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Published on: 8/17/2007
Last Visited: 8/17/2007
Hagerty's assistant, John Quinn, the Special Features editor, fancied himself something of a dapper dresser and thought it hilarious to assign me a fashion feature.John was forever appalled by my California wardrobe, especially my penchant for wearing short-sleeve shirts during the summer, and always threatened to take me shopping at Paul Stuart's, the fashionable men's store.
Quinn was one of the paper's vivid characters--a tall, slender, sardonic guy (he always greeted my wife as "The first Mrs. Nachman"), full of high dudgeon and disdain for everything.He was forever sounding off in lengthy harangues about Jimmy Breslin ("a professional Mick"), Mayor Abe Beame and, most of all, the Daily News editors, writers and readers, which he thought were well beneath him even as he was constantly forced to cater to them.
John would stride up and down spewing invective, to our great amusement, but usually he kept his tongue in his cheek so you didn't take him totally seriously.He mocked all of the paper's star columnists, especially a nice guy named Sid Fields who wrote warm-hearted profiles in a column called "Only Human" that Quinn always referred to as "Barely Human."
Over lunch at The Palm, he and Hagerty laughed privately at The News's blue-collar readership.Hagerty and Quinn may have worked at The News but clearly they were not of it; they were well above it and made sure we realized it.The two of them edited our features from a slight remove, as if afraid of catching lower-class germs if they got too close to any actual readers.
Even more eccentric than John Quinn was the book critic, a lanky raw-boned guy from Atlanta named Judson Hand, whose vest was always speckled with cigarette ashes.
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Hand, like Quinn, had nothing but disdain for the readers and felt himself badly miscast at The News.