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Country Club News
King Lou Is Dethroned But Still Won't Shut Up
By Dean Rotbart
I was hunting for journalism treasures this past week at my favorite news emporium, Frank's News, when I felt a cold chill streak up my spine. Frank, you see, not only sells freshly minted newspapers and magazines, he has many that have been well preserved for decades that appeal to collectors like me.
I love to pass a morning now and then combing through his morgue of vintage news.
I was lost somewhere in an edition of Wall Street Magazine, an obsolete publication from the early 1900s that gave heavy play to the stellar future of the U.S. railroad industry, when I first felt the chill, following immediately by Frank's shadow racing over me and the magazine like a cloud in a time-lapse weather video.
It was high noon on a beautiful Spring-like day. It stuck me as odd that the only clouds I could see were puffs of condensation that danced from Frank's mouth with each word he spoke. What had he been doing, chewing ice?
FRANK: I want to tell you my secret now.
ME: (Glancing around, like someone awakened from a meditative state.) What? What are you talking about? Are you talking to me, Frank?
FRANK: I want to tell you my secret now.
ME: (Puzzled) Okay.
FRANK: ...I see people
ME: (Dumbfounded silence)
FRANK: I see dead people... Some of them scare me.
ME: (Thinking that Frank must once again have found the bottle his wife hides from him.) In your dreams?
FRANK: (Shakes his head) No.
ME: (Thinking that maybe I should give the airport newsstand a try next time) When you're awake?
FRANK: (He nods) Yes
ME: (Wondering and worrying what else Frank keeps in his news morgue) Dead people, like in graves and coffins?
FRANK: (Leaning into me, with a raspy whisper) No, walking around, like regular people... They can't see each other. Some of them don't know they're dead. They only see what they want to see.
ME: (Recalling I once saw a Bruce Willis movie a lot like this) How often do you see them?
FRANK: All the time. They're everywhere.
Frank slips me that day's Baltimore Sun like he is handing over nuclear recipes. I unfold the paper and read the headline, which he has circled in red. "MPT replacing Rukeyser on financial show after 32 years; 'Wall St. Week' host rejects reduced role."
"He's one of them," Frank mouths, his head bobbing up and down in self-agreement. "The walking journalism dead."
####
Frank is right, once again. It didn't require a sixth sense to recognize that Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser and its 69-year-old host had slipped the bonds of mortal relevance some years ago.
Lou sees only what he wants to see.
Unlike so many other business news luminaries who stepped aside gracefully when their time had passed -- think Barron's Alan Abelson and Forbes' James W. Michaels -- Rukeyser issued a huffy news release vowing to fight another day and on another program.
"Most people who have heard that Maryland Public Television is going to try to do 'Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser without Louis Rukeyser think it must be somebody's idea of a bad April Fool's joke."
Well, Lou, this joke is for you.
Being that Maryland Public Television dumped Lou, who declined to settle for a spot as a commentator on its new show due next Fall, Lou boldly proclaimed in his news release that he didn't want anything further to do with MPT.
The Rukeyser phone, he blustered, is "ringing off the hook" with other offers.
(I just feel kind of sorry for his poor administrative assistant who likely developed a blister pushing the redial button on her outside line so often.)
Like stars in many fields, Lou Rukeyser believed too many of his own press clippings and became the king of arrogance. That's just my opinion, of course, and I'm sure Lou could point to plenty of other haughty people who would testify that he is actually a humble giant.
But I've covered Lou and Wall Street Week for the past 15 years and there isn't another business journalist I know who thinks as highly of himself (and demeans others in kind) as does Lou Rukeyser.
Guests and regulars of his program who didn't worship appropriately at the Rukeyser alter were not invited back. Heck, even his personal assistant (the last time I bothered phoning Lou in early 2000) seemed to believe that she was Lou's gift to the world.
Wall Street Week has been Lou's country club for 32 years. He let in a select few of his well-heeled friends and used the program to launch newsletters, speaking tours and investment cruises that have made him a wealthy, wealthy man.
But Lou survived far longer than he ever should have on the program. That's not because its ratings, about 2.7 million viewers each week, were bad nor because Rukeyser didn't do what he does very well.
No, Rukeyser survived too long because he came to believe the audience was there to serve him and not vice versa. In the end, Lou drowned in his own pomposity and doesn't even know it.
Lou promises (threatens?) that we haven't seen the last of him and I suppose he will show up at some new business journalism haunt to provide yet one more proof that the dead, do, still walk among us.
March 2002
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