Culture

A Tabloid Alum Blasts News to the New York Post Nation


When news breaks inside the world of the New York Post, past or present, it spreads quickly to Post Nation, an e-mail group of more than twelve hundred of the paper’s former and current employees. Myron Rushetzky, once a head city-desk assistant at the Post, is in charge. He maintains strict criteria for topics worthy of one of his blasts: births, promotions, book events, honors, and retirements. Also deaths.

Many of Rushetzky’s old colleagues have told their families to notify him as soon as they keel over. In recent years, some of his e-mails have begun ominously, as in “Post Nation, we have lost another one.” When he announced that Carl Pelleck, a cigar-chomping police reporter, had died, many people commented on how Pelleck had helped them when they were rookies. “I got assigned to cover rising milk prices. In Bensonhurst,” JoAnne Wasserman, a former reporter, wrote. “I asked Pelleck how long the subway was from lower Manhattan. ‘I think they got it down to 3 days,’ he said.”

Rushetzky, who is sixty-seven years old, is about five feet five and has an intense gaze and thinning gray hair. His trimmed mustache, a look popular when he was a young man, is once again in fashion—or so said the Post on October 5th, in a story titled “Millennials Are Bringing Back the Mustache.” He grew up in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, and attended Lafayette High School, where Jeffrey Epstein was in his graduating class. “He did not sign my yearbook,” Rushetzky said the other day, in his one-bedroom co-op in Woodside, Queens. The décor includes Mets memorabilia, a poster for “A Chorus Line,” and relics from Rushetzky’s long career in journalism. In 1974, as a student at City College, he took a side job at the Post as a copyboy. He worked there for nearly forty years, and then took a buyout. (He asked that his exit package include a Post subscription.)

On display in his apartment is a mock front page—or “wood,” in tabloid parlance—that proclaims, “AFTER TEN YEARS, WE ALL HAVE MYROMANIA.” It dates to 1987, when Rushetzky celebrated a decade as a head city-desk assistant, a pre-Internet position that he describes as being in “the eye of the hurricane.” Reporters would call the desk looking for editors, readers would call to complain, tipsters would phone in story ideas. Rushetzky made plenty of outgoing calls, too, occasionally to sleeping editors when big stories broke in the middle of the night. “I had calluses on my fingers from rotary phones,” he said. Sometimes spouses of Post staffers called looking for errant husbands or wives, but Rushetzky is discreet. He knows where the bodies are buried, and many of them still owe him money.

At some point, word got out that, if you needed quick cash, Rushetzky would come through. From a drawer of a rolltop desk in his living room—not far from two urns containing the ashes of his cats, Isabelle and Haley—he retrieved a yellowing piece of paper, on which he’d written the initials of borrowers next to amounts of no-interest loans, mostly from the nineteen-eighties. Repaid loans had been crossed out. Many were for ten or twenty dollars—“In those days, you could get drunk on ten dollars,” he said—while others were larger. The Australian-born Post veteran Steve Dunleavy borrowed regularly from the Bank of Myron, but he and Rushetzky had an agreement: if a newspaper strike loomed, Dunleavy would pay him back before it began. “I didn’t realize how many people still owe,” Rushetzky said, peering at the paper.

Since leaving the Post, in 2013, Rushetzky has been busy with activities such as the Silurians Press Club (an organization of mostly retired journalists), SilverSneakers exercise classes, and Post Nation, which evolved out of Rushetzky’s birthday list. For four decades, he sent birthday and anniversary cards to colleagues, friends, and their children. He bought so many cards that he was known to staff at Hallmark stores—but only those which participated in the Gold Crown program, which offers rewards to frequent buyers. A birthday card that Rushetzky sent to the playwright Lanford Wilson, a drinking buddy from the Lion’s Head bar, is in Wilson’s official archive, at the University of Missouri. Rushetzky always sent a card to Rupert Murdoch, who, Rushetzky noted, was born on March 11th, the same day as Dorothy Schiff, who sold Murdoch the Post, in 1976. The boss responded with thank-you notes.

Now Rushetzky sends birthday greetings electronically. On his own birthday, this past summer, Susan Edelman, a current Post employee, announced the fact to Post Nation. Good wishes and gratitude flowed in from all over. Warren Hoge, who logged a decade at the Post before joining the Times, wrote, “Myron—You are truly the national leader we all believe in.” ♦



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