From an Upland Office in Lakeville, Robert Yoakum Sends
Semiweekly Pieces to 80 Newspapers Around the World
by Anthony G. Rudd
Berkshires Week, July 16-22, 1981
Lakeville, Conn. — Of the four topical humorists whose columns run regularly in newspapers across the United States — Russell Baker, Art Buchwald, Art Hoppe and Robert Yoakum — only one lives in the sticks and syndicates himself.
That’s Bob Yoakum, whose twice-weekly column, titled “Another Look,” appears in The Berkshire Eagle, The Sunday Times (London), Katherimini (Athens), Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo) and 76 other periodicals including the Boston Globe and the Alabama Journal (Montgomery).
Yoakum lives outside the Northwestern Connecticut village of Lakeville in a house commanding a view of Lake Wonoscopomuc (more pronounceably known as “Lakeville Lake”). He works a mile down Reservoir Road in a converted residence equipped with one youthful assistant, one old copying machine, two electric typewriters, 58 filing drawers and uncountable stacks of newspapers and magazines.
The arrangement is nearly ideal for a writer-entrepreneur who likes country living. Though the closest city, Hartford, is 50 miles away, Yoakum Features has mastered the mechanics of sending out 600 words of timely copy twice a week to its 80 client newspapers. Neither the writing of the column nor its distribution seems to demand large-city surroundings.
That another journalist could do the same thing at this time is doubtful, though. Would-be self-syndicators who ask Yoakum’s guidance are sympathetically touted off the idea.
Work with an established syndicate, he recommends. For starters, he points to the annual syndicate directory put out by Editor & Publisher. But don’t try to found your own syndicating business, as he did nine years ago. Today the cost and the hassle are out of hand.
Yoakum blames United Press International, mostly, for the mounting difficulties of mini-syndicates. Despite blather about free enterprise, he says, UPI imposes rules and transmission requirements that virtually bar fledgling syndicates from the newspapers UPI serves.
Today UPI tells small operations like Yoakum Features that its newspapers will not accept material that is not already on computer. But the multi-thousand-dollar cost of installing his own electronic system gives Yoakum pause. For an infant business, the outlay could be mortal.
Probably, syndicating will be easier in the future, Yoakum speculates, as computer services spread their lines throughout the country. Within five years it may be a simple matter to transmit directly to client newspapers, perhaps with the network being developed by Bell Telephone.
Meanwhile, getting out the column represents a semiweekly challenge. Without Bonnie Hunter, his bright, no-nonsense assistant — and vice president, managing editor, controller, promotion director, production manager and office foreperson — Yoakum says the job would be hopeless.
It is one of Vice President Hunter’s duties to type Yoakum’s 600 words in the three different scannable type fonts owned by most of the nation’s newspapers using scanners in the printing process. The job is exacting because the three modes call for different spacing, different margins and different quotation marks. Each typing correction must be precisely placed. A flyspeck or a line askew will inspire the machine at the newspaper end to reject the copy.
Managing Editor Hunter feeds the three typed versions into an IBM copier which makes enough copies for the 80 customers. Copies are mailed from the Lakeville Post Office five days in advance of their scheduled publication date. Fifteen go to the Editors Press Service in New York for transmission overseas.
There are occasional glitches. Yoakum, an admitted procrastinator, sometimes finishes his column so close to deadline that Production Manager Hunter completes the typing, copying, stuffing of envelopes and mailing with only minutes to spare. Once or twice insufficient postage has been applied (and unsung allies in the post office made it right). The power supply has been cut by storms, immobilizing the electric typewriters and copier.
But Yoakum Features meets its deadlines. And 59-year-old Bob Yoakum remains fit and productive. Staying well enough to write is important, Yoakum confides, because he has no backup columns for use in case of flu, writer’s block or other catastrophe. If such a crises should occur, some timeless old columns would be posted into the breach.
Why Yoakum does not squirrel away half a dozen columns for emergency use, as he collects everything else in print that crosses his desk, is partly explainable by his need to be in step with the week’s news, partly explainable by simple procrastination. Yoakum’s Law, enshrined in Paul Dickson’s anthology, “The Official Explanations,” goes, “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can get done some time next week.”
Certainly he does not ache for column ideas. His writing desk and its add-ons form a bullpen surmounted by newspapers soaring to dizzying heights. Each paper is there to be clipped for information that may find its way into his work. A five-foot row of manila folders, nearly buried by other reading matter, contains starting ideas for columns. Across the 20-foot room, six four-door filing cabinets bulge with indexed and cross-indexed clippings.
While many clips are filed by topic in the usual way, others are grouped below titles devised by Yoakum and reflecting his special slant. Some are amusing as they stand, such as the compilation of scoundrels and monsters who have scored successes in life: “How _____s Rise to the Top.”
Along with the humorous are the “not-so-humorous,” as perhaps befits the thinking of the son of a Congregationalist minister who was “always teetering on the edge of agnosticism.”
Under the rubric, “God’s role,” is the account of a pious New York spinster who attended mass every day of her life but was crushed to death when her tenement roof collapsed. In the same file is the story of a planeload of Mecca-bound pilgrims, all killed when their jetliner crashed.
“Here were good people who followed all the rules and regulations and got wiped out,” Yoakum muses, folder in hand. “What sort of a Deity is this? Once you start noticing this stuff, you see a frightening pattern.”
In the same dark vein is Yoakum’s “Suicide” file, a thick wad of clippings attesting to man’s propensity for acting against his best interests.
“Most people and institutions are doing just opposite to what they should be doing,” Yoakum says with a gesture toward the file. “That isn’t theory. It’s all documented, right there.”
Then there is the “L-R, R-L” collection of clips demonstrating likenesses between leftwing and rightwing political groups that claim to be poles apart. As example, Yoakum points to the tendency of left and right extremists to exterminate those who disagree with them.
Plainly, material of this somber hue does not go straight into Yoakum’s humor column. He finds uses for it, though. He contributes to the Nieman Reports and the Columbia Journalism Review. Two recent articles explored obscenity and the First Amendment. An extended essay reviewed “The House of the Prophet,” the Louis Auchincloss novel based on the life of columnist Walter Lippmann.
In collaboration with a longtime friend, William H. Attwood, former editor-in-chief of all Cowles Publications and foreign editor of Look, Yoakum is putting together a book that will contain a lot of his columns plus treatises on subjects that either cannot be handled in 600 words or would make newspaper editors “uneasy.”
Some of his biweekly pieces come close to inducing that effect. Yoakum writes on both sex and religion, subjects generally skirted by topical-humor columnists. Their fear, of course, is that these matters will excite strong, serious feelings in newspaper readers, and then where will be the chuckle?
More often than not, Yoakum’s column evokes a chuckle despite the ingrained hazard of the topic. Racism treatment of the poor, handgun control, the idiocies of extremism, the “loonies” of electronic religion — all these Yoakum themes are heavy, but their treatment is light.
Far from maintaining that sensitive subjects should not be handled with humor, Yoakum believes they often are handled best with humor. He visualizes many of his readers as armored in convictions fashioned and forged to repel direct assault. But good satire can slip inside the helmet and “explode” in the reader’s mind.
The American master of satirical humor, in Yoakum’s canon, was Mark Twain. “We need him more than anyone today. All of us together don’t add up to that talent.” Yoakum cites Twain’s satanic “Letters From the Earth” as a little-celebrated masterpiece. He gives away paperback copies to help spread the word.
Other funny writers whose work Yoakum admires are the late S. J. Perleman, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Wolcott Gibbs — for that matter, a whole stable of erstwhile New Yorker writers.
Sometimes when you’re writing topical humor, Yoakum says, penetration into the reader’s mind takes place but then there’s no explosion. It is the function of the column’s last section, often the closing paragraph, to supply the detonation while summing up what has gone before. To the degree that the ending achieves this double aim, the column effects new angles of vision in its readers.
Because the closer is critical, Yoakum can take two or three hours to come up with one that seems apt. He shows it to Managing Editor Hunter who — usually busy on another task — may simply shake her head. Yoakum tries another version. If Hunter shakes her head, he tries again. And again. And again, until they agree it is right.
Yoakum has abiding faith in his assistant’s editorial judgement. “Bonnie and Alice are my editors and proofreaders,” he says. “This is not like a newspaper, with copy editors. There has to be someone between the writer and cold print.”
If endings are the most “agonizing” part of column writing, leads come a close second. The trouble, Yoakum says, is that you need to lay out your facts while making it clear they are not to be treated all that solemnly.
As everyone knows who has tried his hand at satire, the ever-present danger is that you will be taken seriously.
“I can write that a UFO landed in my back yard filled with little green men speaking Chinese, and someone is sure to challenge me on the facts,” Yoakum observes. “This is something you have to keep in mind while you’re writing the column.”
One kind of signal he gives the reader is the ludicrous Dickensian name identifying a column character: Boothby Frimble, Congressman Treacle, Prudence Vipps, Prof. Upgraph. Yoakum inserts one of these tipoffs into an early paragraph as often as he can.
Another trick Yoakum has borrowed from Perelman: a short, authentic news item set at the head of the essay and furnishing the springboard for the writer’s subsequent flips. Yoakum is fond of the device and wonders why his friend and former International Herald Tribune co-columnist, Art Buchwald, does not use it too. Buchwald, he claims, sometimes wastes half a column just establishing the facts.
Yoakum takes between one and four hours to write his column, an amount of time he considers “appallingly small.” In addition, he spends at least an equal length of time, up to twice as much, in research. At absolute maximum, then, his twice-weekly stint takes 24 hours, which hardly adds up to a full work week.
But Yoakum says he puts in 60 hours, occasionally laboring into the night. “A lot of that is wasting time,” he explains. “Otherwise, I couldn’t do it.”
Yoakum pays scant attention to promoting his own syndicate, a duty he cordially despises. A business letter placed on his desk quickly becomes hidden by papers and magazines stacked higher by the day. The letter goes unanswered until one of the unstable piles falls over and brings it to light. Depending on the height of the stack, Yoakum’s answer may go out weeks, months — even years— behind time.
Aside from the discomfort of promoting his own works, Yoakum’s chief complaint is absolutism, the moralistic, black-is-black and white-is-white mindset that he holds responsible for much of the world’s grief. He deeply admires the tentative humanistic outlook outlined by novelist E. M. Forster in “Two Cheers for Democracy.” He is proud to be founder and first president of the Anti-Absolutist League — “We’re against absolutists though not, of course, absolutely” — even though it is making slight headway. “I’m sorry to report there are more absolutists every day.”
Even in non-global terms, Yoakum’s world seems no more firmly balanced than one of the newspaper stacks on his desk. His client papers are crying for computerized copy. Soon he may be obliged to make the big, costly switch over to video data transmission.
Even more upsetting, the irreplaceable Bonnie Hunter was married recently and is spending fewer hours on the job. That adds to Yoakum’s load. He is not sure how he will manage.
But he still gets candid, helpful advice from wife Alice, a partner in the Lakeville law firm of Reid & Reige, and 17-year-old son Robert, a sophomore at Cambridge School in Weston, Mass. Two daughters, Elizabeth, 24, living in New York, and Ellen, 22, a senior at MacAlester College, St. Paul, Minn., are only phone calls away.
For refreshment of spirit there remains the lovely Litchfield countryside out the windows of both his house and his office building — placid, green now and undefiled. For amusement, piling up in stacks in front of this droll moralist with the perceptive eye, there is always and endlessly the day’s news.
