pipe” or cigar, but no cigarettes.

When I first stepped in that Leaf-Chronicle newsroom on September 12, 1974, I quickly learned that quitting smoking for health reasons was fruitless. Everybody, even copy desk chief and religion columnist, Big Jim Monday, smoked cigarettes.  Max was one of the worst offenders. I sat between him and Gene Washer and puffing machine Richard Worden, the city editor who eventually died of leg injuries from his stint as a Marine in Vietnam, was a few feet behind me.

The first day or so, I bummed cigarettes. But then I figured “what the hell,” and went back to the break room and slid in two or three quarters for my own pack.  Before I quit smoking, 20 years later, I sometimes reached three packs a day. That went well with my 40 cups of coffee a day average.    

I’m kind of wandering around here. Even though I knew he was dying, any day, it is hard to grasp fully. He wouldn’t approve of all this wandering around, either. Get to the (fucking) point.

I think about the first ballgame he worked with me. It was Thursday night at Municipal Stadium in Clarksville, where Erin (Now Houston County High School) was taking on The Clarksville Academy. I guess that would have been Sept. 15, 1974.

I can’t remember who won. Doesn’t really matter. All I can remember is Max’s steady reassurance as he taught me how to properly fill out a scorebook and take pictures and notes all at the same time. I must have done OK, since that was my only training session. I went back to the newsroom to write the story. Max went home, apparently satisfied that I’d do OK.

The next night I was on my own, probably at Fort Campbell, while Max went to either Clarksville or Northwest, the only high schools in the city back then.

He’s the guy who taught me the disciplines of newspapering: use of the pica pole, sizing wheel, layout and design, developing film, printing pictures, editing wire and other copy.

I pretty much already knew how to write, but I felt assured when it was Max who was the guy with the wax pencil going through my copy. I knew that whatever changes he made were warranted. He told me I was the best writer he knew. That meant a lot.

He really liked my stories from New Orleans, when I covered the Muhammad Ali-Leon Spinks fight for the Chronicle. Max was managing editor by then and I was sports editor.

He was as much a friend as a boss (he was assistant sports editor when I began there). And he also was a professor, who valued what he saw from his pupils. I was the main pupil for a few years.

I eventually became sports editor after Max had a heart attack or some such, and it was decided he needed to keep more regular hours and stay off the road.

It’s funny now, seeing as how things change, that when I went to the hospital to visit Max after that heart problem, we both sat there smoking and laughing.  As far as I know that behavior is not acceptable in today’s society.

When Max became managing editor, he named me  his associate editor, and that pretty much had me tending to the paper while it was being put together.

There’s a lot more I could say about Max and the lessons I learned. The laughs we shared. The trifecta bets we made weekly during the season at the track in Evansville, Indiana. Ellis Park? I think. Max would go and place the bet as Gene Washer and I chipped in $2 apiece. I don’t think we ever won.

It was like the football cards we played weekly in those days when gambling was illegal. The horizontal pink pieces of paper were available at Poor Man’s Country Club or other purveyors of beer and bait. We’d all go in for $2 apiece. And we’d generally lose.

Max and I went on to work together at the Nashville Banner (he went there a few years ahead of me), where he was wire editor and did some outdoors writing.

When the Banner closed, Max didn't get a job at The Tennessean, which bought us out. I don't know why they didn't hire him. His age or their ignorance? Or maybe he wanted a change. So he took his fishing pole and knowledge and was writer-producer of the outdoors module of country.com, a web site operated by Turner Broadcasting and CBS.

 When that job played out, he pretty much went home to Pleasant View, where he could more easily take care of his bride as her health diminished, while he set up shop as a freelance writer, covering outdoors topics, fishing in particular. His “research” for that was tough: He had to take his boat out and fish for crappie or whatever. And shoot pictures of dawn at Lake Barkley. He didn’t hunt, though. One Christmas his family gave him a deer rifle. I don’t think he ever used it. “I couldn’t go out there and kill Bambi,” he said.

He edited a national bass fisherman's magazine, The Lunker Hole, for awhile. And he was  head of the Tennessee Outdoor Writers Association and other organizations involving hunting and fishing. He also was active in his church and on the local planning commission. 

Max quit smoking long ago, so his cancer came as a shock to me. To him, too. But he was stoic. He sat in his chair, next to the chair where Merrily sat, and watched cowboy movies during the many months leading up to his death.

The last time we talked, before he began his long descent into sleep and death, we were hankering for the days of real film, typewriters, the pneumatic tube that carried stories and art (photos is what they call them now) to be typeset, the art of counting spaces and writing the perfect headline. Carrying pages to the camera room to be shot before they were turned into plates. Standing by the presses with the foreman, checking the pages, making sure they were just right, before we let them go. Neither the pressmen nor the newspapermen wanted smeared pages. Nowadays, there is no such stopgap of running a few hundred, allowing for the good ones to finally begin spitting off the press.  Of course, there aren’t many newspapers anyway.

We talked of our many friends in the business who are gone. And we wondered how many of the coaches we worked with still were alive.

“I’d do anything to go back to those days when we worked together back in the ‘70s,” I told him. I meant it.

“Me too,” he said. “You know, we sound like a couple of old movie gunfighters who are being pushed out by progress.”

I thought of Butch and Sundance, The Wild Bunch, even The Shootist.  The stories really weren’t about the fact they died. But how they lived. And didn’t back down. Time just ran out on them.

Then he said: “You know, Tim, you always were a free-spirit.  You had fun while we worked together.”

Yeah, I did rebel a lot during my life, but only against authority figures I didn’t respect.  Still do, really. My soul hasn’t changed.

I never swore at Max nor showed him disrespect.  Other bosses, the ones who specialized in back-stabbing and lying and age discrimination, well, they didn’t earn that degree of respect.

I always respected … nah, I always will respect Max Moss, a classy gentleman, kind soul, fair fisherman, my mentor, a great boss and fine family man.

The story isn’t that he’s dead, of course. But that such a man lived and will forever inhabit a spot in my life.

Max, Rest In Peace.    

I love you, old friend.  And I’m sure they have pica poles in heaven.  You might see if Glover is there to help you paste up the pages. Hell, Max, now you can even fire up a Winston and see if Glover has the whiskey bottle he always kept in his desk. Sounds reasonable to me.

Max Moss was the best newspaperman I ever met. 

Stop the presses.