Tucson Weekly: Jack's Dead... (March 25

...And It's Too Damn Bad The Spirit He Brought To Newspapering Failed To Live On.
By Jeff Smith
BACK IN THE time when daily newspapers printed the truth and raised hell, they had this term "preparedness." It was a file of obits for personages who were either old enough or frail enough or squirrely enough that they might inconveniently drop dead when nobody was around the newsroom who had the wit or the balls to call the next-of-kin at 3 a.m. and ask the relevant questions.
Smith As a kid at the Star in 1968, they showed me through the morgue, as newspapers call their libraries, and told me if Eisenhower or Carl Hayden died while I was on night-cops, I should pull his preparedness, type in the correct dates, check the A wire for cause of death and pass it along to the night city editor. As luck would have it, when Ike died it was during broad daylight, but I still got to write the local angle. They took his body back home on the train, so I did a little sendup on "The Chattanooga Choo-Choo."
I figured a grieving nation could stand a little comic relief.
In 1981 when I whacked this large pine tree while motorcyling at high speed and wound up in El Paso on the critical list, the local dailies even did preparedness on me. Wishful thinking, I suppose. It didn't work, and by 1982 when the TNI plant somewhat blew up, and Frank Johnson and Frank Delehanty and Jack Sheaffer got burned in the fire, I was working at the Tucson Citizen, and since I'd known Sheaffer longer than anybody else around there, they had me write preparedness for him.
I felt, in an odd way, honored.
It wasn't like Jack Sheaffer was the pope or the president or anything. He was a newspaper photographer. It wasn't like he'd led a life of vaulting nobility or unstinting charity. He was arguably one of the least suitable role models a parent might summon out of nightmarish imagination. And it wasn't like he was dead: he was just barbecued, somewhat, and I for one hadn't the slightest notion he was going to be leaving us in the foreseeable.
It was just that Jack Sheaffer was such a hoot. And like nobody else in the news business, Sheaffer's name, his personality and the overwhelming sensory impact of the man--big belly, dyed black hair, fat lips and nicotine-stained teeth hanging onto the decomposing end of a cheap cigar, ashes all down the front of his shirt and pants--and the smell--hair-oil and cigar smoke--summarized newspapering in Tucson and Arizona at its wildest and wooliest.
I wrote my first obituary on Jack Sheaffer 17 years ago and it was an honest one. For that reason more than issues of shelf life, I do not expect the Citizen or the Star will use it or even excerpt the good parts. The good parts are no longer considered suitable fodder by the grey eminences who now operate the local dailies.
Oh, by the way, Jack Sheaffer finally died last week. One might say his old Chrysler finally ran out of gas. Sheaffer always drove one of those Chrysler M-series monsters that was, in the words of our late, mutual friend, Frank Johnson, "long as a whore's dream." Without alluding to the whore's dream, the Star, which employed Jack for close to 30 years, mentioned his 17 Chryslers. They ran a full page obit on him and told us he was real colorful. They had a couple of their oldest, most experienced reporters write the epitaph: I don't think either of them actually knew Jack Sheaffer personally.
How else can you explain a full-page jump from Page One, and not one reference to Jack as the Old Chingadero?
Anybody who knew Jack from a load of wood knew his favorite term of endearment: He couldn't make it through a paragraph without it. Not that he spoke in paragraphs. He spoke atrociously. You'd have thought hanging around people who lived by the AP stylebook all those years would have polished his prose, if not cleaned up his vocabulary, but Jack let his 4x5 Speed Graphic create his poetry--and his half-breed border cussing carry the burden of his message.
It mattered not whether Jack found himself among the ladies' auxiliary, a class of garten kinder or the TPD SWAT team, his subject matter tended toward drinking, driving and sex or drunk-driving and drunken sex, and his choice of words revolved around the term "chingadero" and whatever modifiers fit the moment. As the song title says, "Spanish is a loving tongue," and Sheaffer lovingly applied his favorite word to friend and foe, the lens he couldn't find amongst the trash in the trunk of his car, the little doohicky he couldn't remember the name of--whatever.
Loosely translated into English, chingadero means mother-fucker. When you put it that way it almost sounds kind of naughty. But coming from Sheaffer it was background music. His theme, you know, like Tchaikovsky gave everybody in Peter and the Wolf.
As many people as Jack Sheaffer regaled with this leitmotif, as many as he embarrassed in his lifetime--and their tribe is legion--the man's popularity was amazing.
I met him under circumstances that were made, as if by God, to highlight his sterling qualities. It was 1957 and my older brother Dave was working his way through college doing nights and weekends for the Star.
He had a feature assignment on a movie Jimmy Stewart was shooting outside of Nogales. He drove me down there with him one Sunday in our folks' old Nash. We were to hook up with the photographer at the Arroyo Motel in Nogales.
It was Sheaffer. It was the morning after Saturday night in the fleshpots of the Sonoran border. Sheaffer was drunker than seven hundred dollars, ranting about the unspeakable things he'd seen the whores of Canal Street performing the previous evening, and he stank. I thought he was terrific. My brother thought he ought to comport himself more decorously in front of an 11-year-old and told him so.
Jack caught himself in mid-oath and cleaned his act right up. For close to a minute and a half. Then something about a donkey and a sombrero popped into his head and out his mouth and he was off on another tangent, giggling and spraying spit and cigar smoke and slimy bits of tobacco. You couldn't shame Jack Sheaffer or keep him down. Or quiet.
Now I suppose you could, and it's a damn shame.
Newspaper people around this town today are a notably quiet bunch, and they aren't even dead yet.

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