The racy cartoon feature "Dirty Duck" was released in movie theaters in 1974.
I got a telephone call at my desk in the newsroom in the late summer of 1974. The male caller, an adult, demanded an apology from WTVR news.
Why? He was offended, he said, by the use of a Yiddish word on our noon newscast earlier that week.
One of the steps I had taken to add some spice to the noon news was to hire a movie critic. He was Jerry Williams, a VCU theater graduate I had known socially for a few years. He was a real movie buff and saw everything that came to town. He had become my personal go-to guy for advice about movies.
"Dirty Duck," a racy cartoon, debuted in movie theaters in July of 1974. In his on-air review of the feature film, Jerry gave it a figurative thumbs down. "The dirty duck is a schmuck," he told viewers. I took it as a clever line and thought no more about it.
But my irate caller wanted us to apologize on the air for using "schmuck," the Yiddish word for "penis." As I listened to the caller chatter on about being offended, I leafed through the unabridged dictionary I kept on my desk. The first definition for "schmuck" was "slang; fool, jerk, oaf." The dictionary went on to note that the strict translation from Yiddish was, indeed, "male member."
I interrupted the caller to tell him what I had found, but he wasn't buying it. I told him that I was sure that Jerry, who did not speak Yiddish, was using the word in its slang sense. The caller, however, insisted that we apologize because we had used the word for "penis," regardless of its slang definition.
The caller never raised his voice or yelled at me, but he was far from satisfied when I told him I didn't think we had anything to apologize for. Clearly unhappy, he nevertheless thanked me for my time and hung up.
None of us knew then that the caller wasn't about to let go of his grudge against WTVR news. He nursed it for more than three years. And then he made another call -- a call that would end my career in broadcast journalism.
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OMG! I assume I know where this is going and I had no idea! Can't wait to read the rest of the story. And for the record, I bet a lot of Jews don't use schmuck to mean penis. Consider this: "The history of schmuck became an issue when NBC was filming Saturday Night Live. In one of the scripts, a portrait of Lincoln was supposed to say to Nixon, “You’re a schmuck!” Al Franken, who wrote that script, thought “schmuck” just meant “fool.” But one of NBC’s censors knew that “schmuck” could also mean “penis,” so he censored the script. Instead, Lincoln had to say to Nixon, “You’re a dip.” Lorne Michaels, the producer, passed the bad news to the writers by sending them this memo: “You can’t say ‘schmuck,’ you schmucks!”
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