I walked into the gymnasium; there was a piece of paper tacked to the bulletin board. Sophisticated men, readers of "Esquire" "Cut" Purpose. Written for "Esquire" "Cut" Audience. Greene's essay gives five examples about how five boys were cut from a sports team and how they used that disappointment to become successful as adults An experience that changed my life. College essay due Thursday, Sept. Sample business law essay for restrict immigration essay.
What I found most interesting in both essays is that their authors use different. We are all used to reading scandalous revelations about politicians, about movie. When does Greene use semicolons to link sentences? His book Hang Time: Days and Dreams with Michael Jordan became a bestseller Bob Greene says one tech expert is advising people on ways to escape from an addiction to their digital devices.
Primary Writing Focus — Personal. As a young graduate of Northwestern University, he quickly made a name as a pioneering journalist. This essay will do just that using the oral In Professor Polner was approached by a clean-cut student freshly returned home from by journalist Bob Greene, published in Throughout the story he talks about many other men who were cut from their middle school baseball teams I had no time to compete Bob Greene Cut Essay Examples my dissertation, but my friend recommended this website.
And Japan have quietly abandoned the illusory goal of preventing global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Many teenagers are in search for their identities and. A Bob Greene personalizes his essay by giving us his story of being "cut" by doing this we feel a connection with him. To understand the apoplexy it created is to understand what Greene had come to represent.
Author Bob Greene had the most cut by bob greene essay emotional reaction to being cut from a youth sports team. Every issue of Esquire ever published. Greatly expanded in the s, it has become one of the longest-running programs addressing systemic poverty in the United States After an unsuccessful journey into the software business, Ms. As a teenager, she had come to the paper to interview Greene for a high school journalism project, a meeting.
The cocktails are all handmade and delicious. Maybe "Bob Greene's Diary," the satirical poem I wrote about Bob's diary, which he was crass enough to publish as a book sometime in the late 80s, really was as great as I and my writing. And how it help them succeed in life. Bob Greene went a long way toward doing that. He was just a perpetually young guy. Greene worked hard to polish that image.
In a column, he wrote about turning 30 and actually being He continued to wear blue jeans; if he had to dress up, he might throw on a rumpled jacket and a loosely knotted tie.
His biggest wardrobe expansion was a rotating set of toupees in different styles: just got a haircut, growing out, and shaggy long hair. In the first week his column appeared in the Tribune , Greene hit a snag. He wrote about a phone call that he had received from a year-old girl named Lindy, who had told him that she had been raped at age nine and had become a prostitute at Her friend Barbara, also 13, was a prostitute, as well.
She wanted out. But the phone line went dead, presumably when Lindy's pimp showed up. Greene reported that he had later gotten a call from Lindy's mother. She said that Lindy and Barbara had been killed in California, where they had run away. In a letter home, Lindy had written: "I contacted a man, Mom, a man that tried to help me, but I'm afraid I couldn't get back to him. The man's name is Bob Greene. In the city's newsrooms, the column set off alarms-the bullshit meters of hard-boiled reporters.
Staffers for the Sun-Times and the Tribune set out to prove-or disprove-the story, calling all over California for a record of the deaths of the two girls. So this column shows up, and nobody-I mean, nobody-believes it. The two phone calls to me apparently were placed by this girl. I have spoken with her parents, who feel that their daughter was responsible for the false story.
The incident fueled Greene's critics, some of whom had long held suspicions about the columnist and his sources.
Greene had once written that to protect the privacy of his sources, he often did not use last names. But no one has ever provided evidence that he has made up sources. His admirers say suspicions that a columnist makes up sources or quotes that are "too perfect" are common for writers whose talents and success are the envy of other journalists.
The column about the dead girls was a bad start that eventually faded into a small, nearly forgotten bump in the road as Greene turned into a mainstay at the Tribune , one of the paper's most marketable personalities. In the s, Greene stopped being a counterculture boy wonder. He was a full-fledged member of the media Establishment with a tripartite career: his columns for the Tribune , a monthly column for Esquire called "American Beat," and frequent reports-up to 30 a year-for ABC-TV's "Nightline.
Most of those words were unedited. As with many star columnists, Greene's contract with the Tribune specified that no changes were allowed in his column without his approval.
Other copy editors quickly became frustrated with his refusal to change a word. Greene's Tribune contract also secured him the front page of the Tempo section.
At one point, Paul Camp, then the associate features editor, tried to organize a group of Tribune writers and editors to discuss redesigning the section. One proposed change was to move Greene's column to the inner pages of the features section. But before the group could even meet, Greene went to management and complained, and he stayed on page one. At the Sun-Times , Greene had been part of the newsroom, where there was a lively give-and-take between reporters and editors.
At the Tribune , he moved into an office in an alcove between the features department and the main elevator. His office had a smoked glass wall, permitting him to be both part of things and yet removed.
Inside, his office was littered with the debris of his work: cases of Coke in glass bottles, a personalized Louisville Slugger bat, photos of Elvis, boxes of his books.
He did not have a lot of small talk for anyone, and so he did not make many friends. In , Greene published his seventh book, American Beat , a collection of newspaper and magazine columns dating back to the mid-seventies. The superlatives on the dust jacket indicate his standing at the time. From Tom Wolfe: "Bob Greene is a virtuoso of the things that bring journalism alive: literary talent, hard reporting, a taste for mixing it up haunch-to-paunch, shank-to-flank, and elbow-to-rib with people of all sorts, and a willingness to let out a barbaric yawp now and then.
Increasingly, Greene's columns began to include a dateline from another state, or even another country. But while his time on the road increased, the subjects of his columns narrowed. He wrote about hotel rooms, faxes or soaps in hotel rooms, airplanes, airports, the life of a chauffeur Greene gave up driving in the s. When he crossed the ocean on the Queen Elizabeth 2 , he wrote about eating in his stateroom and watching television.
Although he still produced funny columns, his writing began showing signs of nostalgia. He wrote about the enduring love of his parents, about his memories of family dinners. What he turned into at the Tribune was the exact opposite. He celebrated being out of step, out of touch. It was a shocking transformation. Foreshadowing the Greene to come, one section of American Beat focuses on his own departing youth. The column tells the story of his visit to Lindy Lemmon, his first love.
This was a relationship of a few months' duration when he was 16 and she was The book is Greene's diary of his first year as the father of a baby girl, Amanda. Far from portraying him as a doting new dad, the Greene in the account is incapable of accepting the responsibility of fatherhood. One memorable scene depicts him demanding his dinner even though his wife is trying to comfort their crying infant. Still, the testimonials rolled in.
The humorist Erma Bombeck bestowed an honorary membership in motherhood. Phil Donahue called it "the most honest and personal account of the first year of fatherhood I have ever read. Indeed, the book appeared to be as honest and self-revealing as anything Greene had written. Greene's wife, Susan, comes across as a lonely mother left at home to fend for herself while the star columnist traverses America, reveling in his celebrity and being perpetually on assignment. There is marital tension in the book, even bitterness.
Describing Susan telling their young baby that one day they will go for ice cream, Greene writes, "She's planning some future that I'm only peripherally a part of. She knows that when the time does come to go to Baskin-Robbins, I'll undoubtedly be at work. He was never much of a family man. In an earlier piece, he wrote of his relationship with his parents: "I have become so proficient at putting words on paper for consumption by large numbers of people that I have lost the ability to communicate privately with the two people who have meant the most to me.
I am much better with strangers. Such feelings are not, of course, unique to Greene. What is remarkable is that social awkwardness and marital discord are so familiar to a person who writes sentimentally about an idyllic American life; perhaps it is an existence he always wanted and never had, rather than a life he once had and lost. In hindsight, another anecdote stands out in Good Morning, Merry Sunshine. Greene wrote that a year-old high school girl had visited him at the paper one day.
She admitted her romantic interest in him. The girl didn't think that mattered. She had had a fling, she told Greene, with a famous comedian-it wasn't a big deal. Greene wrote: "There must be a place where sixteen-year-old girls don't automatically turn for companionship to thirty-five-year-old men whom they've seen in the newspapers.
The one thing that scares me is that such a place may exist only in my memory. By the late eighties, Greene's impact on popular culture was solidly established. He was credited in an Esquire column with disseminating the term "yuppie. The premier issue of Spy magazine made fun of his toupees. In , Greene, at 41, was at the peak of his form. His first bar of choice was at the Executive House, now Hotel 71, but he later switched to the atrium bar at the Marriott across the street from the Tribune.
His standard line: "Imagine, we're sitting here in this bar and above us there are a thousand empty rooms. Even if that was what Greene was selling, Tribune readership surveys consistently reflected that the public was buying it. He was the darling of that crowd. He wrote with a kind of Midwestern point of view, a sensible point of view. He had a good grasp for family, for children, all subjects that that group was interested in. In the s, Bob Greene was best defined by two things: using his columns to defend a series of children seemingly failed by the courts and sinking further into nostalgia.
The columns focusing on children started in with the story of Sarah, born six years earlier addicted to heroin and cocaine, then placed in the foster home of a Bridgeview couple. When Sarah was three, her biological mother, who had completed rehab, and her father decided they wanted their daughter back. Greene disagreed and he wrote passionate columns arguing his point of view. Over the next ten years, Greene's columns about abused children became very familiar to his readers: a seven-year-old Wisconsin girl forced to live in a dog cage; a six-year-old Indiana boy chained in a broom closet; the Henry children of Nebraska, who had been tortured by their father with an electric cattle prod.
In a way, Greene was conducting old-fashioned crusades, the kind of noble and passionate journalism that gives newspapers life and purpose. He reprinted devastating courtroom transcripts. And he got results, from intervention in cases he followed to an avalanche of gifts from readers for the victimized children.
Some critics, however, thought that Greene's writing came close to exploiting the children. Because so many of the columns repeated background information and made teasing references to revelations that would appear in the next installment, many journalists came to think that the pieces had taken on an aura of shtick.
The most famous of Greene's crusading columns involved Baby Richard, the centerpiece of perhaps the most dramatic parental custody battle in state history. Over a period of three years, Greene wrote more than 60 columns about the child.
His mother had been estranged from her boyfriend, the father, when their son was born. She told him the child was dead and signed away her rights to the infant. Baby Richard was privately adopted. Later, when the father learned the truth and reconciled with the woman, they both wanted their son back.
Greene argued that removing the child from his adoptive parents at this stage would be extraordinarily cruel to the boy; most of Illinois, it seemed, agreed. The state supreme court, however, eventually ordered that Baby Richard should be returned to his biological father. In the aftermath of the Sarah case, the legislature revised the laws to make "the best interests of the child" paramount. There was a clear line from that case, Greene's first crusade, to the new legislation and directives of the state child welfare agency following Baby Richard.
Boyer contends that the legislation was a political reaction to complicated and extreme cases that should not have been the basis for creating law. But to many people, Greene was a hero. He had accomplished what few journalists can claim: He had embarrassed bureaucrats, changed laws, stood up for children who needed a champion.
Also during this decade, Greene aligned himself with one of the most popular cultural figures in the world: Michael Jordan. In the early nineties, Greene began writing columns about the Bulls superstar.
And it was a stupid lie, told for no good reason. But it showed the contempt he had for all of us. Champion of abused children. Friend of Jordan. These were not bad comebacks from the beating he had taken in the Spy magazine article. Still, he continued to yearn in print for a simpler, happier time. In , Greene published his first novel, All Summer Long. In it, he writes about three old friends from the imaginary town of Bristol, Ohio, who after their 25th high school reunion decide to spend one more summer together on the road.
The character who most resembles Greene is a divorced network TV correspondent living in hotel rooms and scouring the country for human interest stories. He becomes involved with a graduate student prone to wearing tank tops and running shorts, and he eventually moves back to his hometown to write books. In real life, of course, Greene never moved back to his hometown of Bexley, despite always seeming to pine for it in print.
He lived in a Streeterville condominium. And he wasn't divorced; now he also had a son, and both of his children were attending the Latin School of Chicago. Several times in the early nineties, his wife, Susan, made brief appearances at the Tribune. She also became a volunteer and then a board member for Creating Pride, a nonprofit organization that helps inner-city schoolchildren develop confidence by making art. Susan was a nice person who was married to someone who lived a public life, said an acquaintance.
But she didn't; she enjoyed her privacy. By the early nineties, Greene had reinvented the way he dressed, exchanging the look of someone on the move for the look of someone who has reached his destination: nicely tailored pants, checked shirts, well-fitting jackets, and ties.
But beneath the veneer of this glossy career, when it came to women Greene still seemed to be stuck back in Bexley High School or in the swinging Chicago of the seventies.
As far back as the Ms. Greene's World Pageant, colleagues had joked about his overheated interest in young women. It's important to remember the context of the times. Some observers thought Greene was too persistent in his flirtations. A student at Columbia College, You introduced herself. I told him I was a journalism major and then he told me that he was about ready to go to his skyscraper condo and write his column.
He asked me if I wanted to come watch him write. I told him no. The following year, the Tribune hired You; she started out working at the phone desk in the newsroom. His gaze never went above my breast line. You says that she never saw Greene's behavior go beyond overattentiveness.
She herself left the Tribune under a cloud after freelancing for supermarket tabloids like the Globe and lending them photographs from the paper's library. She now works for the National Enquirer.
But her account dovetails with other reports given to Chicago by Tribune insiders past and present. Those sources say they sometimes warned the interns and young staffers about Greene and his intentions. After the scandal broke last September and Greene resigned, the often-told tales of his womanizing reverberated through the Tribune.
There is no indication that a woman ever formally complained to Tribune management about Greene's behavior toward her. However, several sources say that a succession of Tempo editors and their bosses had been alerted in the eighties and early nineties to Greene's overattentiveness to young women. One person who complained was told to "stop picking on Bob. Two former Tribune editors say that is simply not true. Owen Youngman, the Tribune 's vice-president of development, who was the managing editor for features from to , says, "No such complaints were ever made to me during the time that Bob worked for me.
James Warren, who was the Tempo editor from to and is now the deputy managing editor for features, refused to comment, although he recently told Newsweek that "[Greene] had a lot, a lot, a lot of younger women who kind of paid homage to him in one way or another. But we're not the morals police, and we didn't follow him out of the building if and when he left with them. Today, it is not clear whether Greene engaged merely in boorish and inappropriate flirtations-if, in fact, he was mostly acting like an overeager and unsuccessful teenager-or whether his actions frequently ended in sexual encounters.
After the scandal broke, the Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg published an account from Susan Taylor, a Milwaukee-area woman who says that she had an affair with Greene in about She had written him a fan letter about a column on breast implants and had mentioned her own; he called her and they met. According to Taylor, they had dinner on North Michigan Avenue; then he asked to see her breasts. They went to a room at the Marriott. After that, Taylor says, she saw him a few times. But once she confessed that she was developing feelings for him, he cut her off.
Taylor told Chicago that Greene said he had gone "to a therapist and he was trying to stop that behavior. Most of the stories that circulated were more like the one reported to Chicago by Barbara Crystal, a year-old corporate communications professional.
Crystal first visited Greene when she was a year-old senior on an assignment for Sullivan High School, during the school year. They met in the Sun-Times reception area and spoke for 30 minutes, and Greene was "a perfect gentleman.
Four years later, in , Crystal, then 21, spotted Greene at a Rush Street bar. She recalls that he said, "Oh, please have a drink with me. It was 2 a.
Once they got there, she kept the door open and her coat on. She says that Greene then got "a little handsy with me and I realized this wasn't where I wanted the evening to go. Megan Sheppard, now a year-old writer living in Seattle, had another kind of encounter with Greene years later. She sent him a fan letter around , mentioning that in a recent personals ad she had described herself as a Bob Greene fan; she thought he would be amused by that. About a week later, Greene called.
He never suggested they meet or brought up sex. By the mid-nineties, Greene's popularity seemed to be on the wane. The number of papers buying his column began to plummet, dropping from the peak to about last year-a decline that coincided with a falloff in demand from newspapers for syndicated general interest columns. There were rumblings again that some inside the Tribune wanted to move Greene off the front page of Tempo, although the paper's editors have always denied that.
Greene was held in particularly low regard by many other Chicago journalists. From to , the Reader ran "Bob Watch," a witty and biting weekly feature written under a pseudonym by Neil Steinberg.
The column examined Greene's output under the slogan "We read him so you don't have to. Within the Tribune , Greene had fewer allies than ever. Colleen Dishon, the powerful associate editor who had reinvented Tempo and who had always squashed features department rebellions against Greene, had retired.
Squires had left the paper. In April , the young woman whose association with Greene led to his downfall was a year-old senior at a Chicago-area Catholic girls' school. Her journalism teacher gave students an assignment to go out and conduct an interview. The young woman snagged a meeting with Greene. Greene himself got a column out of her assignment; in it, he poked gentle fun at the student for her prepared question: "If you could be any kind of tree, what tree would you be? Her intimate relationship with Greene began in the summer of , after she had graduated from high school and had gotten a summer job downtown.
There were several meetings and dinners. Although later the Tribune would write that the encounters had stopped "short of sexual intercourse," a source says that that is not the case. The young woman, an only child, won a scholarship to St. Mary's University in Winona, Minnesota. She graduated in with a bachelor's degree in theatre arts and went on to do graduate work in English literature at St.
Xavier University in Chicago from to In the ten years after graduation, she lived in and around Chicago. Her father was a policeman who became a lawyer and a prosecutor. He is now a judge in a suburban courthouse. The young woman's mother is a retired school principal. In January , the woman, single and living at her parents' suburban home, filed for bankruptcy. Richard Bass, her bankruptcy lawyer, says he remembers only that his client "was highly educated.
She had several unpaid medical expenses from including bills from two hospitals and the local fire department. Her bankruptcy was discharged in May Apparently, she had expected a more favorable turn of events in her life. In a St. Mary's alumni newsletter that appeared last winter, she described herself as a self-employed writer and said that she was expecting to publish her first novel in the spring; she planned to write a second book based on a story she had written while at St.
There is no record that either book was published. Over the years, according to someone close to the situation, the young woman had periodically left brief messages for Greene or had had short conversations with him. But the two calls he received from her in June were said to be the first time she had mentioned going public about their relationship.
In a written statement, the FBI would describe Greene as having "expressed concerns over a series of telephone calls that he had recently received, which he felt were threatening in nature.
That agent opened an investigation and interviewed Greene. The agent also interviewed the young woman, who acknowledged calling Greene but denied having made any threats. Several sources say that while the timing of her calls looks suspicious-she had contacted Greene several months after she filed for bankruptcy-she was not seeking money; she had called him as a kind of therapy.
In order to move on, she needed to talk to people who had affected her life in an adverse fashion. Evidently, Greene viewed the calls differently. The FBI warned the young woman about federal extortion and harassment laws, although the bureau says that that does not mean it believed she had extorted or harassed Greene.
On June 28th, the FBI closed its inquiry, saying there was not enough evidence to continue the investigation. Around this time, the young woman abruptly left her job at the bookstore and had a boyfriend pick up her last paycheck. On Monday, September 9th, she sent the Tribune , through its Web site tip line, a one-and-a-half-page e-mail.
By Tuesday, it was in the hands of the editor, Ann Marie Lipinski, and a human resources official had been brought in and told of the problem. The e-mail contained a lot of detail, both about the writer and about her past relationship with Greene. It described the young woman's meeting with Greene 14 years earlier and explained that he had written a column about her.
The message stated that a few months later, when she was working at a summer job downtown, the two had met for several dinners at a Chinese restaurant near the Tribune. During one of those dinners, the e-mail reported, Greene had started ordering drinks for the young woman. More than once, they had ended up in a hotel room. The woman also wrote that she had called Greene recently because she wanted to congratulate him on his book Once Upon a Town and she also wanted to speak to him because she had experienced a series of problems in her life, including a number of bad relationships.
She wanted to put the past behind her.
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