Longtime copy editor Charles Stough of Dayton, Ohio, has passed away, according to messages on his Facebook page.
Charley last posted himself on Facebook Oct. 21, saying:
I know this place with the most beautiful barmaids in the world. Chemo starts.
Two days later, he entertained his friends by posting:
Wouldn’t call it easy but it’s better’n pickle pizza.
Earlier today — exactly one month later — his son, Geo, wrote:
He’s going to teach the med students how to deal with a Stough on the table. That’s my dad! The universe did not get smaller… Heaven built a copy desk and composing room next to the coat rack and trench coat. Celebrate… and hope they have good cigars… for their sake.
From 1964 to 1966, Charley worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Panama. Years later, he found and posted cartoons he had drawn during his time there.
Charley explained that this one…
…was after [Vice-President] Hubert Humphrey‘s sister breezed through my site in a line of limos, hours late. Villagers called hubbies home from work, cleaned furiously, lined up kids, and she ignored everybody. The light was fading and the film wouldn’t come out.
Charley spent 28 years at the Dayton Daily News as a reporter, editor and columnist. According to a brief bio posted earlier this year at a Greater Downtown Dayton project…
He retired from DDN in 2001 and sought greener pastures with Hearst Newspapers in San Antonio, Texas, but discovered where his heart truly belonged. “I finally decided Dayton is a more sensible place to live,” he says.
Charley was best known, perhaps, as the creator of the weekly journalism-humor newsletter for BONG — the Burned-Out Newspapercreatures Guild. These newsletters came via email and were loved by Charley’s fans. We looked especially forward to The Further Adventures of Herman “Speed” Graphic, Ace Photographer for the Chagrin Falls Commercial Scimitar, and his Faithful Companion, Typo the Wonder Pig — essentially, a comic strip told in all-text, scriptlike form.
I’m not sure when Charley started BONG but it must have been pretty early. I found this 1994 reference tonight to subscribing to BONG via Usenet.
You’ll be glad to know that about 200 these newsletters — the latter years, naturally, when BONG began publishing not-quite-so-weekly — are carefully preserved at Topica. Go here and click “read this list.” One particularly great example is this one from October 1999.
Charley once wrote of his memories of a particularly interesting character…
…the irascible Leon Forscheimer, slot man and stamp columnist at the old Houston Post in the ’60s. Never read a single column he wrote, except the one that came down from the composing room after he forgot to put the copy in a plastic carrier before stuffing it into the air tube. Had to read it to glue the pieces back together.
It was a time of conspiracy thinking everywhere, not just in Texas and Idaho like it is today. Leon dreaded the Reperf Conspiracy.
“In every sheet of 50 stamps,” he said in hushed tones one night, “32 stamps are perforated on only three sides, and four on only two. But when you see individual stamps for sale at the shows, they all have perforations on all four sides. Why is that?
“Someone,” he declared, “is reperfing them!”
Where the stamp columnists went, no one can be sure. But BONG says that when you find a reperfer, look around.”
Charley seems most often described as a “curmudgeon,” or perhaps someone who kept alive the old ways of green eyeshades and gluepots. I’m not so sure that’s accurate. Here’s a piece from 1995 in which he gleefully describes how users of the still-relatively-new internet brought down a very sloppy piece by Time magazine:
Here’s the fun part. Time‘s shoddy reporting set off a blizzard of rebuttal on the Internet itself, exposing Time‘s “scholar,” his record of doubtful scholarship, salacious publishing of his own, and the grievous research flaws in this study. You can still see it and even join the discussion in the Usenet group alt.culture.usenet.
Time had to back down.
Once a world-class publishing powerhouse able to define truth with its own vision, Time was beaten back by Internet users. None had more than a computer and a modem, and yet with the new power of the press — the press of a button — any of them could place an article before millions of readers more than Time ever reached in its best week of ink-on-paper printing.
Is something new and wonderful going on in mass communications now? No. What Time magazine’s editors didn’t know is that it already had happened.
The past few years, Charley called himself an “independent arts and crafts professional.” He painted — watercolor and acrylic — and made birdhouses. A couple of examples from his San Antonio years:
His web site — which was working just a few weeks ago — seems to be gone now.
Charley also wrote two novels:
Charley served as president of the Dayton International Festival in 1986. He was a member of Dayton’s Christ Episcopal Church.
Charley shows support for health care
reform on Oct. 9. From Flickr.
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Something else I learned about Charley tonight: He was on Twitter. At least for a while.
Tom Mangan of Trailspace.com in North Carolina writes today via Facebook:
A newsman I never met but always felt I knew has passed, Charles Stough … Way back in early 90s he started something called the Burned Out Newspaper Creatures Guild (BONG) and a bunch of us bought plastic green eyeshades with B.O.N.G. emblazoned across the brim. Apparently cancer has claimed him. Good man, will be missed.
Tom’s famous old Banned for Life list of media clichés was built, in part, with help from Charlie’s BONG readers.
And Philip Blanchard of Testy Copy Editors writes on his site tonight:
We note with sadness the passing of Charles Stough, whose Burned Out Newspapercreatures Guild (BONG) was in many ways a precursor to Testy Copy Editors. We never met him, but were in touch from time to time on matters curmudgeonly. He will be missed.
I’ll let you know when we see an obituary.
As David Cantor points out in the comments, an obituary was finally posted Sunday. Find it here.
Charley’s newsletter was originally distributed over the wire by the New York Times News Service. It arrived Fridays under the wire slug BONG-BULL. I remember seeing it in the early ’90s. Always good for a smile. RIP.
Early on, BONG was distributed by the New York Times News Service. I’m not sure when that started, but I remember reading it on the wire at the Albany Times Union, which I left in 1989.
Rest in peace, Grandpa.. It was tough living so far away from you all these years, but I looked forward to your comics, or candies.. or even wistles in the mail. You always knew how to make my day better.. I remember a Christmas present one year, Jelly Beans. That made my day amazing.. Can you say sugar rush? Just the thought of not seeing you for a while makes me sad.. But for you, I won’t be sad. You always taught us how to smile, and be happy. And I know you wouldn’t like it for us to all be crying over you.. I’ll do my best. I love you. See you later. -Ali G.
It was my privilege to work with Charlie back in the 80s at Dayton Daily – his wit and wisdom got me through many a dark day on the copy desk. My favorite was when a new reporter called in – he’d finished his story but couldn’t find his way back to the paper. Charlie took a deep breath and said – “Son, that’s why they gave you that beeper! – and then hung up the phone.
We’ll all miss you, my friend. The last of the red hot newspaper men.
Charley changed the lives of many ink-stained wretches in their formative years, and he enlivened the lives of his contemporaries with his BONG Bulletin periodicals, wise-cracking newsroom banter and whimsical drawings, cartoons and serious artwork. I was privileged to sit within arms-length of him for some years at the San Antonio Express-News. I cherish the memories of the holiday open houses he threw with Alicia, the dogs with personalities, and the typewriter key tie tack he gave me. We’re also lucky enough to have six pieces of artwork. We’ll always look at them differently, now. My smile will grow even wider. Vaya con dios, Sto.
This morbidly obese, cigar chomping boozer has died? Impossible! Anyone who could survive decades of dining at the Embassy is surely immortal. Charley will live forever in that Golden Age of Journalism when newspapers ruled and copy editors kept us honest. May God be waiting with green eyeshades, an endless supply of Cuban cigars and a generous plate of Embassy burritos to be enjoyed over a greasy table while stuck to a stained naugahyde seat. – 30 – Charlie -30-
I was copy desk chief at the Dayton Daily News, where, as copy editor, Charley delighted in the role of official thorn in my side. Later, when he returned to Dayton and we were both retired, I came to know a man of great compassion and ability. We worked together on the Ohio Benefit Bank, helping low-income folks with taxes, food stamps, home heating help and other assistance. It was amazing to see you he lifted so many from despair to hope thorough his work with Christ Episcopal Church’s City Heart Program, the local branch of the Benefit Bank.
May he find time to help those of us still doing that work to follow his example.
He was my inspiration to always remain true to form, a latter day HL Mencken. I remember talking to Tony Snow about the newspaper business when somehow Charley’s name came up — this would have been in 1989, before Tony had gone on to become WH press secretary. Never again did I trivialize the pleasures of the police beat at a small town paper. Godspeed, El Sto
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dayton/obituary.aspx?n=charles-senour-stough-charley&pid=154759455
Charley’s BONG releases kept sanity in the profession. He had all the stuff a good copy editor used to have. His departure is relief to all the wrong people.
Wow, although I left the Dayton Daily for what I always hoped would be greener pastures in the 1980s, Charley was one of those who toiled on. He had that old-school curmudgeonly attitude — but it didn’t take much to chip away that shell to find a true gem of a newspaperman. Looking back, there are times when I realize that those days as a rookie reporter and copy editor were some of the best times of my life. RIP Charley, and enjoy those stogies for eons to come…
The first time I met Charley, at a National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ conference in the early 90′s, he sold me some of his typewriter jewelry. He took the letters off a keyboard and made jewelry out of them. Gosh, he even let you pick the letters that you wanted. It was a tribute to the old Herb Caen-styled newspaper days. He was one of a kind, very supportive, very funny, very loving.
Dad was proud to be among those that held on through what he considered the fall of the ‘golden age’. He watched as, (at least in what I was around to participate in), the newspapers of old quietly began the long nap of complacency.
He refused to accept the fall of the written word and the catering to advertisers. He guided his reporting, writing, and even his artwork with 6 questions that he faithfully followed… ‘who, what, where, when, why’… and most importantly, ‘so what?’
Dad watched over the industry with an eagle’s eye. Ladies and gentlemen out there in news land… I am proud to say that, like my father, you are still being watched.
Think, speak, report… tell the stories that need to be told with integrity and a barrage of insight that cannot be argued or denied. When you smell the cigar over your shoulder, you’ll know you’re doing well.
Thanks to all for your well wishes. Now get back to work. I promised him a Pulitzer, join me.
I am so sorry to hear of Charlie’s passing. While I never got to meet him, BONG helped me stay reasonably insane while laboring as a proverbial ink stained wretch. To find him again years later on Facebook was such a pleasant surprise. For all of our correspondence, I never did get a direct answer to my question, which came first, the acronym or the name. Well, some things are better cloaked in a deathbed gift from an ancient mystic wire service executive editor on a fog-shrouded eastern island. Godspeed Charlie, and may you never, ever, ever be named to a committee.