Bob Greene I

Yes, children, there once were widely syndicated general-interest columns.



You don't hear of them much any more. Heck, newspapers of the old sort are themselves an endangered species, and the old-style columnists (humorous like Erma Bombeck, politically analytical like Peter Lisagor, self-appointed tribunes of the working stiff like Jimmy Breslin).

Perhaps it's just that we don't need gatekeepers any more to tell us who is good at spouting opinions, analyzing public issues, or making us laugh.  Good for us.

But back when there were still syndicated columnists, one of them -- one of the most popular of them at his peak in the 1980s -- was Bob Greene.

I haven't given any thought to Bob Greene in years.  But for no good reason, I've come across some material lately about him and about the scandal in which his career ended in 2002.  Let's not discuss the scandal now. You can read about it here if you want.

But that was, as I say, in 2002, and by that time we all knew about the internet. The old gates were crumbling, and Greene's career was well past its peak by any measure.

The final column that he wrote for his home-base paper was published on September 11, 2002. Itr was a reflection on the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks: easily the most obvious subject about which one could have written a column for publication on that day, and Greene's great flaw was that he too often wrote about the most obvious subjects.

Though not an original thinker, Greene did have a distinctive voice. I went through a phase of reading him with some regularity, and I don't regret it. He'd write thus: "Baseball hasn't been the national pasttime for many years now -- no sport is. The national pasttime, like it or not, is watching television."

Or, a tad more philosophical, "If you look closely enough, amid the merciless and the bitter, there is always the chance that you may find comfort and the promise of something good."

In 1984 he wrote a book about his daughter's first year of life, and his reactions to fatherhood, Good Morning Merry Sunshine. Yes, the title wasn't original. The name is spelled either "Mary" or "Merry" in the children's song: "Good morning Merry Sunshine/ How did you wake so soon? You scared the little stars away/ And shined away the moon."

His baby's actual name wasn't Mary, It was Amanda Sue. Still, the book has a nce tone of smaltz, cleverly maintained with variations.  "Slowly, it occurred to me that I might have the opportunity here to tell the most human story I have ever encoutered -- the story of a new life, and how that new life affects the lives of the two people who have helped to create it."

So it is comforting (in this merciless world) to notice that Greene did make something of a comeback as a writer, although never again as a newspaper columnist, years after his 2002 fall from grace.

I'll say something about his comeback tomorrow.