Slammer of Spring
March 16, 2011—
TEMPE, Az.—-Spring Training is about refreshing fundamentals: bunting, throwing, base running, the things I didn’t see the Cubs do in Tuesday’s loss to Colorado.
It’s not about being a slammer.
I discovered The Slammer weekly newspaper (www.theslammer.com) in February at a Mesa gas station as I was touring Arizona Spring Training parks. I’m safe in my hotel room tonight writing this so I don’t end up in The Slammer.
The Slammer is a 20-page newspaper featuring hundreds of mug shots. For a buck I picked up the Maricopa County, Arizona edition of The Slammer.
This is one item you don’t want to shoplift.
The mug shots are divided into categories, mostly “Recent Arrests.” But the specialty categories are what hooked me: “Hairdos & Don’ts,” fight victims in “Sluggin & Muggin’,” “Wrinkly Rascals” (old criminals) and perhaps my favorite, busted (and mostly young people) smiling in “Laugh It Up.”
The Slammer also has short crime columns like “This Weekend In History” and “Cold Case.” A few weeks ago I also saw a Nashville, Tn. edition of The Slammer. That had many of the same columns as the Arizona edition, although they have missed the boat with “Jailhouse Rockers” that could include vintage photos of David Allen Coe, Johnny Paycheck and the great Steve Earle.
I love all their music.
Maybe it’s a matter of time before The Slammer comes to Chicago. I’d like to see a start-up in Naperville or Wilmette just to see residents get upset and try to put a hammer to The Slammer.
The Slammer has a mast head and the Feb. 2-9 issue I picked up was Vol. 3, No. 5. The Slammer is published by CorMedia, LLC in Raleigh, N.C.
The Chicago Tribune used to have an American flag along the top of its front page.
The Slammer has a pair of handcuffs
The Slammer reminds me of my old friend Ben Thomas in St. Louis, Mo. Whenever visiting St. Louis in the 1980s I would pick up a copy of his “Evening Whirl” crime newspaper that was popular in the black community. Thomas had crime categories like “The Hooch Hound Club” and “The Gun Club,” which was colorful rewrites of firearm arrests.
Thomas set his headlines in free styling caps: SLAIN IN CAR, DUMPED IN ALLEY.
THIS IS NOT BEN THOMAS, but a Slammer candidate for sure. Earlier this month he was getting a haircut at an apartment in Stamford, Conn. when he grabbed a pair of scissors and SLASHED another man. He’s 21 and he was agitated. I had to use this mug,
The Evening Whirl was also a weekly. Thomas started the broadsheet in 1938 as “The Night Whirl” which he passed around at St. Louis nightclubs. He thought nightlife was a “whirl.” There are no “whirls” in the slammer.
Thomas was a one-man show when I met him in 1984 while visiting St. Louis for an important Cubs-Cards series. He told me he put in about 18 hours a day at the Evening Whirl, but he worked out of a tiny storefront and never seemed to have made a lot of money.
Crime does not pay.
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