Movie Quote Stuck in My Head: ‘Harvey’

Published May 30, 2015

James Stewart is the protagonist in “Harvey,” the 1950 film in which our man Elwood P. Dowd’s best friend is a 6-foot-3½ invisible rabbit, a pooka. This causes concern in Elwood’s family. Is it the booze? Is he crazy?

Is he more clever than all of them?

There will be no answers here. The reason for this post is this “Harvey” quote stuck in my head, and the reason why.

“In this world … you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”

For about a decade, if I saw those words on my computer screen, chances are there was something worth reading above them. That quote from the movie was part of the tagline of SF_Express at SportsJournalists.com, a site where I and many others in the newspaper business (and other walks of life) discussed journalism, writing, editing, pop culture, current events, nonsense and further nonsense. SF_Express brought considerable experience and wisdom to bear on many topics, especially about good writing and editing. The tagline on his posts at SJ.com also included a link to his blog, which changed names a time or two, but mostly was about using words well.

Someone just starting out in newspaper writing — and even someone with hundreds of thousands of words under their belt — could do a whole lot worse than to consider suggestions by SF_Express. I didn’t always agree with him, but in almost every instance of disagreement, I could see the method to his madness (sorry about the cliché, SF, but in an Elwood P. Dowd kind of way, it seemed appropriate).

His last post on his blog is dated July 4, 2011, three weeks after I finally got to meet him in person after roughly a decade of getting to know him online. I took a part-time editing job with CBSSports.com, which flew a handful of us to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for training. I didn’t know I would be meeting SF_Express; that part of the trip was an unexpected bonus. We spent a few days there, and walking past a row of desks in the offices of CBS Interactive, I saw this quote at someone’s work station:

“In this world … you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”

Hmm. Interesting. During training, and in the casual conversations between sessions, I began to align certain writing and editing philosophies of one SF_Express with CBSSports.com deputy managing editor Craig Stanke, who led much of the discussion during our time in Fort Lauderdale. Then I saw that the desk featuring the quote above belonged to him.

Upon returning to the Pacific Northwest, I mulled mentioning my discovery to him. In a private message on SportsJournalists.com, under my pseudonym (which he did not know belonged to me), I told him I’d recently been to Fort Lauderdale, and while down there, I saw that someone’s desk had the same Elwood P. Dowd quote that was under all of his posts on SJ.com. I loved his response, via private message:

That’s a very odd coincidence … 🙂 funny how different people can come up with the same obscure things (I can’t believe I didn’t make this connection last week)…

Less than a year after I started working part time as a remote editor for CBSSports.com, I was sitting outside my favorite coffee shop in the small town in Oregon where I was living, and I got the horrible news. Craig Stanke had died. The day was May 29, 2012. He had run a Memorial Day 5K the day before, then went to work. That night, he went to sleep — and never woke up.

He was 56. The cause of death was heart disease, as listed in his obituary.

His last post at SJ.com was May 28, 2012. His last email to me was the day before. I’d wanted to know the CBSSports.com style for the basketball term shootaround. His reply: That’s it….

There were other email exchanges in which I got to see, from across the country, a quality described in this tribute by Gary Parrish, a columnist who still works for CBSSports.com: “He was a tremendous journalist and boss with a unique ability to tell you what to do without making it feel like he was telling you what to do.” Others got to witness that daily in the office, and I felt fortunate to see glimpses of it in group email threads in which he seemed, as I described it, more maestro than editor. I told him that, and it was a compliment for and a one-word testimony to the finesse in his leadership.

Maestro? “Cagey veteran,” he replied, using an old-school sports-writing term that made me smile at the time. It still does.

People who write and edit for a living can get involved in some intense conversations about whether a term should be one word, two words, hyphenated, placed between quotes, and more. Once, after listening to me make an impassioned plea to have a ruling go in my favor, an editor (and friend) looked at me and said, “Is anal retentive hyphenated?”

Welcome to our world.

Craig Stanke (and SF_Express) could wade into such conversations without making the waters more choppy, and usually, he calmed them. He was smart, but he was pleasant, and his opinion came with the weight of the type of authority those around him would embrace rather than grudgingly accept.

The SportsJournalists.com thread announcing his death contains page after page of tributes to the man known as Stanke and, there, as SF_Express. It’s a wonderful thing to read, even three years later, as a reminder of the editor and the man.

If you’ve read any of my “Movie Quote Stuck in My Head” posts here, you probably know part of the inspiration for it came from Craig Stanke’s “Real Time Song Stuck in My Head” tweets.

This is one of my favorites, for many reasons:

This is the last one he tweeted on that Memorial Day in 2012, his last full day of life:

He’s been on my mind this past week. For some who knew him, the day after Memorial Day will always be the reminder of his death, its anniversary of sorts. Yesterday was May 29, three years to the day. I looked through email conversations between us and at notes I scribbled during that June 2011 training session in Fort Lauderdale.

Tweeted with all due discretion, sir.

A few months after Stanke’s death, I accepted a full-time position with CBSSports.com. I was lucky to have his recommendation, in the voice of another editor who vouched for Stanke’s support for me being added full time for another remote editing team. Upon going back to Fort Lauderdale, the office wasn’t the same without him. Anyone who worked there could tell you that. But on the wall, not far from the desk that displayed the Elwood P. Dodd quote, was a lovely tribute to the man. I’m a better editor for having worked with him for even so brief a time, and a better man, I’d like to think, for having engaged in conversations with him, before and after meeting him in person.

Time to wrap this up. Sorry it’s so long, Stanke, but I didn’t have enough time to make it shorter, or better. I could have used an editor for this one, a cagey veteran. I used a lot of words, and I still left a lot of great stories on the table.

Thinking of you, Stanke, now and whenever I get the urge to be oh so smart.

“Movie Quote Stuck in My Head” is self-explanatory, but it’s more than that. It’s a chance to dig inside an old quote for new meaning, or a new quote for an old truth, or to chew on a line for fun or sustenance. It’s also inspired by and a tribute to “Real Time Song Stuck in My Head,” a popular feature on the Twitter feed of the late Craig Stanke, a former editor for CBSSports.com and, for too short a time, a leader by example to me during my time working there.