Please, no autographs

In this business, it's hard to be a celebrity.

Most newspaper folks are born, get a job, work a long time, move around a little bit to improve their paychecks, retire, never write the Great American Novel and die, pretty much in that order.

I'm not trying to be glum. It's just that a handful of journalists have been much in the news lately, and one of the cardinal rules of journalists is to report the news but avoid, at all costs, being the news.

Even if journalists win a Pulitzer Prize, they only get to bask for a few days in the admiration of their colleagues, and then they have to go cover the story about the family whose toilets are backing up with some mysterious black gunk.

But now we are seeing and hearing the names of journalists who have become newsmakers on the evening news, in newspaper and magazine headlines and on talk shows everywhere.

Why?

Because they made mistakes. Big mistakes -- mistakes for which they will be long remembered, thanks to sharp-minded authors of journalism textbooks who relish using real-life examples to explain the subtle undertones of what it really means to be a scribbler for hire.

I'm telling you all of this because I want you to understand how newspaper folks tend to labor without notoriety while their broadcast brethren become on-air personalities, which is just one rung below movie star -- but only one rung above rodeo performer in the Cosmic Scale of Who's Famous and Who's Not. But we're not jealous.

Lawyers, ambassadors, plumbers, faith healers, carnival workers, scientists, bulldozer operators, ministers and everyone named Martha Stewart also have their places on this scale, but I'll leave it up to you to decide who goes where.

I don't usually think about this sort of stuff, but occasionally I have a brief brush with what I think might turn into something close to celebrityhood.

Like when I am checking out at the grocery store, patiently explaining that brussels sprouts are not just a bad cabbage crop, and the checker says, "I know you from somewhere, don't I?"

As you can expect, my chest puffs up and my head swells a bit. Here, I say to myself, is one sharp cookie who may be a little slow in the sprouts department but is obviously a careful reader of the newspaper and probably loves my column as well.

So I say, with genuine modesty, that I work for the newspaper, thinking that will trigger a gushy compliment.

"No," the checker responds, "that's not it. I never read the paper."

On other occasions, some genuinely nice woman will come up to me and tell me how much she enjoys reading the paper. Chest puffs. Head swells. "And I get such a kick out of Heidi's column."

Well, who doesn't, lady?

Then there's the mechanic at the garage where I take the car whenever it's acting mechanically unfit. The mechanic starts off by asking me -- me! -- to tell him what's wrong with the car. Which is his way of torturing the automotively illiterate. And which is something I don't appreciate at all, because I don't know a thingamajig from a hubcap.

While I try to make sounds roughly equivalent to those coming from the car, the mechanic stares at me intently and finally says, "Say, I know you from somewhere." I tell him he's probably seen my picture in the newspaper, the one over my column every Friday.

"No, that's not it. You're not smart enough to be that guy."

It's tough to be a nobody. But at least my name isn't being bandied about in Time magazine.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.