Farewell, Jeff Schapiro
by Gordon C. Morse
Photo of Jeff Schapiro courtesy of Bacon’s Rebellion.
Columnist Jeff Schapiro vacated the Richmond Times-Dispatch rather abruptly last Sunday and for a man of many words, he had little to say about it.
Four decades of scribbling and he throws out a few lines at the end of his column, not at all dissimilar to the Woody Allen dialogue in “Crimes and Misdemeanors”:
“He left a note. He left a simple little note that said ‘I’ve gone out the window.’ This is a major intellectual and he leaves a note that says ‘I’ve gone out the window.’ He’s a role-model. You’d think he’d leave a decent note.”
No decent note from Schapiro. No decent note from anybody, including the paper’s editors. Just out the window.
Management indifference to its writing corps is an established and rotten tradition at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It appears to be the only tradition left at the paper.
And why are we calling it the Richmond Times-Dispatch anyway? The “Hanover Times-Dispatch” would have the benefit of accuracy.
In its heyday, now long removed, the Times-Dispatch newsroom was a sight – a floor scattered with messy desks, messy people and messy commotion. Bright, funny, purposeful writers and editors were splayed about and running a competition, it often seemed, over how many books, reports, press releases and note pads could be balanced onto a single desk without it all collapsing to the floor.
That newsroom spawned raised voices and barked instructions, arguments and disputes, and harbored some just astounding personalities. I thought it was wonderful.
I met Schapiro in the early 80s when he was punching a teletype for United Press International. The competition between UPI and the Associated Press (AP) was one of the defining rivalries in American journalism throughout the 20th century. The work trained you to think, type and do both quickly.
But Schapiro wasn’t long for that. He got a job with Virginia Business and then made his way to a real newspaper. Paired up at the Times-Dispatch with the esteemed reporter Michael Hardy, Schapiro hit his stride.
Some stride. It always came with a skip. The temptation to do hits, runs and errors on Jeff Schapiro –- the errors were sometimes dumbfounding and the conclusions often rude — is near overwhelming. He scorched about everyone and, too often, with little justification. He just enjoyed doing it.
But here was the redeeming thing: He did in fact care. Even with all the nonsense, Jeff Schapiro cared about the Commonwealth of Virginia and what its people had done and were proceeding to do with the place.
History gets rough treatment in Virginia these days and witlessness lies at the base of it. People claim to know things that they do not in fact know at all or understand. There were some noises recently, for instance, about the tardiness of Virginia’s instructional guides on history – “the standards,” as they put it – for its public schools. They’re supposedly overdue.
Are the people making these complaints actually interested in history standards? No. They are interested in what they can politically make out of the history standards. Those are two different things. They are simply itching for a fight.
That’s where state history sits these days in Virginia. It’s just a football for otherwise clueless political participants.
Broad, generalized ignorance with what happened the day before yesterday –- much less a decade or more ago -– is not exactly a new problem in Virginia. In 1948, the General Assembly commissioned an investigation of the teaching of history and government -– it was chaired by state Sen. Lloyd C. Bird of Chesterfield -– and it concluded that “Virginia history and government, as such, are not actually taught in our schools.”
As such. Virginia college freshman showed “a deplorable ignorance” of Virginia history, government and geography,” the report said. Same thing with Virginia high school graduates generally.
Are we in better shape today, some 77 years later? I know the answer to that. It ain’t good.
Unfortunately, the condition increasingly applies to people in elected public life. The desire to hold public office and an interest in why Virginia does what it does and how –- the constitutional, statutory, historical framework that defines the commonwealth –- only infrequently coincide these days.
The same goes with people who aspire to journalistic roles in Virginia. They don’t know nuthin’ – and I am not exaggerating for effect. Easily 80-90 percent of the Virginia working press today couldn’t possibly explain to you, even at a rudimentary level, the history of state efforts in public education, governance of higher education, corrections, state/local relationships, public finance, on and on.
That’s a problem and the problem manifests itself when the General Assembly convenes –- both for those directly participating and for those watching, recording it and commenting on it.
Schapiro, to his everlasting credit, worked at knowing Virginia –- and work is what it requires.
He could tell you about Hampton’s Hunter Andrews -– he experienced it and so did I -– that if you approached the Majority Leader on the floor of the Virginia Senate with a question, you did so with some trepidation. Andrews could quickly swivel in his chair, look you in the face and bellow loud enough for everyone in the chamber to hear, “I am not going to do your homework for you!”
That told you something -– something that everyone writing about Virginia politics today needs to get: There is, in fact, homework to do. You don’t wing it. You dig, read, study. Rinse and repeat.
I first worked in the Virginia Senate in 1977, wrote for a governor in the 1980s who was absolutely fixated on history (Jerry Baliles) and have stayed with the subject -– Virginia -– ever since.
And what does that get you? A deep and abiding sense of what you do not know or understand. So you just keep reading and asking.
In “Absalom, Absalom!” William Faulkner confronted the profound difficulty of understanding and interpreting Southern history. He moved through multiple narrators, each with partial, conflicting, and often unreliable accounts. It gets fragmented and subjective fast. No one knows everything and often people prefer that you not know at all. I’ve encountered that in my own family.
But the past will persist. It does not conveniently go away and those who claim possession of the “truth” should be viewed with considerable suspicion. History –- Virginia history, in particular — gets mediated by memory, prejudice, and the desire to shape the past to fit present needs and political agendas.
There were times when Schapiro did not know quite as much as he thought he knew, but he knew vastly more than most. He sincerely treasured his days at the Times-Dispatch and served it faithfully. By so doing, he served us, too. Jeff Schapiro took Virginia seriously. He watched and thought and wrote. And he imparted genuine insights.
Who does that anymore?