The Greek Wrestler
I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister of the Cheltenham Church of Christ Victoria. This Church had the reputation of being a very large and alive Church. But that was a mirage. The reality was quite different as this young country parson was soon to discover. The life of a suburban Minister has some real surprises.
When we left Ararat the farewell of the country Parson had been heralded in issue after issue of “the Ararat Advertiser”. My friendship with the editor, old Barney Banfield, and the Chief Reporter, Chris Fisher, and the fact that nothing very much ever happened around Ararat meant that there were a whole series of articles covering our farewells from the Church, the school, the jail, the Mental Hospital and the combined Churches. Each of the three editions that came out each week of “The Ararat Advertiser” carried stories with headlines such as “Dynamic young Minister to leave Ararat” and an editorial “Youth loses a great friend”. There was a full page article with photographs of Beverley and myself and our two little children with the headline “A man who made news everywhere” and an article on the Church which stated “Church of Christ lead to grow as never before”. It was an incredible send off in the local press.
My arrival at Cheltenham was met with total silence. No one seemed to know we had arrived. The local paper was uninterested and the community cared little. It rather deflated the ego.
But as a country Parson I had learnt the value of a local paper in taking ideas and concepts from the Church and spreading them throughout the community. I had seen a whole community come together and be committed to important tasks because of excellent coverage in a local paper. But the local paper in Cheltenham, “The Moorabbin Standard News” seemed to be full of sport and political comment about the Vietnam War. It did not seem to be interested in the life of the local Churches nor of the arrival of a new minister from the country.
On my second or third day I spoke to our Church secretary Graham Hilbig and his wife Pat and asked them about getting the local paper to print an article concerning our arrival. Graham sniffed “Humph! You won’t get anything in “The Moorabbin Standard News”. The Churches never get any mention in the “Standard News”. They have a policy that is against the Church. I guess it goes back to the Editor, a Greek chap.” At that point his wife Pat took up the story “He is not only a Greek chap but he’s anti Australian. He’s always on about protesting against Vietnam. He’s an anti monarchist and hates the Queen and even on the Queen’s Birthday weekend will not make mention of her. He is a pacifist and is against the war. But worse than that he’s an atheist and communist totally opposed to anything that the Churches are doing. He’ll never write up anything about Christian things. He’s a really ignorant and bad man. He’s only interested in sport, he was a wrestler apparently.”
Later that day I rang up “The Moorabbin Standard News” and asked for the name of the Editor. His name was George Coote. In my years at University I had often debated with communists and atheists and anti monarchists and I also was deeply concerned about our commitment to Vietnam. But the thing that caught my attention was that this fellow was apparently a wrestler.
That’s where his name rang a bell – George Coote. I said the name to myself several times – George Coote. Slowly the name began to mean something to me. He was a member of the Australian Olympic Team in the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. He was one of the first Australians ever to do well in Greco-Roman wrestling. I’d always taken an interest in wrestling. When I was a boy growing up when Box Hill was a village, my mother sent me to the Y.M.C.A. in Melbourne just beside the Yarra River near the Swanson Street Bridge to learn the art of self defence. I had learnt boxing and wrestling. Wrestling always intrigued me. It was so fast, so clean, so skilful. We were taught to use our body weight, to use leverage and speed and the lessons I learnt at the Y.M.C.A. in wrestling had helped me many times in my life as a pastor in the inner Melbourne slums when drunken louts and teenage thugs had set upon me at different times. The lessons learnt in wrestling stay with a person all his life. George was a great wrestler and I am quite sure he would have been fast and fair as all wrestlers were.
I decided to write to him and see if we could break down his opposition to the Church. The letter read something like this. “Dear Mr Coote, I have just arrived as the Minister of the Cheltenham Church of Christ, the white Church with the high white tower on the corner of Chesterville Road and the Nepean Highway. I am most anxious to establish a good working relationship with “The Moorabbin Standard News”. On my second day in Cheltenham I’ve heard you described as a new Australian, a communist, an atheist, an anti monarchist, a pacifist, a protester against Vietnam and a wrestler. At least I recognised the wrestler bit. I remember you from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. I was so proud of your achievement. I learned Greco-Roman wrestling myself at the Y.M.C.A. in Melbourne and I’ve always felt wrestlers were among the fastest, most intelligent, and cleanest sportsmen. I cannot believe that you have a total set against having any Church information printed in “The Moorabbin Standard News”. Obviously we are doing this incorrectly. Would you be kind enough to accept an invitation from me to have lunch together and tell me what we must do to have articles published in “The Moorabbin Standard News”? Yours sincerely, Gordon Moyes”.
The reply came by telephone almost immediately “You remember me in the Olympics, do you? Not many people are interested in wrestling but it is a great sport as you would know. Of course I would be interested in meeting you for lunch. How about you being my guest at lunch on Tuesday in the Bar of the Cheltenham Arms Pub?” I had a feeling that he knew I would not drink in the bar of a pub and his invitation was just to test me out. I replied “Well George, I would be honoured to have lunch with you and I will meet you at 12.30pm in the bar of the Cheltenham Arms Hotel next Tuesday.” Mr. Coote seemed a bit surprised I had agreed to meet him in the pub but the date was fixed and I looked forward to meeting him.
The following Tuesday I walked into the bar of the pub, ordered a steak and chips as part of their counter lunch there and a large lemon squash and took the glass and plate over to the table in the corner where I could see a gentleman who just had to be George Coote.
He was of medium size but his shoulders were as wide as he was high. He had a shock of the most incredibly tightly curled hair that stuck out from the side of his head as far as his shoulders. I could see from his thick eyebrows and swarthy appearance that this must have been George Coote. He stood up and shook my hand and invited me to sit down beside him. “Not into beer then?” he said pointing at my glass of lemon squash. I looked at his plate and glass. He had exactly the same as me. I responded “And I see you’re not into beer either.” He laughed and we settled down to a conversation about wrestling.
It was then time to broach the big question. “George, why have you got such a set against the Church and why won’t you print any of our information?” His reply came to me as fast as a cross angle pick up. In a cross angle pick up a wrestler would grab his opponent’s ankle with one hand and use his body and leverage to drive him backwards and force his opponent to the ground. That was exactly what George Coote was doing with me. “I don’t print anything about the Churches because the Churches don’t give me anything worth printing” he said. “All they do is send me rubbish written on butchers paper with a pencil and it is nothing more than some free promotion of a ladies fete and they don’t understand that this business only exists when people pay for advertisements like that. It is not news and I won’t print it!”
I knew when someone grabbed you with a cross angle pick up the only thing to do was to change tack and switch. A switch is where a wrestler changes from defence to offence through arm leverage. The standard approach was to grab your opponent’s thigh and to press back and force the opponent into a defensive position. I swung the question back at him “If they only send you garbage on butcher’s paper what would it take for you to print it?”
He smiled at me almost recognising the switch move. He responded quickly “I would print anything from a Church so long as it was news, if it was type written, double spaced on octavo paper side ways with a margin of one and a half inches on each side, with all the information in the first sentence and with …...” I stopped him “George, hang on a moment, I want to write this down. Now go through that again with me, so that I might understand what you require for something to be printed in “The Moorabbin Standard News”. George stopped and looked at me for a moment, while I grabbed a paper serviette and started to write down what he was saying. I felt I was having a ride, another wrestling hold in which one wrestler helps controls the movement of his opponent by holding his ankles from the floor.
George started to repeat what he had said, “I want it type written, double spaced, on octavo paper typed size ways. I want an inch and a half margin on each side for notes. I don’t want any more than about one or two sentences to a paragraph. I want the main information in the first sentence. I want you to answer, in the first two paragraphs, five questions – who? what? when? where? and why? I want any description of what’s going to happen to come towards the end and I want to be able to cut the last four inches of your article without affecting the story”.
I looked up at him with a puzzled look. He responded to the unasked question “You see the most important thing in any newspaper is space for advertisements. You can’t let a story get in the way of a paid advertisement.
I want to be able to lay out a story but if I get a late advertisement at the bottom of page three, for example, I want to be able to cut four inches off the bottom of your story and put the advertisement in and yet not effect the meaning and significance of the story, you understand?”
I understood. George Coote was giving me an enormously valuable lesson in journalism. I kept writing the details down on the paper serviette. I picked another paper serviette out from the little chrome container and started writing more information. George continued “But above everything else it has to be news. Its called “The Moorabbin Standard News” and I want everything in it to be news. Don’t tell me a story about a dog biting a man. That’s not news. Write for me a story about a man biting a dog – that’s news! And I want it to be relevant. Don’t give me rubbish about women’s fetes. Tell me what the Church thinks about Vietnam. Tell me why we should be bringing our troops home. Speak to me about the poor and about what the Church is doing to help immigrants settle into our country. Tell me why the ‘White Australia’ policy is wrong and how we need to change it. Give me that kind of stuff and I will print it, because that’s news.”
I stopped writing. He had beaten me. It was a fall and he was the victor. I recognised the Church had not been presenting material to him in the right way. I slowly picked myself up from the ground and went back into the ring. “George, if I present material like this and in the format you want, will you print it?” “Of course I will. I’ll print anything that’s news if it’s presented to me in the proper format”. We shook hands. The rest of the lunch consisted of cold steak and cold chips and even cold bitter lemon but there was warm friendship. The old wrestler had taught a young fellow some of the tricks of the trade.
That was the beginning of a twelve year friendship that I valued more than almost any other in that community.
I went back to my typewriter in the Church office and wrote up a story about my own coming to Cheltenham. It was news. All the information was in the first sentence. It was colourful and it fulfilled all the requirements George wanted. It was type written, double spaced with headings every third paragraph, with no more than 12 words in a paragraph and so on. I had followed the instructions written down on the paper serviettes to the letter. After re-typing the story three or four times to make it sharper and briefer I took it round to “The Moorabbin Standard News” and asked for his desk. The girl at the reception pointed out to me how to go down the passage to the Editor’s room. George was sitting behind the desk with piles of paper all over it. He didn’t say a word but put out his hand and took my typed pieces of octavo paper. He glanced down through it. “You’ve learned your lessons well”, he said with a smile of satisfaction. “I’ll print it as it is. Wait a moment and I’ll get a photographer.”
Within minutes a photographer had appeared and George ordered a photograph of me sitting on the side of a desk with a coat off draped over my shoulder and a tie undone at the collar. “I like informality. This looks good. I think we’ll have it on page one.”
And so the drought of having no Church news in “The Moorabbin Standard News” was broken.
The article and photograph were on page one as promised and Church members were amazed the following Sunday at my induction that they were able to read all about the event in the very paper that would never publish any Church news!
Over the next months I set myself the task of writing George a news story every week. I commented about the news of the day; made comments about the injustice of the National Service marble conscription program; advocated more women in leadership in the Australian community following South Australia’s appointment of the first female judge in Roma Mitchell; spoke out against Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia and called for United Nations trade sanctions; gave a commentary about how the new decimal currency with dollars and cents would actually increase Church offerings; and wrote an article about the visiting American President, Lyndon Johnson who was a member of Churches of Christ in the United States. This kind of material was news and week after week George Coote printed it.
One day when I brought him in some octavo pages typed side ways as he had requested, he simply said, “Take them through to the linotyper. There’s no need to bring your material to me in the future. Just give it to the linotyper to set and I will place it.” So it was my articles didn’t even go through the editorial eye. I really felt accepted by George Coote. Talking with some other journalists and linotypers, I discovered that their Union within the printing works was called a Chapel and that the head of the Union was called an Abbott – names and tasks that go back to the very earliest days of printing when it was so closely attached to the Church.
It wasn’t long before other Churches began to realise what it took to get articles about their Church, their members and their activities into “The Moorabbin Standard News” and I noticed some of the other Ministers beginning to change their style of writing and they too were being printed.
But I guess the greatest breakthrough came when George asked me one day if I would come to his office. When I was sitting there on the edge of his table, he said “What do you know about Easter?” I looked at him and laughed “What do you mean, what do I know about Easter? For a Christian Easter is the most important festival in the Christian year.” George shot back “I know it is for Christians but what’s its significance for the rest of the community?” I gave a reply indicating how I thought Easter had a special significance even for people who are not Christian. George said “Write that for me then will you. Give me an editorial in twelve hundred words. I don’t want to write about a Christian Easter when I don’t believe, but I know the rest of the community does and I’ve been criticised for not writing editorials about Easter. Write one for me and I’ll print it.”
I shot back at George “I’ll write you an Easter editorial if I can also write you a Christmas editorial. If you don’t believe then Christmas is nothing else but a commercial occasion for you. I can write you an Easter editorial but let me write the Christmas one as well.” George looked at me from under his bushy black eye brows. “Well write me the Christmas one as well and I will publish it.” I immediately shot back to him “and what about Queen’s Birthday? You’re not so hot on writing anything about the Queen. And what about Australia Day? You probably have some difficulties with that as well. And Mothers Day? And Anzac Day? In fact, if you like, I will write several of those editorials for major features during the year and if you want to use them you will have them on hand.”
So it was I started writing editorials for “The Moorabbin Standard News” for every feature week of the year. Those editorials were being read quite widely. A number of years went by and George Coote printed every thing I wrote for him. My scrap books bulged with thousands of column inches of articles published in “The Moorabbin Standard News”.
I thought my run of good fortune had come to an end the day George said to me as I walked passed his office. “Gordon, here’s some news for you. I’m no longer going to be the editor of “The Moorabbin Standard News”. He waited while the impact sank in. I was going to miss my good friend and I was going to miss the challenge of the argument we often had in the passageway outside his office at “The Moorabbin Standard News”. I told him I’d be sorry he was going and but would always be grateful for what he taught me about writing for newspapers. Then he surprised me “But I am not going far. In fact I’m going down the passage to another office. I’m going to be Editor In Chief of 18 other suburban papers that this company produces. I won’t be looking after “The Moorabbin Standard News” but all of these others that cover three quarters of Melbourne. And I’ll tell you what – I’m not going to be wanting to write articles about Easter or Christmas or Mothers Day so if you will still write them for me I’ll include your editorials in every one of the company’s papers.”
So it was that the articles and editorials that I wrote of a general nature were now distributed across more than a million Melbourne homes. As the years went by, articles, editorials, newspaper commentaries quickly flowed and George saw them printed. It was then that a number of the articles and newspaper comments were picked up by the metropolitan press and were printed in the major Melbourne Dailies and in turn, some of those stories and comments were picked up by radio stations and television and a wide audience read Christian commentary on the news.
When I first started working with George Coote every thing was typed out on a portable typewriter and given over to a linotyper and set in hot metal. But now as the years slipped by I was having to undertake a course in computers learning how to set the work on disk and discovering the finer points of automatic spell check. That was the end of the era for linotypers, hot metal press makers, compositors and engravers. The greatest changes and advances in the history of printing were being made before my eyes. The old metal presses disappeared and computer-set, offset printing in colour was now running off the presses.
I’ve always loved writing and every week editorials, magazines, church papers and radio commentary and even these stories have been set in print because of the lessons I learnt from a Wrestler who met me in the Cheltenham Arms Pub and we grappled together over the art of writing for the press.
Thirteen years after that first conflict, on my farewell from the Cheltenham Church of Christ when I was leaving to come to Sydney to be the Superintendent of Wesley Central Mission, one of the speakers at that farewell program was George Coote, the man whom the Churches loved to hate, but who in fact had become one of the greatest allies we had ever had for propagating the Gospel. I really loved my Wrestler mate. He was a good mate.
That night I spent some time in my study writing up my journal and looking out of the window at the never ending stream of cars stopping at the traffic lights at the corner of Nepean Highway and Chesterville Road, that wide intersection that was dominated by the lovely white Church with the high white tower, noting down in my journal the events of another day as a suburban minister.
GORDON MOYES