I cycled over the Ceintuurbaan in Amsterdam and passed Bar Emperium, I don’t know if it was still a night café and if it was already called that then, but more than twenty years ago I was there at four o’clock in the morning with Stan de Jong under the bar because of a shooting a few crutches away. In my memory we were not touched and then we walked on to the office.
Office was the weekly magazine HP/De Tijd. We were best colleagues, outside of working hours the journalistic bullshit continued. His arrival was accompanied by full ashtrays, loud telephone conversations and a work ethos that we didn’t know there yet. He dragged his pieces highly personally through the final editing to prevent them from changing a comma in it and then things were extinguished with tables full of beer. Stan’s world was black and white and I was happy that I was in the right camp.
We went on vacation twice. On ‘writing camp’ as he called it. Once to Torremolinos, where he worked with the curtains close to his house during the day on what he called ‘the first right -wing novel of the Netherlands’. At the end of the week he knew the manuscript with a lot of aplomb, nice that we could return to work again. Another time we were in Madrid, in a very luxurious B&B, where there was a large portrait of Franco on the wall in one of the rooms. That became his room.
They, of the quality media, saw him, they complimented him in the pubs, but later ignored him collectively if there were jobs or assignments to forgive.
Too pronounced.
“Too right,” he improved. “Hypocrites.”
He was often right and sometimes not at all, which did not bother him not to adjust his opinion. He could enjoy drifting opponents into a corner.
If the dime had fallen on the right side, Stan de Jong would have been rightly won a tile or another journalistic prize. He had an above -average good writing style, wrote books that were just not announced bestseller, argued by publishers, after which he was really sewn at the next publishing house, and left to Enschede to the surprise. The stress of the way he lived journalism became too much for him. He became a teacher.
The contact became less, he still appeared at a dinner in Wormer. Parent, brittle and the first to drunk, but the next day he knew exactly who he found why stupid and also that he was frozen in our guest room. When I was once in the theater in Enschede, he called well before to say that I should not tire him with any free tickets.
He was only 61, found behind his desk. A colleague said: died in armor. For the myth formation, a lost bullet in that bar might have been better.
Marcel van Roosmalen Writes a column on Monday and Thursday.
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