Photography by D.J. Wilson
Metamucil and Medicare might be hot topics among some 88-year-olds, but Charles Klotzer would rather talk about spin.
“With the long pips, you never know if they are going to bend this way or that—either way, they take the spin off,” says Klotzer, holding his table-tennis paddle and calling the rubber pimples protruding from his paddle “pips.”
On a recent Saturday, Klotzer is at the city’s 12th and Park Recreation Center, just south of downtown, waiting to play a pick-up game of table tennis, something he does three times a week.
“Whatever spin you put on the ball, my long pips take it off. I don’t care what spin you put on it,” says Klotzer, who describes himself as a defensive table-tennis player. He plays Monday nights in St. Charles, Wednesday nights in West County, and Saturday afternoons at 12th & Park. The games that he plays are recreational and low-key, though several years ago Klotzer placed ninth in the nation among his age group, which includes players over 80 years old. He’s good.
Table tennis is his avocation—his vocation, his obsession—is journalism and the First Amendment. Freedom of speech has a special meaning for him, as he escaped Germany with his family in 1939, when he was a 13-year-old German Jewish boy. Klotzer started the St. Louis Journalism Review in 1970 and has been the visible, and invisible, hand behind it since its inception. The spin on the ping-pong ball is not the only spin he knows.
“You don’t want spin on your news. That’s a different meaning of spin,” says Klotzer, although he acknowledges that it might be easier to return a high-speed, spinning serve in table tennis than it is to navigate media for reliable information.
“There is no such thing as objectivity. It’s mythology,” says Klotzer. “If you have a classroom of people and hold up an object and tell them to describe it, each would define it differently." In the same way, two reporters at the same scene or incident might be factual and accurate in their reports, yet still submit two accounts that would differ, he says. Then there is the editor’s function. “What an editor calls editing, you could also call censoring,” Klotzer says.
At age 88, Klotzer is still a player, in both table tennis and journalism. His St. Louis Journalism Review has morphed into the Gateway Journalism Review, which has a quarterly print edition published by the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
A “First Amendment Celebration” to benefit the journalism review is scheduled for Saturday, March 29 at the Edward Jones headquarters. The master of ceremonies is Ray Hartmann, St. Louis Magazine co-owner and a member of the review’s board of advisors. The featured speaker is Amy Goodman, host of radio’s Democracy Now!, which airs on more than 1,000 television and radio stations worldwide.
Dafna Lemish, professor and interim dean of the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University–Carbondale, describes Goodman as a “model for journalists and the general public of an independent American broadcast journalist and investigative reporter.” In 2008, Goodman received the Right Livelihood Award, which Lemish calls “the alternative Nobel Prize.” Goodman also received an honorary degree from SIU–Carbondale.
“Goodman’s career is marked by relentless investigative reporting about issues that are often excluded in the mainstream media, demonstrating the values of free speech and freedom of the press, to be critical of political and economic systems and institutions,” says Lemish. “Our hope is that the Gateway Journalism Review will continue to follow such a vision of independent, critical, ethical, and in-depth investigative journalism.”
For Klotzer, being outside the mainstream is familiar turf. The first local, regularly published journalism review appeared in Chicago in 1968, after the riots at the Democratic Convention. The St. Louis Journalism Review began in 1970 and survived every other counterpart for decades, with most of the other local reviews closing in the first five to 10 years. The Columbia Journalism Review and the American Journalism Review were national publications, with AJR going solely online last year.
Klotzer shifted the St. Louis Journalism review to Webster University from 1995 to 2005, then took back control until it was moved to SIU-Carbondale in 2011 and was renamed the Gateway Journalism Review. Its current issue is 36 pages long.
The current magazine leans to more academic analysis of media issues than its predecessor, in part because it's based on a college campus. Its first issue, in 2011, drew criticism, as it included an article written by Margie Freivogel about the start of online news outlet the St. Louis Beacon. Criticism about the largely complimentary article centered on its publication while the writer’s husband, Bill Freivogel, served as head of the SIU-Carbondale Journalism School, which publishes the magazine.
For Klotzer, such controversy is a small matter compared to the publication’s 50-year struggle to survive. He’s confident that the review has found a steady home. “I wanted to disappoint the people who were hoping with my demise the Journalism Review would go out of business,” Klotzer says.
The journalism review persists, but his typesetting business does not, as the recession killed his work of preparing construction-industry catalogs for print. He rents out much of his University City building on Olive Street to Mane Event, with a barbershop/beauty salon in front and a car wash-and-auto detailing business in back. A self-described “compulsive hoarder,” Klotzer’s cramped office is stacked high with archival publications and documents.
Klotzer remains as eagle-eyed as ever as a media observer and consumer, although he mostly sticks to traditional sources: The New York Times, BBC, CNN, 60 Minutes, the online edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, local television news, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Social media is not his thing. He doesn't have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
"I got so many invitations to all of that—even my family thinks I am odd," he says. "I refuse to do any social media. It’s a waste of time, and time is what is most precious to me now. Anybody who wants me can get ahold of me by email or telephone.”
He instead spends his time playing table tennis and is a member of the St. Louis Tennis Table Club, which organizes the Saturday afternoon sessions at 12th and Park.
Although he’s an accomplished player for his age bracket, he did not start playing until he was in his 50s. “My doctor asked me what I did for exercise,” he recalls. “He told me I better do something. I didn’t want to join a team sport. I could do exercise, but that was kind of boring. Table tennis had a certain appeal—it’s polite, and the people are nice. I gradually got a little better.”
The etiquette of the game on Saturdays is to play the best out of five matches, each one to 11 points. Players wanting to play next put their paddles at the side of the table, but the winner of the set does not stay to play the next player; the person who was at the table the longest leaves.
Klotzer realizes that at his age, most of the “kids” are better than him. That’s why he fancies himself a defensive player, who wants his opponent to play hard. “When I play with better players, I tell them ‘no mercy,’ because that’s the only chance you have to get them," he says. "If they play really slow, they get every point back. The only way you get a point is if they miss when they really attack.” (When I played him, Klotzer beat me three straight: 11-7, 11-5, and 11-8. My guess is he flubbed a few serves to make it look close. But it was really no contest.)
Klotzer one day could return to a national competition. But even if he doesn’t, he's still engaged at age 88, driving his Subaru every day, answering his cell phone, and showing up at the remnants of his office on Olive. He’s still eager to master spin control, whether it’s a forehand in table tennis or a biased, botched report in the media.
Game on.
