A sympathetic newspaper story is an act of neither charity nor friendship. It’s a transaction. When the upright guy in the story turns out to have feet of clay, a newspaper covers its butt. A friend hangs in there.
Brotman’s story on Wolfson ran last Labor Day. “For the last 19 years,” she wrote, “he has worked regularly at McCracken Middle School in Skokie, where he is so highly regarded that teachers often called him at home to request he fill in for them. Only these days, they can’t call him at home, because he doesn’t have one. For the last four months, Wolfson has lived in a homeless shelter.”
Wolfson wrote Brotman in distress. The students had stopped returning his phone calls, and he feared that in their eyes “I have gone from heroic sub worthy of worship and emulation, to horrific scoundrel—never to be spoken with again.” For they were still just kids, he went on, “unschooled in the subtleties and nuances entailed in the human experience.”
In desperate and absurd denial of the ABCs of journalistic disclosure, he told Brotman that she had no more needed to inform her readers “that I squandered a large portion of an inheritance several years ago” than she did to tell them that when he was ten he used to read newspapers in the neighborhood drugstore without paying. “What does either have to do with how our society values, or devalues, substitute teachers?”
In other words, what Brotman’s original article said about Wolfson was true: he was an exceptional substitute other teachers trusted completely. When Sweeney found out about the Team Mr. Wolfson fund, he chipped in $1,000. When news broke about Wolfson’s problem with the ponies, he let Wolfson know he didn’t want a penny back.
