New Salon column, a quickie about John Updike, who died Tuesday morning, and his famous baseball piece “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.”
Quickie? Forty minutes from word of Updike’s death reaching Salon to this piece hitting the Web. Five-hundred words. Nothing great or anything, but it’s 500 words. You can count ’em. That old newspaper training comes in handy sometimes.
When Salon was new it used to shock the kids on the editorial staff, who’d come straight from college and hadn’t worked for newspapers or wire services, that someone could turn a story around in a half hour or so. That was when I started feeling like one of the old dudes. I was 33.