Sep
3
Weekly World News wake revels in weird
Filed Under single stories |
Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Monday, Sept. 3, 2007.
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
LAKE WORTH - A boy with bat ears, a fortune-telling countess and an alien gathered Sunday for a final farewell to the Weekly World News, perhaps the wildest supermarket tabloid ever sold.
Bigfoot didn’t show, but Elvis sang a Frank Sinatra cover. And a rowdy group of writers including British ex-pats and New York tabloid veterans reminisced about their most fantastic lies at Brogues Irish Pub.
The Weekly World News printed its last edition on Aug. 27. A victim of changing times and declining sales, it will continue only on the Internet.
The tabloid based in Palm Beach County was founded in 1979, two years after more conservative publications reported that Elvis had died in Memphis.
The National Enquirer was going to color and needed something profitable do with its black-and-white presses. Originally, most of the stories were real — rewritten from news of the weird in papers around the world.
But Eddie Clontz, a high school dropout and veteran Florida newsman who worked as an editor there, understood that a story could be much more interesting if it didn’t have to be true. When papers in Scotland reported sightings of the Loch Ness monster, the Weekly World News reported its capture.
Many of the writers had been serious journalists with experience at large daily newspapers. By the 1990s, said former Managing Editor Sal Ivone, the tabloid had a staff of about 15 people who made between $40,000 and $100,000 a year to write the “news.”
They had a winning formula: start with a hyperventilating headline called a “screamer,” add an exclamation mark — the “banger” — and then lie with such authority and detail that the craziest story seemed plausible.
Jim McCandlish, a journalist from Scotland who served as master of ceremonies at Sunday’s wake, said the tabloid found many of its photo subjects in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
When the tabloid needed to quote a perplexed expert or baffled scientist, they would grab anyone with a beard and glasses who wanted to make a few bucks, McCandlish said.
For a report on a woman who got married to seven brothers, the photographer rounded up “seven blokes in a gay bar,” he said.
The woman who agreed to pose as the bride wore her wedding dress in the picture.
It seemed like a lark, he said, until everyone in town recognized her from the photo. Her husband, he said, had a prominent position at Tulane University. She was terrified that her marriage was over.
He never found out, McCandlish said.
But many people did read the tabloid. Sales peaked at 1.2 million one week in 1988 with the headline that Elvis was alive and living in Kalamazoo, Mich.
Diane Phillips, who wrote for the Weekly World News in the early days when many stories were true, said she once found an obscure item in an Australian medical journal that, theoretically, men could become pregnant. The idea was to somehow implant the placenta inside a man. On deadline, she said, she tracked down the doctor who wrote the article at a cocktail party. He was surprised, she said, to get a phone call from a reporter on the other side of the world, and confirmed her story.
Jo-Ann Scott of West Palm Beach made predictions as Countess Sophia Sabak, often posing with a crystal ball handed down from her fortune-telling mother in England. A few stories, particularly one about stem cell research, sort of came true, she said. Others, such as a prediction for 1991 that an ingredient in white bread would cure all forms of cancer, proved to be less prescient.
Of all the story lines in the Weekly World News, perhaps none was so genius as the boy born with bat ears.
Former graphics artist Dick Kulpa, who now does party caricatures as Captain Cartoon, was drawing another alien baby when Ivone stopped by his desk. Alien babies were by then a cliché, so they came up with something better: Bat Boy. He was discovered in a West Virginia cave, writers said. Years later, he used his knowledge of caves to help hunt for Osama bin Laden.
At Sunday’s wake, Kulpa’s 8-year-old grandson Fortunato Riggleman dressed as Bat Boy. He bared his teeth and shook hands with Elvis impersonator Scott Ringersen.
When asked where he got his pointy ears, his mother, Candi, admitted it was Party City. But maybe, she said, she should say he was born with them.
He seemed to be enjoying life as Bat Boy, she said, but will have to go back to school at Crystal Lakes Elementary in Boynton Beach on Tuesday with a shaved head.
The Weekly World News had strong sales in college towns, where ironic hipsters could laugh at the headlines. But the tabloid also appealed to “people hiding in their trailers, waiting for the end of the world,” McCandlish said.
Ivone said that he thought of his core reader as a woman living in Valdosta, Ga.
Maybe she had been through a tough divorce, he said, and was raising two kids alone. She might be reading the Weekly World News while waiting for her clothes to dry in a laundromat, he said.
She wasn’t stupid, he said. And she wasn’t poor. But she might have a hard job and a tedious life.
Don’t insult her, he told his writers. “Just take her for a ride.”
Copyright 2007 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
September 3, 2007 Monday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. 1B
LENGTH: 850 words