Mark Russell, Sid Yudain and your editor

Mark Russell wearing headphones at the Watergate complex.
(Dev O'Neill/CQ Roll Call file photo)

 

Roll Call -Political comedian Mark Russell, who died on Thursday at the age of 90, was a jovial satirist whose friendship with Roll Call founder Sid Yudain helped define the newspaper’s tone in its early years. As part of celebrating Roll Call’s 50th anniversary in 2005, Russell wrote about how Sid (Sid would hate it if we referred to him on second reference as “Yudain”) helped him get a job playing the piano at the Carroll Arms hotel near the Capitol. “I didn’t go to college, but my poli-sci class was the Carroll Arms. My textbook was Roll Call and my professor was Sid Yudain. He would introduce me to various politicos, staffers and lobbyists — aka, The Ones Who Pick Up the Checks" 

Sam Smith - In the early 1960s I found work in a basement office of a row house on New Jersey Avenue SE, a few blocks from the Capitol. Out of this long, sunken, slovenly one-room den qua office was published Roll Call, a weekly paper for those thousands who worked on Capitol Hill. In the center of the room, with its low lights, brick wall, overstuffed bookcases and casual furniture, were three desks. The first would be mine. The second was assigned to an ad representative who might or might not be employed at any given moment and if employed might or (more probably) might not be in the office depending upon the current status of her not inconsiderable array of personal problems which, according to the frequent testimony of the man behind the third and rearmost desk, were due to alcohol, insanity, sexual dysfunction and various other character flaws which in aggregate left him to sell the frigging ads as well as having to edit the whole damn paper himself.

This aggrieved man was Sid Yudain, the editor. He was tall, of medium build with wavy swept back hair and heavy black horned rimmed glasses He smoked a pipe and talked out of the tiny space remaining between his pipe stem and the right corner of his mouth and generally affected the manner of a Catskills comedian engaged in contract negotiations.

Roll Call was a free paper supported by advertising. Some of the advertising was paid for, some was run and not paid for, and some was published and eaten. Sid was a bachelor whose sole interest in cooking consisted of making coffee when no one else was around to do it for him. Among the purposes of the paper, therefore, was to feed the editor. Sid traded restaurant ads for free meals. It was a shrewd business move. While plenty of advertisers failed to pay for their ads, none refused to serve him.

Sid regarded my arrival as a possible break in his ill-deserved fortune and set me to writing what would sometimes be as many as a half dozen stories a week on such topics as a new 300-car parking lot for the Senate, hiring prospects in the next House of Representatives, and how the great iron dome of the Capitol gyrated several feet a day in response to the thermodynamics of the sun. One of my scoops was the discovery that 1,200 people could go to the bathroom at the same time in the brand new Rayburn House Office Building.

Sid also let me try my hand at writing humor and a column of whimsical shorts about life on the Hill, including this transcript of a conversation overheard in a House office building:

Matron (whispering) Could you tell me where the reading room is?
Guard (also whispering): We don't have a reading room
Matron (still sotto voce): Isn't this the Library of Congress?
Guard (still likewise): No ma'am
Matron (out loud and with force): Then what are we whispering for?
Guard: (louder still): I don't know, you started it.

On another occasion, I reported that "we've heard about parties that are so hip, everyone dances to Mort Sahl records."

Even more pleasing was Sid's acceptance of my contributions of light verse. One went:

I like to go down to the zoo
And there I sit and watch the gnu.
I've also noticed recently
The gnu has started watching me.
For hours we just share a stare
A happy unproductive pair
Economists we might impress
With our total uselessness.
Still it's the G-N-U for me.
Let others boost the GNP

Although Sid was a Republican, and a former aide to a GOP congressmember from Connecticut, he considered politics first and foremost a fraternity and entertainment; its ideological content was of tertiary concern at best. He seemed to know just about everyone on the Hill and treated them as neighbors and friends whose gossip he relayed in his paper. This did not mean he was unmindful of the business of politics -- in fact he knew the specifics of elections as well as anyone I've ever met. In 1960 he correctly predicted the outcome of 426 of the 437 house races. He was 96.5% accurate and even declared five too close too call. They were, in fact, still in doubt several days after the election. Sid also found politics funny and had no objections if one of his writers wanted to suggest that the funny had, on a particular occasion, slipped into the absurd. After all, it was Sid who would take me over to the Carroll Arms Hotel to enjoy Mark Russell, a discovery he shamelessly promoted in the paper.

The Carroll Arms had been a 'railroad hotel,' situated between Union Station and the halls of Congress. Shelby Scates in his book, Maurice Rosenblatt and the Fall of Joseph McCarthy, reported that rooms in the hotel - where McCarthy aides Roy Cohn and David Schine lived on the top floor - went for as little as $10 a night as late as 1961. On the second floor was the notorious Quorum Club, a hangout for favored lobbyists of Senate Secretary and LBJ capo Bobby Baker. And in the bar was piano-playing comedian Russell who later told Scates that "In those days there was no satire on television, no irreverence. The barometer was good old Bob Hope."

I had no trouble enjoying Russell's puns, one-liners and dubious rhymes. In fact, I saw him as a challenge, which I finally fully met near Christmas time with an lyric work that, so far as I know, has yet to be surpassed. Called A Representative Christmas List, it was an ode containing the name of every member of the House of Representatives. The poem took a full page in Roll Call, with the print superimposed on a screened clip-art picture of Santa Claus. It committed such unpardonable offenses as rhyming bacchanal with Chesapeake & Ohio Park Canal as well as asking "Herlong, oh Herlong America, must we suffer this?"

About 390 names into the poem, I ran short of ideas and copped out with "we might write a line that ran " and then listed most of the remaining names followed by ""You see it's going to rhyme but will it scan?"

It was Mark Russell who taught me to write things like that.