Rusty Unger, a former book editor and Village Voice columnist, denied that the paper’s 100,000-copy press run was printed by Garber Publishing Co. Similarly, New Times Senior Editor Kevin Buckley denied that he and Frankie FitzGerald collaborated on the parody of Reston, and Tony Hendra, a former National Lampoon editor, denied that he posed for the photo of the Pope. According to coverage in that week’s Time magazine,įreddy Plimpton denied that her husband wrote a brilliant parody of Timesman Red Smith’s sports column. (Incidentally, The Paris Review-also run out of Plimpton’s Seventy-second Street apartment-failed to meet its deadlines that fall the staff was forced to merge its final two issues into a single Fall-Winter edition.) I was there all week.” Plimpton himself was unavailable for comment-presumably tidying up after playing host to the editorial debauchery. It’s also not true that we used the Plimptons’ apartment to put the paper together. “I can give you a list of other people who weren’t involved as well. “I had nothing to do with this,” Cerf quipped. Among those enlisted as “journalists” were Carl Bernstein, Nora Ephron, and Terry Southern-though none was exactly forthright about his or her contributions. The spoof, it turned out, was the work of Paris Review founder George Plimpton and a handful of his friends, including Christopher Cerf (the ringleader), Tony Hendra, and Rusty Unger. There was a weather notice, too: “Mostly present today, still there tomorrow.” Among the items on the front page were an exposé on an exotic new drug (“pronounced ko-kayne” and “generally ingested nasally”), a tedious seven-paragraph report written entirely in bureaucratese (“Carter Forestalls Efforts To Defuse Discord Policy”), and Mayor Koch’s recipe for chicken curry. This was Not the New York Times, a one-off parody rife with satirical news stories, faux advertisements, and farcical editorials. Two and a half months into the ’78 strike, though-and thirty-six years ago today-New Yorkers awoke to find the Times unexpectedly back on newsstands, kind of. No editions of the Times were printed for a record-setting eighty-eight days. And then there was 1978, when, from August 10 to November 4, a multiunion strike shuttered all three of New York City’s major newspapers. The paper took five holidays in the early 1850s a strike in 1962–3 led to a nineteen-day blackout another, in 1965, caused four “joint” publication dates, which combined the Saturday and Sunday papers. The New York Times has seen surprisingly few interruptions in its 163-year history. “Sounds as if they emptied the back room at Elaine’s for this one.” -Calvin Trillin, in 1978, speculating on the character of those behind Not the New York Times.
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