Respected Editor Is Illiterate Says Publisher

(Colona) Retired news hound, Melvin Bedwetter O’Toole  “faced adversity at every turn” according to one newsroom boss. The 60-year vet, who retired Wednesday at 101, could not and still cannot read.

“How he manipulated the printed page with such glaring inadequacies is anyone’s guess,” added the boss. “He brought donuts to work almost every day and his coworkers seemed to have forgiven him his grammatical sins.”

He has had trouble with menus, eye tests, road signs, subtitles, cereal boxes, topo maps, grafiti, and reportedly cannot even read his own birth certificate,” said the editor, “but he could verbally shout out crisp, grabbing heads, one after the other, after grasping the gist of a story.”

“You gotta give it to him,”said the editor. “He never let on that he could not read and his moves around the copy desk assured us all that he was on top of things. Once the publishing industry moved into the digital age he was home free.”

Sources close to O’Toole explained the dilemma in that the stumbling scribe quit school to sell newspapers on the street at age 12 and was simply too busy to learn his letters.

Grateful thanks to Fred, Ted, Ned and Edward and Red Herring for contributing to this report

“Why have so many people joined — and stayed in — a personality cult built around a man who poses an existential threat to our nation’s democracy and is also personally a complete blowhard?”

– Paul Krugman, NY Times