Frank as a newspaperman
I met Frank probably in the early seventies when we were working as journalists at Motor Cycle News. He was a sub-editor - that is, a person who checks the stories that the reporters submit and creates the page designs. Frank was a newspaper pro, one of those people who worked amongst the clattering of the big Imperial typewriters of those days and the constant ringing of phones in an era before most messages were sent by email. He was a jovial character with his trademark offbeat sense of humour who added a lot of colour to the office.
MCN had its specialist writers. Some focussed on road testing new bikes, others on road racing or speedway. Frank’s passion was grasstrack racing, and he wrote a weekly column named On the Grass. Grasstrack racing was a rustic and earthy sport. People would lay out an oval course of, say, 800 metres in a farmer’s field, hammer in some stakes and loop ropes around them to “protect” the crowd, and that was it - you had your grass track.
Frank captured the flavour of this scene and its characters through his writing on the sport. Indeed he was, really, Mr Grasstrack in terms of the sport’s media exposure in those pre-social media days. He knew it all - the riders, the organisers, the builders of the motorcycles.
Later, Frank became a publisher, the person responsible for managing everything regarding a magazine - editorial, advertising, finance, marketing, circulation. One of his magazines was a new one named Classic Bike. He was looking for an editor for it and offered me the job on a freelance basis while I was living in Devon. We got on well. If Frank saw that you could handle the job, he didn't micro-manage. In our meetings where we planned the development of the magazine, he was focussed, the magazine grew, and we had a good working relationship, always coloured by a few of Frank’s anecdotes from the world of grasstrack racing.
In later years I lost a lot of contact with Frank, but I remember him as what I term a newspaper pro, which in my eyes is a pretty high accolade. The Imperials clattered, there was plenty of banter, but the job was done and the pages went away on time. Frank, in the time that I knew him, was that - a newspaper pro. It was a good thing to be.
wrote
Report abuse
Comments