Sunday, November 17, 2002 10:11 PM
The Board of Directors decided in January 2003 to move to an electronic newsletter, as preferred by most club members. A few members who do not have e-mail or who have expressed a preference for a hard copy continue to receive one by mail.
You’ll need the easy-to-use Adobe Acrobat Reader software (available here) to read the new 8 Ball.
The e-version eliminates the steep costs of printing and mailing, thus allowing us to add great new features that put a spotlight on the amazing diversity and talents of the 450 members of the Los Angeles Press Club. We’re also able to include more color photography and add “hot links” — clickable web and email addresses that will open in your browser or email program.
The new 8 Ball features include:
·Profile of the Month: We are asking members to give us great tips about club members who have recently enjoyed career or life achievements. Submit up to 400 words to us at info@lapressclub.org, and we’ll consider your colleague or you for profiling in our new feature. Anyone newly joining the club is also eligible for Profile of the Month.
·Member News: Other great tidbits we receive about our members, if not chosen for Profile of the Month, will be published in short form. So please let us know if your friends and colleagues have achieved a recent milestone. E-mail us at info@lapressclub.org.
·Q & A: Each month we single out a club member attending a Press Club event to find out what prompted a busy journalist to come rub elbows with other journalists.
·New Members: Our listing of every member newly inducted into the Press Club, and their work affiliation.
·Collins Connection: By popular demand, we reinstitute the wonderfully chatty column about L.A. journalists by freelance investigative reporter Michael Collins, who, it turns out, has a flair for the soft side as well.
The 8 Ball newsletter is designed by the patient and unflappable Eric Almendral, former art director for New Times Los Angeles.
Why “8 Ball?” A Brief History
By Chris Woodyard From the May, 2003 8 Ball
As mysteries go, it hardly ranks with such enduring issues as the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction or the ultimate fate of the Belmont Learning Center.
But in Press Club circles, it’s a question that occasionally piques curiosity: why is the monthly newsletter called “The 8 Ball?”
Sure, it has a cocktail-cool ring to it. But to anyone who has grown up smothered in such newspaper lingo as ledes, heds, subheds, grafs, tick-tocks, thumbsuckers and the hallowed “inverted pyramid,” the term “eight ball” leaves most baffled.
The answer to this bit of club lore is buried deep inside the battered, leather-bound scrapbook of the early years of the budding Los Angeles Press Club.
The occasion was the club’s most famous day, which came only a year after its founding. There, on the jump page of the Los Angeles Examiner’s June 15, 1948 account of President Harry Truman’ s visit to the city, is a photo of the cheery Missourian hefting a little eight ball atop a statuette.
“President Truman yesterday was presented with a replica of the Los Angeles Press Club’s eight ball–traditionally used at the speakers’ table when guests talk off the record,” reads the accompanying story.
“With a hearty laugh, the President accepted the token from Press Club Chairman Walter Ames,” the story said. Truman then commented of himself, “The president’s behind the eight ball a good deal of the time, but I manage to get out of it.”
During the first few years of its existence, the Press Club had many of these off-the-record encounters. The club retains photos of a few of them — usually a banquet table of men in suits with a speaker seated behind the bowling-ball-sized eight ball.
That way, the speaker is, as the expression goes, behind the eight ball.
An Internet site, The Phrase Finder, offers a more universal explanation for “being behind the eight ball.” It is “a dangerous position from which it is unlikely one can escape.” Of course, that definition might not be too reassuring to a public official hoping to keep comments off the record, but it apparently worked for all those years.
The Internet also reveals other ways the term has been used:
It’s a book. “Behind the Eight Ball: A Recovery Guide for the Families of Gamblers.”
It’s a movie. The Ritz Brothers — Al, Jimmy and Harry — starred in “Behind the 8 Ball” in 1942.
It’s a song. Heavy Eric croons “She’s Got My Heart Behind the 8 Ball.” It’s the lead cut on an album that includes titles like “The Yippy Yahoe” and “3,000 Mile Heartache.”
By the way, that giant eight ball that once protected guest speakers is still rolling around the club’s headquarters. Symbolizing how times have changed, its utility nowadays is limited to being a doorstop or massive paperweight — no longer a reassurance to press-shy speakers that they are commenting off the record.
In the end, it will probably go the way of another fast-fading newspaper tradition:
