The Grammar Patrol Is on Duty--Hurrah! Dan Ruth, Rosemary Goudreau Leave Tribune

Dan Ruth Vacates the Tribune; so Does Rosemary Goudreau

Ms. Goudreau:

I regret your being one of the Tribune people downsized.

I am grateful for the very long meeting you held with teachers about their side of the story on school issues on which the administration and board shafted them. It meant the world to the both those present and those absent teachers that you and Vicky would take three hours of your time to give them a full hearing.

I don’t know what you plan to do in terms of work. I advise people against going into the print press. It’s a dying industry. I said so years ago when the Web first appeared.

The way you summarized the teachers’ input in such a logical, professorial manner impressed me when Vicky put it on the blackboard as you spelled it out.

Why don’t you teach? It’s not a career with much money expected. The administrators get the money because they and the complicit board divvy it up in their favor before the teachers see a cent. Steve Hegarty, a former SPT reporter who didn’t have the experience required in the job description and can’t punctuate got the nod from Elia because she thought his having been a reporter would yield her automatic good press. She is not savvy enough to consider that the press would resent Steve’s defection and his making twice the money they do although his job at the Times was tip top.

But there’s more to life than money. You get the satisfaction in teaching that, when you walk out of the classroom at the end of the day, you feel you have done your part to improve the world. And teachers do get a pension. I have a friend down the beach working now in her dotage because she did not consider this factor when she was young. There is nothing worse than a poor old woman, so women should review their eventual retirement situation.

I hope you will teach in Hillsborough County and have sufficient courage to show teachers they can push back at the board and administration and not be annihilated by these obtuse bullies. I hope you will also lead an effort to get teachers to drop the current union and get one like New York teachers have that does the job for teachers and does not hop in bed with the administration as the current CTA does in Hillsborough County.

Good luck in whatever you do.

Lee Drury De Cesare

Dan,

I read about your leaving the Tribune in La Gaceta. It said some fired employees got marched out the door by Tribune constabulary without getting to clean out their desks. That would be my preferred way to depart the premises. I have always loved hostile dramas of that sort.

I recall your and my sitting in Beach Park at my kitchen table thirty years ago during your first Tribune stint—you were a reporter then. We discussed the social turmoil that the women’s movement in Tampa caused. I had convened a NOW chapter when my family moved from NYC for my husband’s job.

How the years have flown. I lived to see the ERA go down, of course. Typical weapons of expunging women’s Constitutional status came from the thought patterns of the quidnuncs of Hillsborough County’s fens and bogs. These Pleistoscene intellects maintained that ERA’s passage would ensure sexually integrated bathrooms. All of civilization would then be in the toilet, of course. The toilet argument worked.

That’s the kind of sure-fire appeal to idiocy that Bay Area denizens demonstrate. One has to journey to NYC periodically to get a dose of culture because our main resources in these forlorn badlands are the Bucs franchise and tractor pulls.

Yet you managed to make this unpromising customer base laugh—and often out loud.

That is a rare talent. Even Swift and Chaucer didn’t get belly laughs. And Aristophanes did only occasionally.

My youngest daughter, Margie, will be forlorn at your leaving. She often quoted you to me. I bet you have a lot of fans like that.

And stop preening your triple bypass. It wasn’t a quadruple, was it? I am a registered nurse and don’t cotton to malingering. Be grateful for small graces.

You will live a long time is my prediction. So find another job. Go over to the Times. Troxler did and is a star at that location. Tell Tash he is brilliant and handsome. I have called him a chachectic ectomorph, which is why I never get a letter to the editor published.

But your best bet is to solicit Slate for a slot. The future of the print press dwindles apace. Communication, as I told my old man many years ago, belongs to the Internet.

Good luck and thanks for the memories.

Lee Drury De Cesare

From: Anonymous [noreply-comment@blogger.com]

Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2008 5:49 AM

To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Once Upon a Time.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Once Upon a Time":

"I think the the board and the administration should indeed get the publicity they deserve so that an informed public will vote the board slugs out of office and vote in [some people] who care about education instead of power and [who throw state money around without consulting teachers about the issues that affect them.] "

You think the informed public should vote in some people who throw state money around without consulting teachers? Good eye. But Hamilton's mix-up of homophones is worse in the illiteracy scale.

My fault is I wrote a sentence that is too long, so I got one of my prepositional phrases attached to a wrong antecedent. I should have done this: "I think the board and administration should indeed get the publicity they deserve so that an informed public can vote the board slugs out of office. Voters can vote out board members who don't care about education but instead care about power. Voters can also throw out board drones who throw state money around without consulting teachers about issues that affect them.

This knocks the your/you're thing into a cocked hat.

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment.

Moderate comments for this blog.

Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 2:49 AM