My life as a New Yorker caption writer

First off, Merry Christmas to you all.

Over the weekend I watched an interesting documentary on Netflix about the New Yorker magazine turning 100. First off, it was well done and impressive in this day and age that an actual magazine has survived this long.

It got to me to thinking about when more than 15 years ago, as a newspaper editor in Hawaii, a local friend and author said I should enter the magazine’s weekly caption contest. I wasn’t very interested at first but she talked me into it.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure if they still offer the contest. (Fact check No. 2) But I went onto their website at that time and there, you find a cartoon but with no caption. The one that week was that of a centaur, which is a half man, half horse (Fact check No. 3). In the cartoon, he’s lying down on a couch next to a psychiatrist. I didn’t overthink it and wrote, “So, you say you’re only half the man you used to be?” I filled out the basic contact information required and hit send.

I gave it little thought after that but it was a week or two later (Fact check No. 4) that I was contacted by email or phone, I can’t recall (Fact check No. 5). The woman said she was the caption contest editor of the New Yorker and let me know that of the thousands (Fact check No. 6) of submissions, she chose mine as one of the top three.

The contest was not only open for people to submit captions but to vote on them. The cartoon and the placing of the caption, first, second and third, would appear in an actual copy of the magazine, which I have somewhere. Well, long story short, I took second. I called it East Coast bias because the winning caption, which has escaped me, made no sense. I kind of felt like Jerry and Elaine on “Seinfeld” as they tried to figure out what a caption meant while sitting in the diner. But hey, for about 30 seconds of thought, I’ll take it and it is still a source of pride for me.

As to the annoying “fact checks” I’ve included, in the documentary they showed an entire department dedicated to fact checking all aspects of every article that goes in the magazine. The first fact to be checked in this column would have been my headline. Maybe “day” would have been a better choice of words than “life.” But this is my column, my choice.

On the topic of words, I want to follow up a bit on an article in today’s edition regarding the four students at Martha P. King Elementary who read one million words during the first semester of school. The four consist of three fourth-graders and one fifth-grader.

I was so impressed with them. First off, I’m the first to admit that I have never been much of a reader. Maybe it’s because I write all day or maybe because my attention span isn’t what is necessary to keep my attention. Or, because reading makes me sleepy.

As to why I was impressed, it was because of their enthusiasm about reading books. Traditional books. They talked about how when reading sometimes they feel as though they are a character or a director of a movie. The lone girl, Emma, talked about how much she loves a bookstore in Portland, Ore. In fourth grade, I was lucky if I could spell Portland, let alone know where it was on a map. In fact, I doubt I had even stepped foot into a bookstore until early adulthood.

While I am not a reader myself, I can appreciate those who are. My ex-wife was an avid reader, something I envied. I was happy to go to the local bookstore with her on the island and just walk around, looking as though I knew what I was doing.

Back to the kids at King. Ones like them give hope in this ever-increasing digital world that bookstores and libraries have a future. It’s said that every journalist has a novel in them. For me, maybe not so much a novel but a short story. Either way, I sure hope kids in the future, like those at King, will still be able to walk into a library or bookstore and pull my book off the shelf, dust it off, and enjoy it.