Fun ‘n’ Games

JOKES have always been a part of NATIONAL REVIEW. It was at one of our Wednesday-evening drinks sessions that the Swiss edition was born. Bill had departed a fortnight earlier for his annual six weeks in Switzerland to write that year’s book, Four Reforms. We missed the precision he demonstrated in editing our copy, and, in discussing his particular editorial likes and dislikes, my sister Carol, who was working for us as an editorial assistant, suggested that it would be fun to produce an entire page of editorial paragraphs, each carefully crafted to contain some element that would make Bill, the editor, curl up inside: a grammatical error, a stylistic aberration, exclamation points, a vulgarism, an overworked cliché, an inept foreign reference, a tinge of kookery, a mention of himself. What a splendid idea.

Elsie Meyer had come to work at NR as copy editor following the death of her husband, Frank, our longtime book editor. Elsie turned out a paragraph, one of the best, that managed to include three exclamation points (!!!) and the felicitous phrase “. . . before Britain, France, and the U.S. saw the oil painting on the wall, as it were.” There were mentions of Justice William O. Douglas’s “motorized old ticker,” of John-John Kennedy’s pondering that his uncle Ted never “seemed to have swim trunks when he needed them.” “Quod licet Joves, non licent boves, as Bill Buckley likes to say,” was the final sentence of a paragraph about Bill (“Let it grow!”) Proxmire. (Proxmire had recently undergone a hair transplant.) A pageful of these bogus paragraphs was chosen by the judges (Bill Rickenbacker, Elsie Meyer, and me) from entries by every member of the editorial staff. The result, a montage of awfulness, was pasted into two copies of the issue of March 15, 1974, by Jimmy O’Bryan, our art director, and dispatched to Switzerland. It arrived there just as I was about to return home after my annual two weeks’ vacation in Gstaad.

PL

About the Author

Priscilla L. Buckley

Featured Tags

Manage following

National Review

William F. Buckley Jr.

Richard Nixon

The New York Times

The Washington Post

JOKES have always been a part of NATIONAL REVIEW. It was at one of our Wednesday-evening drinks sessions that the Swiss edition was born. Bill had departed a fortnight earlier for his annual six weeks in Switzerland to write that year’s book, Four Reforms. We missed the precision he demonstrated in editing our copy, and, in discussing his particular editorial likes and dislikes, my sister Carol, who was working for us as an editorial assistant, suggested that it would be fun to produce an entire page of editorial paragraphs, each carefully crafted to contain some element that would make Bill, the editor, curl up inside: a grammatical error, a stylistic aberration, exclamation points, a vulgarism, an overworked cliché, an inept foreign reference, a tinge of kookery, a mention of himself. What a splendid idea.

Elsie Meyer had come to work at NR as copy editor following the death of her husband, Frank, our longtime book editor. Elsie turned out a paragraph, one of the best, that managed to include three exclamation points (!!!) and the felicitous phrase “. . . before Britain, France, and the U.S. saw the oil painting on the wall, as it were.” There were mentions of Justice William O. Douglas’s “motorized old ticker,” of John-John Kennedy’s pondering that his uncle Ted never “seemed to have swim trunks when he needed them.” “Quod licet Joves, non licent boves, as Bill Buckley likes to say,” was the final sentence of a paragraph about Bill (“Let it grow!”) Proxmire. (Proxmire had recently undergone a hair transplant.) A pageful of these bogus paragraphs was chosen by the judges (Bill Rickenbacker, Elsie Meyer, and me) from entries by every member of the editorial staff. The result, a montage of awfulness, was pasted into two copies of the issue of March 15, 1974, by Jimmy O’Bryan, our art director, and dispatched to Switzerland. It arrived there just as I was about to return home after my annual two weeks’ vacation in Gstaad.