Rest, Updike, Rest

Best college professor I ever had was a man named Dick Blood. He joined Seton Hall University's journalism department after retiring as City Editor of the NY Daily News. New England born-&-bred with a Cape Cod accent infused with the 'New Yawk-ese' of midtown taverns, Blood attacked teaching the same way he'd pummeled one of the hardest beats in the world, the mean streets of NYC in the 1970s & 80s. I'll never forget being awoken at 4 am by a phone call telling me to cover a teacher's strike in Paterson and have a story prepared for class at 11:00 am. He had a shock of white hair that seemed out of place atop his taut, tanned body. He told anecdotes about drinking with Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin. He was sleeping with his psychiatrist. In Aussie parlance, he was a 'legend'.

Thought of Blood this morning with the news of John Updike's death from lung cancer at the age of 76. I was a latecomer to novels outside the Tolkien/Asimov/Bradbury realm and so at the age of 20 was unfamiliar with Updike's groundbreaking chronicles of a character named Rabbit Angstrom. The morning after Updike did a reading at Seton Hall, Blood bounded into the classroom like a 5-year-old fresh from Santa's lap. He asked us who'd been in attendance. No hands went up. Blood was apoplectic. He went around the room and demanded that each of us tell the class what we'd opted to do instead of hearing Updike speak. When I said I'd worked from 4 to 8 at my part-time office job, he shook his head and spit out one devastating word: "Pathetic."

Updike was a giant. I've since read all of his Rabbit books and New Yorker columns and come to appreciate Blood's disgust at a roomful of journalism students who'd passed up a chance to breathe the same air as a true master of words.

This reminiscing made me curious as to what became of Blood after he left Seton Hall for the Columbia School of Journalism the year I graduated. Found the following Blood anecdote in an article on journalistic plagiarism written by one of his former students:

The week has taught me nothing if not how maddening and thorny the issue of plagiarism is for journalists and educators. It's reminded me of a line I came across years ago from Blaise Pascal: "Man is so necessarily foolish that not to be a fool is merely another freak of folly."

The week also completed a cycle for me that began just over 10 years ago, when I walked into my first day of an Intro to News Writing class at NYU’s graduate school of journalism. On that day, my professor, Dick Blood, had slammed a fist down on the table and bellowed, "There are no standards anymore."

Mr. Blood, a city editor at the Daily News for 18 years, had just resigned from Columbia Univ. because of a plagiarism scandal. The story was that he had caught a well-connected student, and when the administration hemmed and hawed about expulsion, Mr. Blood let it be known that either the student would go or he would go.

So Columbia expelled the student, and then someone got him a job at the New York Post. Mr. Blood contacted the editors there and made sure this ex-student was now an ex-employee as well. Then the kid went to the West Coast, where he was handed a job at Wired Magazine. Blood soon tracked him down and got him fired from there, too. And that’s when Blood quit Columbia and came to teach us.

At first, I thought Blood was just a blowhard. But by May of that school year, the Stephen Glass scandal was in the news, and by August, Mike Barnicle was forced to resign from the Boston Globe. Almost immediately, there was talk of book deals and pay raises for both of them. By the time of the Jayson Blair debacle, I stood firmly in Blood's camp.

I caught my first plagiarist—-the first of seven that I caught over three years—-while I was teaching a freshman Media and Society class at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He was a 20-year-old basketball recruit on a full scholarship, who was barely literate.

I even called Blood and asked him what to do.

"I know you'll show him mercy, because you've got a heart like a marshmallow," Blood said. "But you won't be doing him a favor, and you won't do the school a favor, either."

Classic Blood. Like Updike, they broke the mold into a thousand pieces after he came into this world.