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short takes

 In news writing, the lead -- the first one or two paragraphs of a story -- is all-important. I was pretty good at it. I can quote a lot of my own leads, and some of other writers, from memory. Another journalist, to whom writing was not so important, once asked "How can you remember all that?" "Man," I answered, "it's my work. It's my business."

Following are some I liked.

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This one was written on the day of  Garrison Keillor's first retirement. 

     There will be no more news from Lake Wobegon, the town that never was but should have been, leaving a large hole in a lot of hearts.  

    The little town that time forgot, which sprang from Garrison Keillor's imagination to captivate a live radio audience for 13 years, vanished back into that fertile brain with the final edition of "A Prairie Home Companion" Saturday night.

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    GATLINBURG, Tenn. (UPI) -- They walked deep into the Smokies to die, the heiress and her lover, but when he lay under a tree with his blood seeping down the side of Hannah Mountain, she discovered she wanted to live.

   So she walked out, blood on the lavender dress she had put on in the wilderness for the last day of her life, and it took the rangers four days to find his body.

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   GAINESVILLE, Fla. (UPI) -- Monty the 14-foot python, disdaining a mere bite of the hand that fed him, tried to swallow his owner whole.

     As a result, Monty's intended lunch, J. Bennett Boggess, 23, has put his thankless serpent up for sale. The immediate response was less than overwhelming.

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This was written in disgust after a day at Georgia Tech watching college students from all over the country trying to get various contraptions to fly in a particular way. None did.

   Never, in the long history of Grant Field, have so many worked so hard to produce so little for so few.

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   TAMPA -- Busch Gardens' elaborate new Myombe Reserve is the only place outside Africa where gorillas can see people in the mist.

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    The witness stand was the last place Creepy wanted to be, but with the prosecutor bearing down on him, he told the jury about the night Lunatic and Suicide showed up all covered with gore, bragging about killing some guy, and how Suicide licked the man's blood off his fingers.

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   Remember that massive hype job on television in 1986 over uncovering the tunnels under Al Capone's hotel? Geraldo Rivera expected to find corpses, old cars, machineguns, all sorts of artifacts. As I recall, all he found was a couple of empty bottles. I was in Chicago at the time, and Paul Harvey read my overnight lead on his radio program.

     CHICAGO (UPI) -- Somewhere in that great speakeasy in the sky, Big Al must have been laughing hard enough to swallow his cigar.

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At every newspaper, every so often, some high editor who was never able to string six words together intelligently decides that everyone's leads are too long. He usually decides they should be a maximum number of lines, or even of words. These edicts are silly, of course, but they give people like that something to do. Here's the shortest lead I ever wrote, the top of a story about a national champion turkey-caller.

     "Gobble," he said.

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